00:00:46
Speaker 1: School of Humans.
00:00:49
Speaker 2: Helen Gone Murder Line actively investigates cold case murders in an effort to raise public awareness, invite witnesses to come forward, and present evidence that could potentially be further investigated by law enforcement. While we value insights from family and community members, their statements should not be considered evidence and point to the challenges of verifying facts inherent in cold cases. We remind listeners that everyone is presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing in the podcast is intended to state or imply that anyone who has not been convicted of a crime is guilty of any wrongdoing.
00:01:26
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening. On November 12, 1960, eight-year-old Gloria Kovalevich was getting ready for church. Church was a big deal in this family. and little Gloria had just celebrated her Holy Communion a couple of weeks earlier. Gloria lived in Bridgeport, on the south side of Chicago, Illinois. The family was working class, and they were regulars at the nearby Catholic church, St. Mary of Mount Carmel, and their faith was a huge part of their weekly routine. Gloria had gotten up early that day to go to church and receive the sacrament, which a nun had told her classmates to do daily, in order to get used to the ritual. So Gloria had followed that same route from her home to her church for early morning mass every single day for two weeks, which might become important later when police were trying to figure out if someone had been stalking her. That Saturday was the last day that she would follow that routine. She left her home just after 8 a.m., but instead of riding with her family because the car was being used, Gloria walked. the just over three blocks on her own. She was wearing a pink and brown checkered dress and carrying a white communion purse over her shoulder. Her mother, Esther, waved goodbye to her and watched Gloria walk north before turning east and going out of sight. Gloria knew that route well, but on that morning, she never made it to morning mass. And by that afternoon, her parents and the entire neighborhood were in a state of panic. This was not a place where an eight-year-old girl vanished into thin air. This was a quiet suburb. The Chicago Police Department was immediately on alert, and they launched a massive, immediate citywide manhunt. hundreds of officers and neighbors and volunteers, including the Boy Scouts, fanned out across the South Side. They searched alleyways, they knocked on doors, peered into abandoned buildings, and combed through the industrial lots bordering the city's canals. Gloria's shocking disappearance made the local news, and parents in the area and their children were terrified. But it wasn't until 64 years later that they got an answer. one that involved a decorated homicide detective who was also a child killer. I'm Katherine Townsend. Over the past eight years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned that there is no such thing as a small town where murder never happens. I have received hundreds of messages from people all around the country asking for help with an unsolved murder that's affected them, their families, and their communities. If you have a case you'd like me and my team to look into, you can reach out to us at our Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. That's 678-744-6145. Or you can send us a message on Instagram at hellandgonepod. This is Hell and Gone Murder Line. The entire south side of Chicago was in a panic. after eight-year-old Gloria seemed to vanish into thin air while walking to morning mass at her church. However, just a few hours later, the search for the missing little girl came to a horrifying end. A driver for a laundry company was in McKinley Park on his lunch break and stopped along 104th Avenue, which was in a wooded area of Palos Park, more than 15 miles southwest of Gloria's home. The driver was eating his lunch at a picnic table when he saw something colored that caught his eye. It was Gloria's pink and brown checkered dress. Then he found Gloria's small, lifeless body dumped in a ditch. He could see that her head was badly damaged and misshapen and that she was covered with blood. After checking her pulse and realizing that she was dead, he drove to the nearest town and called the Cook County Sheriff's Office. Gloria had been fatally shot twice in the head with what police believed to be a Colt. 45 weapon. That murder weapon was never found, but police did find a single bullet. Gloria's clothing was torn and strewn around near her body. Investigators found her coat and the little white communion purse she had so proudly carried when she set off for church. Later that day, Her father, Edward, identified Gloria's body. And once the autopsy was complete, the acts of the case got more brutal for Gloria's parents. They learned that Gloria had been beaten and fatally shot. Initial media reports said that they did not believe that Gloria had been sexually assaulted. However, this later changed. Police noted that Gloria was wearing her underwear when she was found. but her blue leotard, the one that she wore under her dress, had been taken off and placed under her. The brutality of the crime shocked even the most hardened homicide detectives on the Chicago force. This case made local and eventually national news, and headlines talked about catching the sex maniac who was responsible for the killing. The Chicago Police Department was the investigating agency. And police did have one lead. Witnesses told police that a girl who looked like Gloria was seen with a man roughly 25 to 40 years old shortly after she left her home. So police were looking for an adult male. That's pretty much all they knew, but that is a wide range of ages. Really, the police had very little to go on. This was before DNA testing or security cameras. However, The technicians from the Chicago Police Crime Laboratory meticulously examined this scene. And while they were examining Gloria's clothing, they focused on something. The strap of that small, white communion purse. And they found something vital. A single, distinct, latent fingerprint. It was just a partial print, left behind in the frantic moments when the killer grabbed or discarded the bag. Even in 1960, a fingerprint was a powerful tool, but only if you have a suspect to match it against. Back then, detectives did not get a match, so the print was cataloged and filed away. Detectives interviewed hundreds of people and seemed to mainly focus on the usual suspects, like sex offenders living near the area, transients passing through, but also on people like delivery men and neighbors. They followed thousands of leads across Cook County and beyond. But as the months bled into years, the