McDonald County investigators identify suspect in 34-year-old cold case
Mar. 21—PINEVILLE, Mo. — McDonald County Sheriff's Office investigators say they have solved a 34-year-old cold case.
The Sheriff's Office identified Talfey Reeves, who was 58 when he died while riding a scooter in November 2021, as the suspect in the 1990 murder of Shawna Garber, 22 at the time of her death.
Reeves died on Nov. 15, 2021, on U.S. Highway 71 at Jane in McDonald County, according to the Missouri State Highway Patrol. He was operating a southbound scooter and attempting to make a U-turn when he entered the path of a southbound car and was struck.
McDonald County detectives Lorie Howard and Rhonda Wise have been pursing the case for years, and said that because of statements, witnesses and other information from sources, they are now confident they know what happened.
On Dec. 2, 1990, a couple came upon decomposed remains in the carport of a vacant farmhouse along Oscar Talley Road in McDonald County.
The woman had been hog-tied, with bindings about her legs. She appeared to have been in her 20s or early 30s. The pathologist believed she may have died as much as a month or two before her remains were found.
Investigators turned up a witness at the time who recalled hearing a woman scream in that vicinity on Halloween night. An autopsy suggested she may have been raped and strangled, but no definitive cause of death was determined at the time.
Her dental work was charted, but all efforts to identify her and find out how she was killed came to dead ends. She gained the nickname "Grace Doe" when investigators recruited a facial reconstruction expert in 2009 to develop a photographic likeness of her through magnetic resonance imaging of her skull. Howard said she was told when she went public with the pictures that it would be "only by the grace of God" that the victim would ever be identified.
The pictures and publicity generated a number of leads over the ensuing years, none of which led to any matches of dental records or DNA.
Finally, in 2021, the McDonald County Sheriff's Department announced that Grace Doe had been identified through advanced DNA testing conducted by Othram Inc., a state-of-the-art DNA laboratory in Houston. The remains turned out to be those of Garber.
Investigators now believe Reeves picked up Garber at the Tanglewood/Ginger Blue resort, bound her, overdosed her with drugs, and sexually assaulted her.
In a press release, investigators said if Reeves were still alive today he would be charged with first-degree murder.
Garber was 22-year-old woman who had been in foster care in Garnett, Kansas, as a child and was last believed to have been returned to the custody of the state of Missouri.
Howard said Garber had a "tough life," including being set on fire with kerosene by her mother when she was 5 years old. She underwent multiple surgeries and a failed adoption before eventually aging out of the foster care system in Kansas.
"What I like to say about Shauna is that she was invisible from Day 1," Howard said.
She had a half brother who wrote to her, told her that he loved her and invited her to live with him, Howard said. But "true to form, those letters were never given to Shauna," she said.
"When she aged out, she didn't think she had a person in the world," Howard said. "This young lady, I say she's invisible, in that no one took a photo of her."
