Did Darren Vann hide bodies in now-demolished Gary hotel?

GARY, Ind. (WLS) -- The ABC7 I-Team has new information on the search for possible additional victims of the accused Indiana killer: the monumental job of searching every vacant building. There are concerns that remains could be in buildings that were already torn down.

In Gary, vacant homes and businesses provided 10,000 hiding places for somebody wanting to stash a body. Authorities there say they are checking some of these abandoned buildings with a cadaver dog because it's the right thing to do.

One of the buildings that became a symbol of the struggle and decay in downtown Gary is the Sheraton Hotel, right next to City Hall. And if Darren Vann hid bodies there, they may have already been moved to a waste dump.

With some fanfare, demolition started this summer on the long-deserted Sheraton Hotel.

"To see it actually coming to pass, it's very exciting," said Gary Mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson. She was joined by state and federal officials in July for the start of the tear-down project.

The Sheraton opened as a Holiday Inn in 1971, and was heralded as an icon of a great "Steel City." But when that industry went under, so did the hotel. For the last 20 years, it has been out-of-business, vacant and a city eyesore. Now it is also among the vacant buildings that authorities have searched for bodies that Darren Vann may have left behind. Investigators say they received information that he hid a corpse or two in the vacant hotel.

"We have not received anything from Vann in reference to him stashing bodies in the Sheraton Hotel. We did pick up leads on the Sheraton today, because we received an anonymous tip that there may have been bodies there. But before demolition of the Sheraton Hotel, there was a thorough walk-through. Following up with that complaint, we did send cadaver dogs over to the Sheraton area," said Gary Police Chief Larry McKinley.

After demolition, all that is left of the Sheraton Hotel building is the foundation. The superstructure is gone and has been hauled away.

Authorities have not responded to questions from the I-Team as to whether cadaver dogs will search the landfill where the steel and concrete that used to be the Sheraton was taken.

There are also hundreds of vacant homes in Gary that were torn down within the past year. It is unclear how, or whether, police officials will be able to check the debris for human remains.

Five months before it was known there was a serial strangler at work in northwest Indiana, the mayor of Gary announced a bold plan to level 1,000 abandoned homes at the cost of $9 million in public money to tear them down.

Authorities knew the vacant buildings bred crime. At the time they couldn't have known that some of the deserted building also hid bodies. They are hoping there are no more, or that they haven't been moved to landfills with the original problem they were trying to solve.