Three decades later, Jennifer Santiago’s last memory of her mother is of her crawling across their apartment floor with one arm outstretched, apologizing and saying “I love you.”
Santiago was only 7 that December day in 1981 when she watched her mother die.
A man visiting their apartment stabbed Maria Luisa Santiago, a nursing student and single mom, and then turned the knife on her, injuring but not killing her.
As the 30th anniversary of the brutal crime is marked this month, the case remains unsolved. Chicago police have assigned a new detective to the case, hoping that advances in DNA technology will yield new clues, or someone will come forward with leads that will help solve the murder.
Santiago hopes that someone can help silence the night terrors and paranoia she has lived with ever since.
“There’s no closure,” said Santiago, now 37. “There’s always more wondering. I probably have more questions than I do answers for every year that goes by.”
On Dec. 19, 1981, Jennifer Santiago remembers playing in the bathroom while her mother folded laundry. They were waiting for a friend to arrive before going Christmas shopping when an unannounced male visitor stopped by their West Town apartment, Santiago recalled. While she didn’t recognize the man, her mother clearly did, she remembered.
The two adults talked in Santiago’s bedroom while the child continued to play in the bathroom. Then there were screams.
Santiago ran into the living room and tried to hide behind an organ. Her mother was stabbed about a dozen times, in her head, shoulders, neck and hand. She also had a fractured jaw, according to police.
The man turned to leave, but saw the 7-year-old girl hiding. He grabbed her by the hair and stabbed her multiple times in her head, the right side of her body, and her left hand.
“I remember my mom crawling on the floor, telling me that she was sorry and that she loved me,” Santiago said. “And that’s the last time I saw her and that’s the last thing I remember about her.”
It wasn’t unusual for visitors to stop by the apartment. Her mother was outgoing and trusting, Jennifer Santiago said. But the 28-year-old had led a high-risk lifestyle, involving herself in drugs and prostitution, police and family said.
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Those days were behind her mother, her daughter said, but police acknowledged that it complicated their investigation.
The knife was recovered at the scene, but it didn’t yield any clues, police said. Jennifer Santiago described the attacker to police as 5 feet 9 inches tall, with scraggly hair, olive skin, pockmarked cheeks and Hispanic features. A composite sketch was created, but detectives had little more to go on at the time.
At some point, detectives spoke with a man they said used to take heroin with Maria Santiago, and resembled the composite sketch. The man took two polygraph tests — passing one after the results of the first were inconclusive, police said. His blood type did not match those found at the scene, police said.
The man, now 61, could not be reached for comment. He is not being identified because he hasn’t been charged with a crime.
Investigators also eyed a neighbor whom Maria Santiago dated at one time, but he had an alibi. That neighbor has since died, police said.
There were no signs of a robbery. Maria Santiago’s sister found $20 in the victim’s purse when family returned to the apartment a week after the crime to clean up the dried blood.
Without any new solid leads, the case went cold. But Jennifer Santiago’s persistent nightmares prompted a family member to ask the Chicago Police Department Cold Case Squad to renew the investigation in 2005.
One of the first aspects of the investigation detectives reviewed was the blood evidence. Modern advances in technology meant police could significantly narrow potential DNA matches. Through testing, police learned that one of the blood samples at the scene could be the killer’s — it didn’t match either of the victims.
The Illinois State Police crime lab tested that sample in 2006, but it didn’t match anyone in the CODIS system, a federally funded computer database that stores DNA profiles to help law enforcement agencies identify crime suspects.
But there are limits to that system. Illinois didn’t start requiring convicted felons to provide a DNA sample until 2002. The killer may not have committed any recent crimes, or has been incarcerated since before the law was enacted. Or he could be dead.
Like so many cold cases, this one would require more street work, police said.
“DNA is what is solving a lot of these cases now, besides the backbone of the detectives going out there and being persistent,” said Detective Marie Biggane, who led the renewed investigation before leaving the Cold Case Squad a few years ago.
The trail went cold, but after a Tribune inquiry this fall, police assigned the case to Cold Case Detective Oscar Arteaga for a fresh look.
Arteaga said he sees new avenues to pursue. The blood samples from the scene can be re-tested. Witnesses can be re-interviewed. A new personality profile of the suspect can be created. Maybe even Santiago herself, after the passage of time, may remember something new, authorities said.
“I don’t see in the future why this case can’t be solved,” Arteaga said.
Looking back on the case she once worked, Biggane gets emotional.
“What really grabbed my heart with this is listening to Jennifer tell the story,” she said. “She told the story like she was that child again — everything that she saw. Her nightmares are still very real.”
It’s been a difficult 30 years for Jennifer Santiago. She didn’t get to attend her mother’s funeral after the attack but instead spent nearly two months in a Chicago hospital recovering from the wounds and resulting surgery.
Her father had died when she was 2, so when she left the hospital she moved to Indiana with an aunt and uncle. She returned to Chicago when she was 9 to live with her grandmother, who lived two blocks from the apartment she once shared with her mom.
The family struggled emotionally in the aftermath of the crime, said Marta Santiago, Maria’s sister.
“I think we all did. There’s no book for that. There’s no preparation,” she said. She kept a close eye on 7-year-old Jennifer.
“I kept her at that age for the longest time. She was always little Jennifer to me,” Marta Santiago said.
Jennifer Santiago’s skull was fractured when she was stabbed, requiring doctors to install a metal plate below her scalp. Instead of finishing second grade with her classmates, she spent time in physical therapy learning how to walk again.
A defensive wound to her left hand resulted in nerve damage, leaving her without feeling in two fingers. She still has difficulty holding a coffee mug or brushing her hair. Because of the scars and the glue used to repair her scalp, her hair doesn’t grow evenly on the right side of her head.
“I would never have a short haircut in my entire life,” Jennifer Santiago said.
Jennifer Santiago became a mother herself at 16, and shortly after her 18th birthday took a Greyhound bus to Florida in search of a more peaceful life.
“After everything I had gone through, that was just the type of life I wanted to give to my child,” Santiago said. “I guess my move was more about being safe and secure and knowing that I could raise a child and they wouldn’t go through anything I went through.”
She has spent the last three decades looking over her shoulder, wondering if the same man is still out there looking to silence the one living witness. She has lived with nightmares and flashbacks, woken up screaming during the night, defensively punching the air, and suffers debilitating migraines that can last up to a week.
She is most fearful that she won’t recognize the killer if she ever sees him again.
“You don’t know who is going to walk up to you,” Santiago said. “Will you recognize that face so many years later? How have they changed? What’s different about them? Will they recognize you first or will you recognize them first?”
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She has returned to Chicago only a handful of times since she moved to Florida. Every time she does, she walks by her mother’s old apartment at 1641 W. Huron St.
“Some people think that spirits stay wherever they pass away,” Santiago said. “In my own mind, I walk by, say my prayer and keep on going.”