Tricia

The summer after my freshman year of college, a girl from my high school was murdered. Her name was Tricia. I didn't know her well, and I hadn't talked to her in a couple of years, but I remember her as a nice kid and a great student. She was a year behind me and a week away from leaving for college when she was stabbed to death on her front porch in the middle of the night. It rather rocked my town because:

A. This stuff never happens in Glenview
B. It was a victim that we knew
C. The police were convinced that she knew her killer. Which means that we knew her killer.

I remember the talk around town at the time. She had her housekey out in her hand. The dog didn't bark. No one heard Tricia scream. And I remember that one of the rumored suspects was a kid that lived on my street.

Glenview was totally unprepared to investigate such a case, and it went unsolved. My friend Rich, who is the director of the bird rescue where I volunteer, is also a police officer and part of a suburban taskforce that was formed to investigate these crimes. It is my understanding that Tricia's case was a catalyst to the creation of this task force and I can tell you that decade later, when next a woman was murdered in Glenview, there was an arrest in about five minutes. That was a domestic abuse case.

Anyway. It seems there has been a break in Tricia's case. The Chicago Tribune reports that Michael Gargiulo, formerly of Glenview and now living in California, was arrested in an unrelated attempted murder. He is now being tied to a 2001 murder in California, a 2005 murder, and to Tricia.

I was on the phone with my brother when I read this, and we both grabbed our yearbooks. I graduated GBS in 1992, Tricia graduated in 1993, Gargiulo graduated in 1994 and my brother graduated in 1996.

I didn't know this guy, but he played football as a sophmore. He would have been a teammate of several people we knew. And he would have been all of seventeen at the time of the murder.

I don't know if this guy killed Tricia. I don't know if I want him to be the one, so that we can close the case. Or if I just don't want to know that a kid in our town could do such a thing. But somewhere out there is someone that got 15 years of a life that Tricia didn't get and I had forgotten until today how angry that makes me.

You can read the new developments here and here.