Eight-year-old Gloria Kowalewicz’s school and church were less than a half-mile from her back door in West Englewood.
On Nov. 12, 1960, a Saturday, her mother Esther was up early to get her dressed. Gloria had received her First Holy Communion recently, and a nun at St. Mary of Mount Carmel Church had urged the third grader and her classmates to receive the sacrament every day for two weeks to impress the ritual into their memories.
That Saturday was the last day. But her father needed the family car, so Gloria would have to make the 3½-block trip on foot.
For her daughter, the older of two kids, Esther picked out a pink-and-brown checkered dress and a blue leotard. Esther kissed her goodbye and watched from the family’s porch as Gloria walked north on Damen Avenue before turning east onto Marquette Road, past a gas station and out of sight.
Gloria never made it to the church. Her body would be found just a few hours later in a secluded spot in the suburbs. She had been shot twice in the head.
It was a crime that shocked the city and stayed a mystery for decades, but now police say they have solved the case using DNA technology. And the perpetrator, they say, was a young man who wore a Chicago Police Department star.
A body is found
Shortly before noon that day, a driver for a laundry company in McKinley Park stopped along 104th Avenue, about a mile south of Route 83, in a wooded area of Palos Park more than 15 miles southwest of Gloria’s home.
While parked, the driver checked his afternoon route and ate his lunch. But a burst of color in a ravine about 20 feet west of the road caught his eye — Gloria’s pink-and-brown checkered dress.
Finding no pulse when he walked over to what turned out to be the child’s body, he drove to a nearby tavern and called the Cook County sheriff’s office.
Gloria had been shot and had bruises on her neck. Given the amount of blood at the scene, investigators determined Gloria wasn’t killed until she was brought to the woods.
Members of the sheriff’s office, Illinois State Police and CPD pored over the area, scouring the dirt, shrubs and vegetation around Gloria’s body. A team of divers searched nearby bodies of water. A bloody trail leading from the road was quickly found, and the Police Department took plaster prints of nearby tire tracks. Using a metal detector, police recovered a single spent bullet casing at the scene.
When Gloria was discovered, she was wearing her underwear, but her leotard was taken off and was under her body. Police believed she was not sexually assaulted.
Gloria’s coat was found several miles away, and her shoes and purse were collected a few feet from her body. Police found fingerprints on the strap of Gloria’s purse and on her Bible, but investigators did not yet know about traces of semen that would eventually be found on her coat.
Edward Kowalewicz identified his daughter’s remains later that day, near where her body was found.
The next day, scores of officers canvassed every home in Gloria’s neighborhood for witnesses and suspects. Local sex offenders were rounded up and pressed for their whereabouts when the girl went missing.
Hundreds of local firefighters, veterans of foreign wars and members of the Boys Scouts of America aided in the effort.
Authorities and community leaders implored the public to come forward with any information on Gloria’s killer. For weeks, local news coverage of the crime was breathless. One Tribune headline trumpeted the Chicago Police Department’s effort to find the “sex maniac” responsible for the killing.
Several witnesses later told Chicago police that a girl resembling Gloria was seen with a man about 25 to 40 years old shortly after she left her home.
Police officer allegedly to blame
Now, more than 65 years after Gloria’s death, CPD cold case detectives have determined who they believe killed her: Thomas Francis McInerney, a Chicago police officer who was 24 years old at the time — the son of a Cook County Jail corrections officer whose parents lived a few blocks away from Gloria’s.
The conclusion was reached after a yearslong series of ballistics tests, fingerprint comparisons and DNA tests. The investigation regained momentum earlier this year after the FBI used DNA submitted to family tree websites for comparison, according to CPD.
Cold case investigators say McInerney and Gloria had no prior contact before her death, and McInerney is not suspected in any other crimes.
McInerney, a U.S. Army veteran, worked for CPD until 1987. Among his assignments during his career: homicide detective.
McInerney died in 2006 in Las Vegas, where he’d moved upon his retirement. Once there, he’d worked as an investigator for the federal public defender’s office until 2004, according to his obituary.
McInerney’s family could not be reached for comment.
A family finds rest
Adam Kowalewicz was born just a few months before his sister was abducted and killed.
In an interview with the Tribune, he said the revelation that his sister’s killer was a Chicago police officer came as a shock, but he praised the work by cold case detectives and investigators who ultimately cleared the case.
Their father, Edward Kowalewicz, was a World War II veteran who operated a gas station at 63rd and Hoyne. He died in his sleep in 1978. Adam Kowalewicz remained very close with his mother until she passed away in 2000.
