Brother of Teen Slain, Stashed in Garage Says Allegedly Abusive Aunt was a 'Tormented Soul'

The brother of a teenage girl found dead in a garage eight years ago said the aunt charged with abusing and killing her had a nightmarish childhood herself.

“There’s a reason why she was like that,” the former Joliet resident said of Taylin Hill. “It’s a shame how she grew up.”

Hill, 50, allegedly killed her 15-year-old niece, Erika Hill, and hid the body in a Gary, IN, garage. Erika Hill’s corpse was found in February 2007. Her body reportedly bore more than 170 healing injuries and scars.

In August, a relative of the slain teen reached out to a Gary detective and told him how Erika Hill was killed and where her corpse was stashed. The young woman was able to explain so much because she helped hide the body, police said. Taylin Hill allegedly forced her to participate, and the unwilling accomplice was too frightened to refuse or — until August — come forward with her secret.

After the story went public, another relative — a Joliet man who said his father and Taylin Hill were fathered by the same man — wanted to know how Erika Hill ended up living in Wisconsin with her allegedly abusive aunt in the first place.

“How did she get custody of the girl anyway?” asked Hill’s cousin, Demetrius Hill. “How come no one looked for her?”

On Friday, a man who said he and Erika Hill share the same mother explained why the teen had been living with her aunt in Madison, WI.

The man, who left Joliet nearly 25 years ago and now lives in South Carolina, requested to remain anonymous. He said he was born 19 years before Erika Hill and was long gone when the woman who had taken her in died in 2001. Erika Hill’s mother, who struggled with drug abuse, gave her up, the man said. Her mother died in 2009.

Her adoptive mother had no will, the man said, and within two days of her death, “Taylin took her out of school and brought her north to Wisconsin.”

“She officially stole her, for lack of a better term,” he said.

The man said he packed up his wife and two children and drove to Wisconsin to take custody of his sister. But the 9-year-old girl did not want to live in the south and preferred to stay with Taylin Hill, whom she considered a sister.

Taylin Hill also impressed him as a religious woman with a good job teaching special education. And with her own horrible past as a childhood victim of sexual, emotional and physical abuse, the last thing he expected was for Taylin Hill to mistreat his sister.

“I didn’t have any indication this was remotely possible,” he said.

While the man eventually lost touch with his much-younger sister, he tried to reconnect with her by searching on the Internet for Taylin Hill’s whereabouts. He was unsuccessful and now believes it was because he was looking for a Minnie or Marie Hill — the names Taylin Hill had gone by in Joliet and when she first moved to Wisconsin. She petitioned the Dane County, WI, court to legally change her name to Taylin in 2011.

“It was like she dropped off the face of the Earth or something,” the man said of Taylin Hill, whom he considered a “tormented soul.”

The man is now haunted by his decision to allow his sister to remain with Taylin Hill.

“We didn’t want to put her in an uncomfortable situation,” he said of Erika Hill. “And in hindsight, that would have been the best thing.”