Unsolved Crimes | 'I think of her as someone that fought'

May 25—CHAMPAIGN — Helen Melchi's family members still show emotion in their voices upon recalling what the family matriarch meant to them.

A pillar of support that her children were always able to lean on. A loving grandmother who kept up with her grandkids during water-balloon fights well into her 70s. A skilled, active gardener who had a penchant for growing thriving plants.

Those close to the longtime community fixture cherished all these qualities and more until July 1, 2003. That's when Melchi, just two days shy of her 85th birthday, was found dead in the bathtub of her Champaign home, bound and gagged after a robbery gone terribly wrong.

"She would have done anything for anyone, and I think she got taken away too soon," said her daughter, Sandy Hammershmidt. "But hopefully things will change and someone will actually realize — I realize it's been 20 years ago and I need to probably think that they're not going to come forward. But I keep hoping that maybe they will."

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Mrs. Melchi spent much of her life in the small, two-story house at 1301 N. Hickory St. just north of downtown Champaign.

She lived there for some 40 years, many of which came well after her husband, Charles, passed away in 1980 and her children, Sandy and Ed, had moved out to start families of their own.

Generations of family members have warm memories of visits to that house, including Sandy's two children, Jared and Kiel, and Ed's four kids, Megan, Page, Adam and Quinn.

"That was really a nice area there," Sandy Hammerschmidt said. "Lots and lots of people, everybody got along together. We actually had other family that lived down the road from us on Hickory. Just had a lot of good neighbors. Not a lot of kids, but good neighbors."

Mrs. Melchi — who worked both as a waitress and for Kit Moss Productions for a "relatively long time," as Ed Melchi recalls — would play a restaurant game with the grandkids as they grew up.

"She was always excellent about doing that," her son said. "I remember (hearing) 'Let's go to Grandma's and play restaurant,' and they would do that. There were times when they baked cookies together."

And her two children weren't the only ones to call that house home growing up.

Page — one of Ed Melchi's four children — lived with Mrs. Melchi for a brief stretch of time. All of her grandchildren were frequent visitors.

"I can't remember just how long it was (they lived together), a number of months," Ed Melchi said. "They had an answering machine, and if you called and no one was there to answer it, it would be 'This is Page and Helen, you know, leave a message,' kind of thing. I always just thought that was nice. And of course Mom didn't charge her anything to live there."

None would stop by more often than Jared Hammerschmidt, Sandy's oldest son, who now resides outside of Effingham with two kids of his own.

He and his mother remain vigorously protective of Mrs. Melchi's legacy.

If Jared Hammerschmidt has taken any positive from 21 years of anguish and uncertainty, it would be that the Hammerschmidt family has come closer together.

"Mom and I did not see eye to eye as I grew up because we're similar personalities," he said. "But now, (and) even through that whole time, it's probably not good for you to get between her and I, because we will go to bat for each other."

Two days before Mrs. Melchi's 85th birthday, Jared Hammerschmidt — then a student at Eastern Illinois University — paid her a visit for lunch, as he often did.

"Twenty years later, it's still raw," he said. "I can tell you what I wore that day, I could tell you what we had for lunch that day. I can tell you the entire day. But mind you, I couldn't tell you what I had for lunch yesterday.

"That day is really just burned into the back confines of my mind, I guess."

In the hours after her grandson departed that afternoon, Mrs. Melchi was on the wrong end of one of the most brutal crimes in Champaign history.

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Champaign police Detective Robb DeLong envisions Mrs. Melchi's murder as a robbery gone awry in the hours after Jared left, which led to a struggle and a gruesome discovery when Sandy and her husband were informed by her mother's neighbors that something seemed off.

Jared isn't sure that victim is the right word, though.

"For 20 years, I think we've all called her a victim of violence," he said. "And that is one thing that I think over the course of her life, she never thought of herself as a victim. She went through some rough times, and I think of her as someone that fought. ... Even that day, I have full faith she fought to the point where she couldn't fight no more.

