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American ex-unidentified 1972 murder victim From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Timothy Jack McCoy (May 14, 1955 – January 3, 1972) was an American murder victim from Omaha, Nebraska.[1] He is the first known victim of serial killer and sex offender John Wayne Gacy, who raped, tortured and murdered at least 33 young men and boys in Norwood Park Township, near Chicago, Illinois, between 1972 and 1978.
Timothy McCoy | |
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![]() Timothy McCoy, December 1971 | |
Born | Timothy Jack McCoy May 14, 1955 Council Bluffs, Iowa, U.S. |
Disappeared | January 2, 1972 Chicago, Illinois, U.S. |
Died | January 3, 1972 16) Chicago, Illinois, U.S. | (aged
Cause of death | Multiple stab wounds to the chest |
Body discovered | December 26, 1978 Chicago, Illinois, U.S. |
Resting place | Westlawn-Hillcrest Funeral Home and Memorial Park, Omaha, Nebraska, U.S. 41.1406°N 95.5956°W (approximate) |
Other names | Body 9 Case #1279 Dec. 78 The Greyhound Bus Boy |
Known for | Victim of serial murder |
Height | 5 ft 11 in (1.80 m) (approximate) |
McCoy encountered Gacy at Chicago's Greyhound bus terminal in the early hours of January 3, 1972, while the teenager waited for a connecting bus to his father's home in Nebraska due the following noon; he was lured to Gacy's home and subsequently stabbed to death. His body was later buried in the crawl space beneath the property, and was only recovered following Gacy's December 1978 arrest, although his body remained unidentified until May 1986.[2]
Following his 1986 identification, McCoy's remains were returned to his family; his body was interred alongside his father within Westlawn-Hillcrest Funeral Home and Memorial Park in his home state of Nebraska.[3][4]
Prior to his identification, McCoy was informally known as the Greyhound Bus Boy and officially as both Body 9 and Case #1279 Dec. 78. His informal moniker was a reference to the Chicago Greyhound bus terminal where he first encountered Gacy and how his murderer largely chose to refer to him; his formal monikers refer to his sequential recovery order from beneath Gacy's crawl space and his assigned medical examiner reference number.[5]
Timothy Jack McCoy was born in Council Bluffs, Iowa, on May 14, 1955, the third of four children born to Jack and Norma "Susie" (née Study) McCoy. He had two older sisters, Cindy and Linda, and a younger brother, Terry. His father was a laborer and country and western singer, whereas his mother was a homemaker.[6]
The McCoy family frequently relocated throughout America throughout Timothy's life, with the family variously living in Iowa, Nebraska and Florida in addition to frequently traveling across state lines to locations such as Missouri to visit relatives. On one occasion, Jack McCoy relocated his family to California in the hope of securing a record deal, although one of the McCoy daughters soon developed a severe respiratory disease, resulting in the family returning to Iowa. In the early 1970s, Jack and Norma—then residing in Florida—divorced, with Norma soon remarrying and gradually returning to Iowa. Both daughters had left the household by this stage; as such, only Timothy and Terry remained at home. Terry chose to live with his mother, whereas Timothy remained with his father following the divorce. Shortly thereafter, Jack McCoy and his older son returned to Nebraska. Months later, Timothy obtained a false ID and secured employment as a forklift operator in nearby Council Bluffs.[7]
McCoy was a fan of rock music, with his favorite album being Cosmo's Factory by Creedence Clearwater Revival. One of his cousins, Jeffrey Billings, described Timothy as "one of them guys that, when you were around him, he was happy, he'd make you laugh", adding that "he always had something to say."
Shortly before Christmas 1971, Timothy visited his cousins in Lansing, Michigan; he spent the Christmas holidays and New Year's Day 1972 at this location, engaging in activities such as snowball fights, riding with relatives in the family's snowmobile and creating a homemade festive 8mm camera movie. His cousin, Beverly Billings, would later recollect that in the final days of 1971, several of her female friends expressed an interest in Timothy, causing him to joke he should perhaps relocate to Michigan.[8]
The day after New Year's Day 1972, Timothy's cousins and their parents dropped him off at the Capital Area Multimodal Gateway in East Lansing, with view to his catching a Greyhound bus to Omaha via Chicago. Prior to boarding the bus, Timothy promised his relatives he would call them once he reached his aunt's house in Iowa. According to his relatives, they watched Timothy board the bus, then wave at them through the window as the vehicle began its interstate journey. They never heard from him again.[1][9]
Timothy arrived in Chicago sometime late in the evening of January 2. His connecting bus was not scheduled to depart until noon of the following day, which gave him some time to spend in Chicago. As he wandered within and around the station with little or nothing to occupy his time, he encountered an individual who pulled his car to the curb, then wound down the driver's-side window of his car and asked Timothy what he was doing. The driver introduced himself as "John".[10]
John Wayne Gacy later recollected that after introducing himself to Timothy and asking his business, the teenager replied with a comment to the effect of: "I ain't doing nothing. I got twelve hours to kill."[11] Gacy then offered the teenager an impromptu sightseeing tour of the city after learning Timothy was from out of state and that his bus was not due for several hours—an offer Timothy accepted.[1]
According to Gacy, after driving around the city and describing several local landmarks to Timothy, the teenager expressed that he was hungry and agreed to accompany him to his home in Norwood Park Township, with Gacy promising the teenager food and that he could spend the night in the spare bedroom of his house and be driven to the bus station in the morning in time to catch his connecting bus.[lower-alpha 1]
According to Gacy's later accounts, he prepared a sandwich for Timothy before the two drank alcohol together; he also claimed that the two performed oral sex on each other, despite the fact that Timothy is known to have been heterosexual. If Gacy's accounts of a sexual encounter between the two are true, it remains unknown whether these were consensual acts. Afterwards, Gacy said he felt tired and they both went to sleep in separate rooms of the house.[12]
"The party started breaking up at about 12:30 a.m. I wasn't tired so I thought I'd go looking around. I went down to the Civic Center to look at the ice sculptures, but then, after I seen 'em, I got back in my car ... So I drove around the block and pulled up in front of [the Greyhound bus depot] ... that's when I seen the kid."
