Chicago police said Monday they used newly discovered DNA evidence to link the 1960 murder of an eight-year-old girl to one of its own former homicide detectives.
Thomas McInerney had been dead for 20 years when authorities released a statement identifying him as Gloria Kowalewicz’s killer – well after he had retired from the Chicago Police Department (CPD) and two federal public defender offices in Nevada where he worked as an investigator.
Nonetheless, the CPD statement expressed hope that the news about McInerney “brings some measure of closure to all who knew Gloria and her story.”
“McInerney should never have worn the CPD star,” the statement added. “And it is devastating to accept that he was never identified or held accountable during his lifetime. »
The Chicago Tribune was first to report that McInerney was Gloria’s killer – recounting in a lengthy article Sunday how the girl’s murder, which shocked the city, was solved more than six decades later thanks to DNA evidence collected on a genetic ancestry website.
Gloria was last seen alive on the morning of November 12, 1960, as she walked from her family’s home in the West Englewood neighborhood to a mass at a nearby church.
She never arrived at the service. Someone abducted her along the way and shot her, and hours later her body was found abandoned in a ditch in a forest preserve southwest of Chicago, police said in the statement.
Police said they obtained various pieces of evidence from the scene where Kowalewicz was apparently murdered, including a bullet, her coat and a white communion bag containing a prayer book. “Investigators also noted a fingerprint on the strap of Gloria’s purse,” police noted.
Meanwhile, the Tribune reported that police — along with volunteers from the ranks of local firefighters, Boy Scouts and veterans — had launched a massive search for the girl’s killer.
A police-led task force interviewed about 1,300 people in connection with Gloria’s murder, including a dozen individuals who underwent lie detector tests during their interrogation.
Police, however, said none of this led them to identify a suspect.
Yet that changed earlier in 2026 when DNA submitted to a family tree website allowed the FBI to reach McInerney at the scene of Gloria’s murder, according to the Tribune.
Further DNA, fingerprint and ballistic tests later established that McInerney — a U.S. Army veteran who lived near the girl — had killed Gloria, CPD said in its Monday statement.
McInerney joined the Chicago police force in 1959, says his obituary, published after his death on Aug. 30, 2006. He was about to turn 25 at the time of Gloria’s murder.
The obituary said McInerney was investigating homicides for CPD when he retired from the agency in 1987. He then worked as an investigator for the federal public defender’s offices in Las Vegas and Reno, Nevada, until his retirement in 2004.
McInerney’s obituary also touted the fact that he had received “numerous accolades during his years with the (CPD)” — as well as the fact that he had been recognized as an outstanding federal investigator as a defender in 2003. It described him as a husband, father of two sons and three daughters, and grandfather of a dozen children.
Monday’s CPD statement made a point of saying that Gloria’s parents died without ever knowing who murdered their daughter. The agency called McInerney “heinous,” saying, “They not only took the life of an eight-year-old child — but left…everyone who knew and loved her broken as they searched for answers.” »
Gloria’s brother, Adam Kowalewicz, told the Tribune it was a relief to learn his sister’s killer had been identified. But he told the outlet he was frustrated that McInerney died at age 70 without ever being brought to justice.
“He never paid his dues,” Adam Kowalewicz told the Tribune. “You hope he will pay his debt to the good Lord.”
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