In October 1977, Russell Nelson, a 22-year-old University of Minnesota architecture student from Cloquet, traveled to Chicago with a friend. He was last seen at a Chicago “discotheque, ”…
In October 1977, Russell Nelson, a 22-year-old University of Minnesota architecture student from Cloquet, traveled to Chicago with a friend.
He was last seen at a Chicago “discotheque, ” according to reports from the St. Paul Dispatch at the time. Nelson’s father, Robert, went to Chicago to search for his son, while his mother, Norma, and Russell’s two brothers waited in Cloquet for news.
Two years later they learned the truth: Russell Nelson had been the victim of serial killer John Wayne Gacy. Nelson’s remains had been found buried in a basement crawl space of Gacy’s Chicago-area ranch house. The infamous tomb contained 26 of Gacy’s then-known 33 victims, all young men and boys.
On Wednesday, police identified another victim: James “Jimmy” Haakenson, a teen runaway from St. Paul.
For some Gacy followers, Nelson’s kidnapping and killing has been fodder for theories that Gacy may have had accomplices, a claim Gacy himself made over the years, although often as an apparent attempt to deflect blame from himself. Initially, police sought Nelson’s traveling companion to Chicago as a possible suspect.
The man, 30-year-old Robert Young of Belle Fourche, S. D., was described as a “drifter” by the Dispatch and raised suspicion when he initially demanded money from Nelson’s family to aid in the search for Nelson but then appeared to disappear himself. In addition, Young, who has been dead for more than a decade, appeared to have had contact with Gacy’s contracting business at the time.
In 2012, two Chicago attorneys claimed to have uncovered evidence suggesting Gacy could not have committed some of his killings without help. As for Nelson, they suggested it would have been unlikely that he could have been abducted without Young noticing.
In March 1980, Norma Nelson sat in a Chicago courtroom and stared into Gacy’s eyes as she described her son.
“As long as I live, I’ ll never forget those eyes staring at me, ” she told the Dispatch. “He looked at me as if he was saying, ‘So what?’ ”
Gacy was sentenced to die the next day.
