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From Los Angeles Times

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John Wayne Gacy victim is identified -- 35 years after death

John Wayne Gacy was executed for murdering 33 men and boys in the 1970s and then hiding their remains in and around his Chicago-area home. But eight of the victims were never identified.

Make that seven.

Authorities announced Tuesday that they had identified the remains of one of the bodies found in a crawlspace on Gacy's property as William George Bundy, who was 19 when he vanished in October 1976 on his way to a party.

Bundy's family had long suspected that he had been one of Gacy's victims. Bundy's younger sister, Laura O'Leary, attended the news conference held Tuesday by Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart to announce the findings. O'Leary said her brother had been working construction jobs before he disappeared, and she noted that Gacy was known to lure victims looking for work through his remodeling and construction company.

"I always knew he was going to be one of them," she said. "But there was no DNA [testing] back then, so there was nothing I could really do."

The Chicago Tribune reported that O'Leary, now 50, had "a sad smile" on her face as she thanked Dart for his decision to revisit the Gacy case using new DNA technology. That decision, Dart said, was made to provide some measure of closure to relatives who have wondered for decades whether their loved ones fell prey to Gacy.

"All of my girlfriends wanted to date him," O'Leary said of her brother, whom she described as a gregarious young man who excelled at sports, the newspaper reported. She said her brother's disappearance took a horrible toll on her parents, who have both since passed away. "My mother, she was really never the same," O'Leary said.

Gacy is believed to have sexually assaulted many of his victims, strangling all but one of them. His reputation as one of the nation's most notorious serial killers was solidified after his penchant for dressing up as a clown and performing at children's parties and charity events became widely known.

While imprisoned, Gacy took up painting. The Miami New Times may have best described his work, calling it "nightmare fuel." Gacy's oeuvre included self-portraits, images of Jesus Christ, and, of course, scores of clowns.

Gacy was executed by lethal injection in 1994.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/nationnow/

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Bias on death row? North Carolina lawmakers now not so sure

The North Carolina Senate on Monday approved a bill that critics view as a gutting of the Racial Justice Act, the state law that gives death row inmates and death penalty defendants the ability to use statistics on racial bias as a way to challenge their prosecutions.

The original law was passed in 2009 by a Democratic-controlled Legislature and signed into law by Democratic Gov. Bev Perdue. But last November, Republicans won majorities in both houses, and many of them sided with state prosecutors who have argued that the law would overburden the justice system with new litigation and create a "backdoor deal" to end the death penalty in North Carolina.

The House approved the new bill in June. Now the issue presents a conundrum for Perdue, a death-penalty-supporting Democrat who has effectively navigated tricky political cross-currents in a state that voted for Barack Obama in 2008, only to give the GOP control of the Legislature for the first time in more than a century in 2010.

There's been no word from the governor's office on her next move.

Critics of the original law have questioned whether statistical analyses of death-penalty cases around the state should have any bearing on individual cases under review. Angie West, who lost a loved one to an inmate currently on death row, said at a news conference that it would be wrong to let the inmate off "simply because there's a statistic in another part of the state that says he should get a lighter sentence."

But supporters of the original law say the statistics paint a chilling picture of ongoing systemic bias against minorities. An oft-cited Michigan State University study found that a defendant in North Carolina was 2.6 times more likely to be sentenced to death in cases in which at least one victim was white.

The News & Observer newspaper reported that 154 of the state's 157 death-row inmates have demanded hearings under the Racial Justice Act. Some of those cases, reporter Craig Jarvis noted, "seemed to have nothing to do with race."

Republican state Sen. Thom Goolsby said the new bill would not be a repeal, but a "modification" of the original law. Sen. Josh Stein, a Democrat, characterized it as "utter and total repeal," according to the newspaper.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/nationnow/

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