Another victim of serial killer John Wayne Gacy identified by Illinois sheriff

July 19, 2017 at 2:35 p.m. | Updated July 19, 2017 at 7:14 p.m.

by Associated Press

FILE - This 1978 file photo shows serial killer John Wayne Gacy. Cook County Sheriff Sheriff Tom Dart plans to provide an update on a years long effort to identify unnamed victims of Gacy Wednesday, July 19, 2017 in Chicago. Dart will discuss the investigation that he launched in 2011. His office exhumed the skeletal remains of eight of at least 33 young men Gacy stabbed or strangled in the 1970s. (AP Photo/File)
FILE - This 1978 file photo shows serial killer John Wayne Gacy. Cook County Sheriff Sheriff Tom Dart plans to provide an update on a years long effort to identify unnamed victims of Gacy Wednesday, July 19, 2017 in Chicago. Dart will discuss the investigation that he launched in 2011. His office exhumed the skeletal remains of eight of at least 33 young men Gacy stabbed or strangled in the 1970s. (AP Photo/File)

A Chicago-area sheriff has identified another victim of serial killer John Wayne Gacy as a 16-year-old boy from Minnesota.

Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart issued a news release on Wednesday identifying the victim as James Byron Haakenson. Haakenson ran away from Minnesota and is believed to have been killed in August 1976.

The teen's remains were among those of more than two dozen young men found in the crawl space of Gacy's Chicago-area home in 1978. He's one of eight who were buried without being identified. Remains of the eight victims were exhumed in 2011 in an effort to identify them through DNA testing.

Dart's office asked that relatives of young men who disappeared between 1970 and Gacy's 1978 arrest submit to DNA testing in hopes of finding matches.

Haakenson is the second of the eight to be identified.

Gacy was executed in 1994.

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