Photo courtesy of Detective Lori Howard and Dr. Katherine Ramsland
By Lorie Howard and Katherine Ramsland
Detectives in the McDonald County (Missouri) Sheriff’s Office have closed a 1990 homicide case based on extensive work on victim ID, plus information gained after a suspect’s death.
On December 2, 1990, a couple searching for cans discovered a skull on an abandoned farm on Oscar Talley Road near Lanagan, Missouri. Nearby were more bones and several items of female clothing: Lee jeans, a denim jacket, white tennis shoes, white socks, and a white T-shirt. A white towel seemed to have been wrapped around the decedent’s head, and she was tied with six types of bindings made up of ropes, cords, and coax cables. Due to decomposition, the cause and manner of death could not be determined, although it seemed likely to be a homicide.
The victim had no ID. She appeared to be in her twenties. She had extensive dental work, which suggested that someone had cared for her. The detectives dubbed her “Grace Doe,” because they believed that only “by the grace of God” would they learn her identity.
Police could only guess when the body had been dumped, based largely on local reports of a woman’s scream and a loud truck in that area on Halloween weekend.
Detective Lorie Howard and Rhonda Wise took over the case. Howard believed that the number and types of bindings were key to finding Grace Doe’s killer. One was MIL-C-5040H type II paracord, sold exclusively to the military, starting that year. Coax cable was used with computers, radios, and televisions to transmit data. Howard thought the victim might have been held captive, with the bindings added successively at different times.
Metal detectors used on the property located nothing of note, and a dental analysis failed to match the remains with documented reports of missing women. Foreign hair strands were found on the victim’s T-shirt, useful only with an identified suspect. The case went cold, but the detectives kept trying to get Grace Doe identified.
In 2008, Detective Howard had an image created by a facial reconstruction expert, Victoria Lywood, based on a CT scan of the skull. The results were entered into the NCIC system, NAMUS, and CODIS. This produced some leads, but none helped.
In September 2020, geneticists at Othram, Inc. requested the victim’s remains for DNA extraction. They uploaded the results of genome sequencing into public genealogical databases. In 2021, this led to three potential familial associations. DNA from Danielle Pixler, living in Topeka, Kansas, confirmed her relation to Grace Doe, giving the victim an identity. She was Shauna Beth Garber, age twenty-two. Her legal name from an adoption was Shauna Robin Harvey.
Shauna had siblings, scattered via foster care, who described an unstable mother who once had set the girl on fire. The extensive work on Shauna’s teeth and face came was the result of physical trauma. When Shauna was five years old, she went into the foster care system. She was adopted, but when the arrangement failed, she returned to foster care until she turned eighteen in March 1986.
Shauna’s brother, Rob, knew of relatives in the area where Shauna was killed who had worked at Hudson Foods, a chicken processing plant in Noel, Missouri. This was seven miles from the dumpsite on Oscar Talley Road. A social worker had told Rob that Shauna had gone to northeast Oklahoma, and the detectives learned that a work-program van transported workers from the Claremore, OK, area to Hudson Foods.
Knowing Shauna’s identity and probable location, however, did not link her to a clear suspect in her murder.
Howard and Wise were aware of the Kansas-based serial killer, Dennis Rader, known as the BTK killer, who was active in Wichita between 1974 and 1991 and who bound his victims with tape, ropes, and cords. He’d confessed to ten murders. A sheriff from Oklahoma who suspected Rader in a missing persons case from his own area contacted the Missouri detectives in 2023 to show them why he believed Rader was responsible for more murders than he’d admitted. They listened.
The Cold Case Links
The circumstantial case against Rader involved the several items: During 1990, Rader had worked for the Census, and he’d traveled in Oklahoma and Missouri. Oscar Talley Road is an hour from the area where he’d played on his grandparents’ farms as a boy. As an adult, he went camping and fishing in the area. He had a lengthy “project” list that showed he had targeted women outside Wichita. In 1989/90, he’d made a journal entry in which he’d expressed an intense need to kill. He’d considered abducting a woman he spotted who’d needed roadside assistance, but he’d been foiled. Thus, if he’d seen Shauna walking on the road, he might have picked her up. He liked to scout for abandoned farms, so he might have known about the one on Oscar Talley Road.
Rader had bound his victims with some of the same types of ropes used on Shauna, and he’d served in the Airforce, so he knew about military-grade paracord. Missouri had the death penalty, giving Rader a reason to stay silent about Missouri-based murders. Finally, among photos he took of himself engaged in autoerotic activities is one that shows him wearing items that resembled Shauna’s clothing. Rader had admitted to wearing clothing he stole from victims to enhance the sexual fantasy.
Yet there were also reasons to eliminate Rader as a suspect. The clothing in the selfie is not actually Shauna’s. Rader did not bind his victims to the degree of overkill that Shauna’s killer had, and he’d never used coax cables. There is no indication on Rader’s extensive project list that he had picked up a woman walking alone. He had no trophies or journal entries among items police had confiscated that referred to a Missouri victim.
Detectives Howard and Wise visited Rader. They offered him immunity from prosecution if he helped close this case. He denied any involvement. They noted that Rader grew visibly excited when discussing his own murders but showed tepid interest in Shauna Garber. He thought the person who’d bound and murdered her had been sloppy.
The Missouri team moved on. The detectives reviewed a suspect they had long considered, Talfey Reeves. Upon his death at age 58 in a motorcycle accident in November 2021, people who’d been afraid of him while he was alive had come forward. Howard and Wise gained six corroborative sources, including a witness to Shauna’s murder. Little by little, her tragic story came together.
On October 27, 1990, Shauna was walking along MO State Highway 59 near where she worked. Reeves and another man picked her up in a black truck with a loud muffler. Reeves worked maintenance at Hudson, so Shauna might have known him. The men seem to have taken her to a room where coax cables connected the TV. A towel and a cloth napkin found with her remains were consistent with those from a nearby resort. The men seemed to have used a coax cable from a TV to fasten the towel around her head, possibly to prevent her from seeing where they were taking her.
Both men lived near the abandoned farmhouse. High on drugs, they transported Shauna there, where they raped and beat her. Shauna’s screams alarmed them, so they made her redress before binding her with items from the back of the pick-up. Concerned that she’d talk, they injected her with a fatal overdose of methamphetamine. They left the body on the property. A person who overheard them describing what they’d done went to the property and saw the body. Too scared of Reeves to say anything, this person remained silent until after Reeves died.
In March 2024, after thirty-four years, the Sheriff’s Office closed the case. If Reeves were still alive, he would have been charged with first-degree murder. Genetic genealogy, which turned up Shauna’s siblings, gave her an identity. Solid investigation with physical evidence and witness reports provided the case resolution.
About the Authors:
Detective Lorie Howard started her law enforcement career two decades ago in the McDonald County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office in Missouri. She is an expert in CVSA examinations and her primary focus is on cold cases.
Dr. Katherine Ramsland teaches forensic psychology and criminology at DeSales University in Pennsylvania. She has published 71 books, been an expert commentator on crime documentaries, and written for multiple forensic publications.