‘You won’t stay invisible.’ MO detectives say they’ve solved 1990 murder of Grace Doe

On Thursday afternoon, in the southwest corner of Missouri, authorities will lay out details of what they say happened to Shauna Beth Garber, including who killed her in 1990 and why.

And whatever McDonald County Sheriff’s investigators reveal will shed critical light on a mystery that has haunted the department and region for 34 years. It will also give two siblings in Kansas answers to what happened to their sister after they were separated from her while in foster care in the 1970s and 80s.

“I have so many questions,” said Danielle Pixler, of Topeka, Kansas, who was just an infant when she and her siblings went into Kansas foster care in 1973. “I think I just need answers.”

Danielle and her biological half-brother, Rob Ringwald, of Bucklin, Kansas, have searched three decades for their sister and didn’t even know she was dead until three years ago. As Rob put it: “There was always a hole. A missing piece.”

Then, in 2008, as he and Danielle continued to search, a McDonald County sheriff’s detective heard the story of a young woman, identity unknown, whose remains were found along a remote county road back in 1990. Authorities at the time found her body hogtied. They believed she had been raped and murdered.

Detective Lorie Howard took on that cold case, promising the woman she would not be left behind again. Howard soon would refer to her as Grace Doe after a friend told her that it may be only by the grace of God that she would learn who the woman was and who killed her.

First, Howard knew she had to give her back her identity — which she and others at the department eventually did in March 2021.

“Once I found out who she was, and the tragedy of her life, she was just invisible,” Howard said. “So I found myself constantly reassuring her, ‘I won’t let you down. You won’t stay invisible. People will know that your life was hard.’”

Howard further vowed that she and Detective Rhonda Wise — who became her partner in the investigation — would one day find out who killed her.

The road getting there would be long and include hours-long interviews with two high-profile serial killers, one of which was Kansas’ Dennis Rader, known as BTK (Bind, Torture, Kill). Both men were ruled out as suspects.

And Howard and Wise would wonder for years why no one reported the woman missing, though discovering that Shauna Beth was in foster care and became lost in the system answered that.

Authorities won’t even hint at what exactly they’ll disclose on Thursday. Only that, Howard said, “it will put an ending to this.”

“I promised her a long time ago,” Howard said, “that I wouldn’t give up on her. And I guess the only thing that I can say is I kept my word to her.”

‘Something happened to Sissy’

When Shauna Beth and Rob were little, they both had the same reddish tint to their hair. But when she was around 4, her hair started to darken and was more auburn than his.

Four decades later, it’s what the older brother remembers. He’s also never forgotten how Shauna Beth was “happy all of the time.”

“She had a big smile,” Rob said of the sister who is still that same little girl in his mind.

Rob was seven — and Shauna Beth was five — when the unthinkable happened. It was nighttime and he had already gone to bed.

He remembers his older brother, Roger, waking him up.

“‘Something happened to Sissy,’” Roger told him. They were going to their uncle’s for the night.

That uncle would fill in the details of what happened to Sissy, the same details later shared with Danielle.

The children’s mother poured lighter fluid on Shauna Beth and lit a match. The little girl was severely burned and was hospitalized.

Siblings were sent to separate foster homes, Rob said. Roger and Rob went to the same one for a while. The baby, Danielle, went to a foster home until she was about three or four. Then her godparents took her until she went to live with her dad a few years after that.

The last time Rob ever saw Shauna Beth was in March of 1974. The two had birthdays two days apart and caseworkers gathered them for a party. They had only been in foster care for a few months.

From there, they lost touch. One had a good childhood, an example of how foster care can improve a child’s life. The other, experienced the very worst.

When he was 10, Rob was adopted by a family who gave him a nice life in southwestern Kansas — “The whole family took me in like I was born to them. “

He never stopped thinking of his sister.

“I hoped she had found something like that,” he said, pausing for a moment. “It’s a good dream anyway.”

The search for Shauna Beth

When he turned 18, Rob wrote two letters to his little sister and took them to the child welfare office in Dodge City. His hope was that workers would get them to his little sister.

The first letter was to be given to her right away.

“It didn’t have anything but my first name,” Rob said, “telling her I was out here and that I loved her and I missed her, and if she wanted to come find me when she was old enough, I was waiting.”

He wanted her to open the second letter in two years, when she turned 18.

“It had all of my information on it,” Rob said.

And he hoped that one day, she would come find him.

Five years later, Rob married his wife Jodi, and he told all about Shauna Beth.

“She called different (child welfare) offices around the state,” Rob said. “Anywhere we found out Shauna had been ... my wife got a hold of them and talked their ears off. She made it her mission to find her for me.”

As soon as Danielle she hit 18, she set out to find her siblings, too. She found Rob first, and both searched on their own for their sister.

“I was putting posters out. Putting things on doors,” Danielle said. “I was calling people like, ‘Hey, do you know a Shauna Beth Garber?’”

At one point, Danielle found who she said was her sister’s first foster parents.

“(The foster mother) told me that when she moved in with her that her face was severely burned,” Danielle said. “ …. She had to wear diapers because she had wet herself all the time, because, you know, being frightened. Just in panic all of the time.”

