January 28th, 2001, at least in the United States, was Super Bowl Sunday; the two NFL teams playing that day were the Baltimore Ravens and the New York Giants. Eighteen-year-old Jill-Lyn Euto had been planning on spending the day with her mother and sister at her mother’s home on Butternut Street in Syracuse, New York, to spend time together and watch the game.
Jill-Lyn, according to her mother Joanne Browning, was a fiercely independent and driven woman, who had insisted upon getting her own apartment and making her own way as soon as she reached the age of majority. In 2001, she was working at the Aeropostale clothing store at the Shoppingtown Mall, and was studying to be a paramedic, with a view to perhaps later becoming a pediatric nurse. She lived with her dog Hooch in a high-rise building on James Street, a short bus ride from her job.
On the night before the football game, Jill-Lyn talked to her mother on the phone, and seemed to be looking forward to hanging out with her family the next day. Joanne Browning later told police that she had last spoken to her daughter between eleven-thirty and midnight on January 27th, and that everything had seemed fine.
On Sunday, at about noon, Joanne and Jill-Lyn’s sister Jenna became slightly concerned when Jill-Lyn didn’t show up as planned. Initially, they thought Jill-Lyn had simply run into some friends and decided to watch the game with them instead. Joanne even phoned Jill-Lyn numerous times, telling her that if she had gone off with friends, then that was completely okay, but every call went to voicemail. As the afternoon wore on, Joanne and Jenna began to get more worried, but still, panic had not yet set in.
By the time Monday morning rolled around, though, Joanne was becoming frantic, and her ominous feelings only increased when she called the store where Jill-Lyn worked and was told that Jill-Lyn had neither shown up for work nor called in sick. Her terror increasing, Joanne drove to her daughter’s apartment with Jenna in tow.
Upon arriving, Joanne knocked on the apartment door, and was at first mollified by the fact that she didn’t hear Hooch barking. If the dog wasn’t making noise, Joanne reasoned, then perhaps Jill-Lyn had indeed gone off with her friends somewhere and had taken Hooch with her.
However, after a few moments, Joanne heard a sound that froze her blood: Hooch was quietly whining and crying behind the door.
Joanne tried the knob and found that the apartment door was unlocked. As soon as she entered, Hooch crawled toward her, clearly distraught, and Joanne scooped the dog up in her arms. It was then that she saw her daughter’s body, lying very still on the futon. Jill-Lyn was clearly dead.
Joanne immediately retreated from the apartment and phoned the police. Jenna, meanwhile, began knocking on the doors of the neighboring apartments, asking for help or if anyone knew what had happened to her sister. No one answered their doors, despite the anguished pleas from Jenna and Joanne.
When officers arrived, they found that Jill-Lyn had been stabbed multiple times, and that she had likely been killed between noon and three p.m. on Sunday, January 28th. There was no sign of forced entry, and nothing appeared to be disturbed or stolen from the residence. Authorities have never divulged whether Jill-Lyn was sexually assaulted.
The murder investigation seemed to stagnate almost immediately; police had no suspects and no motive, and were unable to determine whether Jill-Lyn had known her assailant or if he was a stranger to her. It seemed a completely bizarre, random crime that took place in the middle of the day in a high-rise apartment building, but yielded no witness accounts whatsoever.
In the years following the slaying, Jill-Lyn’s mother made it her mission in life to find her daughter’s killer, and worked tirelessly to keep the case in the public eye, writing to and appearing on television programs such as America’s Most Wanted and Sally Jessy Raphael, taking out billboards with Jill-Lyn’s picture, speaking to investigators numerous times a day, and running a website and a pink-ribbon campaign to find the perpetrator of the senseless crime. Five years after the murder, Joanne even sued the property management company who owned the apartment building where her daughter lived, claiming negligence and lax security. The case was ultimately dismissed.
Sadly, Joanne Browning would not live to see justice in the stabbing death of her daughter. In October of 2007, while working on a roofing job with her company, she slipped and fell backwards off a roof and onto the pavement below. She never regained consciousness, and her life support was turned off several days after the incident.
A reward of $13,000 is on offer for any information leading to the conviction of Jill-Lyn Euto’s killer.
Crime Immemorial 