leads dried up. The case file kept getting bigger. But Gloria's case slowly went cold. Years passed and the world moved on. Many of the original detectives on the case retired. But preserved in an evidence bag was that white communion purse with the single fingerprint on the strap. Then, in 2010, there was a break in the case. Cold case investigators with the Chicago Police Department pulled Gloria's file out to take another look. By now, there was DNA testing and the CODIS database. So police sent Gloria's preserved clothing, her leotard and coat, to a specialized forensic laboratory. Using advanced techniques that required only microscopic amounts of biological material, forensic scientists were able to successfully extract a male DNA profile from the fabric of Gloria's clothes. The DNA profile came from semen that was found on Gloria's coat. This must have been a parent's nightmare to hear because the initial report said that Gloria had not been sexually assaulted, but the semen on the coat seemed to confirm that either pre- or post-mortem, there was a sexual component to this crime. The semen was a massive breakthrough because now detectives had DNA, and for the first time in half a century, the killer had a genetic signature. But when investigators ran that DNA profile through CODIS, the national database that houses the DNA of convicted offenders across the United States, the system returned a frustrating result. No match. The killer's DNA was not in the system. This tells investigators one of two things. Either the killer managed to avoid a felony conviction for the rest of his life, or he died before the modern DNA databases were established. The case stalled again for years. with the genetic profile locked into a vault. Until 2024, the FBI's forensic genetic genealogy team entered the narrative. 62 years after Gloria's brutal murder, investigators finally had a break in the case. They had matched the DNA to a suspect, Thomas F. McInerney Jr. But Thomas McInerney Jr. wasn't just your average suspect. He was a police officer And he had been working and living near Gloria's neighborhood before she was kidnapped. Genetic genealogy doesn't have to rely on criminal databases. It uses consumer DNA databases. So the same platforms millions of everyday people use to trace their family trees, look up their ancestry and find distant cousins, to find potential familial DNA links. The FBI took the unknown male DNA profile from Gloria's clothing and uploaded it to these genealogical databases. And the system found matches, but they weren't direct hits. The database found potential distant relatives, This would be things like third cousins, second cousins once removed, or great nieces. An FBI genealogist sat down with a blank piece of paper and started to construct a massive, multi-generational family tree. Then the FBI worked backward to find a common ancestor. And then they built the tree forward, tracing every male descendant who would have been alive, adult, and in Chicago in November of 1960. So this was a combination of the most cutting edge digital technology available, but also a lot of old school detective work because it involves digging through birth certificates, marriage licenses, death notices, census records, and military draft cards. Slowly, the genealogy team eliminates individuals who are overseas, individuals who are too young, or individuals who are incarcerated elsewhere. This was the same technology, by the way, that was used to catch Joseph DeAngelo, the Golden State Killer, after almost four decades in California. Joseph was also a former police officer. Eventually, the branches converged on one specific family line. And within that family line, investigators isolated a prime suspect, a man named Thomas F. McInerney Jr., And investigators discovered that not only was Thomas a police officer, he was a highly decorated police officer who had been on the beat as a rookie cop when Gloria was kidnapped and murdered. Thomas McInerney Jr. joined the Chicago Police Department in 1959, so he had been on the force for a year in November of 1960. when Gloria Kovalevich was killed. And over the years, not only did Thomas fly under the radar, he was promoted. He became a detective and rose through the ranks of the Violent Crimes and Homicide Division of the Chicago Police Department. He spent nearly 30 years investigating the exact types of crimes he was now accused of committing. He sat in on interrogations of hundreds of suspects and talked to grieving families who were victims of violent crime. He investigated hundreds of murders. He had access to crime scenes and evidence, all while carrying this dark, monstrous secret. But the DNA match wasn't enough on its own. It was a powerful lead, but prosecutors need definitive traditional forensic confirmation before a case can be officially closed. But they couldn't just swab Thomas' cheek because they found out that after he retired from the Chicago Police Department in 1987, after nearly three decades of service, he collected his pension, packed his bags, and eventually moved away from the cold winters of Illinois to Las Vegas, Nevada. Thomas was married. He had five children and eventually grandchildren. Thomas appeared to live out a quiet, comfortable retirement in Las Vegas, and he died peacefully there in 2006 at the age of 75. But investigators didn't need Thomas because they still had that one piece of evidence that had been sitting in an evidence room for decades, the single latent fingerprint on the strap of Gloria's white communion purse. So detectives pulled Thomas McInerney's archival personnel file from the Chicago Police Department records vault. Inside that file was his original 1959 employment application, the paperwork he filled out to become a police officer. Pressed onto that 1959 document were the clear black ink impressions of Thomas McInerney's fingerprints taken the day he joined the force. a senior fingerprint examiner took the latent print from the communion purse and set it side by side with Thomas McInerney's 1959 application print under a high powered comparison microscope and found that the fingerprint on Gloria's purse strap was a perfect match to the fingerprint on Thomas's job application. So after hearing this, the question I had was why didn't they find this match sooner? It turns out that this seemed to be for a couple of reasons. One, Thomas's fingerprint was done on the old card system and wasn't digitized. And two, even if it had been digitized like many police employment records are today, it would not have shown up in the system because CODIS only tests against people who've been arrested and charged. It's a criminal database, so it doesn't test against people who haven't been arrested. Our system is built to catch known criminals, not police officers, hiding