The 2001 Super Bowl saw the Baltimore Ravens win the coveted prize for the first time in history, beating the New York Giants 34-7.
Sisters Jill Lyn and Jenna Euto — lifelong Denver Broncos fans — were rooting for the Ravens that year. “I don’t think we were really fans of [the] Ravens,” Jenna texted Dateline. “We just never liked any NY team.”
Jenna, 17 at the time, and their mother, Joanne Browning, were living together in Syracuse, New York, while 18-year-old Jill lived in a studio apartment a few miles away. “She was, like, fiercely -- fiercely independent,” Jenna said of her older sister. “So she spent a lot of time working and just trying to make enough money that she could get out on her own.”
According to Jenna, Jill dropped out of school in the ninth grade — eager to carve out her own path. “Right away, she went and got her GED,” Jenna said. “Pretty much from, like, that point on, she was working.” Jill dreamed of working in the medical field when she got older. “That’s just kind of, like who she was,” her sister Jenna told Dateline. “She was just, like, really out to, like, help anybody.”
In 2001, Jill was working at the Aeropostale store in the ShoppingTown Mall in Syracuse to pay the rent at her sixth floor apartment nearby. “It was, you know, her first real apartment,” Jenna said. “She loved that building. And it was working out really well.”
SUPER BOWL SUNDAY
On Sunday, January 28, 2001, Jill was supposed to come home to watch the Super Bowl with the family. “She called in the morning at like, 11:00 or something — might have been a little bit earlier than that,” Jenna remembered. “She wanted to talk to my mom.”
Jenna told her sister their mom couldn’t talk, because they were heading out to the grocery store to get ingredients for Super Bowl tacos — Jill’s favorite. “It’s one of my biggest regrets,” Jenna told Dateline. “I just wish I would’ve let her talk to my mom.”
That was the last time anyone in the family spoke to Jill.
Jenna says she and her mother got back from the grocery store around noon, at which point she called her sister back. “I started calling her, you know, to let her know that we were ready to go get her or pick her up. And she wasn’t answering,” Jenna said. “The longer she didn’t answer, the more I would call. And then after a while, I started getting mad and being like, you know, ‘Where are you?’ You know, like, ‘This is ridiculous.’ You know, maybe, you know, ‘Did you go somewhere else? You know, you should have called. Like, I don’t get to see you very often.’”
She would later be haunted by those messages.
Jenna and her mother and stepfather started watching the Super Bowl. Backstreet Boys sang the national anthem. They still hadn’t heard from Jill. They ate the tacos. Jill would have loved them, they were her favorite. They watched Aerosmith and *NSYNC headline the halftime show with guests like Britney Spears and Mary J. Blige. Still nothing from Jill. The NY team lost. Jill would have loved that.
“We really thought she was going to be there,” Jenna said. But their mom remained calm. “My mom was like, ‘She probably, you know, had a change of plans,’” Jenna said. “‘I’ll call her in the morning.’”
MONDAY MORNING
On Monday morning Jenna was at home when the phone rang. It was her mom calling from work. “She said, ‘Something’s wrong. Your sister didn’t show up for work,’” Jenna recalled. “[My mom] had been calling Jill in the morning at her house and she still wasn’t picking up.” So around 9:30 a.m., Joanne had called Jill’s job to see if she was there.
Panic began to set in. Jenna says her mother came home to pick her up and they headed to Jill’s apartment on James Street. When they got up to the apartment they knocked on the door. No answer. Joanne Browning went inside.
“I can’t even explain — like, she just — the sound that escaped her,” Jenna said of her mother. “And then, she just, like, collapsed.” She’d found her daughter Jill. Murdered.
Jenna tried to go into the apartment, but her mother stopped her from seeing her sister’s body. “She, like, grabbed my stomach, or my ankles, or something,” Jenna said. “She was, like, an immovable wall, you know, and I — she wouldn’t let me pass.”
Jenna remembers what happened next only in flashes. She went to try to get help from neighbors. “I was banging on the doors and banging on the doors,” she said. “And I remember [my mom] was on her knees and she had a cell phone. Um, and she called 911 — and she was hysterical.” Jenna hadn’t quite grasped what had happened. “I didn’t think she was really gone. And I guess that happens when you don’t get to see it for yourself.”
