Catching The Ripper Hollywood

A fatal stabbing spree that spanned 15 years reads like a blockbuster thriller – only it’s real. Now, a serial killer is finally behind bars, but justice remains elusive for the loved ones of one victim.

- Michael Crooks

The students of Glenbrook South High School were celebrating the end of the school year, but for best friends Tricia Pacaccio and Karen Jones, it was the end of an era. The 18-year-olds from Glenview, a small, tight-knit community in suburban Chicago, Illinois, were about to graduate and leave home for separate colleges. But before the sad goodbyes, there would be one last hurrah. On August 13, 1993, they joined their school friends for an evening that kicked off with a road-rally scavenger hunt. “We were driving around town following clues,” recalls Karen. “It was a way to gather together for the last time.”

The hunt finished at a TGI Fridays, where Karen, who was heading off to study arts, and Tricia, who had been accepted into an Indiana university to study engineering, ate and drank late into the unusually cool and foggy August evening. At the end of the night, Karen and Tricia were dropped back to their homes. “The next morning I had another party to go to, a birthday party,” Karen tells Marie claire. “When I came home, Dad met me at the door. I could tell something was wrong.”

Ushered upstairs by her father, she found her mum in the master bedroom, hysterical. “The first thing they said was ‘Tricia’s dead’,” says Karen, now a publicist who runs her own company in Atlanta, Georgia. “And all I could think of was that it must be some sort of medical thing that happened. And when they told me she had been murdered, I was just in shock. It was horrific.”