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It’s a morbid fact to consider, but on average, it generally takes somewhere between 2-5 minutes to strangle or suffocate someone to death. When a person’s airway is obstructed, whether pressure is placed on their throat or from an obstruction from air, oxygen no longer reaches the victim’s lungs. With this, the brain, which utilizes about 20% of the body’s oxygen, begins to panic. At about 10-20 seconds consciousness may fade if blood flow to the brain is completely cut off or 30 seconds to a minute if the airway is obstructed as in a case where a pillow is placed over a victim’s face. Death follows after 2-5 minutes after the heart stops as a result of the lack of oxygen. Full brain death can take 6-10 minutes
In the fall of 1970, Donna Susan Doll was a 21-year-old student in her senior year at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois which is situated 64 miles (103 km) east of Chicago. After she graduated from Riverside-Brookfield High School in 1967 where she graduated 15th in her class & was a member of National Honor Society, she went on to college where she attended NIU on a scholarship. She had always been an ambitious student & attended Middlebury College in Pennsylvania during the summers of 1969 & 1970 in order to earn credits toward her master’s degree. She had sandy colored hair, blue eyes & an innocent look with a matching, trusting personality.
Donna had aspirations of one day teaching Russian or working as an interpreter after graduation. She had just recently stood beside her friend from high school, Donna Chiarelott, who’d recently gotten married; Donna had been her maid of honor. According to Chiarelott, her friend had always been an exceptionally responsible young woman, helping her parents around the house with cleaning & looking after her younger brother & sister. Oftentimes, she was unable to socialize because she was obligated to babysit her siblings. She was very innocent, never wild & the two had known each other from as far back as eighth grade.
Now off to NIU & away from home, Donna was allowed more freedom despite the fact that her Russian studies were very demanding. With time away from her parent’s to-do-list, she was allowed the freedom to go on dates & hang out with friends. Her life was more her own in DeKalb despite the fact that her schedule was jam-packed with classes, studies, socializing as well as working at the on-campus Swen Parson library.
On Friday, October 2, 1970, Donna was working a shift at the library & made plans to meet up with Donna Chiarelott later that night. The two had some catching up to do since they hadn’t seen each other that semester as Chiarelott was a newlywed & Donna had spent her summer in Pennsylvania. The two Donna’s arranged to catch up over coffee & planned to meet at the library after Donna clocked out.
According to records, Donna clocked at 9:59 pm, but when Chiarelott stopped by the library in her 1959 black Ford Galaxie to pick her up, she waited for about twenty minutes, but Donna had already left. At the time, she wasn’t worried & just made the assumption that Donna had either forgotten about their plans or got caught up doing something else. Of course, being only 1970 & without the technology of cell phones, plans often changed with a person left unaware.
Donna had been dating another NIU student, Charles Burke, but when she visited Pennsylvania that summer, she met another man who she felt wasn’t as possessive & controlling as Charles had been. She wrote letters to her friend over the summer & confided in Chiarelott that she planned to break up with Charles in order to pursue a relationship with this new, unnamed man who had only recently separated from his wife. She also wrote that the man planned to visit her at NIU over Halloween.
Because of this, when Donna wasn’t seen at her rooming house on Lincoln Highway by roommates, they figured she’d gone to Pennsylvania to visit her new love interest that weekend. However, when there was still no sign of her by Sunday, she was reported missing by her houseparents at 11:30 pm, two days after she went missing.
When her room was searched, investigators found her clothes & suitcase which indicated that it was highly unlikely she’d taken a trip. They also came across her last paycheck from the library which suggested she likely had no more than $10 on her when she went missing. When Chiarelott learned that Donna still wasn’t back & her prescription allergy pills had been left behind, she was immediately concerned as she knew her friend would have never left without taking her medications with her.
When Donna failed to show up for work as well as to celebrate her younger sister Becky’s 10th birthday, back in her hometown of Brookfield, those that knew her were only that much more concerned.
Some sources also indicated that her increasingly panic-stricken parents had received phone calls in the days after Donna vanished in which the caller would sneer, I know where your daughter is before slamming down the phone.
