If Elna Jarvi hadn’t been afraid to parallel park, she might not have died the way she did.

The 60-year-old DeKalb resident was stabbed to death in the DeKalb municipal parking lot on North Third Street on Sept. 28, 1973. Jarvi bled to death after her killer plunged a knife into her upper left side, piercing a lung and severing an artery.

While DeKalb Police have charged no one with Jarvi’s death, they haven’t forgotten her. Lt. Richard Moudy, current head of investigations at the DeKalb Police Department, said the department still thinks of the 13-year-old crime, particularly when they try to unravel the killings of Barbara Wagner and Lisa Garretson, victims of two other unsolved DeKalb murders.

Jarvi’s younger brother Kayo and his wife Nelly can’t forget Elna’s death either, although they try.

The Jarvi family of DeKalb was close-knit in the 1970s. Kayo, Nelly and their two daughters lived from 1949 to 1960 in a converted apartment on the second floor of the house Kayo was born in. Elna and her widowed mother, old Mrs. Jarvi, lived downstairs.

Those 11 years were a happy time for the Jarvi family. “You can imagine our girls going up and down, the grandparents babysitting, his sister taking the girls anywhere and everywhere. I mean, they never missed a Christmas with Elna taking them into Chicago on the train, and she fussed with their hair and she bought their clothes. It was just a wonderful relationship,” Nelly said. “We were just as close as close could be.”

By the mid-70s, Elna had worked for the DeKalb Ag for over three decades, and in 1973 headed the Ag’s accounts payable department. Just prior to her death, the Ag presented Elna with a piece of diamond jewelry in appreciation for her years of service.

“When DeKalb Ag was located down here on Fifth Street, Elna always walked to work. She was a good walker. But, when the Ag relocated to Sycamore Road, she thought, ‘Oh, I’m going to need a car,'” Nelly said. “So, she took driving lessons, she learned how to drive and she bought herself a car”—a four-door 1973 Maverick.

“That meant she had a car to take Kayo’s mother anywhere she wanted to go, and she always reported to her mother where she was and when she would be home,” Nelly said.

But Elna did not like to parallel park, even after driving lessons.

“Because she was a new driver, she would never try to park on the main street where you’d have to parallel park. She’d always park in one of the lots when she went uptown,” Nelly said.

Sept. 28 was the night before Kayo and Elna’s mother’s 80th birthday. Members of the Jarvi family arrived from their home in Rhode Island for the weekend and a large open house party was planned to celebrate the occasion.

The Jarvi family, police and the daily papers all describe that Friday as a rainy, misty gloomy night. Around 7 p.m., Elna dropped her mother off at her “girls’ club” meeting held at a friend’s house on Tenth Street. Elna told her mother she planned to do some banking at the DeKalb Bank, and then she would return home to clean the house in preparation for Saturday’s party, Nelly said. She promised her mother she would return to pick her up and take her home when the meeting was over at around 10 p.m.

Elna never made it home.

Nelly said it was about 10 p.m. when the senior Mrs. Jarvi called. She remembered the time because Kayo already had his pajamas on.

“We were living on North Seventh at the time, we’d bought a house … and his mother called and said, ‘Elna hasn’t come after me.’ Why Kayo said, ‘Oh, don’t worry—she’s grown up, she can take care of herself.'”

Mrs. Jarvi knew Elna was never late to pick her up, so in about 30 minutes she called her son again, Nelly said.

“She said to Kayo, ‘Something’s wrong, this is not like Elna.'” So Kayo put his pants on over his pajamas and went out to fetch his mother from her meeting and brought her home. Kayo and his brother Leo decided to cruise DeKalb’s public parking lots looking for Elna’s car.

The Jarvi brothers had checked only one parking lot before they found their sister’s car in the Third Street lot.

Elna’s left shoe sat outside her car in the rain. The car doors were shut. Her limp body was slumped across the front seat with her slacks and underwear pulled down around her thighs and her billfold clutched in her hand.

Kayo opened the car door and felt for his sister’s pulse. After feeling no life, he realized she was dead and called the police from a nearby pay phone.