As the siblings searched, they had no idea that a discovery on Dec. 2, 1990, in southwest Missouri, would change their lives.

On that day, a husband and wife were taking a Sunday walk after church along Oscar Talley Road in McDonald County and stopped to pick up trash. That’s when the husband saw a skull near an abandoned house. Animals had separated it from a woman’s skeleton.

The couple called the sheriff’s department.

The woman’s body was bound with several materials, including a phone cord, nylon rope and a clothesline. Her hands were bound behind her back and tied to one foot. She wore a light-colored T-shirt, size 5 or 7 Lee jeans, white tennis shoes and a jean jacket — but no undergarments.

In life, she stood between 5 feet 1 inch and 5 feet 4 inches. Authorities decided she was probably 20 to 30 years old.

Using DNA in search of family

In 2011, The Star wrote about Howard and her determination to discover the real identity of Grace Doe.

She had been working the case for three years and had just released the sketch a forensic artist in Canada had drawn. Howard felt she had taken a big step forward in finding Grace’s real name.

“I will find you,” she told The Star she thought at the time. “I will find out who you are..”

As she worked late into the night, on her own time, Wise — who was working as a corrections officer at the time — would come in to see what kind of progress she had made.

“She would sit with me during those early days and she became an invaluable partner in all of my cold cases honestly,” Howard said. “And then when it came time to go traipsing through the woods, or knock on the doors of scary people, she was right there.”

Neither one wanted to stop searching. And finding her real identity became critical.

Othram Inc., a forensics company, had extracted DNA and built a profile to find distant relatives. And in January 2021, Othram notified the McDonald County sheriff’s office that a list of possible relatives had been located.

Now, the sheriff’s department needed to contact possible family members.

‘We wanted to find her alive’

In February 2021, Danielle was at work, at a Dollar General store, when she got the call. The male detective on the other end asked if she could go to the back of the store and talk to him for a minute.

Soon, came his question: “Have you been looking for a lost sister?”

She immediately told him the story of Shauna Beth. And he asked her to submit her DNA to see if Grace Doe was her sister.

“I was bawling. I was crying. I was a mess,” she said. “We wanted to find her alive.”

About a month or two later, she got the results. Authorities finally had an ID.

Shauna Beth Garber was 22 when she was killed.

“It was as if I had found my sibling,” Howard said. “I kept Shauna with me for years ... and the whole goal was to find out who she was so we can find out who killed her.

For Wise, the moment was “surreal.”

“It was one of those things you always hoped would happen,” Wise said. “But you always had in the back of your mind that you may not be able to.”

Rob called Howard and asked her to come to the funeral. His sister would be buried in Bucklin, Kansas, next to Rob’s grandson who was stillborn.

The detective wanted nothing more than to go but knew she had too much to do.

“He was kind enough to call me back afterward and he said, ‘We have a headstone and she’s put to rest,’” Howard recalled Rob saying. “He said, ‘I wanted you to know that on her headstone it reads Shauna Grace Garber.’

“He said, ‘Because I realized she was Grace as long as she was Shauna.’”

Howard sat down and for the first time in the 13 years she had worked the case, she cried.

“Not just because she had been put to rest,” Howard said. “But because she was Grace as long as she was Shauna, because she was no one. ... I literally sat there that afternoon and cried and I thought, nobody deserves that.”

Waiting to hear more

Shauna Beth’s siblings are eager to hear what the two detectives and Sheriff Robert Evenson will say on Thursday.

Danielle wants to understand how the McDonald County detectives came to their conclusions. And why her sister was killed.

“It makes me feel better knowing I’ll be putting it to rest in my head,” she said. “I want to make sure they have the right person.”

She wishes she could talk with people who knew her sister. Maybe see a photo of her as an adult, so she can picture in her mind more than the smiling little girl frozen in a family photo or the woman whose face a forensic artist drew.

For Rob, it’s about knowing that his sister will see some sort of justice.

“The last three years have been, you know, kind of hell,” Rob said, “thinking that someone did that to her and was out there walking free.”

If only, he said, his sister knew that when she aged out of foster care that he was waiting for her. He always had been waiting for her.

“I love her and I miss her and I wish things had been different for her,” he said. “I know I was extremely lucky to get the family I did.

“I just wish she had had that.”

Thursday will be one of the last puzzle pieces for Howard and Wise. They gave Grace Doe a name, returned Shauna Beth to her family and now, will reveal who they believe killed her and why.

And, fulfilling a promise from years ago, Howard has made sure that Grace Doe is no longer invisible. That people will learn that Shauna Beth had a hard life. But also that she was loved.

“Shauna, bless her heart, was born under a dark cloud,” Howard said. “... She was lit on fire by her biological mother. She was adopted, only to have it be a failed adoption and go back into the system. She was in foster care here, there and everywhere.

“She aged out of this system, never knowing that her brother had written her letters, telling her you do have somebody who cares about you. She never received those letters. So she never knew that. She aged out of the foster care system and still didn’t know what she was doing in life.”

And that’s where detectives picked up her story. On Thursday, Howard and Wise will share more.