Suspect in McDonald County cold case identified

Mar. 21—PINEVILLE, Mo. — Detectives announced Thursday that they have determined who killed a young woman whose remains were discovered 34 years ago in McDonald County and went unidentified as a "Grace Doe" until 2021.

The badly decomposed corpse, eventually identified as 22-year-old Shauna Garber, was discovered Dec. 2, 1990, outside an abandoned farmhouse on Oscar Talley Road. Both her arms and one leg were bound with cords, and she had a towel secured over her head with a coaxial cable.

"We are 100% certain we got the guy," Lorie Howard, a McDonald County sheriff's detective, said at a news conference called to report their findings. "What breaks my heart is: He's not still alive."

Howard, who first began looking into the cold case in 2008, and Detective Rhonda Wise, who later began assisting her, announced that they now have six sources, including two witnesses, whose information corroborates their belief that Talfey Reeves, an ex-convict, raped and killed Garber.

Reeves died in a motor vehicle crash Nov. 15, 2021, at the age of 58. If he were still alive, the detectives said, he would now be facing first-degree murder charges. They said Reeves has been a suspect in the case for years, but their ability to bring charges while he was still alive was hindered by sources' reluctance to speak with law enforcement out of fear for their own safety.

"Rest assured, we still have people today who are afraid to talk about this man who is no longer with us because there's other people still around," Howard said.

She said it took years of going back to sources investigators felt certain knew pertinent information about the slaying. A minor who was with Reeves and witnessed the crime refused to fill in the blanks about what she had seen when questioned in 2010, 2015 and 2017 out of fear of what might happen to her, Howard said. But she did eventually give up what she knew after Reeves had died.

The detectives said that witness and five other sources of critical information came forward separately and without knowledge of what the others had told them.

Howard said investigators now have independently verified information that Reeves picked up Garber, whose legal last name was Harvey, on U.S. Highway 59 near the Tanglewood Apartments in Ginger Blue.

She was in a crew that had been transported to McDonald County from a halfway house in the Vinita and Claremore area of Oklahoma to work at Hudson Foods. Howard thinks Garber did not last long at Hudson Foods and was walking back to Ginger Blue from the plant rather than get back on a van that had been transporting the crew back and forth in Missouri.

She said Reeves took her up a hill to the old farmhouse in a loud, old black truck.

"We know who the truck belonged to," she said. "We know it went up the hill there and two doors slammed."

Investigators believe he used some cords that were in the back of his truck to bind her arms and one leg together behind her.

"He raped her, he bound her and he overdosed her (with methamphetamine) to shut her up because she was screaming so loudly it began to scare him in that valley because it echoed."

She said a second witness who heard what was happening left the area at that time but returned several days later and saw Garber's body. Investigators are confident that both witnesses are credible. One of them knew a detail about the state of the victim's body that was never made public, she said.

Identification of the victim's remains was problematic for years. Her bones disappeared for several years, preventing any DNA testing until they finally resurfaced at the Boone County medical examiner's office where an autopsy had been conducted.

Cause of death?

At one point in the investigation, the sheriff's office put out a statement saying that the autopsy determined Garber had been raped and strangled. While investigators now have credible testimony that she was raped, Howard said Thursday the announcement that the cause of death was strangulation was mistaken.

She had been dead about two months when a couple reported finding her remains, and the extent of decomposition ultimately rendered determination of the cause of death less than certain, Howard said. But there were no gunshot or stab wounds or signs of blunt force trauma.

Reeves had been a person of interest in the case since 2010. Early on in her investigation, former Sheriff Don Schlessman gave Howard a letter that had been received by the sheriff's office.

"It was a letter that detailed a very gruesome, horrifying death of a young woman," Howard said.

But at that time, they did not even know who their victim was, and its relevance to the Grace Doe case could not be confirmed. It was only later on, once the remains had been identified through DNA testing, that its details gained significance, she said.

Reeves never acknowledged any role in the crime while he was alive, Howard said. The last time she spoke with him, the detective told him that if he did nothing else to help her, she wanted to be the last person he called before he died.

"And he laughed and he smiled and that was pretty much the extent of what I got from him verbally," she said.

'We're not there yet'

The investigators said the case remains open with the possibility that others might have been involved in some manner. The names of the witnesses are being withheld for that reason. Asked if Reeves was being looked at as a suspect in any other unsolved murders, Sheriff Robert Evenson interjected at the news conference: "We're not there yet."

Howard said Reeves was a known drug trafficker with ties to Oklahoma and Arkansas as well as Missouri. He had served prison time in Missouri and was on probation at one time in Oklahoma.

Howard said he has been a suspect in an FBI investigation in Oklahoma that she could not discuss because it was not in the jurisdiction of the sheriff's office. Asked if that case might be the 1999 abduction and slaying of Oklahoma teens Lauria Bible and Ashley Freeman and the slaying of the Freeman girl's parents, she acknowledged that the possibility has been looked at by another law enforcement agency.

Danielle Pixler, Garber's half sister from Topeka, Kansas, attended the news conference and spoke with reporters.

She was just 3 months old when she, Garber and their brother were all removed from the custody of their mother and placed in foster care. Garber was set on fire by her mother when she was a child and bounced around from foster home to foster home in Kansas and Missouri throughout her childhood.

Pixler, 51, who has never seen her sister since the siblings were split up, believes Garber may have been trying to locate her first foster parents, with whom she had a good relationship, when she went to Oklahoma.

"I just want to know about her, what she was like, what were her favorite things," Pixler said.

She said she appreciates all that the McDonald County detectives managed to accomplish with the case but wishes Reeves was still alive so he could be punished.

The detectives are still looking to gather more information about Garber's life. They obtained a subpoena Thursday morning to get a look at social services records of the victim in the possession of the state of Kansas.

The sad thing is, Howard said, they still do not even have a photo of her, other than one as a toddler. All they have is a forensic reconstruction of her face developed in Canada with the aid of magnetic resonance imaging of her skull taken at a local hospital. That likeness turned out to be "a remarkable image of what she actually looked like" in the eyes of her half sister, the detective said.

She said she just wants to put a face on the victim she has worked for 16 years to identify and find her killer.

"She was only 22 years old, and I don't think she ever had an ounce of joy in her life," Howard said.