in plain sight. But finally, after 64 years, the Chicago Police Department had found their killer. The next step was to publicly confirm it. So on October 12th, 2026, the Chicago Police Department, flanked by FBI agents and Cook County prosecutors, held a somber press conference. They announced to the world that the murder of Gloria Kovalevich is officially solved. They named Thomas F. McInerney Jr. as her killer. Gloria's brother, Adam Kovalevich, who was just a baby when Gloria was murdered, told reporters that he had mixed feelings. He was very relieved that his sister's killer had been caught, but he considered it a bitter victory because the killer got to live out the rest of his life without ever facing justice. Adam told the Chicago Tribune, quote, In this case, the justice system was outrun by the clock. So this may be the end of Gloria's story, but for this case, it's just the beginnings. In Chicago, a decorated homicide detective was unmasked as a child killer. And he was only 24 years old when Gloria was killed. So what are the chances that in all those years as a young man before joining the force and even afterwards, that this was his only crime? A man does not typically commit a crime as escalation-heavy, brutal, and organized as the abduction and murder of an eight-year-old girl as a one-time occurrence. only to become a law-abiding citizen for the next 40 years. Criminally speaking, that is an extreme rarity. Immediately following the October 2026 press conference, the FBI, the Cook County State's Attorney's Office, and the Chicago Police Department's Cold Case Squad announced a massive, unprecedented joint initiative. They are launching a comprehensive audit of every single violent crime, missing person, and unsolved homicide case that Thomas McInerney Jr. ever handled, investigated, or was in physical proximity to during his three-decade career. They're looking for patterns. They're looking for cases that were abruptly closed, leads that may have been mysteriously buried, evidence that went missing— or investigations where Thomas seemed overly eager to push the blame away from a specific profile. They are asking... a terrifying question. How many other victims are out there? And the answer is that we just don't know yet. Because there are several high-profile child murders that happened in Chicago during the 1950s and during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Chicago saw a massive influx of unsolved violent crimes. Many of these victims were young women. Some were runaways. Some were children whose cases were brushed aside or classified as low priority during eras of high urban crime rates. This news has just broken, and the investigation into Thomas' criminal history in killing or killings has just started. So we need to look closely at the timeline of Thomas McInerney's assignments. I have been looking back at other unsolved Chicago cases, including one that happened near Thomas' patrol area, the infamous Chicago unsolved double homicide of sisters, 15-year-old Barbara Grimes and her 12-year-old sister, Patricia. They disappeared on December 28th, 1956, after seeing a screening of the Elvis Presley movie, Love Me Tender, at the Brighton Theater. Were there any similarities between what happened to Barbara and Patricia and what happened to little Gloria. Barbara went to public school. Her sister Patricia attended St. Maurice's Catholic School. So the families were both Catholic and involved in the Catholic Church, but so were a lot of other families in that area back then. Another thing that everyone knew about Barbara and Patricia was that they both loved Elvis Presley, and both of them had recently joined Elvis's official fan club. They loved the movie Love Me Tender so much, they had seen it 11 times. On the night they disappeared, Barbara and Patricia left their residence at approximately 7.30 p.m. They were headed to the Brighton Theater. The theater was about a mile and a half away, and it's not clear whether they planned to walk there or take the bus, but there was a bus route that they often took that went straight to the theater. Barbara and Patricia promised their mother that they would come home by midnight. but they never did. They did make it to the movie. A friend of theirs told police she saw them waiting in line to buy popcorn and that they seemed normal and happy. So a big question in their case was, were they like Gloria seen with an older man? A few witnesses told investigators that they had seen the sisters conversing with, then entering a car driven by a young man whose physical appearance had been similar to that of Elvis Presley. This young man, the witnesses said, drove a car that looked like a Mercury. But the early investigation was stalled because police believed that the sisters may have run away from home. Their parents, meanwhile, insisted they would never have gone out and stayed away for that long on their own in the bitter Chicago winter. But after the snow thawed on January 22nd, 1957, a construction worker spotted what he believed were mannequin parts as he drove along a rural country road named German Church Road, approximately 200 feet east of County Line Road, in unincorporated Willow Springs, in an area called Devil's Creek. These were Gloria and Patricia's bodies. The case hit a wall because the pathologists who examined Barbara and Patricia were unable to find a cause of death, and this turned into a huge controversy. The pathologist ultimately determined that the sisters were killed on December 28th, within a few hours of when they were seen at the movie. They found wounds on the bodies that looked like bruising and ice pick stabbings, but the cause of death was ultimately listed as a combination of shock and exposure. The pathologist said the ice pick-like wounds were most likely post-mortem and caused by rats, not the killer. But what happened to Barbara and Patricia? They weren't drugged. Toxicology reports showed no traces of alcohol or drugs or poison. Both of them were naked. And police later stated that there was evidence that Barbara had likely engaged in sexual intercourse before her death. But they couldn't say whether it was consensual or not. Now remember, this was the late 1950s. And this fact proved very controversial at the time So one question that's never really answered is, is the climate that the girls were found in a lucky break because their bodies were preserved better than they otherwise would have been? Or was this extreme cold something that the killer did to cunningly disguise the time of death? It's really interesting because no one could agree on anything in this case, even the time of death. The coroner's office chief's investigator, Harry Gloss, said he disagreed with the time of death. He believed that a thin layer of ice that was