Choir singer, stellar student, sister, daughter, friend — all could describe Julie Revsin, a 25-year-old master’s candidate at the University of Pennsylvania in 1980.
“She was very fun, she was very calm. We were totally different,” one of Julie’s college classmates told Dateline.“I was very shy, she was more outgoing.”
When Thomas Wheelock — a fellow graduate student at the Annenberg School of Communications — met Julie, she told him she wasn’t looking for a relationship. But after their first date, they quickly became close. Julie soon moved into Tom’s off-campus apartment in West Philadelphia: the El Vista apartments on the 4500 block of Osage Avenue. “We hit it off right away,” Tom told Dateline.
On the morning of March 21, 1980, just a few weeks after the move, Julie and Tom headed out for the day. Tom says he went to the nearby Gimbel Gymnasium, and when he returned to the apartment that afternoon, he found a horrifying scene: Julie dead on the floor.
“It looked as though she had been slashed or stabbed several times,” Tom said. “After that, it gets a little fuzzy, because I was in shock.” Julie’s death certificate states that she bled to death as a result of multiple injuries, including stab wounds to the neck and arms. The manner of death is listed as homicide. The murder weapon, a butcher knife, was found at the scene. Although Julie was found only partially clothed, The Daily Pennsylvanian reported at the time that the medical examiner’s office found no evidence of rape.
According to the same article, authorities found no signs of forced entry and neighbors reported hearing no screaming or signs of a struggle — nor did they see anyone leaving the apartment.
With no clear leads, investigators turned to Tom. “They came in, they put me in a squad car, took me down to one of the stations,” Tom told Dateline. “And it was pretty clear that they assumed that I was the perpetrator.”
“The guy who had been the detective, who had been in the interview with me the first time, really tried to break me down. He was hammering the table, raising his voice, saying, ‘I know you did this,’ and everything. And you know, I freaked,” Tom recalled.
Tom says he had an airtight alibi: at the time of Julie’s death, he was playing basketball. The other players — roughly 20 of them — could corroborate his claim.
Julie’s case was assigned to former Philadelphia homicide detective Igor Alfimow, who remained in contact with Tom in the months after Julie’s death. Tom says he did what he could to help identify anyone who might have wanted to harm Julie.
“Detective Alfimow kept coming back to me and asking. And the only thing I could tell him is that Julie had a prior boyfriend that she had broken up with, and apparently, he was very unhappy about that,” Tom said.
Looking back, Tom says there was a moment, just months before Julie was killed, that still sends a chill down his spine. “Before Christmas, I think in, like, October of that year, I woke up, came out into my apartment in the morning, and I found all the knives in my apartment spread out on the floor,” he remembered.
According to Tom, the knives had been taken from the kitchen and placed in the living room. He remembers telling his landlord, but can’t recall whether he contacted the police at the time. However, he does remember talking to them about it after Julie was killed. He isn’t sure if the incidents are connected, and says he never heard anything about it again.
Julie’s mother, Ann Revsin, also lived in Philadelphia at the time. She was reportedly too distraught to talk to journalists following Julie’s death. Julie was also survived by her sister, Elsa Revsin, and two older half-siblings: Ethan and Leslie Revsin.
Ethan, who lived in Chicago, learned of Julie’s passing when reporters from the Philadelphia Inquirer called to interview him, according to his widow, Susan Davis. She still remembers the call. “He was shocked and horrified. Like, couldn’t believe it,” she told Dateline. “It was really disturbing. After he told me, he immediately called Leslie.”
In Ethan’s interview, published that weekend, he described his sister: “She was very intelligent, but she was very naive. She trusted a lot of people, and some of the stories she told me, I could not believe. She liked people and trusted everybody.”
After the initial shock of Julie’s killing, neither Susan nor Leslie’s daughter, Rachel Ramstad, could recall their relatives being contacted by investigators.
“We basically didn’t hear much about it,” Susan said. “I thought it was weird. I really did. I thought, you know, there didn’t seem to be any follow-up.”
“I can tell you it was zero [contact]. No one reached out to my mother,” Rachel said. “I remember my mom [Leslie] saying, ‘Well, do the cops wanna talk to us?’ I remember overhearing her talking, I assume, to my uncle. And, you know, nothing.”
Meanwhile, news of Julie’s killing spread rapidly across the University of Pennsylvania campus. Carol Tracy, the former executive director at the Women’s Law Project, was working at the Penn Women’s Center at the time.
“The murder was so brutal,” Tracy said. “We read about it, and we were, needless to say, very, very rattled. All of us, everyone I knew, we were scared to death.”
In the week following Julie’s death, a reporter from The Daily Pennsylvanian investigated El Vista’s lack of security, citing tenant complaints — among them broken intercoms, no chainlocks on apartment doors, and open back doors. Days later, Tracy co-authored a follow-up article on women’s safety, writing that despite the lack of information on Julie’s case, “we do know that many rapes, assaults and burglaries have been the result of poor security.”
Tom Wheelock told Dateline that in the year following Julie’s death, he called Det. Alfimow for updates occasionally, but it became “more and more sparse.” None of the sources we spoke with ever heard of a person of interest being identified in the case. Despite the initial commotion, Julie’s case went cold. “I was very frustrated by it,” Tom said. He told Dateline he moved out of the apartment and eventually returned to classes. “It just kind of fell off the radar.”
Detective Alfimow died in 2013.
Today marks the 46th anniversary of Julie’s death. In the decades since, her relatives and friends never forgot the bright young woman they knew. But her unresolved case has cast a long shadow on their grief.
Then, last year, a reporter named Matthew Algeo stumbled on an archived newspaper clip about Julie’s case. He said that as a University of Pennsylvania alum, he was immediately captivated. After publishing an op-ed in The Daily Pennsylvanian, and launching a Change.org petition on Julie’s case, he reached out to Dateline, hoping greater attention on Julie’s case might elicit new leads.
Algeo says one detail in particular stands out to him: the murder weapon found on the scene. “It seems eminently solvable, right?” he told Dateline. “I mean, the bloody knife was next to her.”
If, Algeo speculates, the knife is still in the custody of the Philadelphia Police Department, it could be tested with modern-day forensic technology. He wrote the department last August and was told Philadelphia detectives Robert Hesser and Mike Venson were conducting a case review.
Dateline also reached out to the Philadelphia Police Department to discuss the original investigation and its current status, but they declined our request for an interview. However, a representative from the Office of Media Relations wrote that “the Homicide Unit is reviewing Ms. Revsin’s file for any missed investigative leads and to determine whether modern forensic testing could be applied to any previously collected evidence.”
When asked what emotions Julie’s case stirs up, Tom Wheelock was clear: “A lot of anger, a lot of anxiety. I cared for Julie a lot,” he said. “She was such a bright, good person.”
Julie’s niece, Rachel Ramstad, expressed similar sentiments. She hopes the renewed attention will help her aunt’s case. “I mean, if it pushes the ball forward and enables some more information to get uncovered and maybe bring us all closer to resolving, you know, the jackass who murdered her, then let’s go,” she said. “For me, it’s more about that.”
If you have information about Julie’s case, please call the Philadelphia Police Department Homicide Unit at 215-686-3334 or leave an anonymous tip at 215-686-TIPS.
