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Post by Joanna on May 4, 2015 0:28:49 GMT -5
Brutal 1978 Murder of Alaska TeenagerOn a foggy Saturday morning in early January 1978, the body of a 16-year-old girl was found in a ditch off the Seward Highway. An autopsy would later determine she had been beaten, sexually assaulted, dragged by a car and then tossed down an embankment. Her broken fingernails suggested she had attempted to crawl back to the road before she died.
Later that night, police arrived at a party the girl’s parents were attending. They pulled the husband outside and spoke to him in hushed tones. He went back inside and nodded to his wife. She knew the news was bad before he said a word.
Thirty-seven years. On the day Shelley Connolly died, Jimmy Carter was president, Oil had been flowing through the Trans-Alaska pipeline for less than a year, and advertisers in the Anchorage Daily News offered fryer chickens at 89¢ cents a pound and an AM/FM 8-track recorder for $79.95.
Thirty-seven years, three months and 26 days have passed since then. But for Shelly’s mother, Judy Connolly, the clock is in some ways stopped January 7, 1978. Her daughter’s killer – or killers – have never been caught. And the last real chance for her case to be solved is about to expire. The Alaska Bureau of Investigations’ cold case unit, which investigates unsolved murders like that of Shelly Connolly, will be eliminated June 30 because of budget cuts at the Department of Public Safety. “It means pretty much that we have no hope,” said Mrs. Connolly, a 74-year-old tax-preparer, Texas Hold ‘em poker player and grandmother, who lives in Anchorage.
James Gallan, the trooper investigator currently tasked with the case, is blunt about what it would take to find Shelly’s killer today. The state has forensic evidence from the original autopsy that would link at least one suspect to Connolly’s body with DNA. Beyond that, all leads have been exhausted. “We need to get lucky on the DNA, or we need a witness to step forward and say, ‘This is the person who did this,’” he explained.
This flicker of possibility is why Mrs. Connolly again sat down last week with a newspaper reporter – something she has done roughly once a decade since 1978 – and discussed the facts of the case. Maybe someone will read about Shelly and remember something they know, or feel a pang of guilt. Perhaps someone will come forward. So Connolly is willing to again look at pictures of her daughter’s open-casket funeral, to remember the way applied green eye-shadow and coral lipstick to her Shelly’s face because it just didn’t look like her without makeup. To see the white gloves the funeral director wanted to use to cover her bruised, cut hands and the pink carnations in her nest of dark hair.
‘A typical teenager.’ Shelly was a loud, spunky teenager, born and brought up in Alaska. Connolly says she camped and fished with her family and doted on her younger brother, walking him home from the bus stop. She was petite. She didn’t seem to realize how pretty she was. “Just a typical teenager,” her mother recalled.
Shelly was also eager to get a quick start on life. She had dropped out of Service High School and was set to begin cosmetology courses. And she was engaged, at 16, to a man a few years older in the military. He was on duty at Fort Richardson at the time of her murder and was cleared of any involvement.
On the night she was killed, Shelley went to the well-known Anchorage bar, Chilkoot Charlie’s, even though she was underage. It was a unique time in the history of Anchorage: With oil freshly flowing through the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, there were plenty of young men on R&R with money in their pockets. Everything was greased with alcohol. At bars, “six-packing” was a popular pastime – ordering and drinking a six-pack all at once.
On the night of Friday, January 7, a thick fog permeated the city. Shelly went out wearing a top of which her mother disapproved – it showed too much of her bust, Judy Connolly thought – and the ski jacket her parents had given her for Christmas. At some point during the night, Shelley was seen leaving Chilkoot Charlie’s with several men. At least one person later reported seeing her at Leroy’s, an all-night diner on C Street. Investigators had a hard time establishing a reliable timeline of the night from witness statements, Gallan admitted.
Two female hikers found her body the following morning, 10 miles south of Potter Marsh along the Seward Highway. “They threw her out of the car alive,” Judy Connolly told reporters. “Her hand got stuck in the door. They were driving with her – she was still alive – and once they realized they were dragging something, they stopped and opened the door and threw her over the side. She rolled down near the train tracks. She tried to crawl up. You could see in the snow where she tried.” She ultimately died of a ruptured spleen and exposure. If they had just left her on the side of the road, somebody might have come along and saw her,” she added.
