The cold case murder of an 8-year-old Chicago girl that bedeviled investigators for 65 years has been solved — and the man tied to the killing was a homicide detective for the city’s police department.The murder of Gloria Kowalewicz, who was abducted on Nov.
12, 1960, as she was walking to church on the South Side of Chicago, sparked a citywide manhunt that went on for months during which thousands of people were questioned and hundreds of leads were looked into.But it wasn’t until July that a DNA technology that didn’t exist when Gloria was killed, combined with “a carefully preserved fingerprint,” led investigators to Thomas F.McInerney Jr., the Chicago Police Department said in a statement to NBC News.It was the same technology that was used to capture Joseph James DeAngelo, a former California cop dubbed “The Golden State Killer” who committed 13 murders and numerous rapes from the mid-1970s to mid-1980s and is now serving life in prisonBut unlike DeAngelo, McInerney managed to escape justice.
McInerney retired from Chicago Police Department in 1987 as a detective after 28 years on the job and died in 2006 at the age of 70 in Las Vegas.“McInerney should never have worn the CPD star, and it is devastating to accept that he was never identified and held accountable while he was alive,” the CPD said in a statement Monday.Gloria’s brother, Adam Kowalewicz — who was an infant when his sister was killed — agreed.
“The one thing that does play in my mind (is), unfortunately, he lived a decent life and passed on,” Kowalewicz said of McInerney in an interview with The Chicago Tribune.“He never paid his dues.
You hope he’s going to pay his dues with the good lord.”Then there is the nagging question that, so far, police have not been able to answer: Why did McInerney target Gloria?McInerney’s parents lived less than a mile from the Kowalewicz family, but the officer does not appear to have had any prior contact with the little girl...