- [Narrator] What is up EWU crew today?
Today, we're covering the most disturbing story
you've probably never heard of,
the disappearance of Mary "Bobo" Shinn.
Mary Jimmy shin was born January 11th, 1953
to Gresham and Mary Sue Shinn in Magnolia, Arkansas.
Her family and friends referred
to her affectionately as Bobo.
She had four siblings,
including a sister named Rebecca who was five years older.
She had a normal ordinary upbringing
and graduated from Magnolia High School
in the early '70s.
Bobo then went on to attend Southern Arkansas University
where she graduated in 1976.
Bobo began a career as an art teacher
while working in real estate on the side.
On July 20th, 1978, she told some friends
she was going to meet a man
who had seen her ad in the newspaper
and was interested in buying a house she had renovated.
Bobo was never heard from again.
On that hot summer day in 1978,
she vanished without a trace.
Cliff Knowles was a dispatcher
at the Magnolia Police Department
who had also gone to school with Bobo.
He was working that day when Bobo's mother,
Mary Sue, walked in the door.
She walked in and she looked worried.
So I asked, "Mrs. Shinn, are you all right?"
And she said, "Well, I'm worried about Bobo."
Mr. Knowles had relayed that information to KTAL,
FOX16 news in 2018.
Bobo's body has never been found.
Bobo's car was found behind a grocery store shortly
after she disappeared.
Her belongings, including her shoes and purse,
were in the car along with dirt, grass and gravel.
The keys were in the car and the windows were rolled down.
Fingerprints found inside the car have yet to be identified.
Both Bobo's parents, as well as her sister,
have all passed away now.
Both her parents died not knowing
what happened to their daughter.
"That hurts me more than anything thinking about that,"
Knowles told KTAL.
"Come looking for me."
One of the last people to speak to Bobo
before she disappeared was her friend, Anita,
who called her around 11:00 a.m. that morning
to invite her to come over.
Bobo explained to her that she was waiting for a call
from a man who was interested
in buying a house she had flipped.
Five minutes later, Anita's phone rang.
It was Bobo who said the man called
and said he had a house out of town
he was interested in trading.
His car was being worked on at the Pontiac dealership
so they were going to meet at the Easy Mart
and they'd come over when she was finished,
"Come looking for me if I'm not back this afternoon,"
she said in a joking way before hanging up.
An unnamed employee at a local Pontiac dealership
was closing up for the night
when a woman approached him frantic with worry.
That woman was Bobo's mother, Mary Sue.
She explained that she was worried about her daughter
who never made it home for supper.
Bobo lived with her parents.
Mary Sue came to the dealership
because that's where Bobo told her
the man's car was being worked on.
She hoped that finding that man
would help her find her daughter.
The employee confirmed that there were no cars in the shop
that could belong to the man,
but he did see a car picking up a man
at the Easy Mart around noon.
The car he described matched the blue 1976 Buick
that Bobo drove.
Mary Sue left and the employee got in his car
to drive home for the night.
As he passed a local grocery store called Smitty's,
he noticed a blue, 1976 Buick sitting in the parking lot.
He pulled in and started looking around,
opened the driver's side door and sat down.
He opened the middle console
and noticed some paperwork with her name on it.
He immediately decided to track Mary Sue down
to give her the information,
at which point Mary Sue went straight to the police.
Timeline.
Bobo got up that morning,
went for a walk and then went to her art studio
to teach a class.
At 11:00 a.m., she spoke to her friend, Anita.
A minute or so later,
she talked to the man who told her
he had a house outside of town
that he was interested in trading.
An employee at Easy Mart reported having seen a man come in
to get change for the payphone around 11:00 a.m.
They said he had dark hair
and was wearing a white tee shirt and jeans.
A carpenter working on a house across the street
from the one Bobo was trying to sell reported
having seen a woman matching her description arrive
at the home around 11:30 a.m.
A few minutes later,
a man pulled up in a dark green Pontiac.
The two of them went into the house.
They came back out, got in their own cars
and left in the same direction.
He said the man was in his mid to late 20s
was six feet tall with brown hair,
a mustache and beard, and wearing a ball cap.
The employee at the Pontiac dealership said
he saw a car matching Bobo's pick up a man
at the Easy Mart around noon.
That seemed to contradict the carpenter's timeline
of seeing them at the house at 11:38 a.m.
Why would they leave the house in separate cars
only for her to pick him up 30 minutes later
at the Easy Mart?
It's possible that either the carpenter
or the Pontiac employee were off about the time
or about who they saw.
After all, they were just casual observers
with no idea they might be witnessing to something sinister.
A man named Henry Irwin told police
he had been out on his land bailing hay that day
when he spotted a car that looked like Bobo's drive by,
weaving back and forth as a man and woman
inside appeared to struggle.
