One day you’re living your life, playing around as most teenagers would at the age of 13, and just like that in a blink of an eye, your life has come to an end thanks to a heartless man. This is the story of how 13-year-old Hillary Norskog’s life was tragically cut short.

Hillary Norskog: get to know her

She was a beautiful teenager who seemed to have a fulfilling life ahead of her. But tragedy struck this poor girl. 

She was a young girl. A girl whom many said loved to engage in one of America’s favorite pastimes: shopping. Her friends and family regarded Hillary Norskog as being a very talented young girl.

As well as being a young girl, her friends and family also said that Hillary Norskog was such a tiny girl. How her body was shaped and built was so small, she was a size 0.

According to town reports, Hillary Norskog was regarded as being a very beautiful young girl who often participated in fashion shows. She was a child model as well having starred in a few print advertisements. 

Hillary Norskog’s friends and family also stated that she was a very shy girl, but that at the age of thirteen she was slowly starting to break free of her shell. 

Sure she was shy, but she started taking up a hobby of dancing and started socializing more. When she was murdered, Hillary Norskog was just in her prime in school having been enrolled in Junior High.

As she grew, so did her beauty. Boys started to take more notice of her and she started to want to start experience grown-up things more.

At the age of 13, she was at the right age of finishing junior high school at Palos South in Chicago and be ready to move on to high school at Stagg in Chicago. At this time, Hillary Norskog started hanging out with boys older than her and started going down a path of being interested in marijuana.

Hillary Norskog’s murder: the facts

The day Hillary Norskog was murdered was also the day that she was finally getting to break free and experiment with a different social life as most American junior high school students do.

On the 4th of July 1993, Hillary attended a party with her friends and told her mum that she would have been spending the night sleeping over at a girlfriend’s house.

The party Hillary supposedly attended was located in the Hidden Pond Woods in Chicago. At this time, the party was filled with alcohol and drugs, however, Hillary Norskog had decided to leave the party early and insisted on not staying at her friend’s house.

It was at this point that the murderer Steven Pfiel offered Hillary a lift home. Steven was an acquaintance of Hillary whom she had met through her friend’s brothers, when she started hanging out with older boys.

But the sad part is that Hillary never made it home. Her body was found in a field of weeds not far from where the party was held in Hidden Pond Woods. Hillary Norskog’s body was found by two individuals who were walking past that area, and they described her body as being so badly beaten and decomposed that it was nearly impossible to identify her body.

The authorities were only able to identify Hillary Norskog’s body because her mother described that her daughter was wearing a Jurassic Park T-Shirt.

Steven Pfiel: Hillary Norskog’s murderer

So you might be wondering who exactly is Steven Pfiel and why exactly did he murder an innocent thirteen-year-old girl called Hillary Norskog? Well to answer this question, we need to understand the relationship they had with one another.

Steven Pfiel was entering his senior year at the same high school that Hillary Norskog was going to enter after having completed Junior High.

Mutual friends stated that Hillary Norskog had met Steven the summer before she was to begin school at Stagg High School. She had met Steven through a mutual friend named Kim Gagner.

At this time when Hillary Norskog met Steven, she was already in that phase of her life where she was starting to experiment with her sexuality and slowly becoming a young woman. This is when she had her first kiss and that too with Steven.

There must have been something that triggered Steven to murder poor Hillary because, despite having shared a kiss, friends recall Steven stating that he never saw Hillary as being anything more than a little sister and did not harbor any ill feelings or sexual feelings towards her.

There was no clear motive as to why Steven would want to murder Hillary Norskog. But prosecutors believe that Steven was a troubled kid. From stories told by his friends, teachers, and family members they all said that Steven was a very troubled child who had behavioral problems dating back at least 10 years.

Prosecuting Steven for Hillary Norskog’s murder

Since Hillary Norskog’s body was so badly decomposed and brutally stabbed at least 13 times, it made it difficult for the authorities to begin to even pin the murder on any one individual.

Police started turning their heads towards Steven Pfiel and investigating him for the murder of Hillary Norskog when friends later told Marsha that Hillary was last seen with Steven at the party held in Hidden Pond Woods.

