In all of her years there, the worker at Jockey Club inside the East Chicago Elks Lodge had never walked home after work. She always sat on a bench inside the building's lobby, waiting for her ride.

But on May 15, 1981, about 10:30 p.m., something told her to get her things and leave. For some reason, she became very nervous on the walk to her East Chicago home.

She left the scene of what some consider Lake County's most notorious homicide.

East Chicago political rainmaker Jay Given was shot and killed in the building's vestibule around the same time.

Almost 30 years later, investigators say the club worker, or some unknown witness, still could be the key to closing the cold, politically charged case of Given's slaying. No one was ever charged with the murder. But evidence points to a high-ranking former East Chicago police official whom investigators say had a political beef with Given.

Trampled from the start

"It was a complicated case, and it had a lot of problems from the very beginning," said Ray Vukas, a retired Indiana State Police detective who worked the investigation.

Given had been among 400 people attending a Vegas-style fundraiser for political aspirant N. Atterson Spann. Given was shot in the back of the head, found near a lighter and the cigarette he was headed outside to smoke.

After the shot -- which people described as sounding like a firecracker or a heavy table falling -- Jockey Club employees and attendees of the fundraiser flooded the lobby area. Some stepped over Given's body to leave the building.

"The crime scene was trampled," lamented East Chicago Police Chief Gus Flores, who was the lead detective on the Given investigation.

Responding officers did not seal the scene and people there "were fleeing like a jail break," Flores said.

Solving the case would mean starting from scratch, recreating an unwieldy list of people attending the fundraiser or the Jockey Club downstairs that night.

With each interview came the names of new potential witnesses.

"They would talk to three people, after that, they would have to talk to three more people," said Tom Vanes, a former Lake County deputy prosecutor assigned to the Given case.

It was long, frustrating work trying to find witnesses, many of whom had little to say.

Who saw what?

Sitting in the East Chicago Police Department recently, Flores hit "play" on an audio tape player.

"A man just been shot," a woman's voice said.

"Right," the police dispatcher answered.

Flores, shaking his head, lists the unquestioned woman among his regrets and missed opportunities in Given's case.

"She had to see something, hear something," Flores said. "They didn't think about what she saw. We just dropped the ball there. That was our fault."

Former East Chicago resident John Fortener managed the apartments across the street, in the chillingly named Given building.

Fortener was around the corner when the shot was fired. "I didn't actually see him physically get shot," he said from his Naples, Fla., home.

"I didn't go across the street because I could see that something bad was happening there," Fortener said. "The sirens were already coming."

A shroud of fear quickly loomed over the investigation, and officers struggled to find anyone who saw anything.

Flores said many people thought, " 'If Jay Given can be killed, as powerful as he is, what can happen to me? I'm a nobody.' "

One woman, East Chicago resident Odessa Gamble, opted to spend 10 days in jail for contempt of court rather than cooperate fully with investigators.

According to Times archives, the fearful Gamble said she would serve the time, "if that is what they choose to do ... play games with my life."

Investigators said they thought the Jockey Club worker was holding out important information. The woman felt like a "lost ball in tall weeds, ... (and) just wanted to forget that entire night," she told police.

She had learned to see and not see, she said, because "in East Chicago, two people could be standing side-by-side, one could have his head blown off and the other would not have seen a thing."

Investigators focused on an East Chicago firefighter named Mark Warholic, who said he saw Given talking with a man in the vestibule shortly before the shooting.

After being interviewed several times, by police and grand juries, Warholic hired an attorney. He later moved to Florida.

Warholic, reached more than a week ago at his new home in Merrillville, declined to discuss the homicide.

Crime of passion or politics?

Investigators believed politics not only was the reason for Given's attendance that night, but also for his death.

He didn't usually attend those kind of political fundraisers. But investigators believe Given went that Friday in an attempt to bolster Spann's run against then-Mayor Robert Pastrick.

Given had served as the city's lawyer from 1963 to 1974. He resigned and had a falling out with Pastrick.

Robbery seemed an unlikely motive, as Given died with $300 in gambling winnings in his pocket.

"Anybody in city government has enemies. How do you not?" Given's friend Timothy Raykovich said at the time. "I just can't believe that this kind of thing resulted from anything with the city."

Given was the second of Pastrick's one-time associates shot to death within about a year.

"I really don't have much to say about it," Pastrick said last week of Given's death.

"Jay was a very good friend of mine," he said. "We had a long life together, we really did."

