Imagine how you would feel if you believed that on your block, your quiet, safe little block, lived a couple who might be murderers. The worst kind of murderers. Child murderers. People who might have killed their own daughter and then dumped her body in a field of weeds. Imagine how you would feel.
Midlothian is a solid little town of 14,500-white, middle-class-a half hour south of Chicago, off the Dan Ryan Expressway. There`s a sign on 147th Street that reads ”Welcome to Midlothian, winner of the 1988 Governor`s Home Town Award.” Children grow up, get married and raise their own families there. One resident describes it as a ”soap opera town,” where ”everybody knows everybody.”
The 3600 block of West 148th Place in Midlothian is a tiny street that runs between Central Park and Lawndale. Just a dozen houses line the two sides of the block. Small houses with neat front lawns. Bungalows and ranches. There`s very little traffic; an hour can go by without a car driving up the street. The speed limit is 20 m.p.h. and a sign warns ”Handicapped Children at Play.”
There are a lot of kids on the block. Last summer they were out all day, playing in one yard and then another. Riding their bikes, selling lemonade. They had the run of the place. Then on Sept. 10 last year 7-year-old Jaclyn Dowaliby, who lived at 3636 W. 148th Place, was reported missing. Her parents, Cyndy and Dave, said someone must have smashed a basement window in the middle of the night, snuck into their home, reached into Jaclyn`s bedroom-which is just 10 feet from theirs-and snatched her. Her 4-year-old brother Davey, who slept in the room right next to hers, hadn`t heard a thing and neither had they.
When the neighbors learned that Jaclyn was missing, they pulled their kids inside and locked their doors tight. The only child outside was little Davey Dowaliby.
”There was little Davey, up and down the block,” says neighbor Sue Haseman. ”The rest of us wouldn`t let our kids out of our sight. It was strange.”
Since that September morning, a lot of things have seemed strange to some of the Dowalibys` neighbors. They are a divided group. Some believe, along with the police and the prosecutors, that the Dowalibys, who are out on bond, killed Jaclyn. Some believe that they`re innocent. Some are waiting for the trial, which should begin early this summer, to make up their minds. It has divided the little block. Some neighbors have stopped speaking, some just won`t discuss what happened that night. Yet, in a strange and tragic way, it has brought them closer together.
”We all know each other a little bit better now,” says Haseman. ”It`s a sad way to get to know your neighbors.”
LOVING OR LAX?
The Dowalibys live in a neat little yellow-and-orange-brick raised ranch with blue and white cafe curtains in the kitchen and a swing set and a picnic table in the backyard. There`s a sign next to the front door that says that the house is protected by a security system. That`s new. So are the lights that have been installed outside the house.
People on the street know Dave and Cyndy Dowaliby the way you know neighbors, not friends. They`d see them working in their yard, they`d say
”hi” and ”bye” to them, but not much more. ”They kept to themselves,”
says their next door neighbor Robert Tolbert. The women would see Cyndy occasionally at Tupperware parties and makeup demonstrations, and she was at the Mother`s Day Brownie luncheon and fashion show with Jaclyn, but they didn`t really know her.
The Dowalibys weren`t home a lot. Cyndy, 26, worked in the dietary department of Oak Forest Hospital and took classes at Moraine Valley Community College in Palos Hills. She is 6 months pregnant and no longer works. Dave, 31, worked as a construction foreman at Material Handling Equipment Erectors Inc. in Crestwood and still does. Their children were looked after by his mother, Ann. She owned the home and slept in the basement.
Neighbors say they always thought Cyndy was ”a sweet girl,” ”a loving mother,” and ”nice” but that sometimes she was ”spacey,” ”antsy,” and
”preoccupied.” Dave seemed ”nice,” too. He taught Davey to ride a two-wheeler when he was only 3 and he built him a fort in the backyard. Davey was ”mischievous,” ”wild,” and ”undisciplined” and he sometimes wandered off the block.
Jaclyn was ”an angel,” ”bubbly,” and ”independent,” according to some neighbors. ”Quiet” and ”unusually shy” according to others. Some say she made up stories for attention. ”The circus is coming to my house,”
things like that.
”They were a loving family,” says next-door neighbor Holly Deck. ”They were always hugging their kids. They never yelled at them.”
”They never even spanked them,” says Tolbert. ”They`d send them to their rooms or take away their bikes. They didn`t believe in corporal punishment. They were totally against it.”
The relationship between Cyndy and Dave seems to have been a good one.
”Their eyes lit up when they saw each other,” says Deck. ”They`re really in love,” says Tolbert. ”You can see it. I`ve never heard them argue or anything like that.”
Some of the neighbors remember the Dowalibys spending a lot of time with their chidren, bike riding, fishing, going for ice cream.
”When she had the time, she did things with her kids,” says neighbor Connie Koleczek. Cyndy helped Jaclyn set up a lemonade stand. She took her and a friend rollerskating. She sometimes invited the neighborhood kids for lunch and she had them over to plant flowers.
But other neighbors say that the Dowalibys were lackadaisical parents.
”They didn`t supervise their kids,” says one neighbor who doesn`t want to be identified. ”They never checked up on them. Davey would run around with no shorts or underwear on. I was close to telling them that he urinates outside and runs in front of cars, but I didn`t. I was close to telling them that he needs to be looked after more. He`d be at my house for six or seven hours at a time. I`d say, `You`re tired, you should go home, Davey.` But no one ever came to get him.”
Once Davey knocked a little boy off his bike with a stick. When the boy`s father reported him to his grandmother, she dismissed it. ”Davey`s a little rambunctious,” was all she said. But she didn`t reprimand him or even ask about the other little boy.