It was at this moment that Hillary Norskog’s mother called up Steven’s home but was refused the ability to speak to Steven himself. As a result of this, the case was taken to the police however Steven was not yet a suspect in the case.

The authorities called Steven to the police station to question him about Hillary Norskog’s whereabouts, and if he had any knowledge about what happened to her. During the questioning process, the authorities also let K9 dogs sniff the inside of Steven’s car in case they catch the scent of Hillary Norskog.

When police were investigating Steven’s car, they noticed a lot of red blood had stained the seats and began to wonder whether that blood belonged to Hillary Norskog. Steven had denied this and claimed that the blood was Kool-Aid, but the police were adamant that Steven had a part to play in Hillary Norskog’s death.

Therefore police took samples from the blood and tested them against the DNA found on Hillary Norskog’s body. What they found was that the blood was the blood of Hillary.

At this point, Steven was already allowed to go home after questioning. Therefore, police drove to his house to arrest Steven for the murder of Hillary Norskog. Upon arriving at the Pfiel house, police rummaged through Stevens’s things and found a knife, hat, socks, and shirt which were all soaked with blood and supposedly worn by Steven on the night of the murder.

After this result, Steven was arrested and taken into custody at Cook Country Jail for the murder of Hillary Norskog, however, his parents had posted bail of 100,000 USD and moved the entire family to a completely different town.

A mother was torn from her beautiful child named Hillary Norskog

Hillary Norskog was seen as being the apple of her mother Marsha’s eye. Having been the youngest of the brood, Marsha had always kept a close eye on her little angel.

However, the summer that Hillary Norskog’s life was tragically cut short was the summer that Marsha finally decided to let her daughter spread her wings and fly.

Marsha believed that at 13 years old, Hillary Norskog showed maturity and a sense of responsibility for her age. This is why that summer, she let Hillary Norskog socialize more with her friends and allow more freedom for her daughter. 

Remembering Hillary Norskog through her friends

A 13-year-old who was just starting to find her footing in the world, and a girl who was admired by everyone, this is how Hillary Norskog’s friends think fondly of her after her sudden and sad demise.

One of Hillary Norskog’s classmates named Mario De Falco fondly remembers Hillary as being a girl who started stepping out of her shell more during her time in 7th and 8th grade. According to him, by 8th grade, Hillary Norskog was a motor mouth, meaning that she had built up the confidence to not stop talking. 

Another classmate of Hillary Norskog fondly remembers her for her beauty at such a young age. According to Jayson Mirabella, when Hillary Norskog started to grow more and become more mature, so did her beauty. She became really pretty and even started to gain popularity. 

What did Hillary Norskog’s friends think of her growing and changing

As Hillary Norskog started to grow, and mature she started to experiment more with life which is normal for most junior high school students to do just before they enter high school. However, this sudden change did not fair to well with a lot of her friends.

Hillary Norskog’s best friend Vikki Ostrowski stated that both she and Hillary Norskog were starting to worry that they hadn’t yet kissed any boys. They were the only two fourteen-year-olds in their grade who have not kissed a boy.

This desire to want to experiment led Hillary Norskog down a bad path according to Ostrowski. Hillary Norskog had often gotten into misunderstandings and arguments with a bunch of her friends who did not support her decisions when it came to attending high school parties and smoking marijuana.

According to Ostrowski, a couple of friends had even mentioned Marsha about Hillary Norskog’s bad behavior. Both Hillary Norskog’s mother and friends assume that the reason for Hillary’s desire to hang out with a bad path is because she was upset that two of her friends had just moved to a catholic school.

The memory of Hillary Norskog is survived by her family

Hillary Norskog may have died a tragic death over 27 years ago, but her case was just the start of a long murderous rampage that still burdens Chicago today.

Hillary Norskog is survived by her mother Marsha, and her father whose mother had an affair with and gave birth to Hillary Norskog out of wedlock. She is also survived by her two half-siblings, a 20-year-old brother and a 22-year-old sister.

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