Syracuse police arrived shortly after Joanne’s 911 call. Dateline spoke with Mary Jumbelic, who was the Chief Medical Examiner of Onondaga County at the time and had been called to the scene. Jill’s body was lying in the main living area of the studio apartment. “There were multiple stab wounds to the body,” Jumbelic said. “They were — as I recall them — in the neck, in the chest, in the back of her body.”
The retired medical examiner says the murder weapon was found at the scene. It was one of Jill’s kitchen knives. “Stabbing is a very intimate form of death,” Jumbelic said, theorizing Jill’s killer was likely someone she knew. However, “it’s more from the fact that there was no forced entry into the apartment,” she noted.
“She had been killed, most likely, the day before,” Jumbelic told Dateline. “We surmised it was in the afternoon, but I — I couldn’t get more specific than that.”
Jill’s case is listed on the Syracuse Police Department’s website. It lists “unknown” under suspect. Dateline reached out to Syracuse PD for more details on Jill’s case and the latest in the investigation. Captain Steven Baratta declined Dateline’s request for an interview.
Mary Jumbelic says it’s “surprising — but I guess realistic” that Jill’s killer has yet to be identified. “There was hope early on that it would be possible to solve this,” she recalled. “But certainly within a day or two when nothing was coming to light, it starts to feel less hopeful.”
THE AFTERMATH
As the days turned to months and months turned to years, hope that Jill’s killer would be caught dwindled. According to Jenna, their mother, Joanne, never got over Jill’s murder and was unable to accept her case might go unsolved. “My mom died that day, too,” Jenna told Dateline. “What she saw killed her. Like, she couldn’t function, really, after. Like, her whole life revolved around Jill and getting justice.”
For the next six years, Joanne Browning dedicated her life to her daughter’s case — talking to as many journalists as she could to keep Jill’s name in the news. “She spent all of her time [going on], you know — Montel Williams’ show, like, ‘Unsolved Mysteries,’” Jenna said. “She -- every waking moment -- was contacting people, trying to keep Jill’s name out there.” Joanne made flyers, spoke with detectives, and ultimately stopped working to devote her life to finding her daughter’s killer. “She was on disability at the time because, well, after finding Jill, she was completely incapable of basically doing anything besides fighting for Jill’s justice,” Jenna said.
In 2007, tragedy struck the family again, after Joanne took on a landscaping job to make some extra money. During a shift, she fell from a flat roof to the ground below. “She only fell like 12 feet, but it just happened to be, like, right on the back of her head,” Jenna explained. “The doctors say it was instant.”
Her mother’s death was hard on Jenna, after losing her sister only six years prior. “Obviously, she was gone when we lost Jill, but it was just even more tragic with how it happened,” Jenna told Dateline. “It was, like, the worst thing for me. Like, me and my mom were so close, too. But I feel at least, like, now she’s with Jill.”
Nearly a quarter century has passed since her sister’s murder, and Jenna is left to fight for Jill on her own. “I wanted to see her have kids -- and she wanted to be a mom,” Jenna said. “It doesn’t feel like it’s been this long since I’ve seen her — or this long since I’ve talked to her.”
There is a lingering anguish about that last afternoon that Jenna can’t shake. It was the voicemail she left for her sister when she thought Jill might have been bailing on the family for the Super Bowl. Jill had the kind of answering machine that plays messages out loud in the room while they are being recorded. Looking back, Jenna realizes she may have left that message while her sister was dying. “I pray to God like she didn’t hear, you know, like, me yelling at her, you know, to be like, ‘Where are you? Why aren’t you picking up the phone?’” Jenna said. “That haunts me.”
Jenna Euto does not believe her sister’s case will be solved since so much time has passed. “I used to have a whole lot of hope that we would, you know, get who did this and that she would get justice,” she said. “I don’t think that it can be solved as the way things are.”
The sliver of hope Jenna does hold on to is that Jill’s killer — or someone who knows the killer — will one day wish to clear their conscience. “Most of all, I wish that whoever did this would come forward.”
Anyone with information about Jill Lyn Euto’s murder is asked to contact the Syracuse Police Department’s Criminal Investigations Division at (315) 442-5222, the Homicide Tip Line at (315) 442-5223 or by email at [email protected]. All tips will be kept confidential.
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