A day after Cook County authorities identified Francis Wayne Alexander as one of John Wayne Gacy’s victims, his family recalled him as a fearless young man who called home every month.
Speaking with Chicago reporters through an audio-only Zoom call Tuesday afternoon, Alexander’s siblings, Carolyn Sanders and Richard Clyde said he was a fun-loving, sensitive young man whose disappearance after November 1976 was out of character.
The news from Cook County sheriff’s police was bittersweet for the family who long wondered where their beloved Wayne had gone. “We waited 45 years. Not that we wanted it to end this way, or to find out anything like this,” said Sanders, 59. “Obviously we knew something (was wrong) because we hadn’t heard from him and that wasn’t like him.”
Cook County sheriff’s officials said it appeared he’d lived on the city’s North Side for about a year before he vanished.
His family expressed surprise that Alexander was in the Chicago area, believing he had relocated to California for work around the time of his disappearance. In his final phone call to his mother in November 1976, he asked her to mail his birth certificate to a California address for a security job.
“He called my mother every month and when we didn’t get the December 1976 call, we knew something was amiss,” Sanders said.
On Monday, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart released Alexander’s identity following a two-year investigation that, with the help of DNA experts, cleared a 43-year-old mystery that continues for five others slain by Chicago’s most notorious serial killer.
Alexander, who was about 21 when he went missing, was one of 29 people found buried underneath Gacy’s home in unincorporated Norwood Park Township in December 1978. Four other victims were dumped from a bridge.
Sheriff’s officials were able to identify Alexander through a partnership with the nonprofit DNA Doe Project, which helps law enforcement agencies identify bodies through DNA. A group of volunteers worked to have DNA extracted from Alexander’s remains, analyzed and then used a genealogy database and public records to narrow the search to his family.
“I think it’s a great thing, genealogy, being able to find your relatives and people you didn’t know — your people,” said Clyde who was just 4 years old when his brother left home. “How it brought Wayne to us is a miracle.”
When Cook County investigators first contacted Alexander’s family last June, they did not mention that the case was connected to Gacy, but Sanders said the year of the body’s discovery and its Chicago area location made Gacy pop into her head. “It did cross my mind, yes … that was my first thought,” she said.
Cook County Sheriff’s police Lt. Jason Moran, the lead investigator in the unnamed Gacy cases said it would be cruel to make them aware of the Gacy connection before it was officially confirmed. “I basically introduced myself to the family as a cold case detective and I’m looking into missing unidentified person cases and to learn about Wayne.”
Sanders described the wait for confirmation as “excruciating.”
“I had no choice but to wait and find out, but it was very hard and I tried not to call and email Jason all the time. It was difficult,” she said.
Sanders clarified a statement by sheriff’s police and said the family didn’t believe he wanted “to be left alone” following the end of his brief three-month marriage in 1975.
“I don’t think any of us ever felt that he didn’t want to not talk to us. I don’t think that feeling ever hit any of us at all,” she said. “It’s just something is preventing him from contacting us, we just didn’t know what that something could be.”
After his disappearance, his parents called a police department in California to check the address where he asked them to mail his birth certificate. The police called, saying no one by that name lived at the address given.
She said her family had believed that their contact with police was the start of a missing-person report.
“This is in 1976. Things were tremendously different. What we thought was the beginning of a missing persons report. Unbeknownst to us, it was not,” Sanders said. “It was like a well (being) check. And that was it. We waited to hear back and we never did.”
Born in North Carolina, Alexander was one of seven children raised in Long Island, New York, by his mother, now 87, and his stepfather, who had helped raise him since he was 3. “Wayne, of course, was our half brother,” Sanders said. “We don’t consider half. To us, we’re brothers and sisters, period. There is no half for us.”
“I remember him as a jokester and yet sensitive,” said Sanders, who was 14 when Alexander went missing. “He loved me. He loved us all, but I was the little girl in the family,” she said.
A devout religious household, Alexander and his siblings spent a lot of time at the local church. “We were in church Sunday morning. Sunday night. Wednesday night. We cleaned the church on Saturdays and it was a family affair. We did it as a family, even all of us children,” she recalled.
Sanders remembered a family camping trip, where a venomous copperhead snake went underneath the family car.
“Wayne knew no fear. He never knew fear,” Sanders said. “He crawled under the car and grabbed the snake by the head. It was a copperhead. It was nothing to him to do that. It scares everybody else, but he would do that,” she said. “I just miss him terribly.”
Despite being seven years younger than her brother, Sanders said their relationship was close, without any of the usual sibling rivalry.
“If he was going for a walk with his friends, (he didn’t say) ‘Oh, I’ve got to take my little sister. It wasn’t like that. He would say ‘Hey, do you wanna go?'”
Their connection was apparent in a postcard she said she received from him around the time he went missing.
“The only thing it said, which I remember to this day, was ‘Hey baby. I’ll see you soon because I love ya. Wayne.’ So we got excited thinking he’s coming home for Christmas,” Sander said. “And he never did,” Sanders said, her voice breaking.
The siblings said the grieving process has just begun for the family, but that the remaining siblings are rallying together to help their mother.
“We’re tight. We’re close, all of us in the family,” Clyde said. “We look out for one another and take care of one another and…we’re trying to process it all and it’s difficult. We want to be strong for our mother. She’s very important to us. We want to take care of her and make sure she’s OK. We’ll be fine in the end…we’re just relieved that he’s been found. We’re forever grateful for that,” he said.
Sanders added: “We are a Christian family so we have our faith. And by the grace of God, we know we will get through this,” she said. “Don’t get me wrong, we are grieving. I can hear a song and I cry. But I know he suffered, I’m sure, but he’s not suffering anymore.”
Twitter @MidNoirCowboy
