Image: Steven Soden

A DNA test used by investigators to identify victims of serial killer John Wayne Gacy has helped solve a 41-year-old New Jersey missing persons case, officials announced Tuesday.

Sixteen-year-old Steven Soden went missing on April 3, 1972, but his remains were not identified until 2012, when authorities matched them with a DNA sample from his sister.

Soden's relatives contacted the Cook County Sheriff's Office in 2011 after hearing about Sheriff Thomas Dart's efforts to identify several of Gacy's victims. They believed Soden may be one of them, officials said.

"We always had hopes that we'd somehow find him alive," Steven's brother, Ron Soden, 73, told NBC 4 New York Tuesday from his home in Tacoma, Wash. "In this day and age, it's so much easier to find someone over the Internet."

The teen, who lived at an orphanage, was last seen alive on April 3, 1972, running away with 12-year-old Donald Caldwell, from the Bass River Camp Grounds in Burlington County, N.J., during a group camping trip, officials said. Neither boy was ever seen again.

Soden may have headed to Chicago, where his biological father lived, his relatives suggested — and there he may have come into contact with Gacy.

Tim Boyle / Des Plaines Police Department vi

This is John Wayne Gacy's police arrest photo from Dec. 21, 1978. Following intensive research, investigation and surveillance, Gacy was arrested by the Des Plaines, Ill., Police Department on Thursday, Dec. 21, 1978.

Gacy killed 33 teenage boys and young men in Chicago from 1972 to 1978. He was executed for his crimes in 1994. Seven of his victims remain unidentified.

At Dart's request, a DNA sample was taken from Soden's sister, but there was no match between her and any of the unidentified Gacy victims.

In December 2012, however, her profile matched that of unidentified human skeletal remains found 13 years earlier in New Jersey.

Over the next few months, the Cook County Sheriff’s Office and New Jersey State Police conducted further investigation and obtained additional DNA samples from Soden's half siblings, including a paternal half sibling, to make an accurate identification.

Genetic testing was performed at the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification.

The remains were discovered in the woods in Burlington County in April 2000 — not far from where Soden was last seen.

New Jersey State Police say they're still searching for Caldwell as well as additional evidence in Soden's death, according to Philadelphia NBC affiliate WCAU. His exact cause of death is still unknown.

"You always hope for the best," Ron Soden told NBC 4 New York. "But when you finally get an answer, a partial answer…" He trailed off.

"It's sad," he continued. "The sense of him being so young, and the way it happened, and where it was. He probably ran away because he thought nobody cared about him. It's just not a good story."

Reza A. Marvashti / The Free Lance-Star via AP

Michael Wayne Hash is escorted to a police car in Culpeper, Va. on March 14, 2012. A Culpeper County Circuit Judge ordered Hash's release after his life sentence for killing an elderly woman was tossed out by a federal judge. That judge overturned Hash's 2001 murder conviction, citing prosecutorial and police misconduct and an inadequate defense.

The number of cases in which prosecutors or police helped exonerate people convicted of crimes surged in 2012, passing 50 percent for the first time, a research group said Wednesday.

Authorities led or cooperated on investigations into 34 of last year’s 63 known exonerations, the group said.

“To the extent that they are focused … on correcting errors that have been made, that’s really good news,” said Professor Sam Gross, editor of The National Registry of Exonerations, a project of the law schools at the University of Michigan and Northwestern University. “That means that more innocent people will be released and that we’ll, over time, learn more about the process that produces mistakes like this and avoid more tragic errors.”

The development may reflect the spread of what are often known as Conviction Integrity Units in district attorney’s offices in major cities across the country as well as changes in state laws making it easier to do post-conviction DNA testing, according to the registry, which launched last year and provides information about exonerations since 1989.

Gross said it was an important change, noting that police and prosecutors are the “central actors” in the criminal justice system and had the key role of investigating crimes and pursuing justice. “They have more information; they have more power than anybody else,” said Gross.

But Scott Burns, executive director of the National District Attorneys Association, took exception to the report’s findings, particularly that it was the first time law enforcement helped in a majority of such cases.

“It’s offensive because that’s our job all the time is to … hold the guilty accountable, but our job is (also) to make sure that the innocent are acquitted or exonerated,” he said. “We do that in every case.”

He also objected to some of the exonerations, saying that in decades-old crimes being challenged today, there were bars to prosecutors re-trying these cases, such as dead witnesses or lost evidence.

“A number of these people are not innocent,” he said. “I can’t stress this enough because you have victims out there. … If you live through that kind of stuff it’s maddening.”