encrusted on the young women's bodies indicated that they had most likely been alive for a long time after December 28th. He believed they had been alive until at least January 7th. Harry Gloss believed that they had been abducted and held somewhere else and then sexually assaulted, then beaten and tortured by a sexual predator who had lured them into his vehicle under some sort of pretense. There were allegations made that both girls had been in the habit of spending free time outside bars on 36th Street and Archer Avenue, where they supposedly would get older men to buy alcohol for them. Now, their parents completely denied that this ever happened. Police questioned a man named Edward Benny Bedwell, a 21-year-old former circus worker who was a dishwasher at the time. He was also doing other odd jobs, including factory work. And at first, this seemed to be promising because on January 27th, Benny confessed to killing the sisters, saying that he and an accomplice named Frank had met the girls at a bar on Madison Street on January 7th. He claimed that he and Frank spent the week together with Barbara and Patricia together at various hotels, and that on January 13th, Barbara and Patricia had resisted their advances. and that after that, Benny and Frank knocked them unconscious and dumped them into a ditch while they were still alive. The girl's mother, Loretta, told the Chicago Tribune at the time that her daughters came from a good home and were brought up in religious surroundings. Benny told the Chicago Daily Tribune that he had been intoxicated and stated, quote, if I hadn't been drinking, I wouldn't have done what I did, and what I did, I didn't do intentionally, end quote. However, Benny quickly recanted that confession. He later said the confession had been fake and that he only gave it after days of being held at the police station and pressured. And at any rate, the confession quickly fell apart because it contradicted autopsy timelines. Benny Bedwell had been working on December 28th, the night of the movie, and could prove it with a time card. So the time of death ruling ultimately helped get Benny cleared because he had an alibi. Harry Gloss never gave up on his theory that the sisters had been sexually tortured and that he believed that Benny Bedwell had killed them. He was fired for voicing his opinions, but later deputized by the sheriff at the time. And reportedly, Harry continued working on the case without pay. There was renewed interest in the case many years later, in 2025, when a retired Chicago police detective named James Hennigan created a Facebook page and stated, that he believed that the Grimes sisters' murders may have a possible link to yet another unsolved case, the 1955 triple murder of two brothers, 13-year-old John Schuessler and his brother, 11-year-old Anton, and their friend, 14-year-old Robert Peterson. The three boys were also found naked and in a forest preserve. But for now, James' hunch that the murders of Barbara and Patricia may be connected to the three boys' murders is just a theory. No one was ever arrested or charged in connection with Barbara and Patricia's murders or with the killings of the Schuessler brothers and their friend. Could Thomas have been a suspect in those cases? The Chicago Police Department has said there is no evidence that Thomas knew Gloria and that they have not found evidence so far of other connections to crimes. But according to the Chicago Police Department's cold case review, Thomas' parents lived just a few blocks away from Gloria's home in West Englewood. And his early patrol assignments went through the neighborhood, Brighton Park, where the theater the two sisters visited was. Thomas McInerney was on the force from 1959 to 1987. For 28 years, he had access to police files, investigative tactics, radio calls, and crime scenes. He knew exactly how detectives track killers because he was one. He knew what mistakes caught people and what forensic pit to avoid he also had the ultimate cover a badge that deflected suspicion away from him and onto anyone else think about the power dynamic if a child saw something suspicious in chicago in the 1960s or 1970s who did they look for a police officer If a predator is wearing the uniform, the entire concept of community safety is inverted. Immediately following the October 2026 press conference, when the Chicago Police Department cold case squad announced this massive joint initiative with the FBI and others, they said that they were launching an audit. So what does this mean? This means that they're looking for patterns. Thomas was promoted to detective in 1964, which meant he was directly investigating homicide and sex crimes, and he continued to work in an official capacity after he relocated to Las Vegas. Thomas McInerney worked extensively as an investigator for the Federal Public Defender's Office in Las Vegas and in Reno, which meant that his jurisdiction there covered Washoe County and the surrounding rural northern counties, as well as Clark County, and downtown Las Vegas. He received accolades for that work. He was actually named Outstanding Federal Defender Investigator in 2003, before retiring from that position in 2004. Did Thomas's pattern follow him out to the desert? Police are asking any family member of someone who went missing or was the victim of an unsolved violent crime in the Chicago area between 1959 and 1987 to look back at their paperwork and see if the name Thomas McInerney is on there. Or if you remember him being involved or if you remember a Chicago detective matching his description who injected himself into an investigation. At this point, no one knows how many more families could be out there. Gloria Kovalevich finally has her answers. Now it's time to find out how many more secrets Detective Thomas McInerney could be hiding. He may be dead, but are there any other bodies out there? And if so, where are they buried? I'm Katherine Townsend. This is Hell and Gone Murder Line. Helen Gone Murder Line is a production of School of Humans and iHeart Podcast. It's written and narrated by me, Katherine Townsend, and produced by Edelise Perez. Special thanks to Amy Tubbs for her research assistance and James Wheaton for legal review. Noah Kammer mixed and scored this episode. Our theme song is by Ben Salib, executive producers of Virginia Prescott, Brandon Barr, and L.C. Crowley. Listen to Hell and Gone ad-free by subscribing to the iHeart True Crime Plus channel on Apple Podcasts. If you are interested in seeing documents and materials from the case, you can follow the show on Instagram at hellandgonepod. If you have a case you'd like me and my team to look into, you can reach out to us at our Hell and Gone murder line at 678-744-6145.
00:33:37
Speaker 2: That's 678-744-6145.
00:33:50
Speaker 1: School of Humans.