Cyndy told a neighbor, Judy Esparza, that Davey was difficult and that she was using ”reverse psychology” on him. ”She said that instead of yelling at him when he did something wrong, they would tell him what a good boy he was when he did something right. It was starting to make a big difference in him.”
ODD, FATEFUL DAY
Erin Bell remembers Friday, Sept. 9, the last day that Jaclyn Dowaliby was alive, very clearly. Her husband was on vacation and they had taken their children to the zoo. They came home around 2 or 3 in the afternoon and they were sitting on the front porch. Davey came over to show them a bow and arrow his grandmother had made for him.
Around supper time Jaclyn came over and told Davey they had to go right home. ”She seemed in a bad mood,” recalls Erin. She said they had to go home that minute and they did.
Bob Tolbert, next door to the Dowalibys, was in bed watching television that night. His bedroom faces Jaclyn`s and his window was open. There was a Tupperware party across the street, and he watched it break up around 1:30 a.m. A neighbor pulled up a little after that. Tolbert stayed up another half hour or so, then turned off the television and fell asleep around 2:15 a.m.
Saturday morning, Sept. 10, started out as another warm, late summer day on 148th Place. Then Davey Dowaliby came to Judy Esparza`s door asking if his sister was there. She thought that was strange. It was usually Davey who ran away and Jaclyn who came looking for him. Erin Bell saw Cyndy and Dave Dowaliby walking slowly up the street. They told her that Jaclyn was missing. She says they looked ”scared, but calm.” Later the Dowalibys told Sue Haseman that Jaclyn`s father, James Guess, must have taken her. This was the first time the neighbors learned that Dave was not Jaclyn`s birth father. But Guess couldn`t have done it. He`s in a Florida state prison serving a seven-year sentence for attempted sexual battery and threatening with a deadly weapon.
As the long day wore on, the neighbors became more concerned and little things seemed odd to some of them. Some neighbors had trouble understanding how anyone could have broken in and taken Jaclyn out of her bed without anyone in the house hearing. But still, they rallied around. They went on search parties. They tied yellow ribbons around the trees and brought over food. Some of the children made pictures to give Jaclyn when she came home.
SUPPORTERS REMAIN
After Jaclyn`s body was found, on Sept. 14, some neighbors thought it was strange that Cyndy said, ”It`s over.” They didn`t hear her talk about catching the killer. Her behavior seemed a little ”off.” She sat on her porch and as gawkers drove by, she waved defiantly, as if to say, ”Take a picture, it lasts longer.”
When the police said the killer didn`t come in through the broken basement window because objects under it were undisturbed, and that it had been broken before that night, some neighbors became openly suspicious of the Dowalibys. But when the family stopped cooperating with the police, just days after the body was found, they turned against them. ”If I were them and I thought the police weren`t doing the job, I`d get a private investigator,”
says Koleczek. ”I don`t know how much it costs, but that`s what I`d do.”
Not all the neighbors think the Dowalibys are guilty. Tolbert, who lives next door, believes they are innocent. He continues to let them babysit for his child and he says he knows ”for a fact” that the basement window wasn`t broken before Sept. 10.
”I resodded my lawn that summer and I used over 100,000 gallons of water between June and August. I brought my hose right between the two houses and I saw that window. It wasn`t broken. I even have pictures of it on videotape. I told the police about it, but they never asked to see it.”
On Nov. 22, the Dowalibys were charged with strangling Jaclyn to death.
”The only people who had the opportunity to commit the murder were David and Cynthia Dowaliby,” said Assistant State`s Atty. Patrick O`Brien, who is prosecuting the case. Some of the neighbors were relieved, but they wondered if there was any way they could have known that something evil was happening in that yellow brick house.
Jaclyn had once told a neighbor that she hated her father, but it seemed like the kind of thing any child might say. If she was an abused child-prosecutors say Davey told them that Jaclyn was ”always the one who got spanked so much” with a broom, a belt or a rope-the bruises didn`t show. The neighborhood girls ran around in bathing suits all summer, and there were no marks on her. Davey went around in shorts without a shirt and he didn`t have any bruises, other than the normal ones on his shins, either.
If Cyndy and Dave Dowaliby, these ”loving parents” who according to some neighbors never even spanked their children, if they actually murdered their daughter, the question remains: Why? The neighbors speculate. Maybe Cyndy had been abused as a child and these things repeat themselves. Maybe Cyndy or Dave was hitting Jaclyn and it got out of hand and they panicked. Maybe they had abused her before and she threatened to tell on them. Maybe they were involved with drugs. Maybe they were part of a satanic cult. No one knows. They`re just guessing.
After Cyndy and Dave were released on bond in mid-December, it seemed like they were trying to hide from their neighbors. They pulled their cars all the way to the end of their driveway and used the back door. But now, they`re using the front door again. Dave Dowaliby is sitting in front of the living room window reading the paper, again. Cyndy is renting movies at the video store and going to the beauty shop, again. Davey, who is living with an aunt and uncle, was at home several weeks ago even though the DCFS, which has court-ordered custody of him, does not allow it.
It appears as though life is going on as usual on 148th Place, but it isn`t. ”I look down when I pass their house,” says Haseman. ”I see the bedroom windows where Jaclyn and Davey slept and I know they`re not there and why they`re not there and it makes me sick to my stomach.”
One family, the Koleczeks, moved to a nearby street. ”It was just a bad place to live,” says Connie Koleczek. They now have a backyard so strangers can`t see their children playing out front anymore. They`ve bought a dog, not a pet, a real guard dog. They won`t let their kids sleep over at friends`
homes anymore and they drive them to school. ”I`ll never be that trusting again,” says Koleczek.
The little block of West 148th Place is quiet. Children are playing at home, and mothers are watching them closely. There are either murderers living down the block, or whoever grabbed little Jaclyn Dowaliby out of her bed is still out there.
