Predator. Steven Walker
murdered his wife and daughter. He never saw justice prevail, and he never had closure. He died of a broken heart.
When investigators announced publicly in 2007 that Timothy Wayne Krajcir had confessed to the crime, McGougan was relieved that closure would finally take place. Still, he was disappointed that Krajcir was able to escape the death penalty in exchange for his confession.
“Krajcir stole the lives of decent, wonderful people, but there are other lives, the lives of those who lived on, which were also negatively impacted because of his actions. Justice would be best served if he (Krajcir) would be executed,” McGougan stated.
4
Sheila Cole
November 1977
Cape Girardeau is often described as a big town or a small city, depending on one’s point of view. It hosts a plentiful stock of hotels and motels, bars, and hundreds of choices of places to eat, from fast-food chains to fine-dining establishments. There is a downtown that caters to tourists with a desire to explore American history as well as to the college students who attend the Southeast Missouri State University. There is plenty of free downtown parking available for people who want to visit the unique shops, galleries, and pubs that are nestled along the banks of the Mississippi River. What was not generally plentiful were horrific crimes of murder.
On November 17, 1977, just three months after the Parsh murders, a SEMO State University student was found dead. She was discovered at a rest stop along Illinois Route 3, just south of McClure, Illinois. Her fully clothed body was lying faceup on the floor in the women’s restroom, with two .38-caliber gunshot wounds in her head.
A passing motorist who pulled over at the rest stop discovered the body and anonymously called 911 to report it. Deputy Kenneth Calvert, of the Alexander County Sheriff’s Department (ACSD) in Cairo, Illinois, was the first to arrive on the scene. He saw the body of a fully clothed white female lying faceup on the floor at the north side of the restroom. A wound was clearly visible on the victim’s head, where a large quantity of blood had pooled around it. It did not take long for other officers from the sheriff’s department to arrive.
The scene was photographed and processed by Special Agents Gary Ashman and Connell Smith, of the Illinois Division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. One bullet was found lodged in the north wall of the restroom. A second was recovered from the floor underneath the victim. Two partial footprints were found near a trash container. A woman’s purse was discovered inside the trash can. The purse contained a photo driver’s license belonging to twenty-one-year-old Sheila Cole, of Crest Oak Lane in Crestwood, Missouri. Also inside the purse was a checkbook. The last entry, dated November 16, was in the amount of $8.97 for a purchase from a Wal-Mart store. Other items recovered from her purse included credit cards, traveler’s checks, a small amount of cash, and some personal items. The motive for her murder was obviously not robbery. There was also a Wal-Mart sales catalog in the purse, which was addressed to Sheila Cole, residing on Sprigg Street, in Cape Girardeau, Missouri.
Once all the evidence was collected from the scene, Alexander County coroner Thomas Bradshaw had the body removed and transported to the Crain-Barkett Funeral Home in Cairo, Illinois.
The Cape Girardeau police were notified of Cole’s murder and were told that she had been living in an apartment located on Sprigg Street, directly across from the police department, and, coincidentally, 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