A missing man whose family feared he’d been murdered in the 1970s by serial killer John Wayne Gacy is alive and living in Montana — and has been reunited after 41 years with the sister whose tip to investigators led to the astounding discovery, authorities revealed on Thursday.
Robert Hutton, who disappeared in 1972, was found alive in April by detectives from Cook County, Ill., who had been trying to verify that he was a Gacy victim, the county sheriff’s department announced this week.
The search for Hutton, now 62, started with a tip from his sister, Edy Hutton, who had never stopped looking but also feared the worst — that her free-spirited, traveling construction-worker brother met a gruesome end at the hands of Gacy.
The serial killer who was a building contractor that entertained children by dressing up as a clown, was executed in Illinois in 1994 after being convicted in 33 murders. Many of his victims were transient young men that Gacy lured to his suburban Chicago home, where he then tortured and killed them.
Eight of the bodies police found buried on his property in 1978 were never identified, and in 2011 investigators took new DNA samples from those remains in a renewed bid to close out the cases.
When Edy Hutton heard about the new investigation, authorities said, she called Cook County detectives and told them about her brother, a part-time construction worker who was 21 when he told his family he planned to hitch-hike from New York to California.
He was never heard from after that, she told investigators.
A Cook County detective, Jason Moran, took that information and — thinking he might be looking for a dead man — found Hutton living in a tiny town in western Montana near the Idaho border.
“I sensed a little bit of regret when I was speaking to him,” Moran told the Chicago Tribune. “He said he just got caught up in the ’70s lifestyle, and after years went by he became embarrassed he hadn’t had contact with his family and that made it easier to dismiss them.”
His sister has forgiven all.
“It was probably the most far-fetched thing I did in my search for him,” she told the CBS Chicago. “It turned out to be the thing that brought the reconnection. So don’t give up. I guess that’s what I’d say to people.”
The restarted Gacy investigation has so far put a name to just one of the eight unidentified victims — but has resulted in the successful closure of nine unrelated missing-persons cases.
Five people including Hutton have been found alive. Two died of natural causes. Two bodies in unrelated cases were identified using DNA that family members submitted to Cook County.