Speaker 1: School of Humans.
00:00:49
Speaker 2: Helen Gone Murder Line actively investigates cold case murders in an effort to raise public awareness, invite witnesses to come forward, and present evidence that could potentially be further investigated by law enforcement. While we value insights from family and community members, their statements should not be considered evidence and point to the challenges of verifying facts inherent in cold cases. We remind listeners that everyone is presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing in the podcast is intended to state or imply that anyone who has not been convicted of a crime is guilty of any wrongdoing.
00:01:26
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening. On November 12, 1960, eight-year-old Gloria Kovalevich was getting ready for church. Church was a big deal in this family. and little Gloria had just celebrated her Holy Communion a couple of weeks earlier. Gloria lived in Bridgeport, on the south side of Chicago, Illinois. The family was working class, and they were regulars at the nearby Catholic church, St. Mary of Mount Carmel, and their faith was a huge part of their weekly routine. Gloria had gotten up early that day to go to church and receive the sacrament, which a nun had told her classmates to do daily, in order to get used to the ritual. So Gloria had followed that same route from her home to her church for early morning mass every single day for two weeks, which might become important later when police were trying to figure out if someone had been stalking her. That Saturday was the last day that she would follow that routine. She left her home just after 8 a.m., but instead of riding with her family because the car was being used, Gloria walked. the just over three blocks on her own. She was wearing a pink and brown checkered dress and carrying a white communion purse over her shoulder. Her mother, Esther, waved goodbye to her and watched Gloria walk north before turning east and going out of sight. Gloria knew that route well, but on that morning, she never made it to morning mass. And by that afternoon, her parents and the entire neighborhood were in a state of panic. This was not a place where an eight-year-old girl vanished into thin air. This was a quiet suburb. The Chicago Police Department was immediately on alert, and they launched a massive, immediate citywide manhunt. hundreds of officers and neighbors and volunteers, including the Boy Scouts, fanned out across the South Side. They searched alleyways, they knocked on doors, peered into abandoned buildings, and combed through the industrial lots bordering the city's canals. Gloria's shocking disappearance made the local news, and parents in the area and their children were terrified. But it wasn't until 64 years later that they got an answer. one that involved a decorated homicide detective who was also a child killer. I'm Katherine Townsend. Over the past eight years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned that there is no such thing as a small town where murder never happens. I have received hundreds of messages from people all around the country asking for help with an unsolved murder that's affected them, their families, and their communities. If you have a case you'd like me and my team to look into, you can reach out to us at our Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. That's 678-744-6145. Or you can send us a message on Instagram at hellandgonepod. This is Hell and Gone Murder Line. The entire south side of Chicago was in a panic. after eight-year-old Gloria seemed to vanish into thin air while walking to morning mass at her church. However, just a few hours later, the search for the missing little girl came to a horrifying end. A driver for a laundry company was in McKinley Park on his lunch break and stopped along 104th Avenue, which was in a wooded area of Palos Park, more than 15 miles southwest of Gloria's home. The driver was eating his lunch at a picnic table when he saw something colored that caught his eye. It was Gloria's pink and brown checkered dress. Then he found Gloria's small, lifeless body dumped in a ditch. He could see that her head was badly damaged and misshapen and that she was covered with blood. After checking her pulse and realizing that she was dead, he drove to the nearest town and called the Cook County Sheriff's Office. Gloria had been fatally shot twice in the head with what police believed to be a Colt. 45 weapon. That murder weapon was never found, but police did find a single bullet. Gloria's clothing was torn and strewn around near her body. Investigators found her coat and the little white communion purse she had so proudly carried when she set off for church. Later that day, Her father, Edward, identified Gloria's body. And once the autopsy was complete, the acts of the case got more brutal for Gloria's parents. They learned that Gloria had been beaten and fatally shot. Initial media reports said that they did not believe that Gloria had been sexually assaulted. However, this later changed. Police noted that Gloria was wearing her underwear when she was found. but her blue leotard, the one that she wore under her dress, had been taken off and placed under her. The brutality of the crime shocked even the most hardened homicide detectives on the Chicago force. This case made local and eventually national news, and headlines talked about catching the sex maniac who was responsible for the killing. The Chicago Police Department was the investigating agency. And police did have one lead. Witnesses told police that a girl who looked like Gloria was seen with a man roughly 25 to 40 years old shortly after she left her home. So police were looking for an adult male. That's pretty much all they knew, but that is a wide range of ages. Really, the police had very little to go on. This was before DNA testing or security cameras. However, The technicians from the Chicago Police Crime Laboratory meticulously examined this scene. And while they were examining Gloria's clothing, they focused on something. The strap of that small, white communion purse. And they found something vital. A single, distinct, latent fingerprint. It was just a partial print, left behind in the frantic moments when the killer grabbed or discarded the bag. Even in 1960, a fingerprint was a powerful tool, but only if you have a suspect to match it against. Back then, detectives did not get a match, so the print was cataloged and filed away. Detectives interviewed hundreds of people and seemed to mainly focus on the usual suspects, like sex offenders living near the area, transients passing through, but also on people like delivery men and neighbors. They followed thousands of leads across Cook County and beyond. But as the months bled into years, the leads dried up. The case file