Post by Graveyardbride on Jan 7, 2016 17:44:39 GMT -5
Cold Case: 1975 Murder of Jackie Shireman
Jacqueline L. “Jackie” Shireman, 21, was found lying in a pool of blood in the walk-in cooler at Marino’s Meal on a Bun, located at 1296 Central Avenue in Dubuque, Iowa, around 7:45 p.m., Saturday, January 4, 1975. The newlywed Sunday school teacher had been stabbed approximately 30 times with a pair of scissors. A witness told police she saw two men – one about 20-years-old and the other around 35 – leaving the restaurant minutes after the estimated time of the homicide. A little more than $100 was missing from the cash register.
Two years after the murder, 21-one-year-old Steven Moore – who was incarcerated at Iowa State Penitentiary on a burglary conviction – was indicted and tried for the murder. However, witnesses who had originally accused Moore refused to testify at trial and because there was nothing implicating Moore discovered at the scene, he was acquitted.
Unanswered questions. The afternoon of January 4 had been busy at the restaurant and Rick Spear, Jackie’s brother, who stopped by around 5:30 p.m., had not noticed anything out of the ordinary. By approximately 6:40 that evening, Jackie reported to her boss that things were slow. But when Albert Fortier walked into Marino’s at 7:45 for a cup of coffee, things had changed. Fortier estimated he waited about 10 minutes before going behind the counter and pouring the coffee himself. Then he went in search of someone to take his money and discovered the waitress lying on the floor of the walk-in cooler. It was around 8 p.m. by the time two patrol officers were flagged down and entered the establishment.
Dubuque police were notified and the case was assigned to Capt. Patrick Egan. More than $100 (approximately $450 in today’s currency) was missing, but investigators weren’t sure robbery was the motive because the scissors used to kill Jackie Shireman had been wielded with such force, they were bent during the attack. In other words, such a frenzied and sustained attack was considered “overkill.” Nevertheless, it was concluded the motive was robbery and Shireman had resisted. In short order, there were 10 officers and five Iowa Bureau of Criminal Investigation agents working overtime to find the killer. Initially, police were confident the men identified by the witness would soon be apprehended and charged.
Rick Spear, however, had a different take on things. After learning what had happened to his sister, he had to be restrained from entering the restaurant and it was his contention the investigation was mishandled. “I’m not exaggerating, there [were] 30 cops in that building when I got there,” he recalled. “If there was any evidence there, they trampled over it. I think protocol would tell them to stay away.”
Wilma Spear, Jackie’s mother, did not believe robbery was the motive or that her daughter would have resisted if asked to hand over the money from the cash register. Restaurant owner John Marino agreed and in the January 5, 1975, edition of the Telegraph-Herald, told a reporter he and Shireman had discussed what to do in the event of a robbery and said, “I told her to lay out the carpet to the cash register.”
Also according to the Telegraph-Herald, sources later revealed there was a break in the case two years later gleaned from information provided by local criminals. But Dubuque County District Judge Robert Curnam remembered there was a lack of evidence after a grand jury indicted Steven Moore in 1977. During the trial, Moore spoke of burglaries he had committed at the time, which effectively provided him an alibi for the time Jackie Shireman was killed. According to Wilma Spear, “As time went on, Capt. Egan, I think, thought it was this guy the whole time. I wanted them to just be done with it. At the time they had a bunch of witnesses. But during the trial they all backed out.” One witness reneged, two others declined to testify. The jury deliberated approximately six hours, but returned with a verdict of not guilty.
Mrs. Spear was understandably angry at the witnesses for not testifying because without their earlier statements, Steven Moore would not have been indicted. “When it was through,” she recalled, “I met Capt. Egan on the street one time and told him, ‘Would you please take all the stuff you got down at the police station and bury it out over by [the cemetery] with her her ...?’”
Following Moore’s trial, Egan admitted to the Telegraph-Herald that a lot of things about the case bothered him. “The main thing is the verdict. But that’s life. That’s our form of government,” he said. “We have to live with it.”
Memories. Jackie Spear, born October 2, 1953, was a member of Hempstead High School’s first graduating class. In addition to teaching Sunday school, she was interested in the theater and following graduation, Jackie was asked to perform in a play at Loras College. Just three months before her death, she married James L. Shireman (born May 25, 1953). “She was an outgoing person,” her mother rememberd, but she and other family members described the backgrounds of some of her friends as “rough,” which caused something of a rift in the family. But, Mrs. Sharp recollected, “We started to get close again – that’s what made it bad. I felt I wasn’t with her as much as I should have been.”
Recalling the night her daughter was murdered, Mrs. Spear said, “By the time we got back from the police station, all my sisters and brothers were at my house. My husband, he was pounding the wall and cursing a blue streak. Then he would say to the pastor, ‘I’m sorry,’ and the pastor would say he would do the same thing. Then he’d go right back at it. Whereas I just kind of sat there – I couldn’t even cry.”
According to Mrs. Spear, following Jackie’s burial, James Shireman would go to the cemetery and sit beside Jackie’s grave site. “Finally, our pastor told him, you don’t have to go out there, she’s not there. Then he didn’t go out anymore.” On June 29, 1975, just six months after his bride’s murder, James Shireman drowned while swimming with friends off a sandbar in the Mississippi River south of East Dubuque, Illinois. His death was ruled accidental.
Thomas Spear Jr. was 11 at the time of his sister’s death. Although he remembered only bits and pieces of what happened, he wrote an essay favoring capital punishment following Jackie’s murder.
Pat Egan retired from the police department in 1997 and died in 2007.
Cold case. In 2008, Capt. Mark Dalsing indicated the case remained open, although he could not recall the last time any headway was made. He said he made it a policy to assign all new investigators to old cases to “see if a new perspective can help our case.”
Rick Spear would still like to see his sister’s murder solved, but admitted, “The longer it goes, the harder it seems the case will ever be closed. I still hope they find someone or something that happened that would explain this a little better, other than what we’ve been told. I know there’s someone out there who does know, and they’re probably just afraid to come forward. Now they probably think it’s too late,” he added. “I can’t see anybody ... holding something like that in if they knew something, how they could possibly live or raise their family.”
Much has changed since 1975, not the least of which are the advances in forensic DNA. “States have been tracking these advances and trying to resolve old cases,” Dalsing said. “The accuracy is just incredible with this. It’s made cases and broken cases.” However, he wasn’t certain DNA would provide any leads in the Shireman case.
If you have any information concerning Jackie Shireman’s unsolved murder, please contact the Dubuque Police Department at (563) 589-4410, or the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation at (515) 725-6010, or email dciinfo@dps.state.ia.us
Sources: The Des Moines Register, January 3, 2016; Matthew Ryno, The Dubuque Telegraph-Herald, February 3, 2008; Iowa Cold cases, and Find-a-Grave.