In November 1960, eight-year-old Gloria Kowalczyk left her home on Chicago’s South Side to attend Mass at St. Mary of Mount Carmel Church. The church stood about three blocks away, less than half a mile from her back door. She never arrived.

Before noon, a laundry truck driver passing through Palos Park, a southwestern suburb of Cook County, stopped along 104th Street beside a wooded area. There he found Gloria. She had been shot. Investigators determined she was still alive when she was brought to those woods.

Less than half a mile from her home, her world had been small and close. By midday, she lay dead more than fifteen miles away. Using a metal detector, police found a single spent bullet casing in the ground. Her shoe and her purse were found a few feet from her body.

Her coat was missing and later discovered several miles away, apart from everything else. On the strap of her purse, investigators found fingerprints. They also found prints on her Bible. For detectives in 1960, this was promising.

A fingerprint belonged to only one person. But evidence only becomes an answer when it can be matched to someone. The problem was the nature of fingerprint files at the time. Records were kept on paper cards and searched by hand.

Trained examiners compared ridge patterns card by card. Those files were organized around complete sets of ten fingerprints taken at a police station or office. A single print lifted from a purse strap was far harder to search against thousands of cards. When detectives had a suspect, the task was simple: pull his card and compare.

When they had none, the print sat in the file waiting for a name. The empty casing carried the same limitation. Without the weapon, it could point to nothing by itself. The detectives had a crime scene, a timeline measured in hours, a casing, and fingerprints.

They did not have a single name to compare any of it against. That same day, Edward Kowalczyk identified his daughter near the place where she was found. The investigation that followed was extensive. Police interviewed more than 1,300 people.

Her clothing was displayed on a mannequin for press photographs, and the story spread beyond Chicago. Within days, detectives had another case to consider. On the evening of November 13, fourteen-year-old Nancy Eagleson was walking home from a movie theater in Boulding, Ohio, with her five-year-old sister. A man in a car forced her inside and drove away.

Her body was found the next day in a wooded area about eight miles away. Police investigated whether the cases were connected, but no link was ever established. Nancy’s case remains unsolved today. On November 16, 1960, Gloria’s funeral was held at the same church she had been walking toward four days earlier.

More than a thousand people attended. Six of her third-grade classmates served as pallbearers. She was buried in Mount Carmel Catholic Cemetery in Hillside, Illinois. The same day, a newspaper in Hammond, Indiana, reported that police could find no strong evidence identifying the person responsible.

Weeks turned into months. Tips came in and were checked. A Tribune report later described the search as overwhelmed by tips, dead-end investigations, and arrests that led nowhere. By the spring of 1961, about six months after Gloria’s death, the investigation had lost its momentum.

The evidence collected on November 12 remained in storage: the bullet casing, the clothing, the fingerprints on her purse strap. The man police now name as a suspect continued his career. Thomas Francis McInerney was a United States Army veteran. In 1960, he was a patrol officer on Chicago’s West Side.

In 1964, he was promoted to detective. Over the years that followed, his assignments took him across the city investigating robberies, vice, and gangs on the South Side. At one point, he worked as a homicide detective. Public records do not indicate he ever worked on Gloria’s case.

He remained on the Chicago Police Department until 1987 and died in Las Vegas in 2006. For forty-six years after Gloria’s murder, he lived without his name being publicly connected to it. Meanwhile, science changed. DNA analysis made it possible to link biological traces to a single person, and testing became sensitive enough to work on older, smaller samples.

Gloria’s clothing was still in storage. In July 2010, nearly fifty years after her death, the Chicago Police Department used grant funding to send her dress to a DNA laboratory. The fingerprints from her purse strap and Bible were also sent for examination. It was the first time the 1960 evidence had been examined with modern forensic tools.

Five months later, the lab reported a result. According to Lieutenant Marc Kearns of the department’s Area 1 detectives, the test revealed a male DNA profile from biological evidence on Gloria’s dress. For the first time, investigators had a genetic profile of the man linked to the evidence. The profile was entered into CODIS, the FBI’s national database of DNA profiles collected by law enforcement agencies across the United States.

If the man’s profile was already in the system, a search might yield a name. If his data had never been entered, no search of CODIS could find him directly. Kearns said several new suspects were developed, not one name but several. Each had to be examined, and each had to be confirmed or eliminated.

At the end of that process, the case remained open. Investigators now had what they lacked in 1960, a profile of the man they were looking for, but still no name. For years after 2010, the profile had no match. Then in 2024, the department used another federal grant to send a second piece of evidence, Gloria’s coat, to the FBI.

This time, the method was different. Investigative genetic genealogy, which became widely used after a notable case in California in 2018, does not depend on the suspect being in a criminal database. Instead, investigators compare the unknown DNA profile to people who have voluntarily submitted their DNA to family tree websites. These people are not suspects.