kept getting bigger. But Gloria's case slowly went cold. Years passed and the world moved on. Many of the original detectives on the case retired. But preserved in an evidence bag was that white communion purse with the single fingerprint on the strap. Then, in 2010, there was a break in the case. Cold case investigators with the Chicago Police Department pulled Gloria's file out to take another look. By now, there was DNA testing and the CODIS database. So police sent Gloria's preserved clothing, her leotard and coat, to a specialized forensic laboratory. Using advanced techniques that required only microscopic amounts of biological material, forensic scientists were able to successfully extract a male DNA profile from the fabric of Gloria's clothes. The DNA profile came from semen that was found on Gloria's coat. This must have been a parent's nightmare to hear because the initial report said that Gloria had not been sexually assaulted, but the semen on the coat seemed to confirm that either pre- or post-mortem, there was a sexual component to this crime. The semen was a massive breakthrough because now detectives had DNA, and for the first time in half a century, the killer had a genetic signature. But when investigators ran that DNA profile through CODIS, the national database that houses the DNA of convicted offenders across the United States, the system returned a frustrating result. No match. The killer's DNA was not in the system. This tells investigators one of two things. Either the killer managed to avoid a felony conviction for the rest of his life, or he died before the modern DNA databases were established. The case stalled again for years. with the genetic profile locked into a vault. Until 2024, the FBI's forensic genetic genealogy team entered the narrative. 62 years after Gloria's brutal murder, investigators finally had a break in the case. They had matched the DNA to a suspect, Thomas F. McInerney Jr. But Thomas McInerney Jr. wasn't just your average suspect. He was a police officer And he had been working and living near Gloria's neighborhood before she was kidnapped. Genetic genealogy doesn't have to rely on criminal databases. It uses consumer DNA databases. So the same platforms millions of everyday people use to trace their family trees, look up their ancestry and find distant cousins, to find potential familial DNA links. The FBI took the unknown male DNA profile from Gloria's clothing and uploaded it to these genealogical databases. And the system found matches, but they weren't direct hits. The database found potential distant relatives, This would be things like third cousins, second cousins once removed, or great nieces. An FBI genealogist sat down with a blank piece of paper and started to construct a massive, multi-generational family tree. Then the FBI worked backward to find a common ancestor. And then they built the tree forward, tracing every male descendant who would have been alive, adult, and in Chicago in November of 1960. So this was a combination of the most cutting edge digital technology available, but also a lot of old school detective work because it involves digging through birth certificates, marriage licenses, death notices, census records, and military draft cards. Slowly, the genealogy team eliminates individuals who are overseas, individuals who are too young, or individuals who are incarcerated elsewhere. This was the same technology, by the way, that was used to catch Joseph DeAngelo, the Golden State Killer, after almost four decades in California. Joseph was also a former police officer. Eventually, the branches converged on one specific family line. And within that family line, investigators isolated a prime suspect, a man named Thomas F. McInerney Jr., And investigators discovered that not only was Thomas a police officer, he was a highly decorated police officer who had been on the beat as a rookie cop when Gloria was kidnapped and murdered. Thomas McInerney Jr. joined the Chicago Police Department in 1959, so he had been on the force for a year in November of 1960. when Gloria Kovalevich was killed. And over the years, not only did Thomas fly under the radar, he was promoted. He became a detective and rose through the ranks of the Violent Crimes and Homicide Division of the Chicago Police Department. He spent nearly 30 years investigating the exact types of crimes he was now accused of committing. He sat in on interrogations of hundreds of suspects and talked to grieving families who were victims of violent crime. He investigated hundreds of murders. He had access to crime scenes and evidence, all while carrying this dark, monstrous secret. But the DNA match wasn't enough on its own. It was a powerful lead, but prosecutors need definitive traditional forensic confirmation before a case can be officially closed. But they couldn't just swab Thomas' cheek because they found out that after he retired from the Chicago Police Department in 1987, after nearly three decades of service, he collected his pension, packed his bags, and eventually moved away from the cold winters of Illinois to Las Vegas, Nevada. Thomas was married. He had five children and eventually grandchildren. Thomas appeared to live out a quiet, comfortable retirement in Las Vegas, and he died peacefully there in 2006 at the age of 75. But investigators didn't need Thomas because they still had that one piece of evidence that had been sitting in an evidence room for decades, the single latent fingerprint on the strap of Gloria's white communion purse. So detectives pulled Thomas McInerney's archival personnel file from the Chicago Police Department records vault. Inside that file was his original 1959 employment application, the paperwork he filled out to become a police officer. Pressed onto that 1959 document were the clear black ink impressions of Thomas McInerney's fingerprints taken the day he joined the force. a senior fingerprint examiner took the latent print from the communion purse and set it side by side with Thomas McInerney's 1959 application print under a high powered comparison microscope and found that the fingerprint on Gloria's purse strap was a perfect match to the fingerprint on Thomas's job application. So after hearing this, the question I had was why didn't they find this match sooner? It turns out that this seemed to be for a couple of reasons. One, Thomas's fingerprint was done on the old card system and wasn't digitized. And two, even if it had been digitized like many police employment records are today, it would not have shown up in the system because CODIS only tests against people who've been arrested and charged. It's a criminal database, so it doesn't test against people who haven't been arrested. Our system is built to catch known criminals, not police officers, hiding in plain sight. But finally, after 64 years, the