BAY SHORE— The Long Island Railroad station in Bay Shore, Suffolk County has been re-modeled–and elevated–since March of 1980, when 20 year old Eve Wilkowitz took the last train home from Penn Station on a Friday night.
But Wilkowitz, who had started a secretarial job with Macmillan Publishing, never made it to the apartment she shared with a boyfriend.
Three days after she caught the train at Penn, her body was found not far from the Bay Shore station.
Detectives told Eve’s family she had been held captive for three days, before she was killed.
“She was strangled,” Eve’s only sibling, Irene Wilkowitz Brociner, told PIX 11 Investigates this week. “I know her hands were tied. They had, like, rope burns.”
Irene Brociner, who is now 53 years old, was just 17, when she got the news at home in Oakdale that her sister was missing.
Brociner was living with her father, Alfred, and the family had already endured the loss of her mother, Dorothy, to breast cancer in 1976.
Brociner was silently struggling with her own health issues; years later, she would be diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease.
“I walk around scared all the time,” Brociner told PIX 11. “It’s always in my thoughts that somebody’s still out there who did this to her. Why wouldn’t they do this to me, too?”
In spite of her anxiety, Brociner did her first television interview about her sister’s unsolved murder with PIX 11 News, deciding 2016 was the year she needed to press for answers.
It will be 36 years this March, since her sister’s body was discovered in Bay Shore.
Brociner, the mother of two children, named her son, Evan, after Eve.
“I think it’s an honor to carry on her memory,” Evan Brociner, a college student, told PIX 11.
Irene Brociner said she was very different from her sister, Eve, who was a lively presence and always loved to be with friends.
“She was very sweet, she loved horses, horses were her passion,” Irene Brociner recalled tearfully. “She loved to read.”
Brociner said they only knew Eve’s local boyfriend by a first name, and he would never come in the Oakdale house to greet them.
She said Suffolk County investigators questioned everyone who knew Eve about the murder but never arrested anyone.
Brocincer had fond memories of Dr. Jack Dempsey, a writer that Eve Wilkowitz had met at Macmillan Publishing in Manhattan.
Dempsey has written of their blossoming romance in the six weeks he knew her.
His poems dedicated to the memory of Eve Helene Wilkowitz are published on the Internet.
One of the poems, “Equinox ‘04”–written in 2004–was penned on the 24th anniversary of Eve’s death.
Equinox ‘04
Three days through an underworld of rape,
this was the blue dawn hour
when my Evie left the world,
twenty-four years
this morning.
I have curled my strength
around her sleep,
I will kiss her
hands and eyes
until they trust the world again.
Royal-purple crocus breaking
tender through the snow.
This morning we found
Eve Helene lying on the ground.
No thought,
no word
is adequate for either.
But
gentle things will rise,
however hard the vernal day,
however cold the sun.
This is Dr. Jack Dempsey’s poem for a lost love. And a sister still cries for a lost sister.
