In 1993 Hillary Norskog was a 13-year-old girl finishing junior high school at Palos South in the suburbs of Chicago & getting ready to move on to Stagg High School. She was a typical teenage girl who loved to shop. As a young girl she had been a model, participating in fashion shows & had even been in some print ads. At the time, she was living with her mom Marsha who was a single mother. She had long brown hair that went to her waist & a tiny stature standing at 5’0” & 80#. People would stop her mom on the street to comment on how gorgeous Hillary was.
Hillary was shy, but as she grew, she began to bloom & come into her own personality. She was learning to dance & become more sociable & shed her little-girl shyness. Boys began to notice her & her circle of girlfriends grew. She became addicted to the phone & she loved having sleepovers at her house.
A friend remembers that by 7th grade, Hillary started talking & by 8th grade, she was a motormouth. As Hillary wrapped up her time in junior high, she began hanging out with older boys, hoping to be accepted into a group before she entered in her school where the graduating class sizes were exceptionally large. She also liked the idea of hanging out with older boys since that meant she would have a ride instead of relying on parents.
Through friends who have older brothers, Hillary recently started to hang out with a group of soon-to-be seniors. The group liked to drink beer & smoke pot & often referred to themselves as “stoners.” In this group was a 17-year-old boy named Steve Pfiel.
Despite the new group of friends, Hillary remained a kid at heart & loved to write pages-long notes to her friends in class about typical teenage topics: Boys she liked, girls she didn’t like & signed off to her closest friend Vikki, B/F/F for best friends forever. She also talked about going to parties & getting “stuff bad-4-you” in reference to marijuana.
Some of Hillary’s closest friends would be splitting off from her & attending the local Catholic high school. They didn’t like the changes they were seeing in Hillary & one friend theorized that she was getting into experimenting with pot as a way to get in good with the Stagg High School crowd.
Hillary’s mom, Marsha also had her concerns with her daughter’s new group of friends. Marsha worked from home running a direct-mail business & was able to spend a lot of time with Hillary & really get to know her friends. Marsha also had a 22-year-old daughter & a 20-year-old son from a relationship that ended in divorce & her two older children had moved out to live on their own. Hillary was the youngest by nine years & born out of wedlock & her father who was an attorney in the western suburbs, played only a small role in her upbringing. Hillary & Marsha were extremely close & because Hillary was beginning high school, her mom allowed her more freedom since she was a very mature & responsible girl.
On the night of July 14, 1993, Hillary went to a party with her friends & told her mom she might be sleeping over at her friend’s house. The party was located at Hidden Pond Woods which is a forest preserve area in Hickory Hills, Illinois. The party was saturated with alcohol & drugs & Hillary decided she felt more comfortable leaving the party early & decided not to spend the night at her friend’s house.
Steve Pfiel offered to give Hillary a ride home; Hillary met him through a mutual friend named Kim at the beginning of the summer. Marsha said that she’d met him twice; once when he needed to be asked to go home because it had gotten so late. Marsha saw Steve as a casual friend of her daughters; he would occasionally come by to pick Hillary & her friends up. Marsha said she didn’t like him the first time she saw him & she didn’t want him in her home. She would ask Hillary to talk with him outside instead. Hillary felt that her mom should live by the words she preached which was to give people a chance. Hillary had actually had her first kiss with Steve, but Steve later told Kim that he only considered her like a little sister instead of a romantic interest.
Because the area where they lived has so many local forest preserves, Steve & his friends would often gather in these areas so they wouldn’t be bothered by adults or hassled by police while they partied. They ignored the signs that declared the preserves closed at sunset & they would park their cars nearby & trek in by bike or foot along the trails until they were deep into the woods.
On the night of the party, Marsha had plans of her own & came home at about 12:30 am. She expected a message on the answering machine from Hillary checking in & confirming if she was sleeping at her friend’s house, but assumed there must have been a power outage that wiped the message that wasn’t there. By the next morning, when Hillary still hadn’t come home, Marsha began calling her daughter’s friends to see if she was with them & this was when she learned that she was last seen at the forest preserve, leaving with Steve at about 11 pm. Marsha called Steve’s home & he explained that he dropped Hillary off at home the night before & didn’t know where she went after that. Because she knew it was a lie, Marsha continued to call the home until his mom Gayle answered & accused her of trying to badger & aggravate her son. When Marsha called the police at 3 pm to report her daughter missing, she informed them of the situation.
Over the next few days, Marsha was so terrified that she couldn’t even bear to tell her own parents that Hillary was missing. When they would call & ask about their granddaughter, Marsha would tell them that Hillary was fine & asleep in her bedroom.
