Helen Tobolski enjoyed her job on the custodial staff at Notre Dame, but her life was much more than that.
The widow loved to cook, and she spent some of her spare time drawing and painting. She taught herself to play the piano, violin and accordion.
She was handy around the house and not afraid to roll up her sleeves for repair projects. Tobolski, who lived in nearby Roseland, had an eye for decorating and would paint or wallpaper when she had the impulse.
And, daughter Marilyn Hilberth recalls, she kept up with her loved ones in Texas. Every day at 4 p.m., Marilyn got a call from her mother.
On March 22, 1975, a call from Notre Dame came about noon, but Marilyn was not home to receive it. That led the University’s executive vice president, Rev. Edmund P. Joyce, CSC, ’37, to call Marilyn’s husband with the terrible news that her mother had been shot to death during a break-in at Notre Dame’s aerospace engineering building.
It’s the only known murder on campus in Notre Dame history. And 50 years later, the killer has never been found.
Few of us alive at the time remember the crime, which happened on the first day of spring break on a mostly empty campus. Even I had forgotten, and I was a junior then with a byline on an Observer article about the tragedy published April 2 after students returned. I hadn’t given it a thought for five decades, until a basement cleanup project led me to the article.
I’ve sent text messages to former roommates and discussed the story with others who were at Notre Dame in spring 1975. Their unanimous reply: What murder?
Tobolski, age 62, had been a Notre Dame employee for 13 years. Her primary job was as a maid in Grace Hall, then a men’s dorm, but she picked up extra hours cleaning academic buildings.
On that rainy Saturday morning, Tobolski checked in at work at 7 a.m. and began her cleaning routine in the aerospace building, a one-story structure that stood just north of what is now the Joyce Center. Shortly thereafter, someone killed her with a gunshot to the head and fled.
Later that morning, Professor Hugh Ackert stopped by the building to do some work, found Tobolski’s body and called the police.
The initial report, filed by St. Joseph County police Corporal Charles Eby, provides the basics: Tobolski’s glasses were near her feet. Police found no weapon. Twelve police photos were taken at the crime scene, then the investigation was turned over to the detective bureau.
The South Bend Tribune published a detailed report that afternoon. “N.D. cleaning woman slain,” read the front-page headline. It was possible that the burglar stood on a chunk of concrete to reach through a broken window and unlatch an east-side door, police told the newspaper. Deputy coroner Dr. Louis Grwinski said Tobolski was shot once at close range, in front of her left ear. He ruled her death a homicide. Arthur Pears, chief of the campus security department, said “nothing had been touched” in the building and nothing appeared to be missing from the aerospace laboratories.
A cryptic chalkboard message across the hall from where Tobolski’s body was found read: “2-21-75 the day I died.” The actual date of Tobolski’s death would be written as “3-22-75.” In the April 2 Observer article, Pears said the message had been investigated and deemed unrelated to the crime.
Tobolski’s funeral took place four days after her death. She was buried at St. Joseph Catholic Cemetery in South Bend.
A month later, University President Father Theodore M. Hesburgh, CSC, offered a $5,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the killer, according to an item published on page 9 of the April 24 Observer.
Nine months after Tobolski’s death, the Tribune reported, Detective Elmer Chikar said there wasn’t much evidence in the Notre Dame case. That was unusual at a time when 80 percent of the nation’s homicides were solved, compared to less than 60 percent today.
Evidence from the Tobolski murder remains stored among boxes that contain dozens of decades-old unsolved cases. Captain Aaron Santa of the St. Joseph County Police Department’s investigative division says his staff recently went through those stacks looking for cases in which new technology might lead to a solution. The Tobolski murder isn’t one of the three cases that were reopened. But there’s always a chance. “Under my watch, we never get rid of any homicide evidence,” Santa says.
Because Tobolski’s case remains unsolved, cold case investigators won’t say what evidence they have or what they are missing. In other words, we can’t look in the box.
Here are some observations that police and campus sources have made.
No gun was left in the building, so investigators immediately ruled out accident or suicide.
The building contained no cash box or safe. The lab equipment was too large and difficult to steal, and the tools weren’t of much value.
Espionage? Professors in that era weren’t doing any classified or high-stakes applied research. Data and drawings in the building would have been of interest to no one other than themselves and their students.
A targeted attack? Police interviewed co-workers, friends and University personnel, but they found no one who had a motive to kill Tobolski. Chikar’s best guess was that the murder was committed by an inexperienced burglar.
In a separate April 2, 1975, article, the Observer reported on a campus “crime wave” over spring break, including money stolen from Grace Hall game machines and personal items taken from residents’ rooms. Perhaps Tobolski’s killer swiped keys to the residence hall from her purse, among the “several personal effects” that Chikar determined were missing?
That’s all speculative, as are all the unanswered questions that linger so many years later.
If it was just a break-in by an inexperienced burglar, why bring a gun? And why shoot a 62-year-old woman? Surely, her assailant could have outrun her. As the security director, Pears, noted in the Observer article I co-wrote with Chris Meehan ’78, “Professional burglars don’t usually shoot their victims.”
Even odder is the apparent lack of evidence. Can a person who didn’t plan to kill anyone think ahead enough to avoid leaving incriminating evidence behind? No muddy footprint in the hallway, no fingerprint on the purse, no strand of hair anywhere?
Occasionally, cold cases like this one get solved. In the last year or so, DNA evidence has helped solve murders dating back 50 years or more in several states, including Illinois, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. But reopening a cold case takes time, money and commitment. As Santa points out, older investigations have to be pushed aside whenever police are called to active crime scenes.
In the immediate aftermath of the slaying, neither Tobolski’s photograph nor any deeper details of her life
appeared in print. Readers never got a sense of the human being whose life was cut short. I wonder now why it never occurred to me to contact her family, interview aerospace professors or talk to residents at Grace Hall, if only to offer a more complete picture of her life and better understand her loved ones’ grief. I have no answer.
Fifty years have not dimmed the memories for Marilyn Hilberth, now in her late 80s.
Her mother had been a widow since age 49. Her father, John Tobolski, a supervisor on the New York Central rail system, had suffered a fatal heart attack in 1962 at age 52. The couple had experienced tragedy early in their married life, when a daughter, Jean, nearly 2 years old, died in 1940 after a brief illness.
Soon after John’s death, Tobolski started working at Notre Dame to help pay her bills and to stay busy.
“She really loved interacting with the students and got to know many of them,” Marilyn says.
In 1968, Marilyn moved to Texas because of her husband Bill’s career. Raising three children, she was unable to come back to South Bend to visit. Helen went to Texas for a weeklong trip just once.
The daily phone calls — always at 4 p.m. — kept them close. Tobolski reported for work at 7 a.m., an hour earlier than most of the cleaning staff, so she would be home in time to make that call. After Tobolski’s death, Marilyn had to fight the impulse to pick up the phone at 4 p.m. every day to hear her mother’s voice.
The family ran an advertisement in the Tribune after the funeral, thanking Notre Dame and the various law enforcement agencies.
Marilyn’s son, Brian Hilberth, recalls that Chikar, the county detective, contacted his mother occasionally with updates on the investigation. The detective warned her it was unlikely the killer would be found. There wasn’t enough evidence in the boxes.
Fifty years later, it seems, there still isn’t.
Ken Bradford is a freelance writer and a former reporter and editor at the South Bend Tribune.