Jackie Shireman (Courtesy Telegraph Herald)
Jacqueline L. “Jackie” Shireman
Homicide
On Saturday, Jan. 4, 1975, at approximately 7:45 p.m., a customer at Dubuque’s “Marino’s Meal on a Bun” found waitress Jackie Shireman lying in a pool of blood in the walk-in cooler.
The 21-year-old newlywed and Sunday School teacher had been stabbed around 30 times with a pair of scissors. A trial returned no homicide conviction, and the case remains open.
The following story about Jackie’s murder aired on KWWL.com Channel 7 News on Feb. 21, 2018. It details how Jackie’s sister has never given up on solving her sister’s murder and how Jackie’s death affected the family.
Full news coverage at:
KWWL – Eastern Iowa Breaking News, Weather, Closings
The following information appeared in an article written by writer Matthew Ryno and published in the Dubuque Telegraph Herald on Sunday, Feb. 3, 2008.
Dubuque County in Iowa
Dubuque in Dubuque County
Who killed Jackie Shireman?
More than 30 years after young Dubuque woman was brutally stabbed, the case remains unsolved.
BY MATTHEW RYNO
TH STAFF WRITER | February 3, 2008
She was a 21-year-old newlywed, a Sunday school teacher and an aspiring actress. It was just inside of 1975 when Jackie Shireman was cut down in the prime of her life at the hands of a killer who stabbed her 30 times — a killer never convicted of the crime.
More than 30 years after the brutal unsolved murder, Shireman’s family members remember a young woman with so much potential, so much to live for. They hope the Dubuque Police Department still thinks about her, too.
Shireman, a waitress, was found stabbed with a scissors and left for dead in the restaurant’s walk-in cooler.
The investigation continues into the case, but there appears to be little progress and few new leads.
A trial returned no homicide conviction — something that reportedly hit hard for Pat Egan, captain of the Police Department’s criminal investigation division at the time. Some of Shireman’s family members harbor anger about the trial, especially the witnesses who refused to testify.
The memories and the pain remain.
“We were playing cards with my best friend and her brother-in-law was there. And how, I don’t know, but we got talking about this. We must have had a half-hour or an hour conversation about it all. We always think about it,” said Shireman’s mother, Wilma Spear.
The following is the story of a long cold Dubuque murder, its lasting scars on a quiet family and their hope that the case will finally be solved.
Unanswered questions
It was nighttime, Jan. 4, 1975. Rick Spear, Shireman’s brother, said he remembers visiting his sister and everything seemed fine. Around 6:40 p.m., about an hour later, Shireman reported to her boss that things had slowed down at the restaurant. The day was winding down after a busy afternoon.
But when customer Albert Fortier walked into Marino’s Meal on a Bun around 7:45 p.m. and wanted a cup of coffee, something wasn’t quite right.
After about 10 minutes of waiting, he poured himself a cup and looked around to pay. What he found was Jackie Shireman lying in a pool of blood in the walk-in cooler. The tips of a pair of scissors used to repeatedly stab Shireman were bent from the force of the attack.
Two patrolmen arrived after an elderly couple flagged them down about 8 p.m.
In a recent TH interview, Rick Spear recalled arriving at the scene and how he had to be restrained from entering the restaurant. He also is critical of how the initial investigation was handled.
“I’m not exaggerating, there [were] 30 cops in that building when I got there,” he said. “If there was any evidence there, they trampled over it. I think protocol would tell them to stay away.”
Soon after the police arrived at the crime scene, Egan took the lead on the case and had about 10 officers and five agents from the Iowa Bureau of Criminal Investigation working overtime to find the killer.
Egan died late last year, and many of the officers working the case at the time have moved elsewhere, out of immediate contact, according to Dubuque Assistant Police Chief Terry Tobin.
Early in the investigation, things appeared hopeful, Egan said in a 1975 TH article. A witness told police she saw two men — one about 20 years old and one about 35 years old — leaving Marino’s minutes after the estimated time of the homicide.
