Suffocation is a long, slow, painful death.

It takes between one and five minutes to simply smother someone into unconsciousness, and then the victim must suffer without air another three to five minutes before dying. DeKalb County Coroner Dennis Miller said the exact time of suffocation depends on how much the victim is fighting, among other things.

No one deserves to die that way.

But someone held a pillowcase or a piece of plastic over Donna Doll’s nose and mouth until she passed out and then smothered her to death.

In the fall of 1970, Donna Susan Doll was an NIU senior, an honors student studying Russian. A 1967 graduate of Riverside-Brookfield High School, Donna graduated 15th in her class and was a member of the National Honor Society. After graduating from NIU, she wanted to teach Russian or work as an interpreter. An ambitious student, she attended Middlebury College in Pennsylvania in the summers of 1969 and 1970 and earned credit toward a master’s degree.

Pictures snapped of Donna as a bridesmaid at her friend Donna Chiarelott’s wedding that year show a square-shouldered, smiling, blonde with wide set eyes looking straight into the camera.

In high school, Donna was “never wild,” Chiarelott said. “She was unworldly, and innocent.” Donna Doll and Donna Chiarelott’s friendship dated back to eighth grade and Chiarelott remembered her friend being burdened with responsibilities at home as a teenager.

“She basically took care of her younger brother and younger sister, and they (her parents) always had chores for her to do. She was the one who cleaned the house … and the one who couldn’t go out because she had to babysit. She was pretty well tied down as a kid,” Chiarelott said.

Doll’s life changed at NIU. She studied hard in DeKalb. Russian is a difficult and demanding language to learn, but now she had time for dates and visits with friends. Though she attended NIU on a scholarship and worked weeknights at the Swen Parson library, her life was more her own in DeKalb.

On Oct. 2, 1970, Doll clocked out of the library at 9:59 p.m. She had plans. She was meeting Donna Chiarelott for the first time that fall. The two coeds had yet to see each other that semester because Doll had spent the summer in Pennsylvania and Chiarelott was a newlywed.

“We hadn’t gotten together yet because of schedules and other things … we were going to get together and talk for a while and get some coffee somewhere,” Chiarelott remembered. “We were supposed to meet at the library … I was supposed to pick her up, and we were going to talk about the summer and what had gone on, but she just wasn’t there,” she said. Chiarelott stopped at the library, but Donna was already gone.

Donna did not return to the West Lincoln Highway rooming house she lived in that night either.

So a 21-year-old coed stands up her best friend and then doesn’t come home. Big deal. This is 1970—students are doing their own thing. Peace, love and understanding. How unusual is it for a college student to become sidetracked and miss an appointment? Old friends are supposed to understand those things. It must happen all the time.

But Doll was gone all weekend and two days later at 11:30 p.m. on Oct. 4, her houseparents reported her missing to DeKalb Police.

Her room was searched. Her clothes and suitcase were there, so was her last paycheck from the library, uncashed. She couldn’t have had more than $10 in her pocket.

Current DeKalb Police Chief Don Berke was the detective who investigated the case. Berke read from the missing persons report of 1970: “It was indicated that Donna Doll had a ‘boyfriend’ in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It appears she met this gentleman last summer at an Eastern college.”

“So coupling that up with her taking off, and this relationship we were told of up front,” Berke said the police and her houseparents assumed she had gone East to see her boyfriend. But why hadn’t she told anyone? Well, that too was easily explained. Chiarelott said the boyfriend was married or recently separated, a fact that might have complicated the terms of a visit. Doll’s parents were known to be strict, and the police reasoned she felt they would have disapproved of an unchaperoned visit at the beginning of the school year.

Wherever Doll was, the police just did not have a reason to suspect foul play. “There was no abduction reported to us,” Berke said. “There’s a difference between a witness seeing someone else taking somebody versus someone who was reported missing two days after she was last seen.”

The two days Doll was missing stretched into nine. The Chicago Tribune and The DeKalb Journal ran short stories about her disappearance. Chiarelott’s mother sat with Mrs. Doll at night trying to keep her company.

