Sue Ovington and Eyvonne Bender were 17 years old and had a free afternoon ahead of them.
It was September 5, 1979, and both were seniors at Niles West High School in Illinois. Sue lived in Morton Grove, Eyvonne in Skokie, and that afternoon they went out together with a simple plan: to buy back-to-school clothes at a shopping center near Waukegan Road and Dempster Street. They never made it home. Hours later, their boyfriends at the time, Joe Majerus and Larry Olker, organized a search and found the girls’ car parked, with their purses still inside. That same night, a rescue team found their bodies in the St. Paul Woods Forest Preserve, part of the Cook County forest preserve system. Both had died from multiple gunshots.
Forty-seven years have passed and no one has been arrested. The Morton Grove police formally reopened the investigation in 2020 and sent degraded evidence to a Florida laboratory for advanced DNA testing. In 2023, a former classmate funded an increase in the reward to 10.000 dollars through Cook County Crime Stoppers, while family members and friends are promoting projects such as the podcast “Murder in Morton Grove” to find new witnesses. Anyone with information can call (847) 663-3828 anonymously.
