✨ The Jacklighter is out today. Thank you to everyone who preordered, shared, reviewed, and cheered me on. 🙏 🥹 Order links are here.
Today’s post isn’t mine. I’m turning the blog over to renowned thriller author J.D. Barker. And since this is where I have room to tell the whole story, I want to explain why that means so much to me.
How J.D. Changed My Path
I met J.D. at the Chanticleer writers’ conference in 2025, where I picked up a journalism award for my first book, Chained Birds. He’s an international and New York Times bestselling thriller author, and you may know him from his Fourth Monkey series and co-written books with James Patterson. J.D. publishes in every lane: indie, traditional, and hybrid. He collaborates with other authors and mentors writers who are just starting out.
In addition to being the keynote speaker for that 2025 conference, J.D. taught many indie-author-friendly workshops. He was one of the most persuasive voices I’ve ever heard on authors taking control of their own books, and he was a big part of why I got the rights to Chained Birds back from my traditional publisher just a few months later. Today my second book is out in the world, and I owe him a thank-you.
Why This Guest Post
In 2025, J.D. told me he was thinking about dipping a toe into the true crime lake. This year he dove in. His Substack series, Who Killed Me?, is up to 19 cold-case recaps, built with a TV adaptation in mind (details to come, he says). When I started reading them, I had to reach out. He told me these cases have been some of the most rewarding stories he’s ever put together. And he kindly agreed to let me share, for my book launch day, the one that spoke to me most: a Philadelphia case from my hometown.
The case is Julie Ann Revsin’s. She was a 25-year-old University of Pennsylvania graduate student, killed in her West Philadelphia apartment in March 1980. The case has never been solved. Journalist Matthew Algeo has been working to renew attention to it, and J.D. points you to his work below.
Now, over to J.D. …
The Girl Who Died on the Wrong Day
by J.D. BARKER
Originally published Sept. 19, 2026
Two people were murdered in Philadelphia on March 21, 1980.
You have heard of one of them.
Angelo Bruno, the Gentle Don, took a shotgun blast to the back of the head while sitting in a parked car outside his row house in South Philly. That killing detonated a mob war that ran for years and filled a shelf of books. Ask anyone in that city about March 21, 1980, and Bruno is the answer you get.
Here is the other answer.
Her name was Julie Ann Revsin. She was twenty-five. She grew up in Northeast Philadelphia, sang in her high school choir, made cheerleader, went out to Ohio for college at Lake Erie, then came home to chase a master’s degree at Penn’s Annenberg School for Communication. She had been dating a fellow grad student named Thomas Wheelock, and a few weeks earlier she had moved into his apartment at 4530 Osage Avenue, a building everybody called the El Vista.
Students filled that building. Students also complained about it. No chain locks on the doors. Security that existed mostly as a word in the lease.
At 9:15 that Friday morning, Julie and Tom walked out together and went their separate ways. It was gray. It was raining.
At 3:15 that afternoon, he came back and found her on the bedroom floor, face down. A butcher knife lay near her body. Her throat had been cut. Her wrists had been slashed. The first read at the scene was suicide, and you can see how a tired detective on a rainy Friday gets there. Then the autopsy came back. She had also been stabbed in the left side of her abdomen, a wound that does not fit a woman opening her own wrists. The medical examiner called it homicide. There was no evidence of sexual assault. She was found wearing only a blouse and socks.
And nobody heard a thing.
No screams through those thin West Philly walls. No struggle. No one spotted leaving the building. No forced entry, which means the door was either unlocked or Julie opened it herself, which means she likely knew the person who did this.
There is one more detail that has bothered me since I first read about this: A neighbor told Penn’s student paper that when Wheelock came out of that apartment, he said, “They killed her.”
They.
Not he. Not someone. They.
Nobody in the surviving record ever asked who “they” might have been. And for the record, Wheelock was never charged. He was playing basketball with friends at Penn’s Gimbel Gymnasium that afternoon.
The Philadelphia Inquirer ran a report on the psychiatrist Julie may have seen that same day, sourced to people close to the investigation. Then the trail goes cold. After the autopsy, the Philadelphia papers printed nothing. The Daily Pennsylvanian printed nothing. No follow-up. No suspect. No appeal for witnesses. A young woman was slaughtered two blocks from an Ivy League campus, and the city simply turned the page and talked about Angelo Bruno instead.
Julie Revsin was forgotten. She was buried by a headline.
Here is why I am writing about this now—
The case was resurrected almost by accident. A journalist named Matthew Algeo, a Penn alum who lived two blocks from that building in the eighties and never once heard the story, went down a Philadelphia mob rabbit hole and found Julie’s murder printed in the same edition of the Inquirer that carried Bruno’s. He has been pushing ever since. He wrote a guest column. He started a petition. He wrote the district attorney, the police commissioner, and the Penn police, and got mostly silence back.
Then something moved. Dateline reported that the Philadelphia Police Homicide Unit is reviewing Julie’s file for missed leads. Two detectives are said to be on it. The department declined an interview.
Which brings us to the knife…
That butcher knife was lying right there next to her body. People who stab other people very often cut themselves in the process. Blood, skin, sweat in the handle seams. In 1980, that was garbage evidence. In 2026, it could lead us to a name through DNA.
So the question is brutally simple. Is that knife still sitting in a cardboard box in a Philadelphia evidence room? And if it is, why has nobody swabbed it?
If the killer was Julie’s age, he or she is around seventy now. Alive. Possibly local. Possibly getting the paper delivered.
This one is solvable, and it needs people to make noise.
Start here. Pull the Inquirer and Daily News clips from March 22 and 23, 1980, in the newspaper archives; almost everything known about this case lives in five or six paragraphs of 1980 newsprint. Track down the El Vista’s tenants from that spring, who would be in their late sixties and seventies now, and who were never systematically canvassed in a record that survived. Ask about the psychiatrist. Ask who “they” were. Call the Philadelphia Police Homicide Unit, or leave it anonymously on the department’s tip line. Sign Algeo’s petition. Share this.
Forty-six years ago, a rainy Friday gave Philadelphia a choice between a mob boss and a graduate student, and the city chose the mob boss.
Let’s choose Julie.
If you have information about Julie Ann Revsin’s murder, the Philadelphia Police Department’s anonymous tip line is 215-686-TIPS (8477). It also accepts texts, and tips are confidential. (You can also text your tip to the short code 773847.) The Homicide Unit’s direct line is 215-686-3334 or 3335, and the Philly Police Department website has an anonymous online tip form. You can also email a tip to tips@phillypolice.com. Mention Julie Ann Revsin, March 21, 1980, 4530 Osage Avenue.
Subscribe to J.D. Barker’s Substack to follow along and catch up on all installments in his Who Killed Me? series.
Thank you, J.D., for the guest post and for the push. I have more guest posts in store, and if you’d like them in your inbox, subscribe to Crimemoir Confidential. ✨