Chicago Police Department had found their killer. The next step was to publicly confirm it. So on October 12th, 2026, the Chicago Police Department, flanked by FBI agents and Cook County prosecutors, held a somber press conference. They announced to the world that the murder of Gloria Kovalevich is officially solved. They named Thomas F. McInerney Jr. as her killer. Gloria's brother, Adam Kovalevich, who was just a baby when Gloria was murdered, told reporters that he had mixed feelings. He was very relieved that his sister's killer had been caught, but he considered it a bitter victory because the killer got to live out the rest of his life without ever facing justice. Adam told the Chicago Tribune, quote, In this case, the justice system was outrun by the clock. So this may be the end of Gloria's story, but for this case, it's just the beginnings. In Chicago, a decorated homicide detective was unmasked as a child killer. And he was only 24 years old when Gloria was killed. So what are the chances that in all those years as a young man before joining the force and even afterwards, that this was his only crime? A man does not typically commit a crime as escalation-heavy, brutal, and organized as the abduction and murder of an eight-year-old girl as a one-time occurrence. only to become a law-abiding citizen for the next 40 years. Criminally speaking, that is an extreme rarity. Immediately following the October 2026 press conference, the FBI, the Cook County State's Attorney's Office, and the Chicago Police Department's Cold Case Squad announced a massive, unprecedented joint initiative. They are launching a comprehensive audit of every single violent crime, missing person, and unsolved homicide case that Thomas McInerney Jr. ever handled, investigated, or was in physical proximity to during his three-decade career. They're looking for patterns. They're looking for cases that were abruptly closed, leads that may have been mysteriously buried, evidence that went missing— or investigations where Thomas seemed overly eager to push the blame away from a specific profile. They are asking... a terrifying question. How many other victims are out there? And the answer is that we just don't know yet. Because there are several high-profile child murders that happened in Chicago during the 1950s and during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Chicago saw a massive influx of unsolved violent crimes. Many of these victims were young women. Some were runaways. Some were children whose cases were brushed aside or classified as low priority during eras of high urban crime rates. This news has just broken, and the investigation into Thomas' criminal history in killing or killings has just started. So we need to look closely at the timeline of Thomas McInerney's assignments. I have been looking back at other unsolved Chicago cases, including one that happened near Thomas' patrol area, the infamous Chicago unsolved double homicide of sisters, 15-year-old Barbara Grimes and her 12-year-old sister, Patricia. They disappeared on December 28th, 1956, after seeing a screening of the Elvis Presley movie, Love Me Tender, at the Brighton Theater. Were there any similarities between what happened to Barbara and Patricia and what happened to little Gloria. Barbara went to public school. Her sister Patricia attended St. Maurice's Catholic School. So the families were both Catholic and involved in the Catholic Church, but so were a lot of other families in that area back then. Another thing that everyone knew about Barbara and Patricia was that they both loved Elvis Presley, and both of them had recently joined Elvis's official fan club. They loved the movie Love Me Tender so much, they had seen it 11 times. On the night they disappeared, Barbara and Patricia left their residence at approximately 7.30 p.m. They were headed to the Brighton Theater. The theater was about a mile and a half away, and it's not clear whether they planned to walk there or take the bus, but there was a bus route that they often took that went straight to the theater. Barbara and Patricia promised their mother that they would come home by midnight. but they never did. They did make it to the movie. A friend of theirs told police she saw them waiting in line to buy popcorn and that they seemed normal and happy. So a big question in their case was, were they like Gloria seen with an older man? A few witnesses told investigators that they had seen the sisters conversing with, then entering a car driven by a young man whose physical appearance had been similar to that of Elvis Presley. This young man, the witnesses said, drove a car that looked like a Mercury. But the early investigation was stalled because police believed that the sisters may have run away from home. Their parents, meanwhile, insisted they would never have gone out and stayed away for that long on their own in the bitter Chicago winter. But after the snow thawed on January 22nd, 1957, a construction worker spotted what he believed were mannequin parts as he drove along a rural country road named German Church Road, approximately 200 feet east of County Line Road, in unincorporated Willow Springs, in an area called Devil's Creek. These were Gloria and Patricia's bodies. The case hit a wall because the pathologists who examined Barbara and Patricia were unable to find a cause of death, and this turned into a huge controversy. The pathologist ultimately determined that the sisters were killed on December 28th, within a few hours of when they were seen at the movie. They found wounds on the bodies that looked like bruising and ice pick stabbings, but the cause of death was ultimately listed as a combination of shock and exposure. The pathologist said the ice pick-like wounds were most likely post-mortem and caused by rats, not the killer. But what happened to Barbara and Patricia? They weren't drugged. Toxicology reports showed no traces of alcohol or drugs or poison. Both of them were naked. And police later stated that there was evidence that Barbara had likely engaged in sexual intercourse before her death. But they couldn't say whether it was consensual or not. Now remember, this was the late 1950s. And this fact proved very controversial at the time So one question that's never really answered is, is the climate that the girls were found in a lucky break because their bodies were preserved better than they otherwise would have been? Or was this extreme cold something that the killer did to cunningly disguise the time of death? It's really interesting because no one could agree on anything in this case, even the time of death. The coroner's office chief's investigator, Harry Gloss, said he disagreed with the time of death. He believed that a thin layer of ice that was encrusted on the young women's bodies indicated that they had most likely