Montana 1974 Cold Case Solved — The Sketch Sent Them After The Wrong Man

Earlier today, the Missoula Police Department revealed they had identified a suspect in the murder of 5-year-old Siobhan McGuinness. Now, law enforcement is looking to where he used to live in Arkansas in their search for answers.  We are here today to discuss the closure of a 46-year-old case.  And in a 46-year-old cold case, Montana officials say the murder investigation of a Missoula 5-year-old now has a suspect.

 February 1974  killing of a 5-year-old girl from Missoula, Montana, that suspect is from Arkansas.  But thanks to modern DNA technology, he was able to be identified as a potential suspect in this murder investigation and bring the grieving family some  closure.  Through modern DNA technology and assistance from state and federal law enforcement partners, the cold case squad was able to identify a suspect.

 Davis lived in North Little Rock from the ’70s  through the ’80s and worked as a security guard for the Arkansas School for the Deaf and Blind.  This is across state lines. This is in very separate parts of the country. And if if he’s being linked to these cases, what we’d like people to do is come forward if they have any information.

 A surprising announcement in a Montana  murder investigation that stretches nearly five decades. She was assaulted and killed February of 1974. Now, the FBI is looking closer to home and searching for answers.  Or any suspicions that he may have been involved in similar cases.  Richard William Davis of Cabot was identified as a suspect in Siobhan’s murder and the attempted  abduction of an 8-year-old child in New York 1 year prior.

 He would have been 32 when Siobhan was killed. DNA evidence from the crime scene partially  matched the DNA of a family member of Davis who’d sent a DNA sample into a consumer database.  As one case moves forward  states away, law enforcement is looking for answers in Arkansas and hoping more closure can be found.

 In February of 1974, a man in Missoula, Montana sat down with a pencil and drew a face he had never seen. He was not a police artist and was not a detective, but a father and his 5-year-old daughter had not come home the night before. Earlier that same day, in the same part of town, another little girl had told police that a stranger tried to coax her into a shed.

 She got away. She remembered what he looked like. So, the father listened to that child describe a man and he drew what she told him. A white man, curly red hair, medium build, around 5 ft 11, 18, maybe 20 years old. That drawing went into the case file. It went out to the public. It was the closest thing anyone had to a face and in a town of 40,000 people, it became the face.

For the next four and a half decades, when Missoula pictured the man who took Siobhan McGuinness, this is what they pictured. He was 32 years old. He had already been questioned by police in another state 8 months earlier about another little girl walking home from a store. He had no family in Montana. He had never lived there.

 He was on the road, passing through and by the time a laboratory in Texas finally said his name out loud, he had been dead for 8 years. The only lead the town ever really had was a drawing of the wrong man.  A warning to our viewers. What you are about to watch is a true story. The video contains content that some viewers may find disturbing.

 Viewer discretion is strongly advised. Welcome back to the Crime Bureau. This  one is about a walk of three blocks, a face that sent a whole town looking  in the wrong direction and a family tree that took 46 years to finish. Drop a comment and tell us where you’re watching from. We read every single one of them.

 New here? Hit like and subscribe. It’s what keeps us digging. Now, let’s go back to Missoula. Her name was Sherri McGuinness. She was 5 years old and by every account of everyone who knew her, she was a little ahead of the world she’d been born into. Her father, Steven, would say she spoke perfect English by the age of 4. He called her a genius and he said it the way fathers do, not as a claim to be checked, but as a fact he’d been living with. Happy, curious, outgoing.

 The kind of child who talked to people because she hadn’t yet learned any reason not to. Her parents were no longer together. Steven had his own place. Sherri lived with her mother on the north side of Missoula, a working neighborhood of small houses and short streets north of the railroad tracks, where kids moved between homes on foot because that was simply how it was done.

 Missoula in 1974 was a mill town and a college town wrapped around each other in a valley in western Montana. 40,000 people. Nobody locked much. Children walked. Later, Steven would put it in one sentence. Back then, we had more trust, especially with children. Everyone thought they were safe. Tuesday, February 5th, 1974 was cold in the way that Montana February’s are cold.

