After the Diary, Part One: Kathleen Lombardo, the Case That Started It

This is where the series has to start, because it is where McNamara’s own obsession started. Everything she went on to build, the blog, the reporting instincts, the refusal to let a case go quiet just because the public stopped asking about it, traces back to one alley in Oak Park, Illinois. I want to know the same thing Kathy’s family has been asking for over four decades: what actually happened to Kathy Lombardo, and why does an answer still not exist.

Who Kathleen Lombardo Was

Kathleen Mary Lombardo, known as Kathy, was 24 years old and had lived in Oak Park her entire life. She was a former honors student at Trinity High School, working as a retail clerk, and living with her parents, Dominic and Rhea Lombardo, and her siblings. Her brother Christopher later described her to the Chicago Tribune as quiet, honest, and devout. She had a habit of taking evening walks through the neighborhood, a route that took her along Euclid Avenue, past the Oak Park Green Line station and a White Hen Pantry convenience store, and onto Pleasant Street before heading home.

The Night of August 1, 1984

On the evening of August 1, 1984, Lombardo went out walking in her neighborhood. Somewhere along the route, just over a block from her house, she was pulled into an alley between the 100 blocks of South Wesley and Euclid Avenues. She was raped, stabbed in the heart, and had her throat cut. She was found by a group of local boys who had been out walking to the convenience store. According to later reporting, she still had vital signs when they found her, which suggests they may have come across the scene not long after the attacker left. She died before police arrived.

The precise timeline needs closer examination. Some later accounts place her departure at around 7:30 p.m.; McNamara’s published account describes neighbors seeing her pass their porch at approximately 9:45 p.m., minutes before the attack. Those times refer to different events and do not necessarily contradict each other, but they leave the duration and sequence of the walk unclear. The original reports are needed before either time can anchor a reconstruction of her final movements.

Detective Ronald Surmin, who worked the scene that night, later said the department received roughly a hundred tips in the aftermath. None of them led anywhere. Contemporaneous Chicago Tribune reporting described witnesses who said they saw a man following Lombardo before the attack, and police at the time circulated a specific physical description of a suspect. The police chief in neighboring River Forest later disputed that description publicly, calling it media hype and offering a different account of how the attacker was dressed. Whether that dispute reflected a genuine disagreement between departments or something else has never been resolved in public reporting.

A theory also circulated that the killer had gotten off the elevated train near the Green Line station specifically to follow Lombardo, implying an outsider had targeted her at random. McNamara herself later argued that theory looked less like an investigative lead and more like a story Oak Park told itself, one that let residents believe the killer wasn’t someone from the neighborhood. A year later, a series of similar sexual assaults on joggers occurred along Washington Boulevard, just blocks from where Lombardo was killed. A retired Chicago homicide detective has also suggested a possible connection to the unsolved 1978 murder of 22-year-old Rita Hopkinson at a CTA station. Neither connection has ever been confirmed.

One later recollection complicates the assumption that the attacker had simply arrived by train. In accounts of HBO’s follow-up, Terry Keating, one of the boys who found Kathy, recalled asking a nearby man for help contacting police; the man said he did not have a phone. Keating also recounted another neighborhood boy’s description of a similar-looking man emerging from a nearby house, apparently freshly showered and wearing a robe. The second account is a recollection of what someone else said, not Keating’s own observation. Neither account establishes that the man was the attacker, but both make the local witness history relevant to any renewed review.

What Turned a Teenager Into a True Crime Writer

McNamara knew Lombardo casually through church, though the two were not close given the age gap between them. In the days after the murder, a 14-year-old McNamara went to the alley herself and picked up pieces of a shattered Walkman that investigators believed belonged to Lombardo. In 2012, she wrote about the experience on True Crime Diary in a post she titled “Origin Story,” describing how that moment in the alley was the point her obsession with unsolved crime began. She would go on to serve as editor-in-chief of her high school newspaper before eventually building the blog into a decade-long body of work covering more than a hundred cases, and ultimately into the reporting that produced I’ll Be Gone in the Dark. A working copy of the original “Origin Story” post was not independently located in this pass; its existence, title, and content are corroborated across multiple secondary sources, including contemporaneous coverage from Oak Park’s Wednesday Journal.

After the Diary: Following McNamara’s Unfinished Work

McNamara’s interest extended beyond the night Kathy was killed. In 2016, she emailed Grace Puccetti, a survivor of a 1982 attack in the same general area involving a knife and threatened sexual assault. Puccetti was not ready to talk. By the time she felt able to respond, McNamara had died.

