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#Post#: 8006--------------------------------------------------
Re: MCDONALD COUNTY GRACE DOE: WF, 21-31, found hogtied near an
abandoned farmhouse - 2 December 199
DIR By: Akoya
Date: July 13, 2020, 2:30 pm
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HTML http://www.neoshodailynews.com/article/20110309/NEWS/303099826
McDonald County detective pieces together cold case
By Wes Franklin
Posted Mar 9, 2011 at 12:01 AM
And she has a witness. Or at least as close to one as she can
get right now. A woman has come forward who believes she may
have actually heard Grace cry out just before she was murdered.
On Halloween night, 1990, the witness was a teenager. She had
gathered with a group of other young people at a home just down
the road from the murder scene. They were preparing to leave for
a Halloween party when they heard “an old truck” with a loud
muffler roar down the road past the house. The teenagers came
out to investigate. In the darkness, they heard two vehicle
doors open. And then they heard a woman scream.
“They thought kids were playing,” Howard explained. “They yelled
back up the road there, thinking it was just other kids doing
things during Halloween. They heard another door slam and the
truck drove off.”
That witness account was not in any of the reports. It was given
directly to Howard only after she began working on the old case.
This is a miscarriage of justice. Why was the witness account
not part of the original reports? Should this case be reported
to the Missouri Attorney General?
#Post#: 8007--------------------------------------------------
Re: MCDONALD COUNTY GRACE DOE: WF, 21-31, found hogtied near an
abandoned farmhouse - 2 December 199
DIR By: Akoya
Date: July 13, 2020, 2:32 pm
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HTML http://www.neoshodailynews.com/article/20110309/NEWS/30309982
There was never any suspect in the unsolved murder case. But
Howard is confident that Grace’s murderer was local, even if his
victim wasn’t, and that he may still be around.
Nobody, Howard reasons, would drive down that particular country
road with someone they intended to murder, or with someone they
had already murdered and planned on dumping off, without first
being being certain they could drive back out.
“You’re not going to want to go down a road that you don’t
know,” she said. “It could dead end. If you’re going to dump a
body somewhere, you’re going to want to get back out there.
Also, nobody lived at the house where the body was found.
Somebody had to know that house was abandoned.”
#Post#: 9917--------------------------------------------------
Re: MCDONALD COUNTY GRACE DOE: WF, 21-31, found hogtied near an
abandoned farmhouse - 2 December 1990
DIR By: Scorpio
Date: December 19, 2021, 7:08 pm
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Identified as 22-year-old Shawna Garber of Topeka, Kansas.
HTML https://i.imgur.com/LHMg6XJl.png
Shawna as a child.
#Post#: 9967--------------------------------------------------
Re: MCDONALD COUNTY GRACE DOE: WF, 21-31, found hogtied near an
abandoned farmhouse - 2 December 1990
DIR By: Scorpio
Date: December 20, 2021, 11:40 pm
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HTML https://www.koamnewsnow.com/cold-case-victims-sister-talks-about-her-decades-long-search-for-her-sister/
Cold case victim’s sister talks about her decades long search
for her sister
MCDONALD COUNTY, Mo. – Earlier this week, authorities announced
that they had finally identified a woman found dead in December
1990 in McDonald County. Authorities believe the victim —
referred to as “Grace Doe” — was raped and killed, her body left
on Oscar Talley Road.
The case had gone cold for 30 years, until advanced DNA
technology lead authorities to the half-sister of the victim.
Grace Doe was actually Shawna Garber. That half-sister, Topeka,
Kansas resident Danielle Pixler, says she had been searching for
Garber for almost as long as the case had been active.
“I was told so many different stories. You did have a brother
and sister, and you don’t. And I was like, you know, I want to
know,” explains Pixler.
Pixler says she, her brother Rob and sister Shawna Garber went
through the foster care system and were separated at a young
age. So she doesn’t remember much about her sister.
“I remember a couch. What was on the back of the couch. And
there was two people that were siblings,” says Pixler.
Knowing that she had family out there, when she was 18 Pixler
started searching for her brother and sister. She found her
brother Rob after using social media to look for him, but Shawna
was still out there.
“I printed her pictures off, I randomly would get into phone
books all over, like California. I mean, you name it, I did it.
I was bound and determined to find her,” says Shawna.
She later learned that her sister had been in a foster home in
Garnett, Kansas. But she was surrendered back to the state, so
no one she talked to knew much more than she did about where she
could be. So her search continued — and after 28 years, it’s
over. Earlier this year, she received a phone call from
Lieutenant Michael Hall at the McDonald County Sheriff’s Office,
telling her that she could be related to the victim in a cold
case homicide from 30 years ago.
“I was like, ‘What?’ I thought somebody was like scamming me or
something,” explains Pixler. “I had to call him back to make
sure it was him.”
The McDonald County Sheriff’s Office had partnered with Othram,
a company in Texas that specializes in human identification for
hard to solve cases.
“The testing we do is literally tens of thousands or hundreds of
thousands of markers of DNA.” explains Michael Vogen, Director
of Case Management at Othram. “Using that data, we’re able to
generate really good DNA profiles that can then be used to
upload into various databases to find the closest of ken of the
source of DNA that we’re looking for.”
Using advanced DNA testing and forensic genealogy, the company
compiled a genealogical tree of people who could have been
related to “Grace Doe.” Pixler was on that list. So she was
asked to provide a DNA sample at the Topeka Police Department. A
few weeks later, the results were in. Grace Doe was her sister
Shawna.
“I was freaking out. I was overwhelmed. I was crying. I was
like, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe this,'” says Pixler.
So she had finally found her sister Shawna. And even though the
outcome wasn’t what she hoped for, it’s still a relief to get
some form of closure.
“We just needed that. We all needed that. And it was rough
because, yeah, I was having dreams and nightmares, you know? And
I just didn’t know what to think,” says Pixler.
Now that “Grace Doe” has been identified, investigators are
moving to the next step in the investigation — finding who
killed her. And while there are still a lot of unanswered
questions, Pixler wanted to share her story so that others in
her shoes don’t give up.
“Anything can happen. 50 some years later you could find out.
Don’t stop looking, don’t stop… I mean, don’t.”
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