Rutgers Class of 1971 Establishes Scholarship for Beloved Professor Murdered at the Height of her Career
Jean Wilson Day's killing in her Piscataway home has remained unsolved for 40 years
Forty years ago Jean Wilson Day was doing what she loved.The single mother had earned her doctorate in chemistry, a rare occurrence at the time. She was one of only a few female professors at the all-male Rutgers College. And even though she was born with a physical disability that required her to sometimes wear leg braces and rely on crutches to get around, Day kept going.
That’s what made it so heartbreaking for her former students, now 20 years older than Day was when she was brutally murdered in her Piscataway home. Here was a woman who volunteered her time tutoring disadvantaged students, working on environmental causes before it was fashionable, and encouraging students, science and non-science majors alike, to understand the importance of science to the world around them.
“I was absolutely devastated,” says Jim Savage, a 1971 graduate who took the lead in organizing his class to create an endowed scholarship in her name and is hoping to vastly increase the $75,000 in donations collected so far. “Such a dear, positive-minded, brilliant person who was so caring and motivated so many people, how could this happen?”
Law enforcement still can’t answer that question. Four decades after the popular chemistry teacher was found by her 10-year-old daughter bludgeoned to death in their home, no one has been arrested for the horrific crime.
“We try not to think about that day and how she died,” says her sister, 79-year-old Mary Ellen Warholic, whose distraught mother went as far as hiring a private investigator and the well-known psychic Jean Dixon to find her daughter’s killer. “We just remember how she lived, the wonderful person she was, and all the good she did while she was here.”
What neither Warholic nor Day’s daughter Ellen, who went to live with her father after the murder and lost contact with the Rutgers community, could have ever imagined was that anyone from that long ago would have resurrected the memory of her mother’s life to help future students.
“I had no idea the impact that my mother had made on the lives of so many people,” says Ellen Day, who remembers spending time after school at her mother’s Rutgers office and plans on attending the May 14 formal scholarship announcement at the New Brunswick campus’ annual reunion. The Jean Wilson Day Scholarship will be open to all students and be funded by the interest collected from the university’s annual endowment. It will be part of Our Rutgers, Our Future, the Rutgers University Foundation’s $1 billion fundraising campaign, the largest in the university’s history
Savage, like others whose lives were touched by Day, thought about her life and tragic death often over the last 40 years – so much so that five years ago he decided he needed to do something positive in her memory in addition to the annual chemistry department lecture in her name. He could think of nothing more fitting than a scholarship.
Wanting to talk to Day’s family about the idea, Savage, 61, thought it was inappropriate to just pick up the phone not knowing anything about what happened to the family after her murder. So, after doing an internet search, Savage found out that Warholic was a member of a Catholic Church in Boonton, called the church priest and asked if he could make the connection. Once they spoke, Warholic told Savage how he could reach Day’s daughter, now living in California.
“I was overwhelmed,” Warholic says. “I had always known my sister was a phenomenal person but to hear how many students felt the same way, my heart felt like it had wings.”
Joseph Most, who had been Day’s teaching assistant while he was a graduate student at Rutgers, cannot think of a more appropriate acknowledgment for a woman he described as a warm, caring, and vibrant person as well as an innovative and dedicated teacher who helped her students understand and appreciate the relevance of science to social and environmental issues.
Like Savage, Most, a 68-year-old chemistry professor at Bloomfield College, says he has thought about his mentor often, wondering what happened to Ellen and whether anything new had come about in the murder investigation. A few months before she died, Day asked Most to come to her home to take photographs of her and Ellen.
“I have thought about that day and of how Jean was just so suddenly taken from her daughter’s life,” Most says. “It was so incomprehensible that this could happen to this wonderful woman who cared so much about so many people.”
Although she was just 10 when her mother died, Ellen Day, the mother of a 16-year-old son, says there could be no better tribute to honor her mother’s life.
“My mother didn’t like to take credit,” says Day. “I think she would be very honored by this but very humbled at the same time.”
The Jean Wilson Day Scholarship – open to all students – is part of Our Rutgers, Our Future, the Rutgers University Foundation’s fundraising campaign.