Chicago police have named a former homicide detective as the killer of 8-year-old Gloria Kowalewicz, whose body was found hours after she left home for church in 1960. DNA advances and a preserved fingerprint closed the case more than 65 years later, after the suspect had already died.

Fox News Digital reported that authorities identified Thomas F. McInerney Jr. as the man who shot and killed Gloria. McInerney joined the Chicago Police Department in 1959, stayed through 1987, and died in 2006 at age 70 without facing charges in her murder.

The identification lands with heavy institutional weight. A man trusted to investigate violent crime has now been tied by modern forensics to the abduction and killing of a child walking to Mass. Gloria’s parents died before learning who took their daughter.

A morning walk to church that ended in a ditch

On Nov. 12, 1960, shortly before 8 a.m., Gloria left home to attend morning Mass at St. Mary of Mt. Carmel Church, a few blocks away. She never arrived.

Roughly four hours later, searchers found her body in a ditch at a forest preserve southwest of Chicago. She had been shot and killed. The New York Post reported she was shot twice in the head and that her body lay in a ravine miles from her West Englewood home.

Crime-scene material kept for decades included a bullet, her coat, her shoes, and a white communion purse with a prayer book. Investigators also preserved a fingerprint on the purse strap. Those items later became the bridge between a 1960 murder and twenty-first-century DNA work.

Forensic breakthroughs of this kind have rewritten other long-dormant files, including cases where DNA testing excluded a man once facing the death penalty in a 1985 killing.

A massive hunt that still went cold

Chicago police poured enormous effort into the original investigation. Officers interviewed more than 1,300 people and knocked on hundreds of doors. The case still went unsolved for decades.

Evidence custody mattered. The fingerprint on the purse strap and biological material on clothing remained available when investigators later paired them with modern lab methods. Without that preservation, the link to McInerney would not have been possible.

Cold-case identification after generations of silence is no longer rare. Decades-old remains have been named through similar persistence, as when a skull found in a Sierra Nevada forest in 1991 was finally identified after a long mystery.

How DNA and a fingerprint named a detective

Chicago police confirmed to Fox News Digital that advances in DNA technology and the preserved fingerprint tied McInerney to the killing. Investigators worked with the FBI and the Illinois State Police on the forensic match.

Breitbart reported that the probe regained momentum after the FBI used DNA submitted to family tree websites for comparison. Fingerprints were found on Gloria’s purse strap and Bible, and semen traces were later found on her coat. That combination of genetic genealogy, print evidence, and scene material pointed to McInerney.

The New York Post reported that new DNA evidence from a genetic ancestry site, plus fingerprints and ballistics, linked then-24-year-old Thomas Francis McInerney to the crime. He was described as an Army veteran and a neighbor of the victim who later rose inside Chicago’s homicide ranks.

Authorities have not publicly detailed a motive. They have also not released a full technical account of every lab step in plain public filings beyond the DNA-and-fingerprint linkage already confirmed.

A badge, a long career, and no courtroom reckoning

McInerney joined CPD one year before Gloria’s murder. He remained with the department until retiring in 1987 and worked as a detective investigating violent crimes. After leaving Chicago policing, he worked for the Federal Public Defender’s Office in Nevada and retired from that role in 2004. He died two years later.

He never stood trial for Gloria’s murder. Death closed the charging window. The Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office is now working to identify other cases that may have involved him, a review that treats the new forensic identification as a starting point rather than an endpoint.

High-profile killings sometimes wait decades for a courtroom answer, including the long path that led a jury to convict Duane “Keffe D” Davis of first-degree murder in the Tupac Shakur case after three decades. Gloria’s case cannot follow that path. The man police name as her killer is already gone.

Police and family react to a posthumous identification

Chicago police did not soften the institutional failure. In a statement provided to Fox News Digital, the department addressed both the badge and the missed accountability.

"McInerney should never have worn the CPD star, and it is devastating to accept that he was never identified and held accountable while he was alive."

CPD Chief of Detectives Kevin Bruno told the Chicago Tribune the officer status cuts deeper than a standard cold-case close.

"The fact that he was a police officer is deeply troubling to all of us that have made a career out of this most noble profession."

Gloria’s brother, Adam Kowalewicz, focused on earthly justice that never arrived. He told the Tribune the killer “lived a decent life and passed on” without paying a legal price.

"He never paid his dues. You hope he’s going to pay his dues with the good Lord."

Those reactions mark two separate ledgers. One is forensic truth recovered after 65 years. The other is a child murder that escaped indictment while the suspect wore, then retired from, the city’s police star and later held federal investigative work.

What investigators still have to determine

The Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office review of other possible McInerney-linked cases is the live procedural track. No public list of additional named victims has been released in the reporting package. Investigators will need to determine whether other unsolved files share his DNA, prints, ballistics pattern, or geographic footprint from his years in Chicago and later in Nevada.

Officials have not publicly confirmed whether earlier tips ever placed McInerney near Gloria’s route that morning, or whether neighbor proximity was examined in 1960 and discarded. The original door-to-door sweep was vast. It still did not produce a charge against the man now identified by DNA and fingerprint evidence.

Long-delayed murder cases can still move into trial when suspects live long enough, a pattern also seen as Tupac Shakur murder suspect Duane Davis headed toward trial nearly 30 years after the Las Vegas drive-by. That option is closed here. What remains is case-matching, evidence retesting, and an honest inventory of how a killer kept a badge.

Preserved evidence and the limits of delayed justice

The practical lesson sits in the evidence locker. A bullet, clothing, a communion purse, a prayer book, and a print on a strap outlasted the suspect’s career and his life. Family-tree DNA comparison and state-federal lab work did what 1,300 interviews could not finish in 1960.

That does not repair the gap for Gloria’s parents, who died without answers. It does not create a sentence McInerney can serve. It does place a name on a murder that Chicago police now say was committed by one of their own, and it forces a prosecutor’s office to hunt for any other victims who may have been left in his wake.

When a police department states that a man should never have worn its star, the public is owed more than a press line. It is owed a full accounting of other cases, a clear forensic record, and a standard that treats badge misuse as a public-safety emergency, not a historical footnote.

DNA can name a killer after 65 years. It cannot restore the morning Gloria never finished walking to church, and it cannot substitute for a justice system that failed to stop a detective who should have been in cuffs, not on the force.