Tinley Park, a southwestern suburb of Chicago, consists of mostly single-family homes with a smattering of condos and neatly-kept apartment buildings. Like other middle-class Midwestern towns, it’s dotted with lots of chain restaurants, banks, gas stations, big-box stores and strip malls. This suburb’s peace was shattered on a winter day in 2008, when an as yet unknown assailant killed five women and wounded another at a Lane Bryant clothing store.    

On the morning of February 2, 2008, nothing seemed out of the ordinary for shoppers at the Brookdale Marketplace and nearby stores. The Target across the parking lot from Lane Bryant had its usual throng of customers, and some snow still lingered on the ground from previous storms.

Lane Bryant’s manager, Rhoda McFarland, opened the store. She’d already taken the money from the previous day’s sales to the bank, so the store had little cash on hand. Rhoda, an ordained pastor and Air Force veteran, helped girls attending her church learn etiquette and productivity through her program, Princess Unveiled. Her job at Lane Bryant was supposed to be a placeholder before she moved on to other things, but she found she liked it there and stayed. Even though she wasn’t scheduled to work, she came in to help with a sale the morning of February 2.     

Shortly after the doors opened at 10 a.m., the shooter entered the store, posing as a deliveryman. According to reports, he loitered around the store for at least 10 minutes before he pulled a gun on Rhoda and the other employee, and stole cash from the register. Two customers trickled in, and the shooter herded all the women in the back room and tied them up with duct tape. Two more customers entered the store, and the robber took them into the backroom.

While the shooter robbed the other victims of their cash and jewelry, Rhoda called 911 on her cell phone at at 10:44 a. m. Here’s the only part of the call released by Tinley Park P.D.

A policeman was in the Super Target a few doors down. It only took him two minutes to get to Lane Bryant, but the after the shooter had escaped by then.

Since there were no cameras in the store, police had to rely on the survivor’s description and camera footage from nearby businesses.

One of the most frustrating things about this case is the lack of a security camera in the store. It was 2008, you’d think they would at least have a camera covering one part of the store. Maybe upper management figured the store was in a suburb with a low chance of robbery and mostly credit card sales, so why spend the money on security cameras?  

The killer’s motive remains murky. Maybe he thought a woman’s clothing store was an easy mark. He may have been a drug addict who needed fast cash. Or it could have been a personal vendetta – perhaps the shooter knew one of the victims, or had been targeting an employee or customer that never showed up, and then panicked. (However, the backgrounds of the victims make it highly unlikely they had ever met the killer before that fateful day.) Perhaps the shooter knew an ex-employee who gave him inside tips about the store. He faked a delivery and had a delivery form with him when he entered the store. The delivery form had to be believable, because Rhoda called another Lane Bryant about a potential delivery mix-up shortly after the robber entered the store.

It does seem weird that the robbery took place during store opening, when the register and safe contained little to no cash. The shooter and his accomplices may have chosen this store for logistical reasons, or simply at random. The police have DNA, possibly from from the killer’s coffee cup, which hasn’t yielded a positive ID. In 2018, police released a 3-D image of the killer. The description of the shooter (and later, the DNA) didn’t link him to previous crimes; so maybe it was a tragic “crime of opportunity”.

Local TV stations and newspapers provide updates every year on the anniversary of the murders. The police chief and investigators have shelves of leads but are nowhere near apprehending a person of interest. Law enforcement has contacted a church in Texas where McFarland worked, and the Vidocq Society, a group of former law enforcement personnel dedicated to solving cold cases. NASA investigators studied blurry surveillance footage from the Target store a few hundred feet away, and identified two vehicles that may have been involved in the crime.

The case remains unsolved, as of August 2022, even with a $100,000 reward still on the table.  Shortly after the murders, Lane Bryant’s parent company, Charming Shoppes, established The Tinley Park Memorial Fund, which provided the victims’ families with financial assistance.

The victims were: store manager Rhoda McFarland, 42, Sarah T. Szafranski, 22, a financial industry employee, Connie Woolfolk, 37, a mortgage lender, Carrie Chiuso, a school counselor, and Jennifer Bishop, 34, a nurse. The wounded survivor, simply known as “Martha”, was a 33 year old nursing student and part-time Lane Bryant employee at the time of the shooting.

The Lane Bryant massacre is one of the most infamous unsolved murder cases at retail businesses in the US, along with the 1991 Austin yogurt shop murders and the 1990 Las Cruces bowling alley massacre. The 1993 Brown’s Fried Chicken murders in Palatine, Il, remained unsolved until 2002. The Brown’s killers were sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole in 2009. Although the Lane Bryant case has remained unsolved longer, there is always hope that someone will come forward with new information and help bring the assailant to justice. Two new detectives were assigned to the case in early 2022.

A T.J. Maxx opened in the Lane Bryant space in 2013.

R.I.P.   Rhoda McFarland, Sarah Szafranski, Connie Woolfolk (top row) , Carrie Chiuso, and Jennifer Bishop (bottom row)