Illinois 2000 Cold Case Solved – Arrest Shocks the Community

The last photograph anyone took of Margaret Elaine Kowalski was shot on a disposable camera at a 4th of July block party on Elmwood Street in Deerfield, Illinois. She’s wearing a white blouse with small blue flowers on it and squinting into the afternoon sun. She’s laughing at something off camera. Her daughter, who is 8 years old, is pulling at the hem of her sleeve.

Margaret’s arm is around her. The corn on the neighbor’s grill is still in the husks. She would be dead in 71 days. On September 14th, 2000, at 6:12 in the morning, Margaret’s neighbor backed out of her driveway and noticed that Margaret’s car, a copper-colored 1997 Pontiac Grand Am, was sitting at an unusual angle on the curb.

Half in, half out, like someone had meant to park it and changed their mind mid-thought. The driver’s door was open. Margaret’s purse was on the passenger seat. Her coffee travel mug, one of those ones with a plastic lid, was sitting on the roof. The coffee was still warm. What happened in the 93 minutes between when Margaret Kowalski left her front door and when her neighbor made that call to Lake County dispatch would take 14 years, one retired detective, a genealogy database, and a cold January afternoon in 2014

to fully answer. But before we get to any of that, we have to go back to the beginning because to understand what was lost on that September morning, you first have to understand who Margaret Kowalski was. Deerfield, Illinois sits about 30 miles north of Chicago in Lake County, the kind of suburban community that feels, in certain lights, like it was built to be a backdrop for someone’s happiest memories.

 In the year 2000, it was a town of about 18,000 people. A main street with a hardware store and a diner called Patty’s that had been there since 1964. And a school district that people moved there specifically for. The subdivisions had names like Birchwood Estates and Lakeshore Commons and the streets were wide enough for kids to ride bikes down the middle without worrying too much about cars.

Margaret had lived there for 11 years. She’d moved to Deerfield in 1989 when she married her husband, David, an electrician who worked commercial jobs in Chicago but kept a meticulous vegetable garden in the backyard. By the time of September 2000, they had two daughters. Hannah, who was eight, and Clara, who was five.

Margaret worked 3 days a week as a medical records administrator at Highland Park Hospital, about 7 miles south. On her days off, she ran a book club that met on Thursday evenings at the Deerfield Public Library. She’d started it herself 7 years earlier with four other women. By 2000, it had grown to 18 members.

She checked the garage door twice every night before bed. That’s what David would tell investigators later. He said she had always been that way, even before kids. She just liked knowing things were secure. Margaret was 41 years old in September of 2000. She had a sister in Phoenix she called every Sunday. She kept a bird feeder outside the kitchen window that she refilled with a specific mix of sunflower seeds and safflower seeds because she’d read somewhere that certain finches preferred one over the other. Clara, the younger daughter,

called the finches the orange ones and the yellow ones, and Margaret had a laminated guide to backyard birds on the refrigerator door. That laminated guide would still be on the refrigerator door for years after Margaret was gone. No one took it down. The morning of September 14th was a Thursday. Margaret’s book club met that evening.

She’d already confirmed attendance with four members via email. She had library books on the passenger seat of the Grand Am. She was driving to work the early shift before picking Hannah up from school. It was ordinary. It was the kind of morning she’d had 500 times. That was the last morning she would ever have.

The official timeline that Lake County investigators established in the days following began at 5:41 a.m. when David Kowalski woke to use the bathroom. He remembered hearing Margaret in the kitchen, the sound of the coffee maker, the specific way the garage door groaned when it opened. He went back to sleep.

At 6:07 a.m. a resident two blocks west on Walnut Street noticed a dark vehicle parked briefly at the end of his driveway facing east. He thought nothing of it at the time. He only remembered it after his neighbor’s name was on the news. At 6:12 a.m. Margaret’s neighbor, Barbara Pressnell, backed out of her driveway across the street and saw the Pontiac.

 At first she assumed Margaret had pulled up to retrieve something she’d forgotten. She went on to work. Then, halfway to the expressway, she thought about the open door and turned around. She parked in front of the Kowalski house and called out. No answer. She tried the front door. Unlocked, she called Margaret’s name into the house. The lights were on in the kitchen.

 The coffee maker was still running. The girls were asleep upstairs. Barbara called 911 at 6:29 a.m. Deerfield police arrived at 6:34 a.m. They walked the property. They called for Margaret by name. They checked the backyard. They checked the garage where David’s truck sat in its usual spot. The bird feeder was empty.

 Someone had emptied it earlier that week and hadn’t gotten around to refilling it. The orange ones and the yellow ones were gone. At 6:51 a.m., David Kowalski came downstairs to find two officers in his kitchen. In the years that would follow, investigators would always note the same thing about what was not at that scene.

There was no sign of a struggle. No disturbed soil. No blood. No evidence that Margaret’s car had been involved in an accident. Everything was orderly. Everything was in place. The coffee was sitting on the roof of the car as though someone had set it down to check a tire and forgotten to pick it back up. That cup would be in evidence storage for 14 years.