On July 17, three days after she went missing, Hillary’s body was located. She was found lying in a vacant lot that was overgrown with weeds behind the large homes that bordered Suffield Woods by a subdivision near 127th Street & 108th Avenue. Two people had been out taking a morning walk when they came upon her body. She was wearing a Jurassic Park t-shirt, jeans & combat boots. She had been stabbed at least a dozen times, the majority of the stabbings had been focused at her head & neck. Defensive wounds were found on her arms & hands. Her injuries paired with decomposition were so extensive that Hillary had to be identified through dental records.Because of the state of her body, police did not want her family to attempt to identify her.
Several hours after Hillary’s body was found, Marsha’s dad suffered a heart attack & fell into a coma. Marsha remembers going through the rest of 1993 in a horrible haze, dragging herself between the hospital to see her dad & the Bridgeview courthouse
Police drove to the Pfiel home in Palos Park & found Steve in the driveway, cleaning out his car. During this time, police noticed that the front seats of the car were stained with a dark red substance & Steven quickly explained that Kool-Aid had exploded in his car. When police took a sample of the car seat, testing proved that the blood matched Hillary’s blood type. Inside the home, they recovered a knife, socks, a shirt & a hat that Steve had worn that were smeared with blood.
Steve was brought into the station for questioning & charged as an adult with first-degree murder & armed violence. He was held in the Cook County jail from the day he was charged until October 8 when his parents posted his $100,000 bond. While held, he was kept in Division Ten which is a protective custody unit apart from the jail’s general population. His lawyer felt that jail was no place for someone who hadn’t been locked up before & that it wasn’t a healthy environment for Steve. He pleaded not guilty.
At the end of 1993, Steve’s lawyer informed the court that the Pfiel family wanted to relocate to Saint John, Indiana because they were unable to go anywhere in the Palos Hills area without being threatened & questioned. The judge made a point of pointing out that Steve brought this on himself since he’s the one who murdered Hillary. They were initially denied the request of moving across state lines, but the Pfiel family had already sold their home. At a January 4, 1994 hearing, the judge agreed to allow the move on certain conditions: There would be a 24-hour curfew & the court would check in daily by phone, Steve would have to appear in court once a week & he wouldn’t be allowed outside the home unless he was in school or at court. There was no electronic monitoring so it was strictly an honor system. Marsha couldn’t wrap her head around why her daughter’s murderer was granted special treatment. She felt if the case gained more publicity, the court would be less lenient.
Marsha ended up appearing on the Oprah Winfrey Show to tell her story. While she was at the studios, her father passed away. She indicated, “I lost my daughter, my father, my health & my business.” She was disgusted & outraged that Steve was allowed to post bail & stay with his family. Marsha also felt that the Pfiel family was also being protected & couldn’t understand why it hadn’t been asked where Steve’s parents were when he came home that night & tried to clean the blood from his car.
By the end of January, residents of Saint John had collected 600 signatures on a petition in protest of the judge’s decision, indicating that they wouldn’t be safe allowing their children to play outside if Steven moved there. Steve’s family made their first public statement which their lawyer read at a press conference: “We feel his innocence is not a statement of his legal situation, but of actual fact. Confident this will be proven, we stand not behind him, but beside him, as he establishes his innocence through the justice system.” They specified that he would be home schooled & they wanted him to be closer to their Indiana relatives.
On March 2, 1994, Steve’s attorney withdrew the request to relocate to Saint John & instead, the family moved to Crete, Illinois. They also asked that the case be relocated due to excessive media coverage but this was denied.
A memorial was held on July 25, 1994 on what would have been Hillary’s 15th birthday & Hillary’s friends were given the opportunity to speak about their friend. There were many tears shed that day, one of Hillary’s friends read a poem, “If my tears were blood, I would have bled to death.” They all joined in to sing “Happy Birthday” to Hillary. The service was held because many of Hillary’s friends had been out of town when her funeral had been held & she wanted closure for them.
Marsha has been on the receiving end of attacks & criticism for allowing her daughter to be out with a boy that night. She even sued WLS radio & Don Wade for the comments he made on air after Hillary was killed. Marsha felt that the media needed to be held responsible & she should have never been a target & blamed for her daughter’s death as she was reeling from grief.
During Steve’s time in Crete while out on bail, he was mostly socially isolated but did manage to socialize within a small group of friends. He’d gone to several parties, on one occasion, scaring a group of girls away when he proudly told them that he was an alleged murderer. At another gathering, he shot a gun into the night & two of his friends had to take the gun from him before things got out of hand.