A little more than $100 was missing from Marino’s cash register. Investigators had trouble deciding whether the motive was robbery. Egan believed it was, and that Shireman might have resisted the robbery.
Wilma Spear disagrees robbery was the motive, or that her daughter would fight a robbery. In the Jan 5, 1975, edition of the TH, John Marino, the restaurant’s owner, said he and Shireman previously had discussed what to do in the event of a robbery.
“I told her to lay out the carpet to the cash register,” he said at the time.
Sources later told the TH a break in the case came two years later from information provided by local criminals.
But Dubuque County District Court Judge Robert Curnan remembers a lack of evidence in 1977, when a grand jury in Dubuque indicted Steven Moore in Shireman’s death.
Moore was a 21-year-old Dubuquer serving a term of up to 10 years in the Iowa State Penitentiary on a burglary charge. During the trial, Moore openly spoke about burglaries he said he committed at the time, effectively giving him an alibi and deflecting the homicide charge.
“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,” Wilma Spear said. “At the time they had a bunch of witnesses. But during the trial they all backed out.”
One witness reneged on testimony and two witnesses refused to testify. Blood evidence found at the scene also did not link Moore. No footprints, fingerprints or palm prints matching Moore were found in the restaurant.
The jury, after about six hours, came back with a not-guilty verdict.
Spear said she was angry at the witnesses for not testifying and for potentially leading a case into trial with their earlier statements.
“When it was through, 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 …” she said.
Following the trial, Egan told the TH a lot of things bothered him about the case.
“The main thing is the verdict, but that’s life. That’s our form of government,” he said. “We have to live with it.”
Capt. Mark Dalsing, head investigator of the Dubuque Police Department, said the case remains open, although he could not recall the last time any headway was made.
Dalsing said he makes it a policy to assign all new investigators to old cases to “see if a new perspective can help our case.”
Much has changed over the past three decades, not the least of which are the advances in forensic science driven by DNA profiling.
“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, Dalsing did not know if DNA tests could be used in this case.
Tobin said the accuracy of the blood samples taken in 1975 could impact the accuracy of a modern-day DNA test.
As police continue to examine cases whenever new information comes in, the Spear family continues to move forward with their lives. Addressing the ghosts of the past has not come easily, however.
The haunting memory
Shireman was 21 years old, married for three months and on her way to a new path in life, Spear said.
“We started to get close again (with Jackie) — that’s what made it bad. I felt I wasn’t with her as much as I should have been,” the mother said.
A member of the first graduating class at Hempstead High School, Shireman had a love for theater, family members said. After high school, she was asked to perform in a play at Loras College. She also mentored children where she taught at her church’s Sunday school and the children wrote her letters.
“She was an outgoing person,” Spear said.
But the Spears were cautious in describing Shireman’s friends, noting they had “rough” backgrounds.
Mixed with the warm memories are traumatic stories about the aftermath of the homicide.
“By the time we got back from the police station (upon hearing the news of Shireman’s death), all my sisters and brothers were at my house,” Wilma Spear said. “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.”
Spear said her daughter’s husband, James Shireman, would go to the cemetery and sit by 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.”
Six months after the homicide, James Shireman drowned while swimming with friends off a Mississippi River sandbar south of East Dubuque, Ill. A Jo Daviess County Coroner’s inquest ruled his death an accident.
While working on a project at Betty Jane Candies a few years after the murder, Spear recalled, “it hit me. I was in the building all by myself and I ran through all this stuff in my head. I had kind of blamed myself a lot.”
Rick Spear, Jackie’s brother, said a few years following the murder he quit his job as a salesman. Being alone with his thoughts was too much to handle at the time. Every major life and death marker — birthdays, anniversaries — brought all the painful memories back.
“I think what it would have been like for my sister. You think about it all the time — you have flashes,” he said.
