She tells me about the last time she saw him: It was a Saturday in July, not long after Beaudion graduated from Loyola University and was hired for a grammar school teaching job. A friend was getting married in the suburbs, and he wanted to borrow Rodriguez’s car. After the 20-mile drive back to the city and a late-night trip to the International House of Pancakes, he was gone.

By Sunday, the family heard nothing. Beaudion’s mother, Adla, dialed a friend who her son once dated and who he’d gone to the wedding with the night before. But all she could say was that they left around midnight and dropped by IHOP on the way back. Rodriguez and her father drove to the closest police precinct, where they tried — and failed — to file a missing persons report. “They told my dad, ‘He’s probably sleeping in a hotel somewhere with another girl,’” Rodriguez recalls.

In the weeks that followed, the police found the missing Nova: It had been stolen and driven to Missouri. But there was no sign of Beaudion. The family posted fliers with a large photo and a phone number, and they assembled an altar at the two-story brick house — a framed photograph surrounded by candles. “They were still holding vigil,” recalls Carol Langrehr, the onetime girlfriend who accompanied Beaudion to the wedding that night. Eventually, the family entertained the darkest of scenarios — that Beaudion may have been murdered by Gacy.

The family supplied the Cook County Sheriff’s Office with scans of Edward’s knee, which he’d injured playing basketball, and which, at the time of his disappearance, contained a distinct mark — an orthopedic screw. The X-rays were examined, but the response was ambiguous. “The police came back and said, ‘Well, he’s not excluded as a victim, but it’s inconclusive,’” Moran tells me.

The Beaudions were consumed by the most awful uncertainty: Had Gacy killed Edward? If he hadn’t, why had the police been so noncommittal? Or was he alive — lost, perhaps, and suffering from amnesia? Rodriguez always believed the latter. The psychics, after all, always told her the same thing — one day Edward would come home. A medium in Texas, a man who went by the name Mighty Red, even said it would be on Christmas.

As much as Rodriguez wanted to believe it, when a cousin told her that the Gacy case was being reopened, she didn’t hesitate. “I thought, What the hell?” she recalls. “What have we got to lose?”

A couple of days later, Moran drove to the Beaudions’ brick home. Some of the obvious connections weren’t there with Edward: He wasn’t working construction when he went missing, and as far as his family knew, he wasn’t gay. But he was a young, light-skinned man who lived on Chicago’s North Side, not far from the Aragon. The timeline fit — he vanished in the months before the killer’s arrest — and the ME had never ruled him out. They talked, and Moran collected a DNA swab.

The samples were sent to a lab at the University of North Texas, and about a month and a half later, the results came back: Beaudion had not been found in Gacy’s underground graveyard. This provided some measure of comfort to Rodriguez, Moran recalls. But her brother was still missing.

More than a year went by, until the winter of 2014, when Moran got a letter from the DNA lab. Finally, there were answers — and there was a story for Moran to work with. It was a strange and outrage-inducing one, one that Rodriguez was already familiar with, at least in part, and one that, again involved the medical examiner’s office.

The story begins in the years after Beaudion went missing, when a detective dropped by Rodriguez’s home with Edward’s case file. He wanted her to have it. He didn’t tell her why, and she didn’t ask, but as she combed through it, she was astonished. The same man who admitted stealing her olive-green Nova confessed to murdering her brother. The man’s name was Jerry Jackson, and he was from Caruthersville, Missouri, a speck of a town several hours south of Chicago, on the banks of the Mississippi River.

Shortly afterward, Jackson was questioned by police, and he initially denied having anything to do with the murder. Eventually, though, he claimed that Beaudion propositioned him on a downtown street the night he went missing in 1978. Insulted, Jackson punched Beaudion once; he crumpled to the ground, and Jackson loaded his body into the back of the Nova and sped south, to a forest preserve just off an interstate in the Cook County hinterlands. There, Jackson said, he left him.

Yet when the police accompanied Jackson to the preserve, he couldn’t find Beaudion, and neither could they. So he was never charged with murder. (Moran isn’t sure why this was; most likely, he says, it’s because there was no additional evidence to corroborate Jackson’s confession.) So Rodriguez was left wondering: Was it really Jackson who killed her brother? If so, why didn’t the police charge him for it?

Then, in the spring of 2008, a teenage boy and his two sisters were wandering through Black Partridge Woods, a forest preserve 30 miles southwest of Chicago, when they found an old shoe and a pair of tattered pants with a bone jutting out from one of the legs. Among them was a tibia with an orthopedic screw. “That skeleton was found exactly where Jerry Jackson said it was,” Moran says.

The authorities transported the remains to the medical examiner’s office and there, inside a cardboard box, they sat for five years. It wasn’t until the aftermath of the scandal at Homewood, when Moran developed a new set of protocols for handling unidentified remains, and the cardboard box was sent to the University of North Texas, that a match was made. And so it was that 35 years after Jerry Jackson confessed to killing Beaudion that Moran prepared to charge him with homicide. But as the detective planned his trip to Caruthersville, he received another letter, this time from the Missouri Bureau of Vital Statistics: Just six months before, Jackson had died of heart problems.