Shelly’s death never made the front page of the Anchorage Daily News. It jostled for space with the ongoing saga of a family of crooked fortunetellers being run out of town and President Jimmy Carter’s trip to France. In initial reports, her name was spelled wrong. This was a bad time for women in Anchorage. The year Shelley was murdered, seven other women were violently slain in the city.
The years pile up. The Connolly family thought the case would be solved. Then a year passed, and another. Years turned into decades. Every spring, Mrs. Connolly would check with troopers to see where the investigation was.
The biggest break came in 1993 when the trooper then investigating the case identified four suspects potentially linked by forensic evidence to the crime. The troopers traveled out of state to interview the men. Ultimately, DNA evidence cleared these suspects.
Later, a woman who claimed to have been with Shelley on the night she was killed came forward. “We got our hopes up then,” Connolly remembered. “We thought maybe something would come of that.” It didn’t.
Frustrated, Judy Connolly and her daughter Valerie began to explore different ways of generating interest in the case. They called the TV show Unsolved Mysteries. No takers there. Connolly once consulted a psychic. In 2011, a $20,000 reward for information leading to an arrest was offered. The years were piling up.
If she had lived, Shelley would have gotten married and started a family, her mother said. She’d be 53 now, maybe a grandmother. Sources: Michelle Theriault Boots, Alaska Dispatch News, May 3, 2015, and Alaska Citizens for Justice.
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Post by kitty on May 4, 2015 3:10:04 GMT -5
I was living in Anchorage when this murder happened. There were a lot of men working on the pipeline and there were more men than women. It was also during the time that Robert Hansen, who was later known as the "Butcher Baker" was taking women off in his airplane and hunting them down like wild animals in the woods. The women he was taking were prostitutes and that's why he got away with it for so long, because nobody cared about them. But in the case of this girl, I blame her parents and so did a lot of other people. She was just 16, but they let her quit school and she was still living in their house. They could have insisted that she go to school if she was going to live at home. She also dressed like a hooker, like you can see from her picture, and her parents let her go out dressed like that, even though she was underage. At that time, the bars didn't check ID even if they knew girls were underage. She was seen in a car with a bunch of drunk men and when a girl dresses like she did and goes off with a bunch of drunks, anything can happen.
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Post by pat on May 4, 2015 5:11:25 GMT -5
Every time I read something like this, I'm glad that I didn't have a daughter. My niece went through a phase where she wanted to dress like a slut. My brother told her that if you dress like a whore, men will treat you like a whore and that's true. But you can't tell teenagers or young women that. They think that they should be able to go out half-naked and if a man or boy gets out of line, it's all his fault. I also blame the parents of this girl because I wouldn't have let my son go out to bars when he was 16 and my brother certainly wouldn't have let his daughter go out drinking and dressed in a top that showed everything when she was living at home.
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Post by natalie on May 14, 2015 13:47:08 GMT -5
Her behavior was certainly even more inappropriate considering the fact she was engaged. Getting drunk and driving around with random men, well, nothing good will come out of that.
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Post by JoannaL on Dec 15, 2019 15:11:09 GMT -5
DNA Leads to Arrest in 1978 Murder of Shelley ConnollyAlaska State Troopers have arrested a man suspected of murdering Anchorage teenager Shelley Connolly in 1978. Donald F. McQuade (above), 62, linked to the crime through DNA testing, has been charged with one count each of first- and second-degree murder. He was taken into custody Friday, August 30, in Gresham, Oregon.
According to a probable cause affidavit filed, autopsy revealed Connolly had “multiple abrasions, lacerations and contusions on her face, neck and abdomen.” She also had sustained internal injuries, including a lacerated liver, and there was evidence of both vaginal and anal intercourse. The official cause of death was a combination of internal bleeding and hypothermia.
Connolly was last seen on the evening of January 7, 1978, at a bar called Chilkoot Charlie’s talking with four men. A Crime Stoppers search led to a man known as “Pinkie,” who lived in the Kenai area at the time.
The case remained cold until DNA testing became available in 1997 and the Alaska Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory developed a DNA profile from evidence collected during the autopsy.
