The 18-year-old was found stabbed to death in her apartment in Nokomis, Illinois.
When Janelle Jaros looks at her daughter, she's reminded of another person close to her heart.
"There's times you look at her and you see Shana," Janelle told Dateline.
Shana Jaros was Janelle's older sister, the two were only a few years apart. They dreamed of growing old together, watching each other have children, children Janelle now has.
"My daughter at one point wanted to become an investigator, because she said she was going to solve this," Janelle said.
Janelle's daughter never got the chance to meet her aunt, but she knows the stories her mother has told her. The good ones, and the one that happened on November 1, 1995.
That was the day that left a permanent hole in the Jaros family.
That was the day that 18-year-old Shana Jaros was murdered.
Shana was the eldest of four siblings raised in Nokomis, Illinois. "Small town, U.S.A," Janelle said. "They closed our only Kroger's store but now we have two Dollar Generals," she said, with a laugh.
"She was just kind and giving and caring," Janelle said of Shana. "I looked up to my big sister."
In 1991, Shana started high school. Two years later, Janelle joined her. "I was her tag along. We did everything together," Janelle recalled. "If she didn't want me to, I'd make my parents make her take me."
She remembers those times fondly. Afternoons were spent riding around in Shana's black Camaro, cruising around Nokomis. "Alanis Morissette was played at ear-splitting levels," Janelle said. "It was really nice."
Duane Jaros is the siblings' father. He describes Shana as a bright spirit. "She was very tall, she was like 6 foot," he said. "People were not always kind to her, but she never -- she didn't do that in return. She never took it to heart."
By the fall of 1995, Shana had graduated high school and was working at a nursing home as a certified nurse's assistant, which the family says she started doing at just 16. "She was going to go on to be an RN," Janelle said.
"She said she either wanted to work with old people or children 'cause they were so much alike," Duane said. "She had a really good work ethic."
On October 31, 1995, Duane took Shana's 9-year-old brother to go visit her. By that time, she was living with a roommate not far from the family home in Nokomis. "She wanted him to come over for trick-or-treat," Duane said.
Duane watched his son walk up to the apartment and be let in by Shana. Shortly after, his son walked out with his treats. His son told him that Shana had some friends over. "She had on a blue housecoat and she looked out at the car," he recalled. "I usually would always turn on the light and wave and I didn't do it. It haunts me to this day."
The next afternoon, Duane got a call from the sheriff's office. He had just gotten off of work. "They said, 'Is this Duane Jaros?' I said, 'Yeah.'"
Duane says he assumed they were calling about Shana's Camaro which had been wrecked just a few weeks earlier. "I said, 'I think we got it all taken care of.'"
But the call wasn't about the Camaro. Duane says the officer told him someone was coming to the house with more information.
"I heard a knock on the door and I got up and there was a guy just standing there," he recalled. "He said, 'Your daughter Shana -- she's been murdered.'"
It's a moment Duane can never forget. "I went and sat on the chair and was kind of trying to get my breath," he recalled. "I said, 'I gotta call my wife.'"
Janelle, who was 15 at the time, remembers that day, too. She was home when her father got the news. "I was home sick from school that day, so I was upstairs sleeping," she said. "My dad yelled at me from the bottom of the stairs, 'Janelle! Janelle, they killed her. They killed your sister.'"
Janelle says she plays that day back in her head like a movie. "That will never erase from my mind," she said.
Duane's wife, Debbie, was at work at the time. She rushed home. "She got to the front yard and she started walking towards the door and she collapsed," he recalled. "All kinds of people were coming over and it was just crazy after that."
The Nokomis Police Department was the first to arrive at Shana's apartment complex. They are investigating the case alongside the Illinois State Police and the Montgomery County Sheriff's Office.
Illinois State Police Sergeant Melissa Albert-Lopez told Dateline in an email that in order "to protect the integrity of the ongoing investigation" they are unable to publicly share any additional information, other than what is provided on their website.
According to a post on the ISP's website, Shana was discovered just before 7 a.m. on November 1, 1995, in her apartment at 527 South Maple, Nokomis, Illinois.
The post says "a neighbor reported she heard a scuffle in Jaros's apartment at approximately 4:46 a.m.," and they did not see anyone leaving the apartment afterwards. It goes on to say that Shana was stabbed more than 50 times "from just above her breasts to her neck" and her death resulted from massive blood loss.
Duane say the family doesn't know why anyone would have wanted to kill Shana. "She was a happy-go-lucky child. Always smiling and always giggling -- the last person you'd think anyone would ever want to murder."
Duane had to lay his happy-go-lucky child to rest. Janelle had to say goodbye to her built-in best friend.
"I went to school with the coroner, and he called me up and said he didn't think he was going to be able to show her," Duane recalled. "I said, 'Please, I want people to see her one more time.'"
According to the family, the coroner did the best he could. He covered Shana with makeup and put a turtleneck on her to cover the slit in her throat. "It was so terrible you could even see it with the turtleneck," Janelle said.
The family says everyone around Shana was interviewed by police, especially those in her new circle of friends.
Janelle says that after graduating, Shana started hanging around with people she didn't think were good influences. "In high school, she wasn't really included, so she got in with a group of people that she wouldn't normally have hung out with," she said. "Then this is what happened."
The family says that was the group Shana was hanging out with at her apartment that Halloween night. Many of those friends have since died, according to Janelle, who says no suspects have ever been named in Shana's case.
Shana also had a boyfriend, though the two hadn't been dating long. "I didn't have the best feeling about them," Janelle said.
As the years have passed, the family's hope for resolution has dwindled. The family says they've heard from the Illinois State Police over the years, but there have been no updates.
Life has gone on for the Jaros family, but at a cost. "I had four pieces of my heart and they just took one piece away from it," Duane said of whoever took his daughter's life. And the pain of losing Shana eventually led to Duane and Debbie's divorce. "My wife was never the same person after that," he said.
None of them were. "Whoever did this to Shana actually did it to our entire family," Janelle said. "They killed a piece of all of us."
The siblings are all grown up now. Janelle and her younger brothers, Jeffery and Stefan, are all in their 40s. Their big sister Shana would have been 47 this year. "She'd be a mom, she'd be a nurse, and she'd be a great auntie to her two nieces that she never got to meet," Janelle said.
Although her girls never got to meet their auntie, Janelle says they know a lot about her. "We're not afraid to talk about her. We keep her alive," she said. In fact, Janelle named one of her daughters Jahna -- a combination of both her and Shana's names. She is the daughter who once said she hoped to solve her aunt's case.
A hope that remains alive in the Jaros family.
"I just want people to know that she was a real person, and she had a family that cared about her and we still care about her," Duane Jaros said. "She had a big heart. And when you love somebody unconditionally, that never goes away."
Anyone with any information is urged to contact the Illinois State Police, Zone 6 Investigations at (618) 346-3990, or Crime Stoppers at 1-800-352-0136.