Kathleen Lombardo murder

Kathleen Lombardo’s murder was an unsolved killing in Oak Park, Illinois, whose unanswered questions became a formative part of Michelle McNamara’s life and, decades later, the subject of a disputed eyewitness recollection. The crime was never solved. For McNamara, the case began not with a theory or an investigation, but with the discovery of a broken personal object near the place where Kathleen had been attacked—and with the enduring absence of an identified killer.

The Night of the Murder

On the evening of August 1, 1984, Kathleen Lombardo, twenty-four, was jogging along Pleasant Street with her Walkman. It was a hot night, and neighbors sitting on their porches saw her pass at about 9:45 p.m. She was killed minutes later. Her attacker dragged her into the mouth of the alley between Euclid and Wesley. The book gives no resolution to the central question of who attacked her or why.

At the time, McNamara was fourteen and in the attic bedroom of her family’s house, about three-tenths of a mile away. The room had been renovated into a retreat for the children as they passed through their teenage years: its slanted ceilings, deep-orange shag carpet, built-in bookcase, and large wooden desk made it a private place for McNamara to write and dream. She signed her journal entries “Michelle, the Writer,” and was only weeks away from starting high school. Crime was not yet a particular interest; her childhood reading had included the occasional Nancy Drew book.

News of the killing reached the household through a brief exchange upstairs and her mother’s quick movement to a window. The family knew the Lombardos from St. Edmund’s. Two days after the murder, McNamara went without telling anyone to the place near her home where Kathleen had been attacked. Among the debris she found pieces of Kathleen Lombardo’s Walkman. The object made the event tangible to her, but it did not supply an identity. What stayed with her was the unanswered question of who the killer was. She later described the gap where a face should have been as the force that gripped her imagination.

Discovery and Conflicting Recollections

The murder’s discovery became contested decades later, when Dan Olis contacted McNamara. He and his cousin Terry Keating had both been haunted by the case. They believed the commonly accepted account of what happened that night was wrong and said that they knew the killer’s identity because they had encountered him. Their account did not establish that identification as fact, but it introduced a distinct set of remembered circumstances.

Terry recalled walking with four other boys into the alcove behind 143 South Wesley Avenue. Near the garbage cans, he thought he saw a rolled-up rug. In the dark, he mistook Kathleen’s pale legs for a light-colored carpet. Danny, who was closest, recognized that they had found a body and alerted the others. The boys’ recollections were of a sudden discovery in the alley, followed by alarm and confusion. One boy moved away from the scene; another ran toward a nearby back door to call for help.

The boys remembered that Kathleen was still showing signs of life when they found her, and that she died in the minutes before a large number of police arrived. They also recalled detectives telling them that they must have just walked up on the man responsible. These are the boys’ later memories, not an independently established account in the evidence presented here. Their recollection nevertheless marks a sharp divergence from the accepted narrative: in their telling, a man emerged from the alley almost simultaneously with their discovery.

They described him as tall and apparently of Indian descent, wearing a linen shirt open at the chest, shorts, and sandals. Terry remembered that the man asked what was happening but did not look toward Kathleen’s body. When Mike told him that someone was hurt and the police needed to be called, the man shook his head. Years afterward, Terry revisited the image of the stranger and the way he seemed not to look at the scene. When Terry compared that memory with Tom’s description of a tall man from India whom Tom had encountered in the neighborhood, Terry recognized a possible connection and insisted that the man had been present when they found Kathleen.

The Case and Its Unanswered Leads

The recollections did not close the case. The one lead McNamara knew from witnesses’ reports was a man described as African American, wearing a yellow tank top and a headband, who had watched Kathleen intently as she jogged. McNamara also remembered a rumor that witnesses had seen the killer leave the El train and follow Kathleen. When she later contacted the Oak Park police to check details, they debunked that rumor. The suggestion that the killer had arrived from elsewhere had circulated, but the police did not support it.

The witnesses’ reported sighting and the boys’ later description were not the same account: one concerned a man watching Kathleen during her jog; the other concerned a man who, the boys said, emerged from the alley near the time they found her. The available evidence does not establish that these descriptions referred to the same person, nor does it verify the boys’ identification. McNamara’s contacts with the police left her with the impression that investigators regarded the case as a dead end. The murder remained unsolved.

The case had also prompted questions about possible connections to other killings. In August 1981, newspaper coverage asked whether the Harrington case was related to other recent double homicides in Southern California. Santa Barbara investigators had raised the possibility of a connection among two double homicides and a knife attack in which a couple escaped, while officials in Ventura and Orange County were skeptical. These broader suspicions formed part of the period’s uncertainty about unsolved attacks, but they did not resolve Kathleen Lombardo’s murder or establish a link to it.

A Murder That Shaped a Later Search

For McNamara, the unresolved case did not recede into the past. She wrote about it from time to time and mentioned it in interviews; even as an adult, she called the Oak Park police to fact-check details. In her account, the case became the beginning of an enduring attentiveness to unsolved crimes: she collected troubling details, associated places and people with other disappearances or killings, and eventually created True Crime Diary, a website devoted to cold-case homicides.

The later message from Dan Olis reopened a case McNamara had thought had reached a dead end. It also shifted the story from a solitary question—the unknown identity of the attacker—to a set of personal memories held by people who had been boys at the scene. Dan and Terry were not contacting her with a verified solution; they were carrying their own account of the discovery and their conviction that the accepted version was wrong. The difference between remembered certainty and proven identity remained essential.

The murder’s significance in the book lies in that lasting tension. Kathleen’s death was known, the location of the attack and the object left behind were recalled, and witnesses had reported a suspicious figure. Yet the person responsible remained unidentified. The broken Walkman gave McNamara a concrete trace of the crime; the later recollections offered another possible trace, but not a resolution. The face missing from the case continued to draw her back to it.