The Doll family received several strange phone calls that week. Chiarelott said someone called six or seven times and said, “I know where your daughter is.”

And then a body was found.

On Oct. 11, at around 8:30 p.m. three teenagers were on their way to a party in DeKalb and drove out to Nelson Road to pick up some beer stashed there the week before. Jim Ball, of DeKalb, was in his first year of college. As he walked through the tall grass at dusk near the ditch running parallel to the road he saw the outline of a body lying on its back under a tree about 5 feet away. The two girls with him did not see it, and he ordered them back to his Pontiac stationwagon. The three returned to the car and drove to the DeKalb Police Department to report what they found. The police followed the teenagers back to Nelson Road.

The body was fully clothed, only the shoes were missing. She had a jacket on, but it was not the trench coat she was last seen in. Her shoes, trench coat and purse were never found.

By 3:00 a.m. Monday, police knew they had found Donna Doll. A male friend of Donna’s, a graduate student in the NIU math department named Charles Burke, identified the body. The two had dated, Chiarelott said.

Ironically, a search party, organized by Charles Burke and some of Donna’s friends in the NIU foreign language department, had walked along the railroad tracks west of DeKalb looking for Donna. They ended their search about a quarter of a mile short of where she was finally found.

DeKalb County Sheriff Roger Scott said that in the 1970s, Nelson Road was a popular spot for NIU students to drive to park and drink. The dorms were not co-ed then, and there was a lot more “road partying,” he said.

Newspaper accounts of the time show the town in an uproar. No one could understand what had happened. Sheriff’s Police Capt. Jim Laben said the county was different then, even quieter than today. Always considered a safe, rural area, unexplained homicides in DeKalb were uncommon and the county did not even have a morgue.

“Everyone was wondering, well, obviously, people think right away, ‘Is there some type of serial killer roaming the streets of rural DeKalb?'” Laben said.

But from the night Doll was found, police said they had a prime suspect. Doll had recently broken off a relationship, and Laben and Scott said that fact supplied a motive.

Although the police started with this fact and circled away from it into every direction looking for another explanation, “there was nothing else,” Laben said.

“(The killer) targeted this one person for whatever went on between them. And if we only knew some of those things, maybe that would give us a different direction to go in,” Laben said.

Scott said, “There was no violence in the death, no visible signs of violence, which indicates they had to be close and know each other.”

Doll had recently broken up with the young man Chiarelott called the victim’s first boyfriend. Chiarelott said she received letters Donna wrote while attending a summer foreign language program in Pennsylvania detailing her plans to end her relationship with her first boyfriend. Doll was interested in the man from Pittsburgh, and he planned to visit her at NIU over Halloween, Chiarelott said.

Police said the boyfriend might have had a motive to keep his girlfriend from breaking up with him. This circumstantial evidence indicated to police the boyfriend felt he did not deserve to be jilted. Chiarelott said Doll’s first boyfriend was a possessive jerk—a nerd who did not have an intellect that matched Donna’s.

That boyfriend lived alone in an apartment at Suburban Estates, close to the spot on Nelson Road where Donna’s body was found.

That person never confessed. Scott and Laben say his attitude at the time was, “How could you possibly suspect me?” He served as a pallbearer at her funeral and Donna was buried wearing a pair of earrings he had given her.

These days, the prime suspect is a senior consultant at a large Chicago bank. He spends his days designing computer systems that do number crunching.

When offered a chance to tell his side of the story from 1970, the suspect said, “I have no comment,” and slammed down the phone.

The day the sheriff announced to the press that there was a prime suspect in the case, he tried to slit his wrist. But before checking out of the University Health Service at 4:00 a.m., he retained Ed Dietrich as his lawyer.

The Oct. 20, 1970, DeKalb Chronicle quoted Dietrich as saying, “Burke has been ‘quite emotionally disturbed’ over Miss Doll’s death and has been extremely cooperative with police ‘working 20 out of 24 hours with them’ when called upon to help. Burke even volunteered to take a polygraph test, Dietrich said.

The Donna Doll case is still open.