This is an amazing story that needed to be shared! The man on the right side of the picture on the left, Harold Wayne Lovell, was recently reunited with his family after 34 of being presumed dead. You see, Harold was supposedly one of eight unidentified victims of serial killer, John Wayne Gacy, but was recently found alive and well at the age of 53 living in his home state of Florida. Tim Lovell and Theresa Hasselberg hadn't seen their brother, Harold, since he left their family's Chicago home in May of 1977, when he was 19. Their father had left, and tension had mounted with their mother. So, Harold left in search of construction work while living in various foster homes, and it was around this time that serial killer, John Wayne Gacy was trolling for young men and boys in the area. Gacy, often seen dressed like a deranged clown, was a contractor who would lure the majority of the 33 young men and boys that he killed into his dwelling by offering them construction work.
Cook County Sheriff's detectives reviewed the unidentified remains cases, and discovered that eight of the 33 people John Wayne Gacy was convicted of murdering were never even identified. So, they obtained exhumation orders over the past few months to test the remains of the unidentified 8 for DNA, hoping relatives of the missing young men from that area around the 1970s might submit to genetic testing, this way they can finally get closure. Harry Lovell's siblings, who now live in Ozark, Alabama, were planning to do just that when they oddly stumbled across a recent online police booking mug shot photo of their brother taken in Florida. Somehow, they were able to get in touch with Harold, who now goes by his middle name, Wayne, by phone and bought him a bus ticket to come to Alabama to be reunited with his family for the first time in 34 years.
Wayne Lovell described the reunion as "Awesome!" In a recent interview, he also went on to say that he left for Florida all those years ago because he wasn't getting along with his mother and stepfather, and over the years, he worked various manual labor jobs and has had occasional brushes with the law in and around Tampa, including charges for buying marijuana. You can't really blame him for that? Wayne Lovell said he went from having nothing to having a full-blown family! He's still pinching himself! I do have a question, though. If they never identified his body, and he was missing back in the 70s, wasn't his mug on TV? Or wasn't there any Missing Persons reports filed back then? I'm sure that if someone saw Wayne's face on TV or a Missing Person's paper, they would've told him that he looked like this guy from Chicago who was missing. Also, did he hate his brothers and sisters, so much that he didn't even stay in touch with them? I thought that it was his mother and stepfather that he didn't get along with. Why didn't he stay in touch with his siblings? After all, wasn't he 19 years old when he left his house? I mean, he was old enough to be responsible enough to have, at least, stayed in touch with his siblings, unless, of course, he didn't want to be found until now. It kind of doesn't really make sense, but I'm still happy he was reunited with them.
According to Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart, dozens of the men's families who disappeared during the 1970s have come forward for the DNA testing. Investigators searching John Wayne Gacy's home following his 1978 arrest found most of his victims buried in his basement's crawl space. Detectives also said that Gacy dumped four victims in a nearby river after he ran out of room in his house. John Wayne Gacy would confess to the slayings after his arrest and was executed in 1994.
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