The police interviewed more than 280 people in connection with Elna Jarvi’s murder. Lt. Moudy said among that number, perhaps as many as 30 people were suspects, including people in DeKalb paroled from prison. Everyone with a history of violence who might have known Jarvi was questioned.

“There were a number of people who were in the area who were on parole … some of them were people who may have known her through different groups or whatever, but there were a number of people we talked to and, in our minds, might have some knowledge of what happened in that car… But we didn’t come up with anything,” Moudy said.

The investigation was complicated further by the weather the night of Elna’s stabbing. “You see, that night, it rained and it rained. It was almost like a flood… Because I wasn’t even in town, I got a call and I had to drive about 30 miles to come back. And I remember driving back, I couldn’t see, it was raining so hard,” Moudy remembered.

“If there was any evidence outside of that car, it was long gone… Water was running across that parking lot a couple of inches deep,” Moudy said.

Moudy does remember, however, the Maverick’s doors were shut when they found Elna, and the car’s interior was dry. “I think, and we can only surmise, that if the car door had been left open… we probably would have had a call on it sooner.”

Unfortunately DeKalb Police did not know “exactly how long she was in the car before someone found her. Was there someone that she possibly knew that she allowed to get in the car? Had she been out of the car, got back into the car and someone was waiting for her? We just don’t have the answers… as happens in most cases you don’t solve, there’s just so many unanswerable questions,” Moudy said.

Capt. Jim Laben of the DeKalb County Sheriff’s Police said the longer it is before a body is found, the less likely a crime will be solved.

The police searched the entire downtown DeKalb area. A knife and some bloody tissue or toilet paper was found in a garbage can, but nothing could be positively linked with Jarvi’s death. Experts said the knife could have been the one used to kill Jarvi.

Although no one has been charged with killing Elna Jarvi, her family has its own opinion about what happened that night.

DeKalb’s Greyhound bus terminal was located just around the corner, about 50 feet away from the Third Street parking lot. The Rice Hotel, often a home for transients at the time of the murder, was less than half a block away.

“We’re of the opinion that somebody came in on the bus… maybe somebody from Chicago, they just went in there to do something bad, because nothing’s ever turned up,” Kayo said.

“It was just a pervert, that with one stab … being so close to the bus station … we sure couldn’t think of anybody we knew (that would want to kill Elna),” Nelly said.

Current DeKalb Police Chief Don Berke was one of the original detectives assigned to the case. Berke has a different theory about what happened to Elna Jarvi.

“There were several people we looked at when we considered the location of that homicide, the day, the location of her body when it was found … everything was looked at,” Berke said.

Berke said the Rice Hotel, which now is NIU’s Social Science Research Institute, was “an inexpensive place for people to stay, probably the cheapest in the community” at that time. Other sources said the Hotel was basically a flophouse, somewhere to avoid.

“My own personal thought or theory was that (the attack) was an attempt to get money or funds, and the indication to me of things that were there was that there was somewhat of a struggle … that’s a gut feeling that I have … And that the suspect was close to the area,” Berke said.

Although the Jarvi family determined no money was stolen from Elna, Moudy said family members often do not know exactly how much money a person carries each day. It was possible Elna Jarvi was robbed of only $10 or $20.

“I have a suspect in my mind, and we checked the suspect out, but we didn’t have anything to go on outside of my feelings and his proximity to the area,” Berke said.

Berke said he still believes this particular suspect killed Elna Jarvi. But Berke refused to confirm or deny the suspect was a resident of the Rice Hotel at the time. Berke said he has not seen that person in DeKalb since shortly after the crime was committed.

Five detectives worked full-time on the Jarvi case until Dec. 17, 1973, and the case was re-opened in 1975 when a woman found a knife in the Third Street parking lot. The knife could not be linked to the case. The case was re-opened in 1988 when an officer remembered some undisclosed information about the case and tried to connect it with some fingerprints.

Local attorney Jordan Gallagher said there was a confession to the murder, but that person could not remember which parking lot Jarvi was found in, and beyond that, obviously did not commit the crime.

None of the attempts to solve the case have been successful.