Lake County Sheriff’s Detective Ron Pachiwski caught the case on September 15th, one day after Margaret Kowalski disappeared. Pachiwski was 52 years old, 26 years into a career that had mostly been homicides and domestic cases, and he was 18 months from retirement. When his supervisor handed him from file, Pachiwski took it home that night and sat with it at his kitchen table until 2:00 a.m.

Something didn’t sit right, he would say much later in a 2015 interview with the Daily Herald. Too clean. The whole scene was too clean. People don’t vanish off their front curb in Deerfield on a weekday morning with their coffee still sitting on the roof of the car. That doesn’t happen by accident. The initial investigation widened quickly.

Neighbors were interviewed. The hospital confirmed Margaret had never arrived for her 7:00 a.m. shift. Her book club members were contacted. Her sister in Phoenix was called and flew to Illinois within 24 hours. Posters went up on telephone poles along Route 41 and in the windows of Patty’s Diner and at the Deerfield Jewel Foods.

The photo of Margaret squinting into the afternoon sun at the 4th of July block party was reproduced 1,200 times and distributed across three counties. Pachowski had two early persons of interest. The first was a co-worker at Highland Park Hospital who had made two women in the medical records department uncomfortable over the previous year with behavior their supervisor had documented but not fully acted on.

Pachowski ran that lead for 6 weeks. The man had been home with his wife and two children on the morning of September 14th. She confirmed it. His son confirmed it. Security footage from a Walgreens three blocks from his house confirmed it. He was eliminated. The second person of interest was a man named Gary Toth who lived alone in a house on the south side of Deerfield and had a conviction from the early 1980s for aggravated assault that Pichowski had pulled in a background check of registered sex offenders and persons with violent

records in the area. Toth drove a dark-colored vehicle. He had no alibi that Pichowski found convincing. For 4 months, Toth was the center of the investigation. Pichowski interviewed him three times. He surveyed his property. He subpoenaed his phone records. Gary Toth had nothing to do with Margaret Kowalski.

 He was eventually cleared on the strength of phone records that placed his calls in a pattern inconsistent with the timeline. Pichowski later described eliminating Toth as the most deflating moment of the whole case because he was the best we had. In February of 2001, the case was formally classified as cold. The library books that had been on Margaret’s passenger seat were never checked out.

They sat in the evidence locker with the coffee cup. Three library members of the book club quietly transferred to a different branch. David Kowalski took Hannah and Clara to his mother’s house in Waukegan for Christmas of 2000 and didn’t go back to the Deerfield house until March. The bird feeder was still empty when they returned.

 He filled it the first morning back alone before the girls were awake. The years that followed did what years do to everyone who is left holding something they can’t put down. By 2003, Hannah Kowalski was 11 years old and beginning to understand in a different way what had happened. Clara, at 8, still asked questions that had no answers.

David had taken on a second electrician because he couldn’t keep up with the work alone, and because the distraction was better than the alternative. He declined two separate suggestions from well-meaning relatives that he should consider moving forward. Their words, with someone new. He still called Ron Pacholski twice a year.

Once in September, and once on Margaret’s birthday in April. By 2007, the reward posted by the Kowalski family and a network of Margaret’s former book club members had reached $40,000. No one claimed it. The poster in Patty’s Diner window, the one with Margaret squinting into the 4th of July sun, had been replaced three times because they kept fading.

By 2010, Ron Pacholski had been retired for 6 years. He kept the Kowalski case file in a plastic tote bin in his garage, next to a box of Christmas decorations he hadn’t used since his wife died in 2008. He still made his September phone call. David still answered it. The house on Elmwood Street had been repainted twice.

The vegetable garden was gone, replaced with ornamental grass that David planted because it required almost no care. Hannah was a sophomore at Illinois State. Clara was in eighth grade and had once, in a social studies class, written an essay that her teacher submitted to a school paper about what it is like to grow up knowing that a case is unsolved.

14 years had passed. For every one of those days, someone in that house had known a human being did this. A human being went home afterward and lived inside his ordinary life. He had neighbors. He probably had a car in his driveway. He probably had something on the roof of it occasionally, a phone or a coffee cup, or a bag of groceries set down for just a second.

And he went on. Then, in January of 2014, something happened that no one had anticipated. Every case on this channel takes weeks of research, court documents, public records, interviews, official reports. If you want us to keep uncovering stories like Margaret’s, take a second to like this video and subscribe.

And drop a comment telling us where in the world you’re watching from. It helps more than you know. Now, let’s get back to what changed everything. In October 2013, Illinois law enforcement joined a growing national effort to submit old, unresolved biological evidence to a new generation of forensic genealogy databases.

The same platforms ordinary people use to trace grandparents and discover distant cousins in order to identify unknown DNA contributors in cold cases. The process works this way. Crime scene DNA is uploaded to ancestry databases that hold genetic profiles submitted voluntarily by the public. And investigators trace partial matches backwards through family trees, branch by branch, until a single unknown contributor can be placed within a specific bloodline.

 There had been a single hair recovered from the interior of Margaret Kowalski’s copper-colored Pontiac Grand Am on the headrest of the driver’s seat. Not Margaret’s hair. Not David’s. Not the girls. A male contributor. The hair had been collected in the original September 2000 investigation, preserved, cataloged, and never matched.

