A Family’s Nightmare: Parents Stood by One Son, Lost Another : Illinois: Youth is accused of brutally killing his elder brother while free on $100,000 bond in girl’s slaying. Trial begins Tuesday.

On St. Patrick’s Day, Roger and Gayle Pfiel relaxed at a party--a respite from their waking nightmare, the murder accusation against their younger son that had hung over their family for more than a year.

They returned home to find a cataclysm.

Six squad cars and two ambulances lined the pothole-scarred rural road that separated their large and isolated Tudor home from a fallow cornfield.

Inside, their older son lay dead, beaten with a baseball bat, his throat slashed with a meat cleaver. A young family member, the one whose hysterical telephone call had summoned help, had been raped.

For a family that already had too much grief to bear, there was one more terrible blow in store.

Police told them it was not an intruder who was responsible for the violence, but Steven--the baby-faced, 18-year-old son who had been charged with killing a young girl 20 months earlier.

This was the son for whom they posted a $100,000 bond and moved the family to a rural home when the taunts and glares of neighbors became too much. He was the son who, days later, penned a note to his parents from a jail cell.

“Mom and Dad,” Steven Pfiel wrote, “now I’ve killed two people.”

*

“Wouldn’t it be cool,” Pfiel once told his friend Ed Prasauskas, “to stab someone in the head with this?”

In his hands he held a knife. He had pulled it from under the car seat, Prasauskas told the Chicago Tribune.

After the murders, those who knew Steven Pfiel searched their memories for indications of murderous rage in a boy who was reared in comfortable circumstances, in a ranch house under towering oaks.

Prasauskas, 18, remembered seeing his friend smash his stereo speakers with a pool cue; others recalled that he had been arrested once for smoking marijuana and drinking alcohol outside of his home.

Pfiel reveled in shooting pool, riding in fast cars and cranking up the volume when he listened to heavy metal bands. He ran with a fast crowd at Stagg High School, where his record was unremarkable.

“There was nothing in his activities in school that would indicate anything like this would happen,” said Jim Sibley, school community relations coordinator.

“He was a typical high school kid.”

*

Pfiel knew Hillary Norskog, though they were just acquaintances. Hillary was 13, about to enter high school. Eighth-grade graduation had come and gone; her Size 2 shocking pink and black graduation mini-dress had been dry-cleaned and tucked safely back in her closet.

She was just starting to spend evenings away from the watchful eyes of her single mother. On July 14, 1993, she kissed her mom goodby; she would likely party with friends, she said, and spend the night with a girlfriend.

“That summer was the summer I had to let her grow,” Marsha Norskog said recently as she thumbed through photographs. “She had always been so dependent on me. She was just starting to break the attachment.”

Hillary and her friends headed to Hidden Pond Woods in a nearby forest preserve. The teens sat at picnic tables, laughed, drank a couple of beers. At some point, Hillary apparently decided against spending the night at her girlfriend’s.

She left the forest preserve in time to meet her 10:30 curfew.

Friends say that Steven Pfiel, just turned 17, offered her a ride home.

Three days later, two people walking behind a subdivision of million-dollar homes not far from Hidden Pond found Hillary’s 80-pound body in a field of weeds. Beaten, stabbed and too decomposed to immediately identify, investigators recognized the Jurassic Park T-shirt her mother had described.

“She was so tiny,” Norskog said. “She never had a chance.”

*

Steven was arrested July 20 outside his family’s Palos Park home, a short car ride from Hillary’s condominium. He told police the blood-red stains that covered the seats of his 1988 Chevrolet were Kool-Aid.

He remained behind bars until Oct. 3, when his parents posted $100,000 of a $1-million bond.

From the moment of her daughter’s death, Marsha Norskog was determined to ensure that Hillary was not forgotten. She appeared on “Oprah,” tipped reporters to forthcoming events, orchestrated an elaborate memorial service for her and kept in constant touch with the prosecutor.

*

The petite, well-manicured brunette also took her share of criticism, mostly from those who felt she should have alerted police sooner than midday on Saturday--when she realized Hillary was not at a girlfriend’s house--that her daughter was missing.

“If you’d spent as much time on your daughter as you spent on your appearance, she’d still be alive,” an anonymous neighbor wrote in a note slipped under her door.

Although Norskog kept intense pressure on prosecutors and police, the case against Steven was delayed again and again as attorneys wrangled over DNA evidence and its admissibility.

The trial is now scheduled to start Tuesday.

Norskog was convinced of Steven’s guilt. Last November, as he left the courtroom, she leaned from her seat and hissed in a stage whisper, “Why don’t you go kill someone else? You’re already killing me.”

The Pfiels, meanwhile, sat behind their youngest son at every court hearing and continued to back him publicly.

Media scrutiny had become excruciating, and the Pfiels decided to move with their children to St. John, Ind., just across the state line.

*

They changed their minds after St. John residents learned of the plan--Norskog acknowledges playing a role--and mounted a letter-writing campaign to urge the Pfiels to go elsewhere.

The family settled instead in rural Crete, more than 30 miles from Palos Park. The 4,500-square-foot house was purchased quietly, for about $200,000 in cash, through the Pfiels’ lawyer. He referred to his clients by first name only, said sources familiar with the negotiations.

“We thought they were in the federal witness protection program,” said a neighbor who requested anonymity.

Other than a rowdy teen party late last summer, neighbors say the Pfiels kept to themselves.

By several accounts, Steven remained tight with his brother Roger, older by one year.

Roger defended his sibling against those who believed him guilty.

“They were really close,” said friend Shawn Baker.

“He was his only friend out there,” another friend, John Grigus, told the Tribune.

*

On the night of March 17, Roger and Gayle Pfiel left home for the 50-mile drive to Chicago and the St. Patrick’s Day party.

In the hours after they left, the Pfiel home became a slaughterhouse.

How it came to pass, police do not know. But at 7:13 a.m. on Saturday, they received a frantic call from a young female family member, asking for help.

By the time police arrived, Roger Pfiel was dead in a bedroom. Police say he had been bludgeoned and slashed.

The young woman who alerted police had been raped. Steven Pfiel had fled the home, taking with him his father’s shotgun and two rifles, said Will County Deputy Chief John Moss.

Several hours later, Mayor Michael Einhorn heard a knock at the front door of Crete’s tiny Village Hall.

“I need to talk to somebody,” said a young man wearing a black Metallica T-shirt. “I think I’m in some trouble.”

*

The mayor called police, who arrested Steven Pfiel. Sheriff’s officers say Steven made a full confession to his brother’s death but gave no motive.

Pfiel’s parents have not visited their son since the day they returned home to find their lives undone.

“It’s a tremendous loss,” said their attorney, Raymond Pijon. “I don’t think there’s any way to assess it. There are no magic words that make this go away.”

At his first court hearing after Roger Pfiel was killed, Steven was led through a phalanx of reporters on his way back to jail.

“Steven, do you have anything to say?” shouted one of the reporters.

Steven lifted both handcuffed hands, the middle finger on each extended upward.