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\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCredit: Insia Haque<\/a> \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n On a gray, rainy day in March 1980, Julie Revsin, a 25-year-old Penn graduate student, was murdered in her West Philadelphia apartment<\/a>. The crime has never been solved. I write as a journalist and a Penn graduate, hoping to renew interest in this case, which, I believe, could still be solved.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n Revsin was a Philadelphia native, a graduate of Lake Erie College in Painesville, Ohio, a daughter, and a sister. At Northeast High School, she was a cheerleader and a member of the choir. At Penn, she was pursuing a graduate degree in the Annenberg School for Communication.\n\t\t<\/p>\n Revsin lived with her boyfriend, also a Penn graduate student, in the El Vista, an apartment building at 4530 Osage Ave. The building is still there, but in 1980, the neighborhood was much more dangerous than it is today.\n<\/p>\n At 3:15 p.m. on Friday, March 21, 1980, the boyfriend returned to the apartment and found Revsin dead on the floor. A knife was lying near her body. She had, according to the coroner, been \u201cslashed and beaten and stabbed<\/a>.\u201d Her death was ruled a homicide. The boyfriend had an airtight alibi: He had been playing basketball with friends at Gimbel Gymnasium.<\/p>\n Neighbors reported hearing no screams or signs of a struggle emanating from the apartment that day. There was no sign of forced entry, suggesting Revsin may have known her attacker.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n It was the kind of crime that would have been expected to generate considerable media interest: a young woman found brutally murdered in her own apartment. But Revsin had the bad luck to be murdered on the same day that the mob boss Angelo Bruno was assassinated<\/a> while sitting in a parked car in South Philadelphia.\n\t<\/p>\n The Bruno murder was one of the most sensational crimes in the city\u2019s history, and it sparked a wave of mob violence that would last for years. Perhaps it\u2019s not surprising that, by comparison, the murder of Revsin attracted little attention from the media and, it seems, investigators. After her autopsy, none of the Philadelphia papers gave updates on the investigation.\n<\/p>\n The utter lack of information about this case in the papers and online is remarkable. I entered Penn in September 1984, less than five years after the murder, and during my junior and senior years lived less than two blocks from the scene of the crime, yet I never heard anything about it. I only learned of the murder when I recently went down a Philadelphia mob rabbit hole and chanced upon an article about it in the same edition of The Philadelphia Inquirer that reported on the Bruno slaying.\n<\/p>\n Despite the many years that have passed since the crime occurred, it seems eminently solvable. If police still have in their possession the apparent murder weapon \u2014 the knife found near the body \u2014 it should be tested for traces of the perpetrator\u2019s DNA. I have written to Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, Philadelphia Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel, the Penn Police Department, and other officials and agencies, but none has responded to my suggestion that the knife be tested.\u00a0\n\t\t<\/p>\n \t\t\tSign up for our newsletter<\/p>\n Get our newsletter, DP Daybreak, delivered to your inbox every weekday morning.<\/p>\n Although the case is still open, I suspect it has not been actively investigated in decades. But if the killer was around Revsin\u2019s age, 25, at the time, he or she would now be about 70 years old, still relatively young considering the case is now 45 years old.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n It is my hope that publicizing this unsolved murder will compel investigators to take another look at it. Cold cases live and die on public attention. Hopefully, buried somewhere in the bowels of a municipal building is a cardboard box containing the knife that killed Revsin. I beseech authorities to find it and test it, and all these years later her killer may be brought to justice. As overdue as it would be, justice in Revsin\u2019s case would be no less sweet.\n<\/p>\n MATTHEW ALGEO<\/strong> is a 1988 College graduate and an author, journalist, and historian. He hosts Morning Edition on Kansas Public Radio. His email is malgeo@ku.edu<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Daily Pennsylvanian is an independent, student-run newspaper. Please consider making a donation<\/a> to support the coverage that shapes the University. Your generosity ensures a future of strong journalism at Penn.<\/p>\n
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