Chicago police find killer in 65-year-old cold case murder of little girl — one of their own

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 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 the mid-1980s and is serving life in prison.

But unlike DeAngelo, McInerney managed to escape justice.

McInerney retired from the Chicago Police Department in 1987 as a detective after 28 years on the job and died in 2006 at age 70 in Las Vegas.

“McInerney should…

Original source: https://www.nbcnews.com/health