Fourteen years after five women were slain inside a Lane Bryant store in Tinley Park, police say fresh eyes on the case may help in yielding critical clues needed to solve it.
Two new detectives with the department were assigned in December to the case and they’re reexamining the evidence collected since the Feb. 2, 2008, shooting deaths at the Brookside Marketplace store southwest of Harlem Avenue and Interstate 80.
More Top Picks Foods That Cause High Blood Pressure
Killed that day were 42-year-old store manager Rhoda McFarland of Joliet; Jennifer Bishop, 34, of South Bend, Indiana; Sarah Szafranski, 22, of Oak Forest; Connie Woolfolk, 37, of Flossmoor; and Carrie Hudek Chiuso, 33, of Frankfort.
A sixth woman, also a store employee, was shot in the neck but survived and provided police with a description of the killer.
Since the slayings, police said they have processed some 7,500 leads.
The department has a tip line for the investigation, 708-444-5394, and an email address, lanebryant.tipline@tinleypark.org.
Ray Violetto, who had been lead investigator, retired last November. Tim Poulos, who worked alongside Violetto, came off the case last October when he was promoted to commander of the department’s patrol division.
Replacing Violetto and Poulos in the department’s investigation are detectives Jeff Graves and Roger Davisson.
“They are hard chargers,” Poulos said. “They are taking a look at it from Day 1.”
Despite the passing of years, Poulos said he firmly believes the case will be solved.
“We are waiting for that tip to come in, that lead,” he said. “I remain confident after 14 years, praying and hoping that day comes. We have hope this is going to come to a resolution some day.”
Bringing ‘fresh eyes’
Police Chief Matt Walsh said the detectives taking over bring “fresh eyes” to the investigation. One room in the department’s headquarters is devoted to the case, with photos of the victims posted on a wall and several filing cabinets filled with reports and other paperwork the detectives are converting to digital form to make it easier to review.
“Maybe there was something we missed initially,” Walsh said.
Larry Rafferty, the department’s deputy chief, noted that in the beginning, with assistance of South Suburban Major Crimes Task Force, there were about 50 detectives working the case.
“Those leads were coming in fast and furious,” Rafferty said, adding that the new detectives might spot something.
“I have faith in them, I really do,” Rafferty said. “It’s an arduous task, it really is.”
Each year, as it gets close to the anniversary of the slayings, tips “start ticking up” to the department, Poulos said.
Some tips, investigators know, are not likely to result in a solid lead, such as someone who sees somebody in a store who might resemble the killer.
“We weigh those things out,” Rafferty said. “There has to be some value to the tip.”
Still, he said, police don’t just dismiss out of hand something that might at first seem a dead end in the investigation.
“You never know what’s going to crack it,” he said.
Still standing and unclaimed is a $100,000 reward, much of it put up by the parent company of Lane Bryant, that was hoped to pry loose key information that would lead to an arrest and conviction.
Rafferty said he is surprised the lure of the reward hasn’t prompted someone who has solid information to step forward.
“I find it very difficult to believe one person did this and didn’t talk to somebody about it,” he said.
Police were nearby
Shortly after 10 a.m. on the day of the shootings, which was a Saturday, an African American man about 6-foot to 6-foot-2, with a husky build and broad shoulders, came into the store posing as a delivery man, according to police.
Based on the description by the surviving woman, police said he had three to five “puffy” corn rows running from the back of his head to the front, with one strand with green beads hanging over his right cheek.
More Top Picks Best Pillows That Stays Hypoallergenic
Four women, including McFarland and the other surviving employee, were in the store at the time. The man pulled out a .40-caliber Glock pistol, told them he was robbing the store, then herded the women into a backroom, where they were bound with duct tape and ordered to lay facedown on the floor, according to police. Two other women who came into the store also were similarly restrained.
McFarland managed to call 911 on her cellphone, whispering her location to an operator, who told her to stay on the line. McFarland pleaded “hurry” before the connection was lost. An edited version of the 911 call is at the Police Department’s website.
The call was first received by the Will County sheriff’s office and immediately transferred to Tinley Park, which took the call at 10:44 a.m., according to authorities. A Tinley Park police officer was on a call in Brookside Marketplace, in the parking lot of Super Target a few hundred yards away, and was on the scene within a minute, but the gunman had already fled.
Police said they know, by the survivor’s account, that the man was in the store for 40 minutes and suspect the women’s deaths were the result of a botched robbery.
Police had previously said their investigation didn’t uncover any evidence to suggest that any of the women knew their assailant.
Poulos said that, over the years, he and Violetto visited many jails and prisons, talking to inmates who claimed to have solid information on the case in hopes it would get their sentence reduced.
In some cases it meant a face-to-face visit with an inmate, but in others it was a simple matter of looking up records and seeing that someone was in prison at the time of the crime and likely lacked firsthand knowledge, Poulos said.
“They never panned out,” Poulos said of jail visits.
Rafferty said that as years have passed, Tinley Park hasn’t scaled back its commitment to supplying the financial resources the department needs to continue the investigation.
“Tinley Park has spent a ton of money on this case, Rafferty said. “(Village officials) have never stopped providing the money to do what needs to be done.”
Rafferty said that as testing advances, that could shed new light on physical evidence collected in the case.
“We are still exploring everything,” he said.