Hunt for Gacy's Victims Leads to Other Missing Men

Sgt. Jason Moran's work began in a graveyard, his first stop in his quest to identify the eight unknown victims of John Wayne Gacy. More than 30 years had passed since Gacy had murdered 33 young men and boys. Investigators now had more sophisticated crime-solving tools, notably DNA, so the Cook County sheriff's detective was assigned to find out who was buried in eight anonymous graves. Moran quickly helped a family confirm Gacy killed their brother. The other 7 victims still haven't been IDed, but since then, his search has led him down a totally unexpected path: He's cleared 11 unrelated cold cases across America, amazingly locating five living men who'd vanished in the 1970s. Here's one such case:

In 2013, Moran reunited Edyth and Robert Hutton—after 41 years. Edyth had made numerous attempts to find her brother, including mailing about 300 postcards to various Robert, Rob, Bob, and Bobby Huttons nationwide. In a last-ditch effort she searched NamUs, a website featuring missing and unidentified people, narrowing her list to seven. She contacted the respective law enforcement agencies. One person replied: Jason Moran. Using Hutton's vital statistics, Moran thought he'd tracked him to Colorado but when police arrived, the man was gone. Moran waited several months and when the sheriff's analysts checked updated databases they found a match in Montana. The siblings re-connected the next day. Her brother, she says, told her he'd gotten involved with drugs, straightened out and returned to the family's hometown in California but everyone had moved. Robert Hutton recently moved to Nevada to live near his sister. Marveling at this remarkable detour from the ghastly Gacy trail, Moran says he recently told his boss: "Is it possible that an evil serial killer has done some good?" (More John Wayne Gacy stories.)