Suburban Chicago police still investigating Lane Bryant murders 16 years later
TINLEY PARK, Ill. (CBS) – Friday marked 16 years since five women were murdered in a Tinley Park Lane Bryant store, a case that remains unsolved.
First responders who were on the scene that day have continued the quest for justice in the case in which the gunman has never been caught.
Police say 16 years after the horrific crime, they're still getting tips about the case.
On Feb. 2, 2008, five women were shot and killed inside the Lane Bryant store at 191st and Harlem during a robbery.
Store manager Rhoda McFarland, 42, of Joliet; Connie Woolfolk, 37, of Flossmoor; Sarah Szafranski, 22, of Oak Forest; Carrie Hudek Chiuso, 33, of Frankfort; and Jennifer Bishop, 34, of South Bend, Indiana, were all killed. A sixth woman was also shot and wounded.
All were shot to death during the robbery.
The sixth woman, a store employee, survived and was able to give police a description of the suspected shooter. That helped lead to a sketch of the man police have been looking for the past 16 years.
"It's something that I think about almost daily," said Tinley Park Village Manager Pat Carr. "When you come into this area, you can't forget something like this."
Carr was the village's director of emergency management on Feb. 2, 2008.
"It was surreal," Carr said. "It was cold. We had a lot of people responding. It was one of the largest responses that I've ever seen, being here in 18 years with the village."
Steve Klotz, Tinley Park's fire chief, was the assistant fire chief in 2008. He remembered arriving at the scene with paramedics and learning all five women were dead at the scene.
"The initial impact was, you want to try to help," Klotz said. "That's our number one goal, and when we find that we can't do anything, there's sort of a sense of helplessness, that we can't do anything."
A T.J. Maxx occupies the spot where the Lane Bryant used to be. Police have added new resources and investigators to the case with the goal of finding the person responsible for the five murders.
"As technology changes over time, there are new things that are available to us," Tinley Park Police Chief Tom Tilton said. "So new ways of processing the evidence, new ways of looking at the information and the materials we've gathered, that changes over time and as technology changes, that gives us a window to look at things differently."
Tilton said police are still receiving tips and that the investigation is active.
"We don't get the same volume that we have over time, but everyone once in a while, people will call or they'll use the website to give us information," he said. "We take it very seriously. We look into it very diligently and we're still hopeful that our community will still be energized enough to continue to use it. So we always continue to operate it."
Anyone with information on the case is asked to call the Tinley Park police tipline at 708-444-5394 or email them at lanebryant.tipline@tinleypark.org.
Tinley Park police also have more information about the case on its website, including recordings of the 911 calls from the day of the shooting in which the shooter's voice is audible. Police said a $100,000 reward is available for information leading to the arrest of the suspected shooter and the reward is not dependent on a conviction.