An entire family is murdered-- father, mother, and daughter. Each family member was shot in the head and the house phone lines had been cut. Thirteen years later and there are still no leads, but a lot of interesting details remain. Who killed the Shorts?
This mystery has always been very captivating to me, as I grew up in Oak Level, VA and was only a few years older than the murdered daughter. Though I did not know the family personally, this was a fairly shocking event and it definitely left an impression on the small, tight-knit community. I've found myself googling the case every so often to see if there have been any new developments because it's always stayed with me (even 13 years later). I apologize in advance for any typos or errors, as I've been gathering information for and putting this together in very infrequent instances of spare time, but I’ve wanted to post this here for a while now.
Initially, both of the parents, Michael (50) and Mary (36), were found after they were each cleanly shot in the head and left in separate locations of their Bassett, Virginia home. Michael was found in their attached garage and Mary in their bedroom. The phone lines to their house had been cut. A nationwide search and Amber Alert ensued for their missing 9-year-old daughter, Jennifer. However, about a month later, her remains were found in Rockingham County, North Carolina (around 30 miles south of their home). She, too, had been shot in the head. See the FBI summary here and a general timeline of the case here.
Police never seemed to have much evidence or strong leads in this case, and no real developments have ever came out. One of the only leads released was a request for information about an unidentified man in a flatbed truck parked in the vicinity of the Short home. They released sketches of the man and the truck.
Initially, police showed interest in Garrison S. Bowman, a man who lived near where Jennifer’s body was found, and who also, may have had issues with the father, Michael, who had ran a business that moved mobile homes. According to an acquaintance, Bowman had complained that “he had paid a man in Virginia to move his mobile home and that if he didn't move it or return his money, ‘he would have to kill him,’" and also did other shady things like pulling a gun on his landlord, installing a “false floor” in his van, and then moving to Canada a day after the murders. According to some news outlets, the Short’s mobile home moving business had been out of business for several years prior to the murders, and the Shorts were attempting to move to South Carolina, not actively running the business in Virginia. This doesn't mean that Michael couldn't have offered his services on the side or anything, but it further obfuscates the connection between the Shorts and Bowman. Bowman maintained that he had never even met Michael or any of the Shorts, and though his home and possessions were extensively searched, police did not find any solid evidence linking him to the crime or the family. They did find a map with an “X” on it near the area of the Short residence, but I’ve never been able to figure out how much of a lead this could be considering the verbiage used—it could easily refer to a map of Virginia with a huge “X” near the bottom, or a small, detailed map of their actual rural community with a super-specific “X” on their house. (Also, as an aside, something that initially cast undue suspicion on Bowman was that two men had initially told investigators that they saw him carrying Jennifer. Later, these men were indicted for lying about this to get reward money.)
Another theory is that a sexual predator killed the parents and took Jennifer. One suggestion in a lot of mystery forums is that the murderer could have been Joseph E. Duncan, a child molester and murderer, who was rumored to have been in town for a scuba diving expo during the time of the murders. Now, I can’t find any substantiated evidence for this, and this theory seems, to me, to be a bit too sensationalist considering the following:
First, and above all, it lacks even a shred of real evidence.
Duncan never actually resided in the area. The Short’s home was in a fairly rural area and Jennifer’s body was found well off the beaten path. These both seemed like places that only locals would know.
As someone who was born in Oak Level, a scuba diving expo in southern, rural, landlocked Virginia being popular or big enough to draw in dangerous transients from Washington/Idaho just seems improbable.
I think the real suggestion behind this theory is that there was some kind of deviant, interested primarily in Jennifer, who did indiscriminate harm to a random family. Again, this was a fairly small, southern community, and though it certainly had crime, violence of this caliber just seemed foreign and out of place—it seemed to people like a random variable must have come in and caused it. There’s a decent amount of back and forth between two posters in this forum about the possibility/impossibility of Duncan having committed the crime here. This blogger made a good case that the sketch of the unidentified male sitting in the flatbed truck outside the Shorts’ home resembles serial killer, Gary Hilton, who killed an elderly couple in North Carolina in 2007 (among other victims).
