The Shawna Beth Garber Cold Case: Could There Be a BTK Connection?
Kansas serial killer Dennis Rader spent his childhood summers just 19 miles from the crime scene and often traveled the year Garber was murdered
This is the second article in a two-part series on the Shawna Beth Garber, aka “Grace Doe,” cold case. You can read the first installment here. In the third installment, the boy who allegedly found her body comes forward after 30 years. Read it here.
For more than three decades, Shawna Beth Garber was known only as Grace Doe. After a couple discovered her body behind an abandoned farmhouse in southwest Missouri in December 1990, investigators gave her that nickname because “only by the Grace of God” would they be able to identify her.
In spite of endless obstacles, detectives finally gave the victim her real name back in April. After partnering with Othram Inc, a Texas-based firm that uses DNA analysis to identify the deceased, they located a family member: Danielle Pixler, Shawna’s half-sister. Pixler had been looking for her sibling for 28 years.
The two women had the same mother, though Pixler was born after a second marriage. By then, child protective services in Topeka, Kansas had already placed Shawna and her two…
