—Underground Genius: How Alfred Beach Built New York City’s First Subway—in Secret. I submitted the manuscript to my editor at Island Press on December 4, slightly less than a year after I signed the contract and almost a year earlier than the due date. That means the publication date has been moved up from Fall 2026 to Fall 2025 (probably October), which I am very happy about.
—The Varadaman, Miss., Namesake Change Project. In November, I sent letters to the town’s mayor and six aldermen asking them to consider changing their town’s namesake from the virulently racist former governor James K. Vardaman Sr. to his much less loathsome son, the war hero James K. Vardaman Jr. So far none has replied. I am considering contacting media in Mississippi to get some publicity for the campaign.
—The Yasuo Kuniyoshi Citizenship Project. Not much to report on this front, though if you have not yet signed my online petition, please do so (and share it). This year marks the centennial of Kuniyoshi’s most famous and controversial work, Circus Girl Resting, which is a good peg for media pitches. Once the new Congress is up and running, I plan to resume the lobbying campaign.
—Determining Bosnia’s Highest Mountain. Exciting news on this front: Eric Gilbertson, a Seattle University professor who is also an expert mountain measurer has agreed to come to Botswana to measure the two contenders, Otse and Manolanong Hills, later this year (probably September). University of Botswana geology professor Boipuso Nkwae has agreed to assist with the project, so this might actually happen!
Finally, I have a new project to announce, one with a more serious bent:
An unsolved murder: In 1980, a 25-year-old college student was murdered in her Philadelphia apartment. But the crime occurred on the same day as another murder in the city that attracted much more attention from the media and police. Who killed Julie Revsin? And do police already have the evidence needed to solve the crime?
I recently stumbled upon a murder case that I’d never heard about before and about which very little has been written. The crime occurred at 4530 Osage Ave. in Philadelphia, Pa., on March 21, 1980. The victim was a 25-year-old University of Pennsylvania grad student named Julie Ann Revsin. The crime did not receive a lot of attention at the time because it occurred on the same day that the mob boss Angelo Bruno was assassinated in South Philadelphia. As far as I have been able to determine, the murder of Julie Revsin remains unsolved.
Contemporaneous reports give only a bare bones description of the crime. Revsin lived with her boyfriend, 32-year-old Thomas Wheelock, also a Penn grad student, in an apartment building called the Elvista, not far from the Penn campus in West Philly. The Elvista was occupied mainly by Penn students, many of whom complained about the building’s lax security, including a lack of chain locks on the apartment doors.
At 9:15 on the morning of Friday, March 21, 1980, Revsin and Wheelock left the apartment together, then went their separate ways. Presumably both attended classes, though one report (in the Philadelphia Inquirer, March 23, 1980, p. 22) quoted “sources close to the investigation” as saying Revsin visited a psychiatrist that day.
When Wheelock returned to the apartment at 3:15 that afternoon, he found Revsin face down on the bedroom floor, a butcher’s knife lying near her body. Her throat had been cut “from ear to ear” and her wrists had been slashed. Initially investigators suspected suicide, but an autopsy found that she had also been stabbed in the left side of her abdomen, and the coroner ruled her death a homicide. Revsin was wearing “only a blouse and socks,” but the autopsy showed no evidence of sexual assault. Neighbors reported hearing no screams or signs of a struggle emanating from the apartment that day. There was no sign of forced entry, suggesting Revsin may have known her attacker. One neighbor told the Penn student newspaper (The Daily Pennsylvanian) that after Wheelock found the body he said, “They killed her.” Who “they” might have been is not mentioned.
And, really, after that the trail goes cold. Neither the Philly papers nor the Daily Pennsylvanian gave updates on the investigation after the autopsy. As mentioned above, the crime took place the same day Angelo Bruno was assassinated with a shotgun blast to the back of his head while sitting in a parked car, his murder being one of the most sensational crimes in the city’s history. The Bruno murder sparked a wave of mob violence that would last for years. Perhaps it’s not surprising that, by comparison, the murder of Julie Revsin attracted little attention from the media and, it seems, investigators.
But I am a bit stunned by the utter lack of information about this case in the papers and online. I entered Penn in September 1984, less than five years after the murder, and during my junior and senior years lived less than two blocks from the scene of the crime, yet I never heard anything about it. I only learned of the crime when I recently went down a Philly mob rabbit hole and chanced upon an article about it in the same edition of the Inquirer that reported on the Bruno slaying.
If police still have in their possession the apparent murder weapon (the knife found near the body), it’s probably worth testing for traces of the perpetrator’s DNA. (As known from similar cases, the perpetrators of stabbings often end up cutting themselves while committing the crime.) I have contacted the Philly P.D.’s public information department to ask if the case is still officially open. If I hear back, I will post an update. But if the killer was around Julie’s age (25) at the time, he (or she) would now be around 70 years old, still relatively young considering the case is now 45 years old.
Here is a link to several articles about the crime from the Inquirer and Daily News. I’m curious to hear what you all think of the case, and any suggestions on how I could find more information about it.
That’s all for now, thanks for reading, and please share this with anyone who might be interested.
Matthew
Matthew- The New York City subway piece should be an interesting read indeed. Looking forward to it. Hope you're well this week, Matthew? Cheers, -Thalia