Andre "Andy" Drath was a teenager found murdered in San Francisco in 1979. He had been reported missing from Chicago in late 1978. He was thought to have been a possible victim of John Wayne Gacy until DNA ruled him out from the remaining unidentified victims. He was identified in 2015.
Case[]
Drath ran away from the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services and was last seen in Chicago in late 1978.
Childhood photo.
In 2011, Cook County Sheriff's Office reopened an investigation to identity the then remaining eight unidentified victims of serial killer John Wayne Gacy. Drath's half sister, Willa Wertheimer, submitted her DNA to Cook County because she realized that her brother matched the profile of Gacy's known victims, young white males between the ages of 15 and 25.
Her DNA did not match any of the unidentified Gacy victims, but in May, her DNA was uploaded to a federal database, which discovered a familiar relationship with an unidentified young male, John Doe #89, found shot multiple times and buried in the sand in June 1979 in San Francisco. The unidentified male also had an "Andy" tattoo.
Wertheimer was notified in September of that year about the match.
Sources[]
- ABC7
- Cook County Sheriff's Office
- Santa Maria Times
- San Francisco Examiner:
- John Wayne Gacy on Wikipedia