been alive for a long time after December 28th. He believed they had been alive until at least January 7th. Harry Gloss believed that they had been abducted and held somewhere else and then sexually assaulted, then beaten and tortured by a sexual predator who had lured them into his vehicle under some sort of pretense. There were allegations made that both girls had been in the habit of spending free time outside bars on 36th Street and Archer Avenue, where they supposedly would get older men to buy alcohol for them. Now, their parents completely denied that this ever happened. Police questioned a man named Edward Benny Bedwell, a 21-year-old former circus worker who was a dishwasher at the time. He was also doing other odd jobs, including factory work. And at first, this seemed to be promising because on January 27th, Benny confessed to killing the sisters, saying that he and an accomplice named Frank had met the girls at a bar on Madison Street on January 7th. He claimed that he and Frank spent the week together with Barbara and Patricia together at various hotels, and that on January 13th, Barbara and Patricia had resisted their advances. and that after that, Benny and Frank knocked them unconscious and dumped them into a ditch while they were still alive. The girl's mother, Loretta, told the Chicago Tribune at the time that her daughters came from a good home and were brought up in religious surroundings. Benny told the Chicago Daily Tribune that he had been intoxicated and stated, quote, if I hadn't been drinking, I wouldn't have done what I did, and what I did, I didn't do intentionally, end quote. However, Benny quickly recanted that confession. He later said the confession had been fake and that he only gave it after days of being held at the police station and pressured. And at any rate, the confession quickly fell apart because it contradicted autopsy timelines. Benny Bedwell had been working on December 28th, the night of the movie, and could prove it with a time card. So the time of death ruling ultimately helped get Benny cleared because he had an alibi. Harry Gloss never gave up on his theory that the sisters had been sexually tortured and that he believed that Benny Bedwell had killed them. He was fired for voicing his opinions, but later deputized by the sheriff at the time. And reportedly, Harry continued working on the case without pay. There was renewed interest in the case many years later, in 2025, when a retired Chicago police detective named James Hennigan created a Facebook page and stated, that he believed that the Grimes sisters' murders may have a possible link to yet another unsolved case, the 1955 triple murder of two brothers, 13-year-old John Schuessler and his brother, 11-year-old Anton, and their friend, 14-year-old Robert Peterson. The three boys were also found naked and in a forest preserve. But for now, James' hunch that the murders of Barbara and Patricia may be connected to the three boys' murders is just a theory. No one was ever arrested or charged in connection with Barbara and Patricia's murders or with the killings of the Schuessler brothers and their friend. Could Thomas have been a suspect in those cases? The Chicago Police Department has said there is no evidence that Thomas knew Gloria and that they have not found evidence so far of other connections to crimes. But according to the Chicago Police Department's cold case review, Thomas' parents lived just a few blocks away from Gloria's home in West Englewood. And his early patrol assignments went through the neighborhood, Brighton Park, where the theater the two sisters visited was. Thomas McInerney was on the force from 1959 to 1987. For 28 years, he had access to police files, investigative tactics, radio calls, and crime scenes. He knew exactly how detectives track killers because he was one. He knew what mistakes caught people and what forensic pit to avoid he also had the ultimate cover a badge that deflected suspicion away from him and onto anyone else think about the power dynamic if a child saw something suspicious in chicago in the 1960s or 1970s who did they look for a police officer If a predator is wearing the uniform, the entire concept of community safety is inverted. Immediately following the October 2026 press conference, when the Chicago Police Department cold case squad announced this massive joint initiative with the FBI and others, they said that they were launching an audit. So what does this mean? This means that they're looking for patterns. Thomas was promoted to detective in 1964, which meant he was directly investigating homicide and sex crimes, and he continued to work in an official capacity after he relocated to Las Vegas. Thomas McInerney worked extensively as an investigator for the Federal Public Defender's Office in Las Vegas and in Reno, which meant that his jurisdiction there covered Washoe County and the surrounding rural northern counties, as well as Clark County, and downtown Las Vegas. He received accolades for that work. He was actually named Outstanding Federal Defender Investigator in 2003, before retiring from that position in 2004. Did Thomas's pattern follow him out to the desert? Police are asking any family member of someone who went missing or was the victim of an unsolved violent crime in the Chicago area between 1959 and 1987 to look back at their paperwork and see if the name Thomas McInerney is on there. Or if you remember him being involved or if you remember a Chicago detective matching his description who injected himself into an investigation. At this point, no one knows how many more families could be out there. Gloria Kovalevich finally has her answers. Now it's time to find out how many more secrets Detective Thomas McInerney could be hiding. He may be dead, but are there any other bodies out there? And if so, where are they buried? I'm Katherine Townsend. This is Hell and Gone Murder Line. Helen Gone Murder Line is a production of School of Humans and iHeart Podcast. It's written and narrated by me, Katherine Townsend, and produced by Edelise Perez. Special thanks to Amy Tubbs for her research assistance and James Wheaton for legal review. Noah Kammer mixed and scored this episode. Our theme song is by Ben Salib, executive producers of Virginia Prescott, Brandon Barr, and L.C. Crowley. Listen to Hell and Gone ad-free by subscribing to the iHeart True Crime Plus channel on Apple Podcasts. If you are interested in seeing documents and materials from the case, you can follow the show on Instagram at hellandgonepod. If you have a case you'd like me and my team to look into, you can reach out to us at our Hell and Gone murder line at 678-744-6145.
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Speaker 2: That's 678-744-6145.
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Speaker 1: School of Humans.