 There was snow on the ground and more coming. Sherri spent part of that day at a friend’s house, a couple of streets over from her own. Then, in the early evening, she started home. The distance was almost nothing, two blocks, maybe three. Her father, decades later, would try to explain to a reporter how small that gap was and how perfectly the world had arranged itself against her inside it.

It was dinner time in February. It was dim, that thin blue twilight that arrives before 5:00 in a northern winter. Windows were closed against the cold. Nobody was standing on a porch. Nobody was hearing anything outside. He called it a perfect storm. What he meant was that a child walking three blocks at dusk in a town that trusted itself was for about 90 seconds completely alone.

Police would later put the point of the abduction in the area of 500 North 2nd Street West. Siobhan never reached her door. And here is the detail that would sit inside this case like a splinter for the next 46 years. Earlier that same day in that same corner of Missoula, another young girl reported that a stranger had tried to lure her into a shed. She escaped.

 She was unharmed. She told police what happened and she described the man. Two children, one neighborhood, one afternoon, only one of them made it home. The knock on Steven McGinness’s door came from a Missoula police officer and Steven would remember the man’s face before he remembered the words. “The look on the guy’s face was very telling.” he said.

 “He asked me to sit down. He said, ‘Your daughter is missing.'” What followed was the kind of search a small city mounts when the missing person is 5 years old. Officers went door-to-door. Volunteers walked the north side grid. K9 units worked the streets and the alleys and the riverbank. People who had never met the family were out in the dark in February calling a stranger’s child by name.

They searched through the night. They searched into the next day. The temperature dropped and the snow came down and every hour that passed took something out of the room. On February 7th, two days after she disappeared, the search ended about 10 miles east of Missoula. A culvert runs under the roadway near the Turah exit off Interstate 90, a drainage pipe, the kind of feature you pass at 70 miles an hour and never once notice.

 Shevonne had been placed inside it. The snow that fell that week had covered her, and it had covered everything else, too. Tire impressions, footprints, any trace of how she got there or who brought her. Her body was sent to Great Falls for an autopsy. The findings were reported plainly in the Montana papers that week.

 She had sustained extensive trauma, including wounds to her chest, and she had been assaulted. That is as far as this channel will go, and it is as far as anyone needs to go. What matters for everything that follows is a decision made by people most accounts don’t name. The pathologist and investigators who collected biological evidence in 1974, logged it, sealed it, and stored it.

There was no DNA science in 1974. There was no national database. There was no theory under which that material could ever be turned into a name. They preserved it anyway. Missoula changed that week, and it did not change back. Parents who had let their kids walk two blocks started driving them. The whole loose architecture of a trusting town tightened in a matter of days.

 Local residents pooled a reward fund of $7,000, real money in 1974, for information leading to an arrest, and investigators worked with what they had, which was two things: a description and a car. Police believed the person responsible had been driving a large sedan, and reporting from the time indicates that the vehicle they were looking for carried New York license plates.

 That is a very specific detail to have in western Montana. It should have been a thread worth pulling for years. Instead, it produced the case’s first false ending. A 15-year-old was detained because he owned a Cadillac with New York plates. He was put through a psychiatric evaluation. He was interviewed under what the newspapers of the era called truth serum.

 His alibi held up, and on February 21st, 1974, 16 days after Shevon disappeared, he was publicly exonerated. He was a teenager who happened to own the wrong car. Then there was the drawing, the composite built from the description given by the girl who escaped the shed, a young man, late teens, curly red hair. It went everywhere.

 It shaped every conversation and every tip. Missoula spent decades looking for a local kid who would have been in his 20s by the end of that decade. The years stacked up. Detectives retired and handed the binders forward. Other Montana cases from that era were solved and ruled out as unrelated. When forensic DNA testing finally became available, Missoula police used it the traditional way.

They asked men to volunteer samples, and men did, dozens of them, for years. Every comparison eliminated someone. Not one produced a match. The reward offers were extended into 1979, then quietly expired. Shevon McGinness became the case that western Montana didn’t get over. Before the next part, tell me what you’d have done with that New York license plate lead in 1974, because it was real.

It was accurate. And it went nowhere for 46 years. If this is landing with you, hit like and subscribe. Every one of these takes weeks to build. Through all of it, Steven McGinness believed one thing that almost nobody else did. He never thought it was someone the family knew. He never thought it was a neighbor or a relative or a name already somewhere in the file.