On the evening of March 17, 1995, Steve’s parents were out celebrating St Patrick’s Day & he spent part of the evening drinking with his brother, 19-year-old Roger before he went to his room to smoke marijuana. Steve then went back to his brother’s room to watch TV but Roger was asleep. Steve went to the closet, grabbed a baseball bat & started swinging it. Without any reason, Steve stood over his brother’s sleeping body & savagely beat him with the bat. When Roger began to convulse, Steve went to the kitchen for a meat cleaver & hit Roger in the throat once. He later said he did this to prevent Roger from dying slowly.
He then went into his younger sister’s room & sexually assaulted her. His sister didn’t call police until 7:13 am on March 18 which gave a four hour span of time from when Steve killed his brother & when he fled the home. In that time, he gathered camping gear, three rifles & shotguns. He then left a note for his parents saying that he was now responsible for two murders.
Steve was gone from the house for about five & a half hours before he turned the car around & went to the Crete village hall to turn himself in. This horrific act brought light to the question of why Steve had been allowed to be free on bail after allegedly murdering Hillary. There had been many warning signs that both school officials & the Pfiel family were aware of before he committed any of these horrendous murders. He was a known problem at Stagg High School & had been suspended seven times. He was known for being chronically abusive to his classmates & in the months before he murdered Hillary, his moods became darker, his behavior more erratic. He showed violent tendencies even ten years before he killed Hillary when at age seven, he brutally beat a classmate. It was the same age he also set fire to a motor home of a person who had upset him. At age eight, he was known to drop bricks from an overpass in attempts to hit passing cars below. At a ninth birthday party, he chased a friend with an ax. When he was in fifth grade, neighbors petitioned to give Steve his own bus stop in an effort to prevent him from bullying classmates. In elementary school, he taunted students with death chants & vandalized a classmate’s home with Satanic symbols.
As Steve got older, he began to abuse drugs & alcohol, smoking pot & occasionally taking LSD. During a July 4, 1993 party, Steve threw a firecracker into a crowd & became agitated when others were bothered by the incident. His parents apparently showed no concern when he developed a fascination with skinheads & Adolf Hitler. He was known to make an effort to kill small animals with his car & was forceful when it came to having sex with teenage girls. At one time, he pulled a knife from under his car seat & told his friend that he had fantasies of stabbing someone in the head with it & repeated this act in the presence of more friends. This was the knife he ended up using to murder Hillary, a present from his father for his seventeenth birthday.
Steve was from a wealthy family, his parents Roger & Gayle often spoiled him. His parents were often not home, which allowed Steve to host many parties at their Palos Park home. He was rarely forced to face responsibilities for his actions & given endless freedom.
In the year 2000, Marsha filed a lawsuit against Roger & Gayle claiming negligent supervision since Steve had known issues & violent tendencies but was given the tools by his parents that allowed him to murder Hillary; the car & the knife. The Pfeils claimed that their son had been a loving & caring child & alleged that it was his friends that transformed him from the boy they once knew into someone they barely recognized. They also argued that they couldn’t be expected to control their 17-year-old child. It was pointed out that Gayle & Roger gave the impression of having no concern over the son’s involvement in Hillary’s murder since they didn’t attend many of the court hearings.
Dr Matthew Markos evaluated Steve to determine competency to stand trial; he was found to have deeply rooted emotional issues but he was deemed competent. He showed no signs of remorse for the two murders & only became annoyed when his crimes were mentioned. It was Steve’s belief that he would be acquitted & gain great financial reward from suing the newspapers. He met the criteria for Antisocial Personality Disorder, Conduct Disorder, psychopathy as well as that of a serial killer & a sexual sadist.
Steve pleaded guilty to both murders in exchange for Will County not pursuing the death penalty in Roger’s murder. He wasn’t eligible for the death penalty in Hillary’s case because he wasn’t yet 18 at the time of the crime. Marsha read her victim impact statement, “What made you think you could get away with killing Hillary? Is it because you have never been taught to be responsible for your actions? You have had everything handed to you. That was obvious when I would watch you smugly walk in & out of court, your parents by your side coddling you. All of us here today sentence you in our hearts to long days & nights of misery & struggle, like Hillary struggled for her life. Your pampered lifestyle is over.”
Steve’s lawyer, Raymond Pijon responded to the statement, questioning why a 13-year-old girl had been allowed to stay out late with a 17-year-old boy. With this, the courtroom exploded in protest.
Steve was asked if he had any response & he tersely replied, “No I do not.” Steve was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
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