A young woman is murdered, and her killer confesses, leading police to a dumpster where he says he left her body. Of course, that’s not where the body is any more:
Sheriff’s officials say the man charged in the slaying, Stewart’s ex-boyfriend Timothy Wayne Shepherd, confessed to investigators Wednesday night that he choked her, stuffed her body in a large plastic storage container and placed her body in a Dumpster in northwest Harris County on March 15. Authorities found no body in that bin, which had been emptied at least twice since.
By day’s end, officials with Waste Management and the sheriff’s office had estimated that there is a 65 percent chance that Stewart’s body is at the Atascocita Recycling and Disposal Facility, 3623 Wilson Road.
There is a smaller chance the body is in a landfill in Clute, which is in southern Brazoria County.
The 504-acre landfill in northeast Harris County receives about 3,500 tons of nonhazardous residential, commercial and industrial waste every day. Although officials have narrowed their search area to a 2- to 3-acre section at the landfill, they said the body could be buried beneath as much as 40,000 tons and 50 feet of refuse.
40,000 tons of trash. The mind boggles… and that’s assuming the killer was up front with police about where he left Ms. Stewart’s body. I’m sure the sheriff’s office is correct: the odds are very low that a search would recover her remains.
Yeah? And?
Faced with the “virtually impossible” task of excavating 40,000 tons of landfill waste to find Tynesha Stewart’s body, Harris County sheriff’s officials made the agonizing decision Thursday night that the odds of success were too remote to try.
Sheriff’s officials met with the slain Texas A&M University student’s mother, Gale Shields, shortly before a scheduled 7 p.m. candlelight vigil to inform her there would be no search for her daughter’s body.
Since when does a challenge — even one with very low probability for success — mean that people don’t try? Folks, the appropriate resting place for someone is not in a pile of garbage. To simply leave this young person’s body there without even looking is cold to the point of inhuman.
In fact, it’s outrageous. I’m absolutely positive that if my Adorable Child’s body was deemed too expensive to look for — just not worth digging out of a garbage heap, so sorry — this decision would kill me. The nightmares would consume me for the rest of my life.
Who did the cost-benefit analysis? And how could they possibly have arrived at a quantifiable value for a murdered person’s body?
No. This is wrong wrong wrong.
Not only does Polimom think the Harris County sheriff’s office needs to re-think their decision here, I also think a useful cost-offset should be mandatory community service by Texas’ convicted murderers — starting with the monster who says he dumped Ms. Stewart’s body in with the trash, as if it were gum scraped from his shoe.
They need to start looking for Tynesha Stewart’s body. And they should start today.
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12:41 pm: The Chronicle has updated the story (for at least the second time since I first wrote this post):
The man who authorities say confessed to killing Tynesha Stewart, a missing and presumed dead Texas A&M student, has now said he dismembered the body, placed the body parts in bags and left them in multiple trash bins. That means the woman’s remains could be spread across multiple landfills in the area.
“It has made the search tremendously difficult because we don’t even know where to start now,” community activist Quanell X told reporters this morning after meeting with the family and Harris County prosecutor Kelly Siegler, chief of the District Attorney’s special crimes bureau.
Quanell, who added that the family still hopes to search for the body despite the long odds of success, said the suspected killer, Timothy Wayne Shepherd, gave the authorities the new information, possibly Wednesday night, after being rescued from a suicide attempt.
If that’s correct — and this guy seems to be all over the map — does it change things? Certainly the logistics are a nightmare. How horrifying. But I’m having some trouble picturing somebody driving around with multiple bags containing someone’s body parts, discreetly dropping them here and there, with nary a care in the world for the obvious risk.
Second Update – 7:26 pm: Officials are evidently reconsidering. A number of sources report that the County Commissioners, in an emergency session, set aside $500,000 to fund a search, and depending upon where you get your news, it’s either a “maybe”, or the search will begin Wednesday.
Meanwhile, Lt. John Martin, the P.I.O for the Sheriff’s Office, sent Polimom an email (at 5:30 pm) saying that a search is still an “if”, rather than a “when”, and that various officials and representatives will be meeting on Monday.
I have no doubt I’ll be writing on this story again.