Chicago police find killer in 65-year-old cold case murder of little girl — one of their own

The cold case murder of an 8-year-old Chicago girl that bedeviled investigators for 65 years has been solved — and the man tied to the killing was a homicide detective for the city’s police department.

The murder of Gloria Kowalewicz, who was abducted on Nov. 12, 1960, as she was walking to church on the South Side of Chicago, sparked a citywide manhunt that went on for months during which thousands of people were questioned and hundreds of leads were looked into.

But it wasn’t until July that a DNA technology that didn’t exist when Gloria was killed, combined with “a carefully preserved fingerprint,” led investigators to Thomas F. McInerney Jr., the Chicago Police Department said in a statement to NBC News.

It was the same technology that was used to capture Joseph James DeAngelo, a former California cop dubbed “The Golden State Killer” who committed 13 murders and numerous rapes from the mid-1970s to mid-1980s and is now serving life in prison

But unlike DeAngelo, McInerney managed to escape justice.

McInerney retired from Chicago Police Department in 1987 as a detective after 28 years on the job and died in 2006 at the age of 70 in Las Vegas.

“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,” the CPD said in a statement Monday.

Gloria’s brother, Adam Kowalewicz — who was an infant when his sister was killed — agreed.

“The one thing that does play in my mind (is), unfortunately, he lived a decent life and passed on,” Kowalewicz said of McInerney in an interview with The Chicago Tribune. “He never paid his dues. You hope he’s going to pay his dues with the good lord.”

Then there is the nagging question that, so far, police have not been able to answer: Why did McInerney target Gloria?

McInerney’s parents lived less than a mile from the Kowalewicz family, but the officer does not appear to have had any prior contact with the little girl, police said.

That said, McInerney’s DNA is in the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, know as CODIS, and the agency is checking whether there might be any other victims.

“Based on the evidence in the Kowalewicz case, and law enforcement’s profiling of child predators and their victimology, we are pursuing every investigative lead that may bring closure on other potential unsolved crimes that occurred during that time period in our area,” the FBI said in a statement.

On the last day of her life, Gloria left home just before 8 a.m. that Saturday to walk to morning mass a few blocks away at St. Mary of Mt. Carmel Church, police said.

The third-grader, who just recently had her First Communion, was dressed in a pink-and-brown checkered dress and blue leotard that her mother had picked out for her, the Tribune reported.

“She never made it to mass,” the police said in a statement. “Somewhere between her home and the church that Saturday morning, Gloria was abducted.”

Gloria was fatally shot twice in the head and left in a ditch in a forest preserve southwest of Chicago, police said. Her body was found by a motorist who spotted Gloria’s colorful dress and went to investigate.

“Evidence was collected and carefully inventoried and preserved — a bullet, Gloria’s coat, her shoes, her white communion purse containing her prayer book,” police said. “Investigators also lifted a fingerprint from the strap of Gloria’s purse.”

But police could not pin the crime on anyone.

Four days after Gloria was killed, more than 1,000 people attended her funeral at St. Mary of Mount Carmel Church.

McInerney, at the time, was a 24-year-old patrol officer based on Chicago’s west side and wasn’t promoted to detective until 1964.

It was not immediately clear if McInerney was ever involved in Gloria’s murder investigation. But after he left the CPD and moved to Nevada, McInerney worked for the Federal Public Defender’s Office as an investigator.

McInerney retired from that job in 2004, according to his obituary in the Tribune. He was even named Outstanding Federal Defender Investigator in 2003.

An Army veteran, McInerney was also a father of five and grandfather, his obituary noted.

Meanwhile, detectives continued to work Gloria’s case as the evidence sat in storage.

“Even as the case seemed frozen in time, the Chicago Police Department never forgot the little girl and never stopped searching for her killer,” police said.

The first tantalizing break in the case, police said, came in 2010 when investigators were able to build a male DNA profile of the potential killer from traces of semen found on Gloria’s clothes.

But that didn’t yield any arrests.

Then, in 2024, at the request of the Chicago police, the FBI compared the DNA on the clothing with other genetic samples submitted to family tree research websites and identified McInerney from the semen samples.

Armed with a name, they matched McInerney’s fingerprints from his 1959 CPD job application to the fingerprint found on Gloria’s purse strap, police said.

“Identification was made through a fingerprint and DNA left behind at the crime scene,” the CPD said in a statement.