Police for years have said they believed Given had been in an argument over politics that turned ugly, and deadly.

A mangled bullet and shell casing narrowed what could have been a long list to someone connected to the East Chicago Police Department.

A blessing in disguise?

In the hours after the shooting, the bullet and shell casing collected from the scene were placed in a drawer in East Chicago's evidence room. They were not locked in the evidence locker, as was typical procedure.

Sometime before sending the pieces to the FBI crime lab in Washington, D.C., someone punched a larger hole into the shell's firing pin and carved grooves into the sides of the bullet.

Though damaged, the pieces still could be identified as being shot from a rare, .45-caliber Detonics. Investigators knew of only one East Chicago staff member who had access to the evidence and owned a Detonics: Deputy Police Chief John Cardona.

Cardona reportedly had asked another officer around the time of the killing how a bullet or casing might be traced back to a specific gun. The two variables the officer gave Cardona were the only markings tampered with on the bullet Given was shot with, Flores said.

The man of interest

In a June 4, 1981, statement to police, Cardona said he went to the Elks Lodge the night of the murder to talk to an East Chicago officer after seeing the officer's car parked near the building.

He saw Given that night, he told police, along with a slew of other city heavyweights, gambling at the upstairs fundraiser.

He described hearing a loud noise while standing in the Jockey Club somewhere between a Space Invaders arcade game and the bar.

He went to the lobby with other onlookers and saw Given, he told police, saying, "People were stepping right over him, going around him, coming in, coming out."

After the shooting, Cardona drove witness Warholic to the police station to take his statement, stopping along the way at St. Catherine's Hospital, where Given had been transported.

Cardona told police Warholic had wanted to stop.

In a separate statement, Warholic told police Cardona was the one who wanted to stop at the hospital, saying, "Deputy Cardona did not tell me the reason why we were stopping there."

Cardona told police he carried a gun with him that night to the Elks Lodge, a .38-caliber nickel-plated revolver.

Investigators say it was widely known at the time that Given had warned a change in the city's power structure would mean "Cardona would be walking a beat."

When asked what he would have to gain "in respect to job promotion by the death of Jay Given," Cardona told police, "None."

He called such an accusation "Absolutely ridiculous," East Chicago police records state.

On May 26, 1981, Cardona was administered a polygraph exam concerning the homicide at Chicago's Keeler Polygraph Institute.

Chief examiner Len Harrelson told detectives he believed Cardona "lied to all the relevant questions," East Chicago police records show.

Harrelson was "so certain Cardona murdered Jay Given that he is willing to testify in court," East Chicago police records state.

Cardona refused to take a separate polygraph concerning the tampered evidence. He has not been charged in Given's murder.

The Times attempted to locate and contact Cardona, who was last seen several years ago in Florida, through tax records and multiple listed phone numbers.

Local attorney Nick Thiros, whom Cardona hired to represent him during the investigation, said last week that he has not spoken to Cardona in years and has no idea where he is.

Thiros declined to comment on the case, except to call it "an interesting time."

Who was in charge?

Within days of Given's murder, the Lake County Metro Squad was brought in to help East Chicago, adding detectives from Griffith and Hammond.

It would be the first and only case the squad -- formed to help crack complex cases -- would investigate. According to Times archives, the unit was called off within three weeks of Given's slaying.

"The concept was a good theory, but in practice it didn't work," former Lake County Prosecutor Jack Crawford said of the metro group. "I don't think as a practical matter it was efficient."

Police records detail a rotating list of at least 10 detectives, a prosecutor and a special investigator assigned throughout the case.

"There were too many cooks in the kitchen," said Vanes, the former deputy prosecutor.

Problems arose, too, when those cooks didn't always agree on the investigation's direction.

Former Griffith Detective John Mowery and another detective, Robert Townsell, took Cardona to his polygraph at Keeler. That day, Harrelson told the detectives he believed he could get Cardona to confess, East Chicago police records show.

But Harrelson held back because of what he deemed an "unprofessional" disagreement between the detectives on whether Cardona was involved in the killing.

"Keeler was no slouch," Mowery said of the polygraph institute. While the test may not have been scientifically reliable, Mowery said, "It certainly can be used for lead information. (Cardona) wouldn't have been the first guy who took a polygraph test and realized he wasn't doing well and fessed up."

Mowery called Townsell, who has since died, a good detective. He couldn't recall why Townsell objected to the questioning.

