On a cold December night in 1976, seventeen-year-old Gregory Godzik vanished without a trace. He was last seen dropping off a girl after their much-anticipated date. Days went by without a single word from Greg. Soon, Christmas passed as well, and his parents, heartbroken and worried, moved his unwrapped gifts to a closet. There, they remained for three years while the Godzik family waited to answers.
Two years later, while searching the home of serial killer John Wayne Gacy, investigators uncovered Greg’s wallet. They believed the teenager’s body was one of the twenty-six bodies hidden in the crawl space. In total, Gacy killed thirty-three boys and young men, their ages ranging between fourteen and twenty-seven. Greg’s remains were matched with dental charts in January 1979, and once again identified by DNA provided by family years later in 2011.
Normal life never resumed for the Godzik family. John and Eugenia Godzik braved the murder trial together. The horrendous details of the young boys’ sufferings shook them to their core. Their oldest child, Eugenia, named after her mother, said her parents never recovered and attributed the stress and horror of her brother’s murder to their deaths. John Godzik passed away in 1984, and his wife died five years later in 1989 after succumbing to breast and liver cancer.
Now the sole living member of the family, Eugenia Godzik faced Gacy’s demise alone. She gathered with other victims’ relatives in the prison’s basement during Gacy’s execution on May 10th, 1994. Together, they sat huddled in the basement, where they anxiously watched updates on a television set.
″I’m glad he’s gone, but it’s never really over,“ Eugenia said when asked about Gacy’s death. “I don’t have anybody left. My brother is gone, and the whole incident really is what killed my parents.″
Although her little brother is gone, Greg is never far from her mind. Eugenia remembers as a typical teenage boy, one with a heart of gold and many dreams for his future. Greg greatly adored animals. Throughout his childhood, he had multiple pets, some of which were strays he took in from the streets. He enjoyed manual labor and the satisfaction of completing a difficult job. His most prized possession was a beat-up 1966 Pontiac. He spent hours working on it and much of the money he earned went to buying parts for it. Above all, Eugenia remembers him as an incredibly caring and sentimental boy, one who never left the house without kissing his mother goodbye. In her heart and in her mind, that is forever who Greg will be.
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