Detective Don Berke, who was head of investigating Donna’s case, learned that Donna was actively dating a man from Pittsburgh who she met the previous summer while she was enrolled in a foreign language program in Pennsylvania. Police initially felt there was no reason to suspect foul play involvement in Donna’s disappearance as no witness had seen her being abducted & because her current love interest had only just separated from his wife, paired with the fact that her family was strict, police theorized she may have taken a quiet getaway to see him. Authorities would later learn that this man had not heard from Donna that weekend.
However, when the days continued to stretch on & there was still no sign of Donna, it was clear that something terrible must have happened since she was a wonderful student who never missed classes. In the meantime, Charles, Donna’s ex-boyfriend, took it upon himself to arrange a search party in hopes of finding her.
But it wasn’t until Sunday, October 11, nine days after Donna was last seen that her family learned where she was & it was devastating. Three teenagers were on their way to a party at 8:15 pm, headed down Nelson Road in a Pontiac station wagon, a little over one mile west of campus. They stopped off at a cornfield at dusk to pick up a stash of beer that had been hidden there a week earlier. While the girls waited by the car, Jim Ball, who was in his first year of college at NIU, trudged through the long grass about five feet from the cornfield when something caught his eye. Here, he found a body lying on its back in a ditch & under a tree that ran parallel to the road.
With this, Jim turned & ran back in the direction of the car & the trio headed to the DeKalb Police Department to report what Jim had found. The police followed the group of teens back to Nelson Road & they found a body that was fully clothed with only the shoes missing. The deceased girl wore a jacket, however, it was not the jacket that Donna was last seen wearing.
It wasn’t until 4 am that the body was confirmed to be that of Donna Doll after a male friend of hers, a graduate student in the math department, who just so happened to be her ex-boyfriend, Charles Burke, who identified her remains.
After Donna went missing, Charles had organized a search party for Donna along with her friends from the NIU foreign language department. They’d incidentally walked along the railroad tracks west of DeKalb looking for her, however, they ended their search only a quarter of a mile from where her remains were ultimately located. The spot where her remains were found also happened to be very close to where Charles lived. Despite the fact that he was an ex-boyfriend, Charles served as a pallbearer in Donna’s funeral & she was buried in the earrings he previously gifted her.
According to DeKalb County Sheriff Roger Scott, during the 1970s Nelson road was a hot spot for students to stop off to socialize & drink. At the time, the dorms were co-ed so there were much more road parties than what are currently seen.
DeKalb was a very quiet, safe, rural area & word of Donna’s death caused an uproar among the community as residents feared that a killer could be roaming around town. Homicides in the small farm town were so few & far between that the county didn’t even have a morgue at the time.
Police thought back to four days before Donna’s body had been found when a stolen car was found a mile & a half where her body was found on October 7. They wondered if it was somehow connected with her death, but ultimately traced the car back to two minor DeKalb boys who had taken the car from a local service station on Sunday, October 4 & abandoned it on the corner of Nelson & Fairview Road. Investigators concluded that the car had nothing to do with Donna’s case.
A state crime lab technician was called to the scene as police cordoned off the area around where her remains were found. The DeKalb Fire Department brought in a portable generator & searchlights were utilized so detectives could comb through the area for any clues. There were no visible signs of trauma or injury to Donna’s body which had been transferred to the medical examiner’s office where County Coroner Paul Van Natta completed the autopsy.
Coroner Van Natta determined that Donna had been alive for at least 48 hours after she vanished, meaning she had been murdered late Sunday night at the earliest. There were no injuries of any kind or defensive wounds to her body & the initial autopsy was unable to determine her cause of death. After a second exam was done, traces of vomit were located within her lungs which concluded that her cause of death was from suffocation from either a pillowcase or a plastic bag.
There was no violence in Donna’s death & despite the fact that the medical examiner believed she could have been suffocated with a pillow or plastic bag, no fibers were located in her lungs which is usually characteristic of suffocation. Pathologists also found that an unknown liquid had been drizzled over her body which was reported as mystery substances in Donna’s partially decomposed remains that could not be explained or identified. This begs the question, did these mystery substances incapacitate Donna to the point that she was sedated & unable to fight off her attacker?