“Now I know my mom and dad’s souls can rest,” he said. “Gloria can rest.”
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But even with the case now closed, Adam Kowalewicz and his family are still left to wonder why Gloria was targeted in the first place.
In an interview last week with the Tribune, CPD’s chief of detectives, Kevin Bruno, praised the scores of investigators who, at one time or another, worked on the case.
“When you look at the level of work that went into this investigation throughout these six-plus decades — from that initial group of detectives that did everything they could to move this forward, to different detectives picking this up and trying to move it forward, to, finally, this group here — putting in all this time and effort and taking advantage of technological advances to finally bring this case to closure, it just shows you that we don’t forget, and these guys never stopped,” Bruno said.
“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,” Bruno added. “But at the same time, it’s not something we’re going to minimize or shy away from. And as far as we’re concerned, he’s a murderer who was acting as a police officer.”
Funeral held as a killer stays free
On Nov. 16, 1960, four days after she was killed, more than 1,000 people attended Gloria’s funeral at St. Mary of Mount Carmel. The Chicago Police Department provided escort services, and six of Gloria’s fellow third grade communicants served as her pallbearers.
Delivering tearful remarks, the Rev. Angelo Della Vecchia told those gathered: “Criminals such as this one are the product of our society. Those elected to public office have an obligation to protect the lives of citizens. If they want to, they can make Chicago a better place to live.”
Police interviewed more than 1,300 people in the investigation, but leads proved fruitless and the case faded from public view.
“The search bogged down, mired in a morass of tips, and futile investigations and arrests,” read a Tribune story published six months after Gloria was killed. “The tangible clews have been sifted and submitted to microscopic examination, all to no avail. Somewhere, perhaps in the same neighborhood, the criminal still walks the streets.”
Recovered evidence from the various crime scenes sat in storage, preserved. It wasn’t until the 1980s that DNA collection first became a key part of homicide investigations.
Meanwhile, McInerney’s police career continued. Hired the year before he killed Gloria, McInerney worked as a patrol officer on the West Side until 1964, when he was promoted to detective, according to CPD. He worked assignments all over the city: investigating burglary, vice and gangs on the South Side, homicide and sex crimes on the North Side and, finally, violent crimes on the West Side until his retirement in 1987.
Records from the U.S. Census Bureau show that, 10 years before Gloria’s death, McInerney’s parents lived at 6557 S. Laflin St., about three-fourths of a mile east of where the Kowalewicz family lived. His father worked as a guard at the Chicago House of Correction, where the Cook County Jail is now located.
The forensic testing
In July 2010, CPD used grant funding to send Gloria’s dress to a DNA analysis laboratory. The fingerprints recovered on Gloria’s purse strap and Bible were submitted for testing, as well.
Five months later, “the testing revealed a male DNA profile from semen on the dress,” Lt. Mark Kearns of CPD’s Area 1 detectives told the Tribune.
The DNA profile was submitted to the FBI’s national database, CODIS, and several new suspects were developed, Kearns said. However, saliva tests later determined they were not responsible for the killing.
Another 14 years passed.
Then, in 2024, CPD used a sexual assault kit initiative grant to submit Gloria’s coat to the FBI for “investigative genetic genealogy” — that is, to compare the DNA on the coat with other genetic samples submitted to family tree research websites.
The investigative technique was first used in 2018 and led to the arrest and prosecution of Joseph James DeAngelo, dubbed “The Golden State Killer,” a former California police officer who committed 13 murders and several rapes across the state from the mid-1970s to mid-1980s. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison.
“In July of 2026, Thomas McInerney was positively identified as the donor of the semen recovered from the dress of Gloria Kowalewicz,” Kearns said.
Detectives then pulled McInerney’s 1959 CPD application, and the fingerprints he submitted to join CPD were a match with the fingerprint recovered on Gloria’s purse strap. Further, McInerney owned three Colt revolvers, the same type of gun used to fire the bullet found at the scene of the murder.
Police data show Gloria’s killing is one of the oldest cases closed by CPD detectives in nearly a decade.
For Adam Kowalewicz, receiving a call from those detectives earlier this year was a weight off his shoulders. But still, he’s distressed by how McInerney escaped any accountability for the killing.
“The one thing that does play in my mind (is), unfortunately, he lived a decent life and passed on,” Adam Kowalewicz said of McInerney. “He never paid his dues. You hope he’s going to pay his dues with the good lord.”