Seventeen-year-old Deborah Kozlarek and her thirteen-year-old friend Carolyn Vandermolen were seen several times on the evening of September 23rd, 1972, near their homes on the south side of Chicago. Deborah washed some clothes at a laundromat on 51st Street, and both girls were seen by multiple witnesses walking around the vicinity, as well as sitting on a stoop in front of a tavern called the Down Beat Tap 5201.
A few witnesses later came forward and reported to police that the girls had also been seen attempting to buy tickets at McCormick Place for a concert featuring The Eagles and Yes. The show was sold out, and the girls apparently left at around ten-thirty p.m.
They were last seen alive about half an hour later, and the following morning, passersby found the bodies of both girls lying in nearby Washington Park. They had both been shot in the head, execution-style, with a .32 caliber pistol. Neither appeared to have been sexually assaulted or robbed.
Police were at a loss to discover a motive in the random crime, and the trail immediately went cold. Oddly, the day before the murders of Deborah and Carolyn, another young girl—fifteen-year-old Amy Alden—was found strangled in a nearby Chicago neighborhood. Given the difference in modus operandi, it is unlikely that the two crimes were related, but in the mid-1990s, a man named Ralph Andrews was convicted of raping and murdering a woman named Virginia Griffin, and at his trial also confessed to the killing of Amy Alden, as well as that of a third girl, sixteen-year-old Susan Clark, who was murdered in 1977.
The shooting death of Deborah Kozlarek and Carolyn Vandermolen, however, has never been solved.
Crime Immemorial 