Based on evidence, investigators theorize that Donna was murdered by someone she knew. As she left the library on Friday night she wore a black trench coat, but when her body was discovered, she was wearing a blue jacket that didn’t belong to her. Her shoes, trench coat & brown leather purse that she carried as she left her shift at the library have never been located.
Donna’s autopsy seemed to generate more questions than answers, many of which remain unanswered to this day. The strangest, most puzzling detail from this case came from what the medical examiner discovered inside Donna’s body. The contents of her stomach proved that she’d consumed an abnormal amount of boiled potatoes, 5-6 pounds, before her tragic demise. To this day, there is no explanation as to why; had she been forced to consume them & if so, by whom & why?
When investigators tracked down the man Donna was dating in Pennsylvania, he indicated he had not spoken to her in days & evidence did not suggest that he’d traveled to DeKalb at the time she vanished. On the other hand, police did believe that Charles was a person of interest in Donna’s murder & he was quickly named a suspect. Even after the passage of more than 5 decades, Charles Burke remains the one & only suspect in Donna’s death.
After Donna Chiarelott told investigators that Donna mentioned her Pennsylvania beau visiting her over Halloween, police wondered if maybe Charles had been motivated to keep her from fully breaking up with him & moving on to this other man. According to Chiarellot, Charles was a possessive jerk & a nerd who lacked the intellect to be compatible with her remarkable friend.
It wasn’t lost on police that Charles lived by himself in an apartment at Suburban Estates which was close to Nelson Road where Donna’s remains were located. Yet Charles remained adamant that he had nothing to do with her murder, investigators indicated that he had a How could you possibly suspect me kind of attitude.
When authorities announced that Charles was a suspect in the case, he tried to end his life by cutting his wrists. After he was treated for these superficial cuts at the NIU Health Center, he promptly hired a lawyer, Edward Dietrich, who claimed that his client was emotionally disturbed by Donna’s death. He also indicated that Charles was being extremely cooperative with the authorities, working with them over the course of over 24 hours & he’d also volunteered to take a polygraph test.
Because there was not enough evidence to prove that Charles was responsible for Donna’s murder, no arrest was made & he eventually went on to move to Chicago where he established himself in a successful career in finance. But if Charles didn’t murder Donna, who did? She was found with her clothing on, but why had her killer taken her trench coat, shoes & purse? Why was she wearing a coat that didn’t belong to her? And why had she consumed upwards of six pounds of potatoes?
Donna’s murder remains a mystery to this day while 2025 marks the passage of 55 years. Her case resides in two binders & a box full of documents at the DeKalb County Sheriff’s Office. Investigators hope that somewhere down the line, something will materialize or someone will come forward to shed light on solving this case.
According to a 2010 article, forty years after Donna’s death, her friend, a then 61-year-old Donna Chiarelott, still thought of her friend. A stranger on the street would occasionally catch her eye that resembled Donna which made her wonder who her friend would have become as she progressed into adulthood. She had been such a dedicated, successful student, she would only believe that she’d be an inspiring teacher who made a difference in her student’s lives.
Donna’s case remains open & her family hope they will one day have closure & justice. Anyone with information about Donna’s case is asked to contact the DeKalb County Sheriff’s Office at 815-895-2155.
References:
- Newspapers.com: The Daily Chronicle: No Warrants issued yet in Doll case
- Newspapers.com: The Daily Chronicle: Missing Northern Coed found dead
- Chicago Tribune: Cold Case: The disappearance of Donna Doll
- Medium: Murder by potatoes: The curious case of Donna Doll
- Northern Star: Murder case remains unsolved
- The TASA Group: Forensic analysis of injury & death by asphyxiation
- Criminal: University student found suffocated to death in cornfield
- I did it for jodie archive: Hold the starch: Confounding carbohydrates in the deaths of Donna Doll & Elizabeth Lightfoot
