Would you rather be murdered or live in Beaverton?
If you type “Ted Szal” into Google, you’ll find at least 4 pages of articles claiming that another “victim” of John Wayne Gacy (a serial killer from Chicago who murdered roughly 33 boys between 1972 and 1978) has been found in Beaverton (maybe more, I stopped looking). Ted Szal was never a victim of Gacy, he never eluded death, he isn’t Harry Potter and he didn’t defeat Voldemort. He probably never even crossed paths with Gacy. He’s just a guy who left home in 1977 and never called his parents to check in, which isn’t even that crazy considering they didn’t have texting in the ’70s.
He apparently left parents and sisters and wife in Chicago after a routine disagreement. In The Oregonian he is quoted saying that growing up he felt like the ‘black sheep’ of his family. While his three pretty sisters were cheerleaders in school, he was more of a class clown. He wasn’t pretty, or a cheerleader, so he decided to flee Chicago for the Wild West. This isn’t very surprising to me, but his family saw this as shocking and after waiting almost 25 years, his sister Marcia called murder because he was a guy in Chicago at the same time Gacy was shoving kids into his crawl space. Marcia contacted the police department on October 18, 2011. A little slow on the draw, but whatever, it’s just her brother’s life.
The police department, possibly lacking in anything better to do, decided to support the insanity by running DNA tests on the victims of Gacy, and they concluded that Szal had not been brutally murdered. They ran a background check that lead them to Beaverton, Oregon, which for some reason wasn’t their first move.
I’ve never been to Chicago, but I can only assume it’s like the stone age there and they have yet to be connected to the series of tubes connecting every computer, because in The Oregonian Szal stated that with the advances of the internet, he thought his family would be able to find him, which I’m sure is true because you can find anything on the internet.
On the off chance that Szal didn’t exist on the Internet, it should also been noted that he left his car at the Chicago airport before he skipped town. In his interview with The Oregonian, he stated that he threw his keys in the sewer, so nobody else could’ve driven it away, and I might be dreaming too big here, but I’m sure that checking the license plate, or doing some police-y thing could’ve brought to attention that his car was left there. That probably doesn’t matter though, murder victims always leave their cars at airports before they are raped and slain, obviously.
Szal has just been living life for the last 25 years, living in various cities in Colorado and California, Springfield, and eventually Beaverton. He got re-married, has a job, and hasn’t been living under the radar in any respect. He just hasn’t called his family and they haven’t tried to call him.
I don’t know who to be more disappointed in, his family for lacking any common sense or computer skills, the police for supporting them, or our parents tax dollars for supporting all of this. In related news, apparently anyone can be a police officer, so I’m joining the force.
Hey dumbass, “Investigators are urging relatives of anyone who disappeared between 1970 and Gacy’s 1978 arrest – and who is still unaccounted for – to undergo saliva tests to compare their DNA with that of the skeletal remains.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/12/gacy-victims-exhumed-auth_n_1006733.html
You spoke of how easy it is to find information on the internet, so one would suppose that you would have done any research at all beyond that single article before making libelous statements towards one of our nation’s most valued institutions, the police force. But I guess not.
By the way, Cook County investigators have since identified one of those victims. So the minuscule amount of money it costs to have a handful of people come in, by their own means, lick a stick and compare it to samples already analyzed and recorded, was at least worth it to one family.
I think that the first measure the police force should’ve taken was doing a search, instead of wasting the resources of DNA tests on someone who isn’t dead, or hiding. If they had even tried to look for Ted Szal, and they had discovered that he was dead, or even really missing, a DNA test would have been entirely appropriate, but the fact that his family didn’t look him up online, and the police didn’t do a simple search for him before doing the DNA tests seems wasteful and absentminded to me.