Harrelson never pursued the confession.

"Definitely, it was a missed opportunity," Mowery said.

Trying to make a case

Given's case involved tricky evidence, and "You only get one bite at the apple," Mowery said.

Investigators had witnesses reluctant to speak, or whose own character or records made their credibility shaky.

One potential witness was a criminal who admitted he had been at the Elks Lodge that night to steal cars. East Chicago city officials were known to have some of the fanciest, he told police.

Another informant wore a wire tap trying to glean valuable information from a prostitute who may have known about the shooting. But the informant later was arrested on a separate charge, police records show.

In the fall of 1981, as a $5,200 reward circled for information on Given's death, investigators began holding a series of grand juries to collect and clarify witness statements.

Nearly a year after the killing, Crawford hired Hammond federal Judge Joe Van Bokkelen, then a private attorney, to work the case.

Even facing a mountain of circumstantial evidence, "I thought we had a case," Van Bokkelen recalled. "It would have been a very, very tough case."

But he considered himself a special investigator, not a special prosecutor. A title of special prosecutor would have suggested more authority to pursue an indictment or charges than Van Bokkelen believed he had.

"I would not have charged without his approval," Van Bokkelen said of Crawford.

Jeff Given, Jay's son, places sizable fault on Crawford's shoulders for the case never being charged.

"Who's to blame? Jack Crawford is to blame," Jeff Given said. "The unsolved mystery does not seem to be who did it. The unsolved mystery seems to be why nothing was ever done."

Crawford defends his handling of the case.

"I never felt like there was enough evidence to charge," he said. "I felt it was close, but that it never crossed the threshold."

Other prosecutors have followed him, Crawford noted. "If there's enough evidence, they can charge (someone) now, if it's so obvious," he said.

Jon DeGuilio, who served as prosecutor after Crawford, said recently he could not recall if his office did any extensive review of the case.

Amid a tightened budget, current Lake Count Prosecutor Bernard Carter is handling multiple death penalty-caliber criminal cases. Carter did not return a call seeking comment.

Jeff Given expressed dismay that as numerous East Chicago political figures faced criminal charges in the years after his father's death, no one "traded information about my dad in an effort to buy a better deal for themselves. I thought that was a moment that that could have happened, and it didn't."

A shattered family

The day after Given was killed, a bullet whizzed through the living room window of the family's second-floor apartment in East Chicago. The incident intensified the fear of the already shaken family.

"We were all scared about why this happened, and what happened," Jeff Given said. "It affected us in every imaginable way."

Someone began making mysterious phone calls to the Given home, saying they would only tell Phyllis Given about her husband's killer.

Jeff Given condemned a "conspiracy of silence" throughout the county as hampering the chances of identifying his father's killer.

"There were a lot of people out there who called themselves friends of my dad who didn't seem to be doing something particular that they could have done to bring his killer to justice.

"My mom lost her husband, who she loved very much. We lost a father who we loved very much," Jeff Given said.

Jay Given would miss his children's weddings. He would never meet his grandchildren. His widow died last summer.

Holding cautious hope

Most people connected to the case express little hope that it might ever be closed.

"I don't have any realistic expectation that that's going to happen, for lots of reasons, including the age of the case," Jeff Given said.

Wearing black rubber gloves about a week ago, Flores ripped open a brown evidence bag full of Jay Given's clothes.

The pants, shirt, coat and tie were tattered dry with age. They remained in good condition, along with Given's black shoes and the keys to his Mercedes.

Flores calls the case one of the county's most notorious, but "one of the more solvable."

For a long time, Flores used to dream about Given's case -- about finally seeing it wrap.

"I think before I leave this Earth, I'm going to find out who did this," he said recently.

But for some frightened witnesses, nearly 30 years does not cure a fear of retaliation, including for the Jockey Club worker.

"If there is a key to the case, it's her," said Vanes, the former deputy prosecutor.

The worker's daughter, whom The Times located in Fort Wayne, wouldn't give her name and said she did not want her mother to discuss the case.

"I wouldn't dare let no one open up a can of old worms like that," she said. She said her 80-year-old mother now lives in a Texas nursing home.

"If my mama testified and said she seen something, who's going to look out for her 24/7?" she asked. "I think people are wrong for digging up skeletons."

If you have information about Jay Given's 1981 killing, contact the East Chicago Police Department Detectives Bureau at (219) 391-8462 or the anonymous tip line at (219) 391-8500.