 He said he had always known deep inside that it was a stranger. Someone who was there for a very brief period of time on the move. If he was right, then no amount of local investigation would ever work. You cannot eliminate your way to a man who was never on the list. In 2018, the ground shifted under every cold case in America.

 Investigators in California used forensic genetic genealogy to identify the offender behind the Golden State case. A man who had gone unnamed for four decades. The method didn’t need a suspect. It ran unknown crime scene DNA against consumer ancestry databases, found distant relatives of the unknown man, and built family trees inward until only one person was left standing at the center.

For the first time in the history of the Sherri Yvonne Megginnis case, the question was not who in Missoula did this. The question was whose family does this DNA belong to? The Missoula County Sheriff’s Office Cold Case Squad had the evidence. It had survived 44 years of storage. And the people who ran the case forward now had partners.

 The Missoula Police Department, the FBI, Bode Technology, and Astrium. A Texas laboratory built specifically to pull usable genetic profiles out of degraded and depleted forensic samples. Astrium worked the extract and produced a genealogical profile. Genealogists took that profile into the databases and started building. The tree narrowed.

 Then it narrowed again. Eventually, the work reduced a country of 200 million adults down to three possibilities. Then to one. And then investigators had to do the hardest part of modern cold case work. They had to go to the family of a dead man and tell them what the science was pointing at. Missoula’s police chief, Jason White, was direct about what happened next.

“It was through cooperation with the suspect’s family,” he said, “that investigators got the information that conclusively linked the man to the case.” His descendants helped. They didn’t have to. They could have said nothing, hired a lawyer, waited it out. Instead, they answered questions about a father and a grandfather who had already been buried for 8 years, and they gave investigators what they needed to close the last gap.

Several weeks before the public announcement, Steven McGinness and his daughter Una got a phone call. There had been a break. There was a name. It was a name neither of them had ever heard in their lives. On Monday, October 26th, 2020, Montana authorities held a press conference and said it out loud.

 Richard William Davis, born November 7th, 1941, in Gaylord, Pennsylvania, 32 years old in February of 1974, a truck driver by trade, no family in Missoula, no property there, no job there, no reason to be there that anyone has ever established. Police said he was simply traveling through. He died of natural causes at his home in Cabot, Arkansas, on August 24th, 2012, at the age of 70.

 His obituary described a loving husband, father, and grandfather, and a born-again Christian who had worked many years as a truck driver. Chief White addressed the family directly. “We never gave up on CherVonne or on finding justice,” he said. And then the sentence that every posthumous identification eventually arrives at. “While we are unable to bring him to justice for his crimes, we hope his identification can bring you a small amount of closure.

 Steven McGinnis was 79 years old that day. Asked whether this was the man who took his daughter, he said, “It appears so.” Una, who was born after Siobhan died and never met her sister, spoke about the science. “My dad never thought he would see this happen in his lifetime.” she said. “It’s a big deal for us. And it’s a huge deal for the Missoula community.

 This affected almost everybody who lived here at that time. There was no arrest to make. There was no courtroom to sit in. There was a name, 46 years and 8 months late. Right here is the moment to say what you’re thinking. Does an identification without a trial count as justice? I want to hear it in the comments.

 Because the family of a man nobody had ever suspected is the reason this case has an answer at all. When investigators went looking for who Richard William Davis had been, they found something worse than a monster. They found an itinerary. He grew up in Pennsylvania and lived there into the early 1960s, working for a period as a missionary on a Sioux reservation.

 He moved to South Dakota late in that decade, Lead, Deadwood, Rapid City, and worked in the mines. By the late 1960s, he had settled in a small village in upstate New York called Bath, where he stayed into the late 1970s. Then North Little Rock, Arkansas, then the town of Cabot, where he stayed until he died. That’s the spine.

 Hanging off it is a list of states he moved through. Alaska, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Washington, Wyoming. The FBI’s public bulletin on him is, in its flat institutional way, one of the most unsettling documents in this entire case.

 It records that he stood 6 ft tall, that he smoked menthol cigarettes, that he was known to carry a folding blade and a firearm, and that he used two names besides his own, Dick and Nash. It lists his cars decade by decade, a Nash Rambler in the late ’60s, an Oldsmobile 98 in the early ’70s, a blue pickup after that, a truck with a sleeper cab by the 2000s.