In a press conference, Col. Barry Wilson said the DNA profile was uploaded to the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) in 2003, however, a match was not generated. Earlier this year, the profile was submitted to Parabon NanoLabs to analyze through genetic genealogy wherein a profile is uploaded to the CODIS system and matched to one found in databases such as Ancestry.com. According to the affidavit, troopers worked with genealogists to locate a relative of the suspect. The top match was a woman in Florida, likely a first cousin of the perpetrator. The genealogist traced the woman’s family tree to Pennsylvania and then created family trees for other top matches and linked them to a common ancestor, John J. McQuade, born in 1858 in Ireland.
Finally, a link was made to Alaska. John C. McQuade, born in 1913, had served in the military and was stationed in Alaska during World War II. He married a woman in King Cove in 1943, and the couple had nine children, three of whom were boys. “Essentially, they find the suspect’s relatives,” McPherron explained. “And then from there, using standard genealogy techniques, they can hopefully whittle it down to a group of individuals or a specific individual. In this particular case, we whittled it down to one of three brothers.”
All the McQuade brothers would have been young adults at the time of Connolly’s murder and troopers learned Donald McQuade was in Alaska on January 7, 1978, because he had checked in with a probation officer four days earlier. Three weeks after the murder, he told his probation officer he wanted to move in with one of his sisters in Soldotna.
Donald McQuade was not a suspect in the initial investigation and the DNA profile created in 1997 had been examined against known suspects only.
McQuade left the state in the early 1980s and moved to Washington state. He returned to Alaska about 10 years later and then relocated to Oregon in the early 2000s. Police worked with authorities in Oregon to obtain a sample of McQuade’s DNA. Officers conducting surveillance on the suspect followed him around, collecting his discarded cigarette butts.
Once the evidence arrived in Alaska, analysts in the crime lab determined the DNA on the cigarette butts to be an exact match to the DNA found under Connolly’s fingernails, on her body, and in stains on her jeans.
Donald McQuade’s brother, Richard, told affiliate KOIN 6 he believes his brother is innocent. “I have felt, and I have talked to other family members, we have never noticed that type of behavior ever in Donald,” he insisted. “I can only hope that it turns out well and they’re gonna give my brother and our family a big apology.”
Shelley Connolly’s mother and brother attended the press conference and are still shocked by the charges and arrest that took 41 years. “I was feeling disbelief, happiness that they found him, sad too. Forty-one years is a long time of grieving,” Mrs. Connolly admitted.
On Monday, October 21, McQuade was arraigned in an Anchorage court. He is being held on a $1 million cash bond.Sources: Shayne Nuesca, KTVA, September 4, 2019; Daniella Rivera, KTVA, October 21, 2019; and Suzanne Downing, Must Read Alaska, September 2, 2019.
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Post by kitty on Dec 17, 2019 15:03:18 GMT -5
I was living in Anchorage when this murder happened and I'm glad that it's finally been solved. This is one of the few sites that ever posts anything about murders and mysteries in Alaska.
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Post by justwow on Jul 6, 2021 14:56:30 GMT -5
No one deserves to be raped or murdered regardless of what a person wears, where they go, or what they do. The blame for rape and murder always lies with the perpetrator.
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Post by JoannaL on Jul 6, 2021 15:17:39 GMT -5
No one deserves to be raped or murdered regardless of what a person wears, where they go, or what they do. The blame for rape and murder always lies with the perpetrator. |
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Post by pat on Jul 6, 2021 15:46:23 GMT -5
No one deserves to be raped or murdered regardless of what a person wears, where they go, or what they do. The blame for rape and murder always lies with the perpetrator. |
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Post by asixxdionysia on Sept 13, 2021 1:04:45 GMT -5
No one deserves to be raped or murdered regardless of what a person wears, where they go, or what they do. The blame for rape and murder always lies with the perpetrator. I'm a woman and I totally agree. If you dress like that in the first place and go somewhere with a bad rap, with people that are just as bad, well..... that's what happens. I'm not saying that they should be doing that but it's common sense right? If you're showing everything it kinda sends a message about the kind of girl you are. But you dont "deserve" it. But the thing is it usually happens to women dressed like that.... not always but more often than not. |
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