Oak Park, Illinois, is both the setting of Kathleen Lombardo’s 1984 murder and the landscape of Michelle McNamara’s first encounter with an unsolved case. The attack took place only a few blocks from the home where McNamara grew up. Two days later, she walked to the site and found pieces of Lombardo’s Walkman. That brief visit made Oak Park more than a hometown: it became the place where a nearby crime opened a question about an unknown killer that McNamara would carry into adulthood.

Neighborhood and Setting

McNamara grew up in Oak Park in a large Irish Catholic family, in a busy household where she was the youngest of six children. The neighborhood’s familiarity shaped the force of the crime’s proximity: the victim was not a distant figure in a newspaper account but a young woman attacked close to home. Lombardo, twenty-four, had been jogging along Pleasant Street with her Walkman on a hot August evening in 1984. Neighbors saw her pass at about 9:45 p.m.; the attack occurred roughly three-tenths of a mile from McNamara’s house.

The book later returns to Oak Park through another neighborhood visit, to a corner brick house at 143 South Wesley Avenue. The house recalled a family McNamara had known while growing up; some of their children had been close to her age. The scene presents Oak Park as a place layered with personal recognition, where a street or house can bring earlier lives and memories back into view.

The Murder and Its Immediate Trace

Lombardo was dragged into an alley off Pleasant Street and murdered. News reached McNamara’s family quickly; they knew the Lombardos through St. Edmund’s. The crime’s closeness was measured not only in blocks but in shared community ties, turning an ordinary neighborhood route into the site of a killing whose perpetrator remained unidentified.

Two days after the attack, McNamara went alone to the spot near her home. She found pieces of Lombardo’s shattered Walkman on the ground and picked them up. The small, broken object was a material remnant of the crime, but what held McNamara’s attention was the unanswered question of who had committed it. She later recalled feeling curiosity rather than fear, and described the killer’s unknown identity as the element that seized her imagination.

A Hometown Becomes the Beginning of an Investigation

Before Lombardo’s murder, McNamara had no particular interest in crime beyond occasional childhood reading. The visit to the attack site changed that: the unresolved identity of the killer drew her toward puzzling details and unsolved murders. She began collecting accounts of mysteries, eventually orienting people and places in her mind by the unsolved crimes associated with them.

Years later, with the advent of internet technology, McNamara created True Crime Diary, a website devoted to cold-case homicides. Oak Park thus marks the personal origin of an investigative commitment that grew far beyond the neighborhood. The case did not provide her with an answer; instead, its enduring question became the starting point for a life spent pursuing answers to other unsolved crimes.