"She's a fighter that just lost, unfortunately. But I think anybody would lose in a fight with five-plus grown men against an 85-year-old woman, or an 85-year-old person."

Warning signs were quick to pop up as the afternoon progressed. Mrs. Melchi's newspaper hadn't been brought inside as usual. Her garage door remained up, another red flag.

Mrs. Melchi often spent afternoons outside gardening, just as her daughter now likes to do.

"I don't have her flower touch, though," Sandy Hammerschmidt said with a laugh.

But Mrs. Melchi — who had previously been assaulted in her home shortly after her husband passed away — was always careful to secure her home.

"She was a creature of habit about keeping the house locked up," DeLong said. "So when they get there, and the house is unlocked, you know, they're obviously starting to think the worst, but having no idea what the worst might actually be."

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Nearly five years of ups and downs followed Mrs. Melchi's murder as the case moved through the legal process.

William Lee was arrested and charged with first-degree murder in January 2004. Ramone Roebuck was arrested some three weeks later on the same charge.

Lee was convicted on Sept. 16 that year, while Roebuck was released from custody on Jan. 5, 2005, because the state hadn't proceeded with his trial quickly enough.

But after issues with Lee's admission of guilt emerged, he was granted a new trial in May 2005. He never stood trial again after being released from jail a month later.

In 2007, Roebuck's charges were dismissed. And in January 2008, an Illinois appeals court upheld the decision to suppress the statements that Lee — who died in 2020 — originally gave to police.

"Obviously I wasn't in the interview room, not really sure what happened," DeLong said. "I believe there were some questions about William Lee's mental capacity and whether he fully understood necessarily and was freely and willfully giving his admission. So whatever the details on that were, the judge overturned the conviction based on that."

Champaign County State's Attorney Julia Reitz told The News-Gazette in 2019 that charges could still be brought against others in the case because nobody else had been convicted, and thus double jeopardy wouldn't come into play.

And Champaign police still have an array of evidence from Mrs. Melchi's house in their possession, though the department's crime-scene unit was relatively new in 2003.

"This was a big case, so it was actually a combination of our crime-scene unit and the state police crime-scene unit that came in," DeLong said. "They spent three days in Helen's house trying to make sure they didn't miss anything. The crime-scene unit at the time had to be talked off the ledge of actually taking the bathtub where she was found out of the house; they processed that. But they did take the kitchen sink."

The ability to test evidence for DNA has come a long way in the last two decades as well.

DeLong recently loaded up his car with several items and drove to Deerfield Beach, Fla., to have them tested by DNA Labs International, a private lab that has the capability to use STRmix technology, which touts itself as helpful in resolving once-unresolvable DNA profiles.

"Some of the items, there was nothing that could be done, nothing could be found," DeLong said. "It's not TV or the movies where everything has the suspect's DNA easily recoverable. We do have a DNA profile that was taken from one of the items that we submitted down there, it was a mixture with male DNA. We know Helen's DNA and we've been able to extract her from it. We do have a male DNA profile."

Because DNA Labs International is a private lab, though, it doesn't have access to the same indexing systems that law enforcement does.

"After I took all this stuff down to Florida, the state lab was also able to reprocess some of their stuff several years later, because they got online with the STRmix that I was speaking about," DeLong said. "They also were able to get a male DNA profile. So we're not sure if it's the same male DNA profile, they have one place or the other. And then there's just some testing that's going on with that right now."

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The term "cold case" is often thrown around to describe cases like Mrs. Melchi's and others where a frustrating amount of time elapses before a definitive answer emerges.

But that implies detectives like DeLong aren't continuing to think about them and look for fresh leads.

"I know from my own personal experience, we own those cases," DeLong said. "They take time away from our family, we lose sleep, it's just a huge thing. So I know that it wasn't what wasn't done. It's now what could be done."

DeLong — who became a police officer in 2005 — isn't the first detective assigned to the Melchi case, which he took over about six years ago.