It had sat in evidence storage at the Lake County Sheriff’s office for 13 years. On a Tuesday morning in January 2014, Detective Sarah Maloney, who had taken over Pachowski’s cold case caseload when she joined the department in 2009, submitted that hair sample to a forensic genealogy lab in Virginia. She noted in her case log that she had low expectations.

She’d submitted four other cold case samples in the previous 18 months. None had produced a result that held up. Six weeks later, she received a call. The lab had identified a partial match, not to a suspect, but to a family, a bloodline. Maloney spent the next 11 days building a family tree backward from the partial match using public records, death certificates, municipal filings, and the genealogy database entries.

She was looking for a single man who had been in his late 20s to mid-30s in the year 2000, who had lived in or traveled through the Deerfield area, whose profile and geography were consistent with the crime. On February 28th, 2014, she found him. She called Ron Pachowski that afternoon. He was sitting in his kitchen when the phone rang.

 He would later say that he already knew something was different from the way she started talking. She didn’t say hello. She said, “Ron, I think I have him.” His name was Kevin Dale Hartman. To the neighbors who’d known him since he moved to Gurnee, Illinois, 9 miles north of Deerfield, in 1999, Kevin Hartman was difficult to describe, which is to say he was easy to overlook.

He was 31 years old in September of 2000. He worked in facilities maintenance at a commercial property management company. He drove a dark green Chevrolet Malibu. He went to his church on the first and third Sundays of the month. He had never been arrested. He had never been flagged. He had been in every formal and informal register of the world, invisible.

He did not know Margaret Kowalski personally. Investigators would establish that their paths had crossed once at a community health screening event at Highland Park Hospital in the summer of 2000, approximately 6 weeks before Margaret disappeared. His employer had offered optional flu vaccine screenings through the same hospital network.

He had attended. She had worked that day. There was no evidence of a conversation. There was no evidence, other than geography and one afternoon, of any prior contact. There was no evidence he needed any. Detective Maloney and a four-person Lake County cold case team built the case over the following 8 months.

Hartman was surveilled. A DNA sample was obtained via a discarded coffee cup from a gas station he frequented in Gurnee. The results came back in September of 2014, 14 years to the month after Margaret Kowalski disappeared. The hair was his. On October 3rd, 2014, at 7:22 a.m., a Friday morning, Kevin Dale Hartman walked out of his house in Gurnee and found six Lake County Sheriff’s vehicles at the end of his driveway.

He stopped. He looked at them. He put his hands up without being asked. That detail, hands up before anyone said a word, would be noted in the arrest record and testified to by two officers. Maloney later said it told her everything she needed to know about what was in his head. He offered no statement. He was transported to the Lake County Correctional Center.

His neighbors, watching from behind their windows and front doors on that Friday morning, would struggle for days afterward to reconstruct any detail that should have warned them. There wasn’t one. That was the thing that kept coming back. There was no detail. He had been standing in front of them for 15 years.

Kevin Dale Hartman pleaded guilty in August 2015 to the first-degree murder of Margaret Elaine Kowalski. He was sentenced to 52 years in the Illinois Department of Corrections with no possibility of parole. He offered no public statement at sentencing. His attorney requested leniency. The request was denied. Margaret’s sister read a victim impact statement that lasted 11 minutes.

David Kowalski sat in the front row with Hannah and Clara, who were 22 and 19 years old. He has been in Stateville Correctional Center since. There is a photograph of Margaret Kowalski in a frame on the mantelpiece in David Kowalski’s house in Waukegan, where he moved in 2004. It’s not the 4th of July photograph.

He has that one, too. But it’s not the one on the mantelpiece. This one is from a few years earlier, maybe 1996, and Margaret is standing in the backyard in Deerfield with a full bird feeder in her hand, looking directly at the camera. She’s smiling the kind of smile that looks like she just laughed. She is whole and ordinary and completely herself in that photograph.

She is entirely unaware that it will be kept. After the sentencing in 2015, David Kowalski released a single statement to the press. It read, in part, “She was a reader and a mother and a keeper of things. She made the world around her more careful. We are grateful for the truth. We will never be finished with the grief.

” The genealogy technology that identified Kevin Hartman has since been used to break open more than 600 cold cases across the United States. Margaret Kowalski’s case was among the first 20. Her case is now cited in Illinois law enforcement training materials as an example of proper evidence preservation, the single hair from 2000, cataloged correctly, stored properly, never contaminated in 13 years of storage, waiting for the technology that would eventually make it speak.

The bird feeder outside Clara Kowalski’s apartment window is blue. She fills it with sunflower seeds. What do you think justice means for a family that had to wait 14 years to know the truth? Does a name and a sentence change what those years cost? And what does it say about the thousands of other evidence lockers in hundreds of other counties where a single hair or a single cup or a single fiber has been waiting for decades for someone to finally ask it the right question.

 Justice found Margaret Kowalski after 14 years. Stories like hers are why this channel exists. If you believe truth is worth pursuing, no matter how long it takes, subscribe so you don’t miss the next case. More solved cold cases are in the description below. Thank you for watching.