Chicago police closed the 65-year-old murder of eight-year-old Gloria Kowalewicz by naming former officer Thomas F. McInerney as her killer, and the case has now moved into a new phase.

According to Fox News Digital, the Cook County State's Attorney's Office is working to identify other cases that may have involved McInerney, who joined CPD in 1959, became a homicide detective and retired in 1987 before dying in 2006.

The FBI also said McInerney's DNA had been entered into an agency database and that it would check whether his profile matches any other unsolved cases, per its statement reported by The Guardian. Media_refs and citations anchor each new claim to its publisher.

The surprise for true-crime readers is not just that a Chicago police officer — later a homicide detective — was identified as a child killer, but that the identification came two decades after his death, so accountability now takes the form of record correction rather than prosecution.

CPD's statement, quoted by The Guardian and Fox News, said McInerney 'should have never worn the CPD star' and that it is devastating he was never held accountable while alive.

Multiple outlets corroborate the forensic chain: DNA from semen on Gloria's dress produced a male profile in 2010, and in 2024 CPD sent her coat to the FBI for investigative genetic genealogy using DNA submitted to family tree websites.

The Chicago Tribune reports that in July 2026 McInerney was positively identified as the donor, that his 1959 CPD application fingerprints matched a print lifted from Gloria's purse strap, and that he owned three Colt revolvers, the same type used in the shooting.

Years of ballistics testing, fingerprint comparisons and DNA testing supported the conclusion, according to CPD.

Gloria's brother Adam Kowalewicz, born months before her abduction, told the Chicago Tribune that the revelation the killer was a police officer came as a shock, but he praised the cold case detectives who cleared the case.

'Now I know my mom and dad's souls can rest,' he said, noting their parents died without ever learning who killed her. Still, he voiced frustration that McInerney lived freely until 2006: 'He never paid his dues.

You hope he's going to pay his dues with the good lord.' The family still wonders why Gloria was targeted.

CPD's chief of detectives Kevin Bruno told the Chicago Tribune that generations of investigators never stopped working the case and that the department will not shy away from the fact the killer wore the star: 'As far as we're concerned, he's a murderer who was acting as a police officer.'

The same week, the Clark County Sheriff's Office announced its own record-setting resolution: a 1962 double homicide near Battle Ground, Washington — the oldest cold-case resolution in agency history.

Investigators identified Barton M. Stebbins and Walter Stain as likely suspects in the murders of brothers-in-law Charles Hale and Lester McCollum after a fingerprint from Hale's Ford sedan, finally matched in 2017, led to Stebbins, whose DNA linked to cigarette butts and binding twine, per the sheriff's office.

Both suspects died before prosecution, and descendants of the victims were notified.