New DNA, fingerprint and ballistic evidence has identified former Chicago police officer Thomas McInerney as the man who abducted and murdered 8-year-old Gloria Kowalewicz in 1960. He later became a homicide detective.
For 65 years, the murder of 8-year-old Gloria Kowalewicz sat among Chicago’s most haunting unsolved crimes. Now investigators say they finally know who killed her, and the answer somehow makes the story even darker: a Chicago police officer who later worked as a homicide detective.
Authorities say newly developed DNA evidence, fingerprint analysis and ballistic testing identified Thomas McInerney as the man responsible for Gloria’s abduction and murder in November 1960. McInerney had joined the Chicago Police Department the year before the killing and later went on to investigate homicides himself.
Gloria disappeared while walking to church. Her body was found hours later in a forest preserve, and investigators at the time collected evidence including a fingerprint from her purse. Police conducted more than 1,000 interviews, but the case went cold.
The breakthrough came decades later when modern genetic-genealogy work pointed investigators toward McInerney. The FBI then helped connect the DNA evidence to him, while additional fingerprint and ballistics analysis reinforced the identification.
McInerney died in 2006, which means there will never be an arrest, trial or courtroom reckoning. His identification instead arrives as a posthumous answer for a family that spent most of a lifetime wondering who had killed an 8-year-old girl.
The police connection is what gives the case its almost unbelievable second layer. McInerney did not merely work around law enforcement after the murder; he became part of the system responsible for solving killings. Somewhere in Chicago’s history, a man investigators now say committed one of the city’s most notorious child murders was later wearing a badge and working homicide cases.
Chicago police said McInerney’s actions represented a profound betrayal of the department and the public. The department emphasized that modern investigators followed the evidence wherever it led, even when the trail ended with one of their own former detectives.
McInerney had received commendations during his law-enforcement career and later worked for federal public defender offices. None of that, investigators now say, changes what the forensic evidence shows about Gloria’s murder.
Cold cases often end with a familiar script: new DNA, a family tree, an elderly suspect and an arrest that arrives decades too late. This case skipped the arrest entirely and replaced it with an even stranger reveal: the suspect had spent part of his life investigating other people for the kind of crime authorities now say he committed.
Gloria’s surviving family has described the identification as both relief and heartbreak. There is comfort in finally having a name, but no satisfaction in knowing the man died before he could ever be confronted in court.
The case also underscores how dramatically forensic technology has changed what “cold” means. Evidence collected in 1960 could not answer the central question then, but preserved material combined with modern databases and analytical tools eventually did what thousands of interviews could not.
There is no criminal case left to prosecute because McInerney is dead. What remains is the historical record, now rewritten around a fact that would have sounded almost impossible when Gloria disappeared.
A child was murdered. The case went unsolved for more than six decades. And the man authorities now identify as her killer spent years carrying a police badge while the investigation gathered dust.
