The Chicago murder case of an 8-year-old girl that tormented investigators for 65 years has been solved — and the man linked to the murder was a homicide detective for the city’s police department.
The murder of Gloria Kowalewicz, kidnapped on Nov. 12, 1960, while walking to church on Chicago’s South Side, sparked a months-long citywide manhunt, during which thousands of people were questioned and hundreds of leads were investigated.
But it wasn’t until July that DNA technology that didn’t exist at the time of Gloria’s murder, combined with “a carefully preserved fingerprint,” led investigators to find Thomas F. McInerney Jr., Chicago police said in a statement to NBC News.
It’s the same technology that was used to capture Joseph James DeAngelo, a former California cop nicknamed “The Golden State Killer” who committed 13 murders and numerous rapes between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s and is serving a life sentence 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 never have worn the CPD star, and it is devastating to accept that he was never identified and held accountable during his lifetime,” the CPD said in a statement Monday.
Gloria’s brother, Adam Kowalewicz – who was a baby when his sister was killed – agreed.
“The only thing that comes to mind (is) that, unfortunately, he lived a decent life and passed away,” Kowalewicz said of McInerney in an interview with the Chicago Tribune. “He never paid his dues. You hope he pays his dues to the good Lord.”
Then there’s the nagging question that, so far, police have been unable to answer: Why did McInerney target Gloria?
McInerney’s parents lived less than a mile from the Kowalewicz family, but McInerney did not appear to have had any prior contact with the little girl, police said.
That being said, McInerney’s DNA is in the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, known as CODIS, and the agency is checking to see if there might be other victims.
“Based on the evidence from the Kowalewicz case and law enforcement’s profiling of child predators and their victimology, we are pursuing all lines of investigation that may bring closure to other potential unsolved crimes that occurred during this time period in our area,” the FBI said in a statement.
On her last day of life, a Saturday, Gloria left her home just before 8 a.m. to walk to morning Mass, a few blocks from St. Mary of Mount Carmel Church, police said.
Gloria, a third-grader who had just made her first communion, was dressed in a pink and brown plaid dress and a blue leotard that her mother had chosen for her, the Tribune reported.
“She never went to mass,” police said in a statement. “Somewhere between her home and the church that Saturday morning, Gloria was kidnapped.”
Gloria was shot twice in the head and left in a ditch in a forest preserve southwest of Chicago, police said. Her body was found by a motorist who spotted Gloria’s colorful dress and went to investigate.
“The evidence was collected, carefully inventoried and preserved: a bullet, Gloria’s coat, her shoes, her white communion bag containing her prayer book,” police said. “Investigators also noted a fingerprint on the strap of Gloria’s purse.”
But the police could not blame anyone for the crime.
Four days after Gloria’s death, more than 1,000 people attended her funeral at St. Mary of Mount Carmel Church.
McInerney, at the time, was a 24-year-old patrol officer based on Chicago’s West Side and was not promoted to detective until 1964.
It was not immediately clear whether McInerney had ever been involved in the Gloria murder investigation. After leaving CPD and moving to Nevada, he worked for the federal public defender’s office as an investigator.
McInerney retired from that job in 2004, according to his obituary in the Tribune. He was even named an outstanding federal investigator in 2003.
McInerney, an Army veteran, was also a father of five and a grandfather, his obituary states.
Meanwhile, detectives continued to work on Gloria’s case while the evidence was in storage.
“Even though the case seemed frozen in time, Chicago police never forgot the little girl and never stopped searching for her killer,” police said.
The first interesting breakthrough in this case, according to police, occurred in 2010, when investigators managed to establish a male DNA profile of the potential killer from traces of semen found on Gloria’s clothes.
But this did not result in any arrests.
Then, in 2024, at the request of Chicago police, the FBI compared DNA from the clothing with other genetic samples submitted to family tree research websites and identified McInerney from the semen samples.
Armed with a name, they compared McInerney’s fingerprints from her 1959 CPD job application to those found on Gloria’s purse strap, police said.
“The identification was made using a fingerprint and DNA left at the crime scene,” the CPD said in a statement.
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