John Wayne Gacy, recollecting how he first encountered Timothy McCoy to journalist Russ Ewing (1985).[13]
In the early hours of January 3, 1972, Gacy claimed to have awoken to find McCoy holding a kitchen knife walking towards his bed. According to Gacy, he jumped from his bed and charged at McCoy, trying to grab the knife. McCoy held up the knife to protect himself as Gacy reached for his wrist, which accidentally cut Gacy's arm.[lower-alpha 2] He said that after his arm was slashed, he was "no longer the sick individual who was physically weak" and "I felt ten times stronger than I ever was before." Gacy said he grabbed McCoy and threw him against the wall, which was followed by McCoy kicking Gacy in the stomach, which doubled him over. Gacy remembered saying: "Motherfucker. I'll kill you." Gacy then wrestled McCoy to the floor and stabbed McCoy several times in the chest.
As McCoy lay dying, Gacy washed the bloody knife in the bathroom and headed into the kitchen, where he saw McCoy's supposed making of breakfast; he had set the table for two and intended to walk into Gacy's room to wake him while absentmindedly carrying the knife. McCoy eventually died of his stab wounds; he was 16 years old.[15]
After his death, McCoy's body was placed in the crawl space of Gacy's home and because Gacy's mother was visiting later that same day, he walked around his house checking for blood stains he may have missed. He later dug a shallow grave in the crawl space and buried McCoy's remains there, later covering his grave with a layer of concrete.[16] Between 1974 and 1978, Gacy would go on to murder at least 32 more victims and buried 25 of the victims in the crawl space along with McCoy's body; he was Gacy's first known victim. He evaded capture from the police for seven years until his arrest in December 1978.
On January 3, 1972, the same day McCoy was killed, his aunt went to the bus depot in Omaha to pick him up only to see no sign of him, despite the fact the bus had arrived on schedule from Chicago. As the year went on, McCoy's family began growing increasingly concerned as they had not heard anything from him at all. Therefore, his father, Jack, hired a private investigator in Chicago. McCoy's disappearance was mysterious to his family, as he'd never been known to run away from home. In March 1973, McCoy's grandfather had also passed away in Iowa. When McCoy failed to show up to the funeral, his family lost all hope that he would ever return.[17]
McCoy's body remained undiscovered for nearly seven years. However, after a 15-year-old boy named Robert Piest disappeared in December 1978, the Des Plaines Police did a check of John Wayne Gacy's criminal background and found out that Gacy had an outstanding battery charge in Chicago and had previously been imprisoned in 1968 in the state of Iowa for the sodomy of a then 15-year-old boy named Donald Voorhees Jr., son of Donald E. Voorhees, in 1967, five years before Gacy murdered McCoy.[18] As police suspected Gacy may be holding Piest hostage in the same house McCoy died in years prior, the Des Plaines Police obtained a search warrant on December 13, 1978, to no avail, but they did find suspicious items, leading them to confiscate Gacy's vehicles and put Gacy under surveillance.[19][20]
On December 15, Des Plaines investigators obtained further details of Gacy's battery charge, learning Jeffrey Rignall had reported that Gacy had lured him into his car, then chloroformed, raped and tortured him before dumping him in Lincoln Park months ago. In an interview with Gacy's former wife the same day, they learned of John Butkovich's disappearance; he was killed by Gacy in 1975.[21] Four days later, on December 19, investigators began compiling evidence for a second search warrant for Gacy's house. The same day, Gacy's lawyers filed a $750,000 lawsuit against the Des Plaines police; the hearing for the suit was scheduled to take place on December 22. On December 21, the Des Plaines Police were granted a second search warrant.[22] After police informed Gacy of their intentions to search his crawl space for the body of Piest, Gacy denied the teenager was buried there, but confessed to having killed in self-defense a young man whose body was buried under his garage, whom he would later identify as Butkovich.[23] Gacy was arrested the very same day, and McCoy's body along with the 25 other victims stored in his crawl space were unearthed over the next week, with three others also being unearthed elsewhere on his property.