Also of interest was the way the police spoke about Michael and Jennifer—as though he may not be her paternal father, with infamous Henry County Sheriff H. Frank Cassell telling new outlets things like “We knew the paternity about 10 days ago… That is one of the last things we would release. ... We're not saying for the simple reason it could be extremely important in this case.” In effect, if people weren’t already gossiping about paternity, it quickly became a focus and people wondered if a potential biological father could have committed the crime. Again, just to be clear, there was never any real evidence presented to suggest Michael was not Jennifer’s biological father. In a seemingly unrelated twist, Sheriff Cassell would plea guilty to “knowingly and willfully [making] a false material statement and representation to a Federal Bureau of Investigations special agent” in relation to corruption charges (regarding the illegal redistribution of seized drugs) only five years later.
Another person of interest was a man who was harassing Mary Short at her work in the early 1990s, and was actually removed from the building by security. None of her former co-workers were ever able to identify the man.
Questions that I find quite interesting are:
Why was Jennifer removed from the house?
What motive could someone have to shoot a family of three in such a methodical manner (cutting phone lines, seemingly execution-style shooting)?
Could the man harassing Mary at her work be Jennifer’s biological father? He was harassing her in 1992 or 1993; Jennifer would have been born in 1993.
Could police corruption have had anything to do with the mystery surrounding these deaths? Other than just complicating things through run-of-the-mill showboating and shoddy police work—could the corruption have had anything to do with these murders?
Who was the man in the truck and why didn’t he come forward? If he was the murderer, what kind of premeditated murderer drives a huge flatbed truck to a murder, and then proceeds to murder three people so cleanly and efficiently that no DNA or substantial evidence is found?
Apart from all of the above-listed theories, details, and speculation, there are still countless other possibilities and twists regarding the case. Though it doesn’t have a Wikipedia page, other mystery forums and Martinsville Bulletin articles (just search for Jennifer Short on http://www.martinsvillebulletin.com/) offer a wealth of craziness relating to these murders, but the killer(s) is/are still at large. Initially, it seemed so brazen, that everyone just assumed it would be solved within weeks. With the resolution of murder cases like the McStay and Jamison families, I can’t help hold out hope that one day someone will come forward or something will happen with this case.
EDIT: Jennifer was found in Rockingham, County. Not just Rockingham.
EDIT # 2: Michael Short was CONFIRMED to be Jennifer's biological father. I just found this.
A quote from Sheriff Cassell: "Before I go any further and certainly before we get into any questions, I want to clarify one thing: Michael Short was the biological father of Jennifer Renee Short. And while I'm here, I want to also apologize to the families, the Short family and Mary Short's extended family, for not being able to clarify this earlier. As you know, we received information early on that there possibly was someone, that Michael was not the father, on and on and on and on, and it kind of fed on itself. We weren't sure who the biological father was at first, and some of you may remember I told you I had no reason to believe that he wasn't.
We quickly found out he was. By that time, I was afraid to tell you for the simple reason if the biological father had Jennifer, we were afraid he would dispose of her. Or someone thought he was the biological father, which is just as important.
We never at any time, at anywhere, discovered any information that Mary Short was anything other than a lady and a model mother for her child. By the same token, we never discovered any information, anywhere that would lead us to believe that Michael Short was anything other than a loving father to his child.
I just want to make that plain for everyone, and particularly the family. We did what we did. I would risk anything to save a little girl's life. But she's gone now, and she's safe now. No evil can befall here. So that needs to be said. Thank you."
So apparently, Michael Short was Jennifer's father, but does anyone else sense a bit of suggestion that the person who did this was believed by authorities to have been involved in a dispute regarding the questionable (Was it questionable?) paternity of Jennifer Short??