When the documentary team behind HBO’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark retraced McNamara’s research, they found Puccetti and returned to that unfinished conversation. Her account widened the chronology: the questions about violence against women in the area reached back before Lombardo’s murder as well as forward to the later attacks on joggers. Similarities deserve investigation, but they do not establish that the same person committed the crimes.

HBO’s June 2021 epilogue, directed by Elizabeth Wolff, brought those questions back to Oak Park. It included Christopher Lombardo and Terry Keating, linking the family’s continuing search for answers with the recollections of someone who had found Kathy that night. By then, the effort to understand what police knew had become a court fight. Its origins were much older than the documentary.

The Records Fight Began Before HBO

Christopher Lombardo had sought police records in 2004 and 2005. As the Wednesday Journal reported in 2019, a December 2004 denial from then-assistant village attorney Jack Tibbetts argued that disclosure could interfere with the investigation and damage a future prosecution. By the time HBO became involved, the family had already encountered that rationale roughly fourteen years earlier.

The later requests tested whether renewed attention would bring greater access. Christopher and the documentary team made three FOIA requests in 2018 and 2019, according to the reporting assembled for this article. The village denied them, arguing that disclosure could compromise evidence gathering, inquiries into persons of interest, and witness cooperation. A November 2018 response said that police had delivered evidence to the Illinois State Police laboratory the previous month.

The effort also went beyond obtaining documents. Christopher told the Wednesday Journal that he and HBO representatives met with Police Chief LaDon Reynolds and Village Manager Cara Pavlicek in March 2019 to ask that evidence be released for private DNA testing. The village declined, he said, and told him three items had gone to the state laboratory for retesting. He also reported that the village declined an on-camera interview with Detective Timothy Unzicker, whose assignment to the case, Christopher said, stretched back more than a decade.

Later reporting supplied a more specific picture of the laboratory work. A September 2020 response described ongoing examination of evidence, including Kathleen’s clothing, for a full or partial offender DNA profile. That account establishes what testing was reportedly being attempted at the time; it does not establish that a usable profile was recovered, matched, or exhausted as a lead.

The dispute reached court in 2021. The case identification supplied for this article lists Story Syndicate, LLC & Christopher Lombardo v. Village of Oak Park, Cook County Circuit Court No. 2021CH00988, filed March 2, 2021. The complaint and current docket still need to be obtained directly to confirm the filing details and subsequent disposition. The 2019 meetings and denials should not be confused with the later lawsuit.

By the reported filing date, nearly seventeen years had passed since Christopher’s earlier requests, and nearly thirty-seven since Kathy’s murder. That history places the documentary in a longer family effort to obtain information. HBO brought an audience and additional resources to a question Christopher had already been asking for years.

Where the Case Stands Today

The reporting reviewed for this article describes Lombardo’s murder as unsolved. Oak Park has characterized the investigation as open and active; Christopher has questioned how much work that designation reflects. His brother Dominic has continued to express hope that someone with information will come forward.

The present status of the records lawsuit and the results of the reported DNA testing have not been independently established for this update. An earlier report that litigation was pending does not establish that it remains pending today. Those gaps limit what can responsibly be said about the current state of either the investigation or the access dispute.

What Still Doesn’t Add Up

Two threads run through this case. One is investigative: disputed descriptions, later witness recollections, an uncertain timeline, and nearby attacks whose possible connections remain unconfirmed. McNamara challenged the assumption that the attacker was an outsider, but challenging that story is not the same as proving where he lived or identifying him.

The other thread is institutional. The village has argued that releasing information could jeopardize an investigation and a future prosecution, while Kathy’s family has questioned how much investigative activity is taking place. Those positions can coexist: work may be happening that police cannot publicly describe. But after decades without an answer, the distinction between an open file and an actively pursued case deserves scrutiny.

The reported DNA submissions are part of that scrutiny. So are the refusal to release evidence for private testing and the long history of denied records requests. A denial alone does not establish misconduct, and an unresolved murder does not establish that investigators have done nothing. The question is what the records can show about the work performed, the evidence preserved, and the avenues still available.

That is why Kathleen Lombardo’s case opens this series. McNamara wanted to close the gap where a killer’s identity should have been. I also want to understand the gap between what an institution says it is doing and what the available record allows a family to know. In Kathy’s case, both questions remain essential.