Chicago police on Monday said they recently used newly discovered DNA evidence to tie the 1960 murder of an eight-year-old girl to one of its own former homicide detectives.

Thomas McInerney had been dead for 20 years by the time authorities issued a statement identifying him as the killer of Gloria Kowalewicz – well after retiring from the Chicago police department (CPD) and two federal public defender’s offices in Nevada where he worked as an investigator.

Nonetheless, the CPD’s statement expressed a hope that the news about McInerney “brings a measure of closure to all who knew Gloria and her story”.

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

The Chicago Tribune was the first to report on the exposure of McInerney as Gloria’s murderer – recounting in a lengthy article on Sunday how the girl’s killing, which shocked the city, was solved more than six decades later by DNA evidence gathered from a genetic ancestry website.

Gloria was last seen alive on the morning of 12 November 1960 as she walked from her family’s West Englewood neighborhood home to a mass at a nearby church.

She never made it to the service. Someone abducted her on the way and fatally shot her, and within hours her body was found discarded in a ditch at a forest preserve south-west of Chicago, police said in their statement.

Police said they secured various pieces of evidence at the scene where Kowalewicz had apparently been murdered – including a bullet, her coat and a white communion purse with a prayer book inside. “Investigators also lifted a fingerprint from the strap of Gloria’s purse,” police noted.

Meanwhile, the Tribune reported that police – along with volunteers from the ranks of local firefighters, Boy Scouts and military veterans – mounted a large search for the girl’s killer.

A police-headed taskforce interviewed about 1,300 people in connection with Gloria’s slaying, among them a dozen individuals who were given lie-detector tests while being questioned.

Police said none of that allowed them to identify a suspect, however.

Yet that changed earlier in 2026 when DNA submitted to a family tree website enabled the FBI to join McInerney to the scene of Gloria’s murder, according to the Tribune.

Further DNA, fingerprint and ballistic testing then established that McInerney – a US army veteran who lived around the corner from the girl – had killed Gloria the CPD said in its statement on Monday.

McInerney joined the Chicago police force in 1959, said his obituary, which was published after his death on 30 August 2006. He was about to turn 25 at the time of Gloria’s murder.

The obituary said McInerney was investigating homicides for the CPD when he retired from the agency in 1987. He then worked as investigator for the federal public defender’s offices in Las Vegas and Reno, Nevada, until his retirement in 2004.

McInerney’s obituary also touted his receiving “numerous commendations during his years with the [CPD]” – as well as his being recognized as outstanding federal defender investigator in 2003. It described him as a husband, a father to two sons and three daughters, and a grandfather to a dozen children.

The CPD statement on Monday made it a point to say that Gloria’s parents died without ever knowing who had murdered their daughter. The agency called McInerney’s “abhorrent”, saying: “They not only took the life of an eight-year-old child – but left … all who knew and loved her shattered as they searched for answers.”

Gloria’s brother, Adam Kowalewicz, told the Tribune that it was a relief to learn his sister’s murderer had been identified. But he said to the outlet that he was frustrated McInerney had died at age 70 without ever being made to face justice.

“He never paid his dues,” Adam Kowalewicz said to the Tribune. “You hope he’s going to pay his dues with the good lord.”