They may be distant relatives. By building family trees from those matches, genealogists can narrow the search toward one family and eventually one person. This method was designed for the problem Gloria’s case had faced since 2010: investigators had a profile but no name, and the man who matched it did not need a criminal record to be found. There is an important limit to this technique.

A match in a family tree is a lead, not proof. Federal Department of Justice policy requires confirming a genetic lead through direct DNA comparison before treating it as an identification. Earlier in 2026, according to the Tribune, the FBI’s genealogy work gave the case new momentum, pointing toward a specific name. In July 2026, according to Lieutenant Kearns, Thomas McInerney was definitively identified as the source of the DNA extracted from Gloria’s dress.

The name belonged to a man who, in November 1960, had been a Chicago police officer. The DNA identification was not the end of the investigation. Detectives turned to evidence unrelated to DNA. McInerney’s 1959 application to the Chicago Police Department included the fingerprints he had submitted to join the force.

Investigators compared those prints to the fingerprint taken from Gloria’s purse strap in 1960. According to investigators, they matched. That fingerprint had been part of the case from the first day. It had been lifted, logged, and stored.

In 2010, it had been sent for examination again. For sixty-five years, it had waited for a name and a set of prints that, according to investigators, matched. They had been inside the department’s own records since before Gloria was killed. The evidence had never been missing.

The connection had been. The fingerprint mattered for another reason. It was entirely separate from the DNA. It came from a different purpose, was collected in a different era, and was compared by a different method.

Police say both pointed to the same man. There was also the firearm evidence. According to a Tribune report, McInerney owned three Colt pistols, the same type of weapon used to fire the bullet found in Gloria’s case. This proves he owned weapons of the same type.

It does not equal matching a specific gun to the bullet, and no such match has been announced. Combined, the DNA evidence, the fingerprint comparison, and the firearm formed the basis of the department’s conclusion. The Tribune described that conclusion as the result of a series of ballistics tests, fingerprint comparisons, and DNA tests conducted over several years. Each line of evidence came from a different moment in the case.

The bullet casing and fingerprint were collected on the first day in 1960. The DNA profile came from 2010 testing. The name came from genealogy work that began in 2024. They were only assembled together in 2026.

But the evidence answered only part of what investigators needed to know. Cold case detectives say there was no known connection between McInerney and Gloria before her death. Census records cited by the Tribune show that in 1950, ten years before the murder, McInerney’s parents lived on South Lawndale Street, about three-quarters of a mile east of where the Kowalczyk family lived. His father was a correctional officer at the Cook County Jail.

Those records place his family in the same part of the city, but they do not prove any connection to Gloria. The reason an eight-year-old girl on her way to Mass was targeted remains unknown. The case now has a name. It still lacks a motive.

Because McInerney had died twenty years earlier, criminal prosecution was no longer possible. When a suspect is identified, an investigation normally moves into a new phase: arrest, formal charges, review by prosecutors, the test of the courtroom. None of those steps could happen. McInerney was never charged in Gloria’s death.

He never stood trial. No court ever ruled on the evidence against him. What the Chicago Police Department reached was an investigative conclusion. Cold case detectives identified the person they believe killed Gloria based on DNA, fingerprints, and firearm evidence.

That is not a conviction, and it was never tested in court. Police also say McInerney is not a suspect in any other crimes. This distinction is not merely technical. A trial is where evidence is challenged.

The defense could question how samples were stored for six decades, how comparisons were made, and what the results could and could not show. In this case, that process never happened and never can. The department could only close the file. According to police data reported by the Chicago Tribune, Gloria’s murder case is one of the oldest closed by Chicago police detectives in nearly a decade.

The findings were made public on October 11, 2026. For Adam Kowalczyk, the news came months earlier. He had been an infant when his sister was killed. Earlier in 2026, cold case detectives called to tell him what they had found.

He told the newspaper the call lifted a heavy weight from him. Learning that the identified man had been a Chicago police officer came as a shock. He praised the investigators who closed the case, but he also said he was troubled that McInerney faced no accountability for his sister’s death. The family still wonders why Gloria was targeted.

The file was closed, but one question remained inside it unanswered. The documented answer to why this took so long is this: the fingerprint alone did not show a name. DNA did. The 2010 profile gave investigators the man’s genetic fingerprint.

The genealogy work that followed in 2024 led them to his identity. Only then did investigators have reason to pull a sixty-seven-year-old job application and compare the two sets of prints side by side. The public record does not clarify whether that comparison could have been made earlier or why it was not. The report does not state whether the purse strap print was entered into automated fingerprint systems once they came into use.

Without that information, any answer is speculation. What the record does show is the order in which the pieces came together: evidence collected in 1960, a profile developed in 2010, a name emerging in 2026, and a fingerprint match confirming it. The evidence collected on November 12, 1960, survived across the decades, waiting until science could read it.

At Mount Carmel Catholic Cemetery in Hillside, Illinois, a headstone marks Gloria Kowalczyk, 1951 to 1960.