McCoy was the ninth victim of Gacy's to be recovered; he had several stab wounds to the ribs and sternum, suggesting he was Gacy's first victim. He was the only victim to have been stabbed; all of the other victims were either strangled or asphyxiated. A Model A belt buckle was also recovered from McCoy's body.[2][24] Gacy was brought to trial on February 6, 1980.[25] On March 13, Gacy was found guilty of 33 counts of murder, indecent liberties with a child and deviate sexual assault. He was sentenced to death and was transferred to the Menard Correctional Center, where he was on death row for 14 years before being executed by lethal injection at the Stateville Correctional Center on May 10, 1994, aged 52.
On June 12, 1981, the unidentified remains of McCoy as well as eight other unidentified victims of Gacy (three of whom have since been since identified) were all buried in separate cemeteries, with inscriptions upon their unmarked tombstones that read: "We Remembered."[26] Tom Moriarty, the executive secretary of the Funeral Directors Services Association, stated that the burial sites would not be revealed in order to prevent them from becoming tourist attractions.[27][28]
In February 1986, Beverly Billings Howe, one of McCoy's cousins located in Lansing, Michigan, read an excerpt of Tim Cahill's book Buried Dreams: Inside the Mind of a Serial Killer, which was soon due to be released and covered Gacy's life and story. She had read about Gacy's first victim, who had been killed in Chicago shortly after New Year's Day 1972. The victim, who was unidentified, was referred to as the "Greyhound Bus Boy" in the book, and was stabbed to death in Gacy's home. McCoy's relatives had previously suspected Gacy's possible involvement of his disappearance after their last interaction with him in January 1972 and they had heard nothing from McCoy ever since. She proceeded to show the excerpt she had read to her sister, who was also surprised upon reading it.[1][29]
The family was sure that McCoy was one of the nine unidentified victims and they made calls to people in Chicago to find out more information, which led to them eventually getting ahold of Tim Cahill, the author of the book, and Cahill soon interviewed Beverly and her family. She had recalled in the interview how she had given McCoy a Model A belt buckle which he loved. The same belt buckle was recovered from his body when it was discovered in 1978. This detail interested Cahill and from there, he and journalist Russ Ewing tried to find McCoy's dental records, which were successfully located in Florida, where the McCoy family had previously lived and were passed on to the Cook County Medical Examiner.[29]
After three months of investigating, Timothy Jack McCoy's identity as one of the nine unidentified victims of Gacy was confirmed on May 9, 1986, eight years after his body was recovered and 14 years after his murder. This now left only eight of the victims unidentified (three of whom have since been identified). After McCoy was identified, his family had learned that one of his aunts, who went by Aunt Tiny, who was supposed to send off McCoy's dental records to Chicago in 1979 hadn't actually done so, as she didn't want to upset the family if it was revealed that McCoy had died.[30]
Dr. John Pavlik, an Olympia Fields orthodontist and chief of forensic science for the Cook County Sheriff's police who made the identification of McCoy possible, stated that McCoy's fillings were "very unique" and his fillings were something only 2-3% of the population had. He also said that McCoy had "certain unique teeth", which helped reduce the percentage of error to the point that he could conclude that McCoy was likely Gacy's first victim.[1][2][24][29]
Soon after his identification, McCoy's remains were returned to his family, who were living in Glenwood, Iowa. A funeral for McCoy was planned, but as his family were tight on money, the cost was picked up by a funeral director and an airline. A week and a half after what would have been McCoy's 31st birthday, he was buried at the Westlawn-Hillcrest Funeral Home and Memorial Park in Omaha, Nebraska. He was laid to rest beside his father, Jack McCoy, who also passed away in 1983. One of McCoy's siblings, Linda McCoy, stated that Timothy's disappearance "hurt his father the most" and was glad he passed away before his son was identified so he "never had to know". Linda was unable to make the funeral as she was pregnant with a son who was about to be born, but as soon as she could, she travelled to Omaha and stood beside Jack and Timothy's tombstones. McCoy's tombstone reads: "Our Beloved Son And Brother. Timothy Jack McCoy."[lower-alpha 3] On his tombstone, McCoy's name is seen under a golden mountain.[3][29]
After McCoy's identification, no developments would be made to identify the other remaining eight victims for 25 years until October 2011, where the Cook County Sheriff Thomas Dart announced that the Cook County Police would be renewing their efforts to identify the remaining victims of Gacy. Three victims, William George Bundy (19, identified in November 2011), James Byron Haakenson (16, identified in July 2017) and Francis Wayne Alexander (21, identified in October 2021) have since been identified. Five victims still remain unidentified.[31][32][33][34]
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