For more than 30 years, Sherry Marino has mourned the death of her 14-year-old son--whose body was allegedly found in serial killer John Wayne Gacy's home in 1978.
As the Chicago Sun-Times reports, Marino visits the grave of her son regularly, despite a nagging feeling that the boy found in Gacy's home was not him after all.
“I have always wondered if it is really Michael,” she told the paper.
Lawyers for Sherry Marino told WGN News that disparities between autopsy results and her son's dental and medical records have given her reasons to doubt his identification as a Gacy victim. Also, it took investigators two years after finding the boy's body in Gacy's suburban Chicago home to positively identify him.
The Chicago Tribune has more on the medical record disparities:
The 1979 pathological report indicated that Gacy's victim had at some point fractured his collarbone and suggested that the child's molars had started coming in, according to the filing. But X-rays provided by Marino's dentist months before the boy's disappearance show that not all of his molars had yet grown in, and the mother does not believe her son ever broke his collarbone, her lawyers said.
Lawyers for Sherry Marino have filed a petition to have the boy's body exhumed from Queen of Heaven Cemetery in suburban Hillside, according to the Sun-Times.
"It's going to be expensive to exhume a body, to do DNA testing and compare it. So, there are still a lot of hurdles going forward, but I think that she deserves a definitive answer that science can give her today," attorney Robert Stephenson told WGN News.
Gacy raped and murdered 33 boys and young men between 1972 and 1978, and reportedly showed no remorse for the crimes. He ultimately convicted and executed in 1994.
