Journalist on case, 33 years later

LITTLE ROCK — They found her shoes, her purse and her car.

Thirty-three years later, the only person who knows what happened to Bobo Shinn is the person who took her.

Investigators don’t know who that person was, nor can they even say for certain that someone took Bobo, a 26-year-old native of Magnolia whom no one has seen since July 20, 1978, when she said she was going to show a house she had remodeled to a prospective buyer.

“‘[There’s] just not enough to go on,’” Columbia County Sheriff Mike Loe told Jamie Davis, the managing editor of the

Magnolia Banner-News,

which published her first-rate story about the case in May. “‘There were no witnesses. Fingerprints ... have never been matched ... . If we got a lead, we checked it, but you know ... We don't even have a crime scene.’”

Sheriff Loe and Mrs. Davis are bookends on the Bobo Shinn case. The sheriff first worked on the case in 1979 as a state police detective. Mrs. Davis learned Bobo’s story in 2005.

When she hired on with the Banner-News in February 2010, the story was first on her to-do list, Mrs. Davis says. “When we got a new sheriff, he just happened to be a former state cop who handled the case.”

Before Sheriff Loe had been in office a month, Mrs. Davis came knocking, and the sheriff welcomed the attention.

“We opened the file up to her. She spent a lot of time on this,” says Sheriff Loe, who remains optimistic that investigators will solve the mystery.

Bobo disappeared several years before police commonly looked to DNA for evidence, so investigators collected only a couple of hairs and fibers from Miss Shinn’s car.

“We’re in the process of looking at the evidence. We’re going to go for broke. We are going to send everything to lab that might help.”

Mrs. Davis’ work included a trip to Waco, Texas, where she interviewed Bill Dear, a private eye who investigated the disappearance.

Within a month of his arrival in Magnolia, Mr. Dear named his prime suspect, and, he told Mrs. Davis, he still thinks he was correct. “He believes he may even know where Bobo’s body was buried,” Mrs. Davis reported.

Mr. Dear’s suspect committed suicide three months after Miss Shinn disappeared, and his body was found on wooded family property where the man was building a church.

“That’s where I think she is,” Mr. Dear told the Banner-News, “buried somewhere around his church.”

Miss Shinn’s father died in the 1980s. Her 92-yearold mother still lives in Magnolia.

The case was the death of innocence in Magnolia, an elderly resident told Mrs. Davis, who was a year old when Miss Shinn disappeared.

“It is my goal,” Mrs. Davis said Monday, “to write the last part to this story.”

Jamie Davis’ report on the disappearance of Jimmie “Bobo” Shinn is at tinyurl.com/bobo shinn.