Moving on
Where the Marino’s restaurant once stood, children can be seen happily going down a slide and playing with friends. A new generation of children at Prescott Elementary School seems oblivious to the gory past. A few years ago, the building that stood on the site where Shireman was killed was demolished to make room for the school.
Rick Spear said he’s grateful for the children’s ignorance about the crime. He said in some ways children in the Spear family remain isolated from the tragedy.
Thomas Spear Jr., Shireman’s brother, was 11 at the time of his sister’s death. He said he remembers bits and pieces.
“When I first came back from Kansas City, I stopped at her grave site. I told my younger son who was 15 at the time. He didn’t even know about it,” he said.
Once reticent about talking about the case, Wilma Spear said she now talks openly about it.
“I would tell anybody who would ever go through something like this to talk about it and not keep it bottled up,” she said.
She credited her faith, family, co-workers at Betty Jane and members of her church for helping her out when she needed support.
“We had a neighbor who went up and down the street and took collections because they knew we didn’t have any money. At that time, $700 or $800 was a lot of money,” Spear said. “I didn’t even know the neighbor did this. She came to the door a few days later, and had a box. How far she walked, I didn’t know.”
She firmly believes her daughter is “in a better place,” and believes punishment has come to the killer.
“I feel that the Lord took care of whoever done it,” Spear said.
Thomas Spear — though he remembers little — wrote an essay about capital punishment in school after Jackie’s death.
“I found your paper and read it,” said Wilma Spear to her son, “and your teacher said, ‘I know now why you feel the way you did.'”
Forgiveness doesn’t come easy.
“I know as a Christian I’m supposed to say ‘I forgive you,’ but I don’t know if I really could and mean it,” Wilma Spear said.
As for the current investigation, members of the family are holding onto hope, however slight it might be.
“The longer it goes, the harder it seems the case will ever be closed,” Rick Spear said. “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, after 30 years, holding something like that in if they knew something, how they could possibly live or raise their family.”
Copyright © 2009 Woodward Communications, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Courtesy photo Cheryl Locher Moonen, findagrave.com
Jackie Shireman is buried at Saint Matthew Cemetery in Sherrill, Iowa, in Dubuque County.
About Jackie Shireman
Jacqueline L. “Jackie” Shireman was born October 2, 1953. She died January 4, 1975.
She was buried at Saint Matthew Cemetery in Sherrill, Iowa, in Dubuque County.
Information Needed
If you have any information concerning Jackie Shireman’s unsolved murder, please contact the Dubuque Police Department at (563) 589-4410.
Sources and References:
- Dubuque Police Department
- Jacqueline L. Shireman (1953 – 1975) – Find A Grave Memorial
- “SPECIAL REPORT: Dubuque Cold Case — A Sister’s Story,” by Lauren Moss, KWWL.com, Feb. 21, 2018
- “Gone Cold”: Jackie Shireman, The Northwest Iowa News, Tuesday, April 26, 2016
- “Gone Cold: Jackie Shireman was stabbed to death with scissors,” Iowa Newspaper Association / The Sioux City Journal, Part of the GONE COLD: EXPLORING IOWA’S UNSOLVED MURDERS series, January 3, 2016
- “Gone Cold: Jackie Shireman, killed in Dubuque in 1975,” The Des Moines Register, This story is part of GONE COLD – IOWA COLD CASES,” January 3, 2016
- “Lest we forget: Day of Remembrance will memorialize several unsolved murders and disappearances to local people over the past few decades,” by Alicia Yager, The Dubuque Telegraph Herald, Thursday, October 17, 2013
- “Marlon Barber’s death not only unsolved case in Dubuque,” by Becca Habegger, KWWL.com, October 8, 2013
- “Who killed Jackie Shireman? More than 30 years after young Dubuque woman was brutally stabbed, the case remains unsolved,” by Matthew Ryno, The Dubuque Telegraph Herald, Sunday, February 3, 2008
- “Report more than 70 unsolved murders in Iowa,” by Nick Lamberto, The Des Moines Register, January 25, 1976
I have heard Hurky (?) Moore may know something about this murder.
