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MARCH 22, 1975 · THE UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME
The finding: Helen Tobolski, 62, of Roseland, had been a Notre Dame employee for thirteen years. Her regular work was as a maid in Grace Hall, then a men's dormitory, and she picked up extra hours cleaning academic buildings. On Saturday, March 22, 1975 — the first day of spring break, on a mostly empty campus — she checked in at 7 a.m. and began her cleaning routine in the aerospace engineering building, a one-story structure that stood just north of what is now the Joyce Center. Later that morning Professor Hugh Ackert stopped by the building to do some work, found her body, and called the police. The initial report, filed by St. Joseph County police Corporal Charles Eby, records the basics: her glasses were near her feet, and police found no weapon. Deputy coroner Dr. Louis Grwinski said she had been shot once at close range, in front of her left ear, and ruled her death a homicide. It is the only known murder on campus in Notre Dame's history.
The scene, as the record gives it: The South Bend Tribune published a detailed report that same afternoon, under the front-page headline "N.D. cleaning woman slain." Police told the newspaper it was possible that the burglar stood on a chunk of concrete to reach through a broken window and unlatch an east-side door. Arthur Pears, chief of the campus security department, said nothing had been touched in the building and nothing appeared to be missing from the aerospace laboratories. A chalkboard message across the hall from where her body was found read "2-21-75 the day I died"; Pears said the message had been investigated and deemed unrelated to the crime. The building held no cash box or safe, and its laboratory equipment was too large and difficult to steal.
The investigation: Police interviewed co-workers, friends, and university personnel, and found no one with a motive to kill her. Detective Elmer Chikar, of the county police, determined that several personal effects were missing from her purse; his stated judgment, carried in the Tribune, was that the murder was committed by an inexperienced burglar. A month after the killing, University President Father Theodore M. Hesburgh offered a $5,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the killer, as the Observer reported on April 24, 1975. Nine months after her death, the Tribune reported, Chikar said there was not much evidence in the Notre Dame case. He contacted her daughter occasionally with updates over the years that followed, her family recalls, and warned her it was unlikely the killer would be found.
The standing: Tobolski's funeral took place four days after her death; she was buried at St. Joseph Catholic Cemetery in South Bend. Fifty years on, the case remains the St. Joseph County Police Department's. The evidence from the murder remains stored among boxes that hold dozens of decades-old unsolved cases, and when Captain Aaron Santa's staff reviewed those boxes for cases new technology might solve, the department reopened three cases — Tobolski's was not one of the three. Because the case remains unsolved, investigators will not say what evidence they have or what they are missing. Her daughter, Marilyn Hilberth, remembers the daily telephone calls her mother made at 4 p.m. from the job she reported to an hour early so she would be home in time to make them. The killer has never been found.
Sources:
- Ken Bradford, "A Life Lost, a Mystery Unsolved," Notre Dame Magazine — the full account, drawn from the contemporary record and the family's recollection, read in full; the family statements in it are printed here as the family's.
- The contemporary record as cited there: South Bend Tribune, "N.D. cleaning woman slain" (March 22, 1975) and its follow-up reporting of December 1975; The Observer (April 2, 1975, and the reward item of April 24, 1975, p. 9).