On the morning of September 6, 1986, a farmer driving a combine through his cornfield in Summerfield, Illinois, made a startling discovery. It was the body of a young woman. Authorities were unable to identify her, and for 22 years, she would be known only as “Summerfield Jane Doe.”
Over the last 40 years, the case has been passed down from investigator to investigator in the St. Clair County Sheriff’s Department. In 2022, it landed on the desk of Senior Detective Ben Vise.
“I’ve known about this case for over 20 years,” Vise told Dateline. “This is a case that’s just important to the whole community.”
According to Vise, St. Clair County suffered a string of brutal murders in the late ‘80s, but this one was particularly gruesome.
Summerfield Jane Doe died by strangulation. She was found naked and bound, with her genitalia mutilated. Her belongings were strewn around her. She had some jewelry on, but no ID.
Authorities were unable to identify the woman, who they believed to be 18-25 years old. The case grew cold. “There’s not a lot of doors to knock on out there,” Vise said.
In 2007, the sheriff’s department re-examined the case and exhumed Summerfield Jane Doe’s body. Crime scene technician Matt Davis noticed something. When the victim’s fingerprints were originally run, the search had been limited to ages 18-25. Davis ran the prints again, this time with a broader age range. In January 2008, they got a match.
Summerfield Jane Doe was positively identified as 27-year-old Eulalia Chavez.
According to Det. Vise, Eulalia was born in Costa Rica. When she was 2 years old, she was adopted by a family in Palo Alto, California, after her parents passed away. Vise says he learned Eulalia had run away several times in her youth but had never been reported missing. At 19 she gave birth to a baby girl whom she later gave up for adoption. Little is known about the last decade of Eulalia’s life or how she wound up in Illinois.
In the early 2000s, a young woman named Katie got a message. “I had put my information on an adoption forum,” Katie told Dateline. “It was a woman that had known my mother.” The woman gave Katie a name: Eulalia Chavez. And she asked Katie a question: “How much do you already know?”
She then told Katie to look up Summerfield Jane Doe. “I just remember being really sad, of course,” Katie said. “Because I thought, what a horrible thing to happen to this person.”
From there, Katie was able to get in touch with Eulalia’s sister. “She said if she had to describe my mom in one word, it would be headstrong,” Katie said.
Katie learned Eulalia was a jewelry maker, a lover of Rock and Roll, and a Big Sister for the Big Brothers Big Sisters program, America’s largest youth mentoring network. She left home and began hitchhiking in her late teens.
Katie doesn’t know the circumstances surrounding her birth or what her birthparents’ relationship was when her mother found out she was pregnant. “I do think it was nice that she made the choice to, uh, keep me,” she said. “I feel like she was hopeful and thinking, ‘OK, things can get better.’ And it was also nice, too, though, that when she realized, ‘OK. I can’t take care of this child,” that she did, you know, give me up for adoption, because I had a wonderful life with my adopted family.”
While Katie was learning more about her mom, the case hit another standstill. Eventually, according to Det. Vise, in the mid-2010s, the detective who worked on the Eulalia Chavez case before him began looking into the possibility that suspected serial killer Larry Hall had something to do with Eulalia’s murder. Hall had been convicted of kidnapping 15-year-old Jessica Roach from Georgetown, Illinois, in September 1993. Her body was found across state lines in an Indiana cornfield, nearly two months later. Hall was sentenced to life in prison. While incarcerated, Hall confessed to dozens of known murders, but later recanted each confession. And Det. Vise told Dateline that Hall once even included Eulalia’s name on a list of women he claimed he had murdered.
In 2016, the detective who worked Eulalia’s case before Vise took a buccal swab from Hall, and ran it against the DNA evidence they had, but the results were inconclusive. He also interviewed Hall and according to Vise, when he was shown photos of Eulalia, Hall replied, “Oh, that woman’s too old for me.”
When Vise took over the case in 2022, he sent the evidence to a lab again and got a bit more information from the DNA data. Using a new laser technology, they were also able to get a partial fingerprint from the duct tape Eulalia was bound with, which hadn’t been picked up by dusting.
“One of the first things I did was have that fingerprint compared to Larry Hall’s, and that is not his fingerprint,” Vise said. The St. Clair County Sheriff’s Department does not consider Hall to be a suspect in Eulalia’s case.
Currently, Vise is working with the FBI to identify people who committed similar crimes, to compare their prints to the partial print found on the duct tape. He’s also hopeful that publicity could lead to a break in the case.
“Maybe somebody out there will have talked to her, received a postcard or a picture — know who she was last with,” Vise said.
Katie says she was happy to see Vise continue working on her mother’s case.
“It would be nice to have whoever it was brought to justice, if they’re still out there,” Katie said, “And I also kind of thought, whether it gets solved or not, my mother’s life was short, and it was hard, but I think it would be nice to have some memory of her as somebody besides just someone who got murdered.”
Anyone with information about Eulalia Chavez should contact Detective Ben Vise at the St. Clair County Sheriff’s Department at 618-825-5309, [email protected], or reach out to FBI ViCAP at 800-634-4097 and [email protected].
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