I believed what my family said at the time and still believe to this day. A Dubuque Police officer committed this crime. It was known as a police restaurant and officers were known to be there at all hours. There is a reason no progress was ever made in this case and the only reason is because an officer was involved. Back then the Dubuque police was known to ” protect the badge ” at all cost. I was raised in that town in an area known then as the “flats” and I can attest to just how crocked the PD was back then. 1 honest cop in the bunch and that was “Pig Smitty”. He had a pigs head belt buckle and a tattoo the said “proud to be a pig” with a pigs head on his forearm.
Mr. Wilmot. I would agree with you, but her murder actually look like a rage killing. It appears someone was upset with her, for whatever reason.
I agree that the crime scene was mishandled, but then that was sort of the way, things were done, back then. How, the crime scene is handled and processed, including taking pictures can provide many answers. It surprises me that she was hidden in a cooler. The other thing, that bugs me is this is a restaurant, yet there is no cook. Did she do everything at this place.
There have been any number of women killed by being stabbed more than the 30 times that Jackie was. A 18-year-woman, was found murdered in New Jersey. She died on blunt force trauma, to both sides of her head. Then she was stabbed 66 times after she was already dead from a skull fracture. This incident took place in 1965.
In Wisconsin another young woman, working late to answer the phones at a manufacturing plant, was stabbed to death over 100 times. Her boyfriend was looked at. However, hexwas basic training and laterxshipped out for Vietnam. He was killed in action.
Plus, the weapon of choice was a pair of scissors, and not a knife. A knife in a restaurant would definitely be a weapon of choice.
You refer to the area called the flats. I assume that is an area from the A & B bar was down towards the river. I am somewhat familiar with Dubuque. Have not been there in a number of years. I remember the single lane toll bridge going to Wisconsin, and the restaurant there.
Praying for justice!
Hoping they can still use the DNA & get a conviction!
Also, it would be very helpful to know who those two men where who left the restaurant around the time she was murdered
They don’t even have her husband’s name right. He was my father and his name is James Robert Shireman not James L Shireman.
Jaymis, I was wondering, where in the case summary (or the Telegraph Herald story) did it mention that your father’s name was James L Shireman? I’ve looked but cannot find it. (BTW, if this comment disappears within a day or so it’s because ICC is currently migrating to a new server and the backup zip file has already been saved and being transferred.) If your father’s middle name and/or initial were printed incorrectly in an archived newspaper article, I (obviously) would have no way of changing that, but do realize the importance of having correct names cited.
All best,
Jody @ ICC
Is DNA still available? I think it would be worth it, I know someone can not be charged for the same crime twice. Hope this murder can still be solved….for the family sakes.
I knew Jackie in high school. It was shocking to hear what happened back then. It is always terrible to hear such things, but even worse when you know who it is. I cannot imagine how that must be for the family…especially parents. God be be with you and bless you all.
How sad. Just married….active in church….. Always seems to be the people who have the most to offer. I pray this crime is solved. I think people should testify. Maybe they were threatened.
It says in the story that her husband died just a few months later; his death was ruled an accident.
Yes, I saw that. They have a wonderful “life” together in heaven now.
I pray someone comes forward.
Scissors are a strange thing to be stabbed with…especially at a diner. I hope they find the monster that did this to her.
Thank you for sharing this on her birthday.
So sad.
I am so sorry for your loss. How terrible of an act, murder is a crime against humanity in which loved ones of the victim do not get over easily, if ever. I know this from personal experience. My father was murdered in 1977 in Davenport. I was 13yrs old. It is the hardest thing to deal with, homicide, and you learn to live with it and go forward in your life. But you never forget, even though others do as the decades go on. You have my deepest sympathy for your entire family. I hope you have all remained close. I cannot say the same for my family. My family exploded on May 10, 1977 and has never been close since. Good luck to you and your family. Please tell the children about their Aunt Jackie, that is the only way we can keep our loved ones alive forever….