The O’Fallon Police Department has only had to worry about one homicide in the last four years, but it took all those years to make an arrest.

The metro-east town, which purports on its Web site to have the lowest crime rate in Southern Illinois, was the site of an Eastern student’s bizarre murder on New Year’s Eve, 1999.

As Amy Blumberg, 20, from nearby Collinsville, worked in her uncle’s O’Fallon dance store while home on break, she was shot once in the head and died.

O’Fallon police first turned the killing of the Eastern junior and Sigma Kappa sorority member to the St. Louis Metro Major Case Squad, a task force of more than 400 detectives from homicide units in Illinois and Missouri, O’Fallon Police Capt. Jim Stover said.

The Case Squad, which has tackled tough murder cases for more than 36 years, usually zeroes in on one case for five days at a time before handing it back to the original police squad. It stayed on the Blumberg case for eight days, Stover said.

After that, one O’Fallon officer was assigned to work the case full time and a hotline for tips was set up.

“It didn’t get very many calls,” Stover said.

But as the four-year anniversary of Blumberg’s death approached, O’Fallon police were led to Edward “Eddie” Scott Phillips. The 37-year-old Mount Sterling man was in jail in Schuyler County for charges in Brown County, which does not have a jail. Police will not reveal what led them to Phillips, who is also going through a messy -and now public – divorce. They still think, as they said when the case broke, that the Illinois Department of Corrections truck driver did not know the family and consumer sciences major and Dixie Chicks fan.

Phillips’ arraignment in St. Clair County is scheduled for Jan. 23.