 An Oldsmobile 98 in 1974 was an enormous American sedan. Police said Davis’s vehicle matched the description of the suspect vehicle from that February, a big sedan seen at dusk in a town where a 15-year-old with a Cadillac spent 16 days as the prime suspect. And the plates, Missoula was looking for New York plates in 1974.

Richard William Davis was living in Bath, New York in 1974. Then there is the part of the bulletin that lists his jobs. And this is where it stops being a case file and starts being something you have to sit with, security guard at a winery and bar in Bath, New York, security guard at the Arkansas School for the Deaf and Blind, a volunteer with Big Brothers Big Sisters in Arkansas.

 And in late 1974 and early 1975, within a year of a 5-year-old girl being taken off a Missoula street, Richard William Davis was driving a school bus in Alaska. He had never been convicted of a violent crime. Though, he had never been considered a suspect in one, but he had come to the attention of police before.

 And the record of it was sitting in a filing cabinet in New York the whole time. In June of in 8 months before Missoula, an 8-year-old girl in Bath, New York was walking home from a store when a man approached her and tried to get her into his truck. She got away and reported it. The description she gave matched Davis, who was then 31 and living in the same town.

Bath police questioned him. He admitted approaching the child and denied meaning her any harm. No charges were filed for lack of further evidence. Read that sequence in order. June 1973, Upstate New York, a man tries to get a little girl walking home into his vehicle, is identified, is questioned, and walks out of the police station.

February 1974, Missoula, a little girl walking home is taken off the street. There is one more file. In October of 1973, a 24-year-old woman named Barbara Jean Alexovich left the Elks Lodge in Bath and walked the two blocks toward her home. She never arrived. After Davis was named in 2020, Bath police reopened her case. The FBI’s position is unambiguous.

They published his photograph, his aliases, his vehicles, his cigarettes, his employment history, and his cross-country routes, and they asked a straightforward question of every agency in the country, “Are there similar cases this man is responsible for?” That question is still open. Here is what the record shows, plainly, without a single flourish.

Richard William Davis was never arrested for what happened to Shavon McGinness. He was never charged. He was never tried. No jury ever heard the evidence. No judge ever sentenced him, and he never spent one night in custody for it. He lived to be 70 in a house in Arkansas, described in his own obituary as a loving grandfather.

 The case was closed by declaration, not by verdict. And the only reason it could be closed at all is that a family agreed to help prove something terrible about their own father, and still go back to that pencil drawing. A curly-haired young man, 18 or 20 years old. That is what a grieving father put on paper in February of 1974, working from the memory of a frightened child, because it was the only thing in the world he could do that day.

 Missoula carried that face for 46 years. It was never him. It was never going to be him. What actually solved this case was the thing nobody in 1974 could have imagined, and somebody in 1974 chose to preserve anyway. A biological sample, sealed and stored by people who had no idea what it would one day become. Chevonne McGinness was 5 years old.

 She spoke in full, clear sentences before she was four. Her father thought she was a genius, and he spent 46 years of his life being right about one other thing, too. That the man who took her was a stranger who was only there for a moment. Some of her ashes are buried near the big white M on the side of Mount Sentinel above Missoula.

 Some were scattered from the Higgins Avenue Bridge into the Clark Fork River over the stretch of whitewater the city now calls Brennan’s Wave. She is still in that valley in the two places you can see from almost anywhere in town. If there is something to take from this case, it isn’t fear of the neighborhood. It’s this.

 The person who ends up mattering most may have no connection to your community at all, and the report that seems too small to bother with, a stranger who approached a child and then left, may be the only paperwork that ever links two cities and two years and one man. The little girl in Bath, New York told someone. Her account was written down.

 It is part of the record today because of that. Tell the children in your life that a strange adult who wants them to come closer is a thing they are allowed to walk away from and talk about loudly to any adult they trust. If this case stayed with you, leave a comment and tell us which moment hit hardest. The drawing, the New York plates, or the school bus in Alaska.

 Hit like and subscribe because there are files exactly like this one still sitting in evidence rooms waiting for somebody to ask the right question. This has been The Crime Bureau. We’ll see you in the next video.