"I sat down and met with the original detective, his name was Don Shepard," DeLong said. "He remembered this case like it was yesterday. ... I expected him to be kind of rusty on it, because he hadn't looked at it for a long time. And he was remembering specifics about interviews and all that kind of stuff. So it's really one of those things that you own when you do it."

True crime as a genre has exploded since Mrs. Melchi's murder with the advent of podcasts, television shows and online blogs dedicated to unsolved cases and crimes of sensational circumstances. That spotlight isn't necessarily a source of comfort for Mrs. Melchi's family.

"I've changed a lot of even my TV programming," Jared Hammerschmidt said. "I used to be a big 'Criminal Minds' watcher, and I just can't do those things anymore, because the meanness in the world, I just can't stand anymore."

It doesn't take much information for detectives to get a better picture of the case, according to Dawn Coyne Trimble, vice president of Champaign County Crime Stoppers. Detectives have more information about cases like Mrs. Melchi's than people might realize.

"Just a little piece of information that maybe somebody doesn't realize is important can help a case, because we don't know all the pieces," Trimble said. "And not all of the pieces are released to the public, either. The police officers know what's happening within that case, and how those pieces all fit together like a puzzle."

Tips can be left anonymously with Crime Stoppers by calling 217-373-8477, going online to or using the free "P3 Tips" mobile app.

"That's the crux of Crime Stoppers is that we keep you anonymous," Trimble said. "I think sometimes people think that we don't do that. But we do, we spend a lot of money in order to make sure that you're anonymous. ... There's no way for us to trace your IP address, we cannot trace your phone number. There's so many different layers of security to be sure that whoever's giving this information is anonymous."

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Much has changed since that fateful day in 2003. Mrs. Melchi would now have 15 great-grandchildren that she never got the chance to meet.

"That's something I've really instilled in our family, my wife and I with our kids," Jared Hammerschmidt said. "You've got to know your past, you've got to pass all that stuff on, and there was stuff that she passed on to me. She was a pivotal person in my life at that time."

Melchi would have celebrated her 106th birthday on July 3. Her family knows it is likely she wouldn't be around today even if the circumstances were different. But that doesn't lessen the sting of spending time with her halted so suddenly — and in such a brutal fashion.

"I think it's just those lost years that saddens me, like what else could I have learned?" Jared Hammerschmidt said. "How could she have touched somebody else's life? Even at the age she was, I mean, she still was kind in her community in that neighborhood. ... I'm sad for the people that missed the opportunity of getting blessed by something she could have done for them."

Just as Mrs. Melchi wasn't around to meet her great-grandchildren, she wasn't around to mourn her grandson Adam's passing in 2018.

"His death kind of replaced hers to some extent as far as honoring, if you will, but we always think about it," Ed Melchi said. "I think about it and our former daughter-in-law, her birthday is right in that same timeframe. So you kind of think about (her) birthday and then you think about Mom's birthday and it kind of all comes together again."

Watching the two initial suspects, Lee and Roebuck, work through the legal system took a toll on the family. More than 20 years removed from the murder and nearly 16 years since Lee's overturned conviction, another trial would sting differently.

"I'm speaking strictly from my standpoint, not my family's or my mom's, nobody's standpoint," Jared Hammerschmidt said. "I hate to say it this way, but I hope nobody ever comes forward, namely because I don't want to ever go through another trial.

"I never want to be in another courtroom where I have to see my dad testify of what he saw. Or my mom. I, at this point in life, I don't want my kids to see what that potentially could do to their dad.

"I've grown strongly in my faith over time. And no judge here on earth will ever judge to the level that they need to be judged on. And I'm good with them living out whatever days they have and being judged for eternity."

Other family members view it differently.

"We wish wholeheartedly that at some point, this thing would be solved," Ed Melchi said. "And we would know for sure who did what, and I know we'll never know the why. I think the why was just theft and it went beyond that."

Tips sought

If you have information related to Helen Melchi's murder — or another unsolved case — contact Champaign County Crime Stoppers at 217-373-8477 or or via the free "P3 Tips" mobile app.