next door to the convalescent home where Floyd Parsh temporarily lived after his wife and daughter were murdered.
Special Agents Ashman and Smith were accompanied to the Sprigg Street address by Cape Girardeau patrolman Ronald Thomas. When they knocked on the door, they were greeted by Joan Barnard. Barnard said that she shared the apartment with Sheila, Connie Walker, and Jan Gredizer. They were all students at Southeast Missouri State University.
Barnard told the investigators that the last time she saw Sheila was at about 3:30 P.M. the previous day in the apartment. Barnard said that Sheila left at that time to go see her boyfriend, Matthew Sopko, a student who lived in a dormitory on campus. She also told them that Sheila’s bed had not been slept in, and her light blue Chevy Nova was gone.
Cape Girardeau police captain William Stover was able to get a thorough description of Sheila’s car, along with its vehicle identification and license plate numbers, by contacting the university’s security police. The Illinois State Police (ISP) then dispatched that information with a notice that the vehicle should be secured for fingerprints if it was found.
When Matthew Sopko was interviewed, he said that Sheila had picked him up at the dormitory at around 4:00 P.M. and that they went to get something to eat at McDonald’s, and then did some shopping at the Kroger grocery store. Sopko told the investigators that Sheila dropped him back off at the dormitory about an hour later, and that he had not seen or heard from her since. His roommate, William Doyle, confirmed that story. He said that Sopko had been dropped off by Sheila at around 5:00 P.M., and he and Sopko were together until around midnight. Doyle stated that Sopko spent a lot of time at Sheila’s apartment—sometimes as many as three or four nights a week. He also provided investigators with a note that he found on Sopko’s desk. The note read, Sheila, I love you with all my heart. There is nothing I wouldn’t do for you, but there is nothing that I can do for you. I guess you need me like a hole in the head.
John Boyce, who lived in an apartment in the same building as Sheila, said that he remembered seeing her car parked in front of the building sometime between five-thirty and six o’clock that evening.
Gredizer, Sheila’s other roommate, said that she was studying at the kitchen table when Sheila left the apartment again, at around 7:30 P.M., to go to Wal-Mart and pick up some film she had developed there.
Throughout all of these and many other interviews, the timeline of Sheila’s whereabouts remained unbroken. Every minute of November 16 was accounted for, until she had gone to pick up her photos. She was never seen alive again by anyone other than her killer. Sopko laid eyes on her one more time. He was asked to come to the Crain-Barkett Funeral Home to identify her corpse. Later that evening, Dr. Cornelio Katu-big, of Marion, Illinois, performed an autopsy in front of the coroner and Special Agents Ashman and Smith.
DNA technology didn’t exist in 1977. One of the main purposes of an autopsy was to determine the cause and time of death, not to collect other evidence to solve a murder. In Sheila Cole’s case, the cause of death was determined to be a result of a gunshot wound to the back of the neck and one to the right side of the bridge of the nose. The autopsy report provided no other information except that there was no evidence of injury to her external genitalia.
Sergeant Brown, of the Cape Girardeau Police Department, said that the hurried process of the autopsy and the embalming of Sheila Cole’s body were detrimental to discovering any possible physical evidence that might have led them to a suspect. He said that the body was embalmed even before some investigating authorities were notified of her death. As a result, physical evidence that would have been beneficial may have been lost.
Patrolman Sam Light reported for duty at 11:00 P.M. on November 17. During his shift, he reported that he observed a blue Chevy Nova in the Wal-Mart parking lot. Detective John Brown relayed this information to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and late the next morning, on November 18, Special Agents Ashman and Smith located a light blue 1976 Chevy Nova in the Wal-Mart parking lot located on South Kings Highway in Cape Girardeau. (Today it is a Hobby Lobby store.) The serial number and license plate matched Cole’s car. The keys were left in the ignition, and the driver’s door was unlocked. It had rained during the evening of November 16, and the windshield wipers were left in the on position. A paper bag in the trunk of the vehicle contained photographs that were recently developed at Wal-Mart and a sales receipt totaling $8.97, corresponding with the last notation in Sheila Cole’s checkbook.
An employee at the nearby Service Laundromat told investigators that she left work at approximately 10:45 on the evening on November 16 and that she believed that the blue Nova was parked in the Wal-Mart lot at that time.
A Wal-Mart employee told Brown that at about 10:30 A.M. on November 17, she heard a page over the store’s public-address system asking for the owner of a blue 1976 Nova to go to the service desk. Apparently, nobody showed up.
The entire car was processed for the collection of evidence. Items sent to the Southeast Missouri Crime Laboratory for examination included hairs found in the vehicle, the floor mats, a gum wrapper, and the contents of the ashtray. No fingerprints were found on the cigarette butts or the gum wrapper. There were only two brands of cigarettes found in the ashtray; the brand that Sheila smoked and that of her boyfriend, Matthew. Hair samples found in the car matched those of Sheila, Matthew, and Sheila’s roommate Connie Walker.
Sergeant John Brown, of the Cape Girardeau Police Department, said that he had no reason to believe that the murder of Sheila Cole was related to the Parsh murders, but for good measure, bullets retrieved from the Parsh house were sent to the FBI lab in Washington, DC, for comparison.
A white pair of panties belonging to Cole was sent to the Bureau of Scientific Services in DeSoto, Illinois, for analysis. No hair or fibers were found. The crotch area was heavily stained, but chemical tests failed to confirm if that was caused by seminal fluid.
No further lab work was authorized unless additional evidence became available. After dozens of additional interviews, up to this point, investigators in both Missouri and Illinois had exhausted their leads, and they still were no closer to discovering who was responsible for the murders. That did not deter them from continuing to investigate every avenue available, no matter how insignificant it appeared.
One witness, Jess Norton, claimed that he had been traveling north on Illinois Route 3 at around 11:00 P.M. after he crossed the Mississippi River from Missouri and entered Illinois. He said that the blue midsized car in front of him pulled into the rest stop where Cole was murdered. He described the passengers as a male and a female, and his description of the female was similar to that of Sheila Cole. He was subsequently hypnotized by an FBI investigator and repeated the same information.
There was no physical evidence at the time to prove that Cole was a victim of rape. Robbery was ruled out because the killer had not taken the traveler’s checks from her purse. Because there was so little evidence left at the scene, authorities could not even confirm if Cole’s assailant was a man or a woman. Special Agent Ashman was quoted by the Missourian newspaper as saying, “People must realize that we have to have something to work on. We’re not miracle workers who can pull a suspect out of thin air.”
With no apparent motive in the slaying, investigators said that locating the handgun and tracing it through its serial number might be the only link to discovering the coed’s killer. It seemed like a long shot, but detectives from the Illinois Division of Investigation called in a septic tank cleaning service to pump out the waste matter from the pits under both the men’s and women’s toilets at the McClure rest area. Once the pits were emptied, investigators probed the debris with claw arms and long-handled shovels to search for a handgun. At best, this might have been considered an unsavory task, but Ashman explained that “it’s just something we have to check out. Experience has taught us that you can’t second-guess these killers.”