Some of the employees of Smitty's Grocery Store said
they first noticed a car sitting in the parking lot
at around 1:30 p.m.
Police narrowed in on the timeframe,
between 12:00 p.m. and 1:30 p.m.,
to try to determine what happened to Bobo.
Unfortunately, the case has never been solved.
Bobo was eventually declared dead.
Michael Jean Morris.
A few months after Bobo disappeared,
a man named Michael Jean Morris committed suicide
in the woods.
He lived in the next county
and matched the physical description
of the man witnesses had seen.
Bobo's father was frustrated
with how the investigation was going
so he hired a private investigator
by the name of William Dear.
They chose him because he worked
on another high profile case
of a teenager named James Dallas Egbert II.
One of the first things Dear did was speak
to Morris' employer
who told him Morris had taken that day off
to visit someone at Magnolia about real estate.
The carpenter who was working on the house
across the street was shown a picture of Morris
and claimed it was the same man he had seen that day.
The carpenter wrote an official statement
to the sheriff with his claim.
The sheriff dismissed it
because it had been over a year by that point
and he didn't think it was possible
to recognize someone he had seen only
for a few minutes over a year ago.
Further investigation revealed Morris
had been previously diagnosed with schizophrenia,
was on antipsychotic medication,
and was seeing a psychiatrist,
People who knew him claimed he had a fascination
with the case and insisted on more than one occasion
that he had insider information.
Since it was no longer possible to question Morris,
there was very little else for either Dear
or the police department to work with to solve the case.
A local psychic claimed that Morris buried Bobo
on top of his father's coffin in the Western cemetery.
With nothing else to go on and desperate for answers,
Dear obtained permission from the Morris family
to exhume the father's grave.
Local officials got on board with the plan.
They all gathered around anxiously at the grave
on a day in November in 1979.
Once the coffin was reached,
it became clear there wasn't another body
on top of the coffin.
A short time later, the Morris family sued Dear
for $2 million on the grounds of emotional duress
and invasion of privacy.
They claimed that he had engaged
in extreme and outrageous conduct from bizarre sources,
such as a psychic and others.
Dear claimed his sources of information about the grave
was never a psychic at all.
He claimed he made that up to protect the identity
of the real source who overheard Morris talking
to his psychiatrist.
It was later revealed the anonymous source was a nurse
who worked for the psychiatrist.
She claimed she heard Morris tell the psychiatrist
that he buried her with his father.
The lawsuit ended up in court in front of a jury
who sided with Dear.
He stopped officially working on the Bobo Shinn case
and moved to Texas.
Privately though, he never completely gave up.
Sheriff Mike Loe.
Sheriff Loe and William Dear never did get along.
From the moment Dear joined the investigation,
the two men started stepping on each other's toes.
Loe had known Bobo personally,
and because he was emotionally invested in the case,
he was working even harder to solve it.
He felt Dear was haughty and arrogant.
He resented the outsider pushing his way onto the case.
From Dear's point of view, the police were getting
in the way of his investigation.
They constantly butted heads
until deer eventually stopped working on the case
and moved to Texas.
However, unlike Dear, Loe never gave up on the case,
even as he neared retirement.
In fact, in 2015, he decided to reopen the investigation
and start from scratch.
While still using some original information,
such as the contents or the car,
he even tracked down surviving witnesses
and interviewed them again.
In an interview with Arkansas Life,
Sheriff Loe said, The community deserves an answer.
"The family deserves an answer,
"so I've made it my decision to solve it.
"It's the only case I've ever gotten
"so personally involved with
"and the only one I ever will
"because it takes a toll on you"
William Dear.
Around 2016, William Dear received a phone call
from someone who wished to remain anonymous.
The person said they had details
to share about the Bobo Shinn case.
They suspected they knew of a person who was still alive
who was involved in her disappearance.
They gathered from things they had seen and heard
that her body was on some land outside of town.
Dear tried to contact Sheriff Loe
but was immediately told by email that any information had
to be given to the county prosecutor.
Dear believed that would lead nowhere
so he continued working on it privately
while Loe continued with his reopening of the investigation.
The two men had never been able to see eye to eye,
which never changed even after many years.
Memorial service.
In July, 2014, 36 years after Bobo's disappearance,
family and friends held a memorial service for her
at Central Baptist Church in Magnolia.
Her parents had already passed away,
but her four siblings decided it was time
to do something to get closer for the rest of the family.
A marker with her name was placed next
to her parents' headstones
and the church became filled with people
who had known and loved her.
They took turns sharing stories, singing songs,
and watching the video montage of a life that was cut short.
There were a lot of tears as they remembered
and grieved the young woman they had known so long ago.
Pastor Joe Stubblefield,
who had been the pastor at the time of her disappearance,
summed it up the best way anyone could,
"We may not know in this lifetime what happened to Bobo,
"but we are assured in scripture
"there's nothing hidden that will not be revealed."
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