He also noted that the 1,089 exonerations found by the registry from 1989 to 2012 was a small number compared to the more than 10 million felony cases that prosecutors nationwide handle annually.

Man held for 42 years in deadly Arizona hotel fire freed from prison

The registry uses its own criteria to determine when someone has been exonerated, since there is no such legal category. People have been exonerated through a governor’s pardon, court dismissal of the case, acquittal on retrial and a few through court-issued “certificates of innocence” or “declarations of wrongful imprisonment.” This includes cases where DNA testing was a factor. Some people have been exonerated posthumously.

The 2012 exonerations included those charged with murder, including: Damon Thibodeaux, who was cleared by DNA testing in the rape and killing of his 14-year-old step cousin and was released from death row; Michael Hash, who was was freed after 12 years following his life sentence conviction in the killing of an elderly woman. A federal judge vacated the conviction, citing misconduct by the prosecutor and police, and an inadequate defense.

The conviction integrity units, have emerged in recent years in Dallas, Houston, New York (Manhattan and Brooklyn), Santa Clara, Calif., and Lake and Cook counties in Illinois to review disputed cases. Some state attorneys general, such as in Virginia and Colorado, have also undertaken programs to facilitate exonerations or help particular defendants.

A snapshot of the 1,050 individual exonerations from January 1989-December 2012:

--  93.2 percent were men; 6.7 percent were women.

--  The race of the defendants was known in 97.6 percent of the cases: 47.3 percent were black, 38.5 percent were white, 12.2 percent were Hispanic and 1.8 percent were Native American or Asian.

--  9.4 percent pled guilty. The rest were convicted at trial: 82.2 percent by juries and 7 percent by judges. In about 1 percent of the cases, the Registry could not determine whether the trial conviction was by a jury or judge.

--  32.4 percent were cleared at least in part through DNA evidence

--  67.5 percent were cleared without DNA evidence.

--  Nearly all had been in prison for years: half for at least 9 years; more than 75 percent for at least 4 years.

Related:

Wrongfully imprisoned for 23 years, freed man suffers heart attack a day after release

Conviction: Reporter's 10-year quest for answers in little-known murder case

Witness error: How mind tricks can put the innocent behind bars

Updated 12:10 a.m. ET Saturday:  The man whose head, hands and feet were found in the Hollywood Hills was identified by police as 67-year-old retiree Hervey Medellin. Medellin was a resident of a Hollywood apartment building investigators searched earlier in the day. Sources told the Los Angeles Times that Medellin was a former Mexicana Airlines employee.

Original story

LOS ANGELES -- Authorities have identified the man whose head, hands and feet were found in the Hollywood Hills, but have not yet released his name, officials said Friday.

Coroner's Assistant Chief Ed Winter told NBCLosAngeles.com that the name was being withheld at the request of the Los Angeles police detectives who are continuing to investigate the crime. Officials also want to notify the man's family before releasing the information to the public, the television website reported.  

On Thursday evening, police served a search warrant in an apartment complex in Hollywood, close to Sunset Boulevard and Vine Streets, according to the Los Angeles Times. They towed a silver Honda from the building, the Times reported.

Although no arrests have been made in the case, the Times is reporting that at least one person was questioned by detectives Thursday. Sources close to the investigation said police were also looking to talk to at least one other man.

Meanwhile, investigators in California were downplaying any possible connection between the body parts case in Los Angeles and a dismembered body found earlier this month in a rural area of Tuscon, Ariz.

Read more about the Hollywood case on NBCLosAngeles.com

"It's fairly implausible that somebody would drive parts of a dead body five hours from Arizona to our Griffith Park," Los Angeles Police Cmdr. Andrew Smith told Reuters.

Smith added there was also no evidence that the man in California was the victim of organized crime or a serial killer.

Arizona sheriff officials say they are are awaiting DNA results, expected Tuesday, to try to definitively rule out any connection between the two cases.  

Pima County Sheriff's Deputy Dawn Barkman said two men were cutting grass along the side of a rural road on Jan. 6 found a body without a head, hands or feet. Investigators determined the body had been in that location for only 24 hours, and a search turned up none of the missing body parts, she said.

Los Angeles police believe their victim was killed elsewhere and the body parts were buried or hidden to deter identification, according to NBCLosAngeles.com.

“They may have been disturbed by animals, but initially they were left off trail and not intended to be found,”  Smith told the NBC website.

By early afternoon Thursday, police ended their search in the Hollywood Hills area for the parts, after determining that major portions of the remains – the torso, the arms and the legs – were not in the park, NBC reported.

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