The image of fugitive murder suspect Nicholas Sheley’s mug shot on her television screen was fresh in Samantha Butler’s mind when the mother ventured out to get dinner for the family, warning them to lock the door behind her.The real-estate agent found police swarming a Subway sandwich shop in this St. Louis suburb, overhearing one officer say Sheley — suspected of eight killings in two states — had just been there and couldn’t be far. So Butler decided Tuesday’s dinner would come from nearby Bindy’s bar, a police hangout with a grill.Cops were everywhere outside hunting for the 28-year-old fugitive, Butler told the bartender before reciting the suspect’s description. But she grew quiet and fearful as she got her first clear look across the bar and saw the wanted man sitting gauntly on a stool, staring right back.Butler, 27, quietly slipped out to flag down police, as did a Bindy’s regular who soon realized the stranger in a dirty T-shirt was the suspect he’d seen minutes earlier on TV news.Police had Sheley in handcuffs moments later after he stepped outside the bar for a cigarette — the latest example of how quickly fugitives get flushed out when their names and faces are plastered across TV screens.
“I can’t stress enough how important it was” to make Sheley’s mug shot and description public, said Tim Lewis, the police chief in Festus, Mo., where investigators suspect an Arkansas couple found slain were part of Sheley’s alleged rampage covering more than 250 miles.“The pictures we put out helped us,” the chief smiled. With them, “you go from 100 sets of eyes to thousands.”
Such tactics are nothing new; authorities have recruited the public help since at least the days of the Old West, when bad guys’ faces graced “Wanted” posters tacked to hitching posts. More recently, authorities point to Fox’s nationally televised “America’s Most Wanted,” which credits viewers with helping capture 1,000 fugitives the program has targeted since 1988.
Certainly, public appeals have drawn what law enforcers commonly consider “Elvis sightings” — phoned-in tips that are simply made up, other times mistaken. But Lewis considers Sheley’s capture testament to when things go right, hastening the arrest of a man the chief worried had more bloodshed in mind.Still, Lewis doesn’t buy suggestions Sheley had grown weary and was intent on giving up.
“I don’t think he had a plan to surrender to anybody,” the police chief said of the suspect whose rap sheet includes a conviction for aggravated robbery and allegations he held a knife to the throat of a drug dealer and shot at a man during another home invasion.At the time of his capture Tuesday, Lewis said, “he was cornered. He was running, he was desperate and he didn’t have anywhere to go. That’s what made him so dangerous.”Authorities believe Sheley killed eight people in the final days of June. The dead, including six in northwestern Illinois, ranged in age from a 93-year-old man from Sheley’s hometown, Sterling, to a 2-year-old child found with three other bodies in a Rock Falls apartment.Sheley is jailed on $1 million bond in Knox County, where faces first-degree murder and other charges in the beating death of 65-year-old Ronald Randall, whose body was found Monday behind a grocery store in Galesburg.Sheley is so far charged in just one other killing — that of 93-year-old Russell Reed — but authorities say evidence links him to each crime scene.No motive theories have been made public.
Lewis, the police chief, said the search for Sheley intensified around St. Louis on Monday night, when a man matching the suspect’s description — 5-foot-6, 160 pounds with tattoos on both arms — was seen outside St. Louis’ Busch Stadium.
The next day, Lewis said, investigators figured Sheley remained in the region, with “more good evidence” the chief wouldn’t publicly discuss pointing to Sheley as a suspect in the Arkansas couple’s slayings.
Area authorities wanted to take their search to area media outlets but investigators first fanned out over St. Louis and its suburbs, including those in Illinois, making them ready to pounce the instant viewers began calling in Sheley’s whereabouts, Lewis said
“It’s kind of like when you go bird hunting. You don’t just jump out of the truck, run into the field and flush out all the birds. You get all the hunters in place first,” he said.
Authorities doled out Sheley’s mug shot and description in time for broadcast on that evening’s news, and the “phone calls started flooding in,” Lewis said.
“Luckily, we had a lot of boots on the ground,” he said. “What got our attention were the calls that started coming in from Granite City, saying he’s at Subway. People saying, ‘I just saw him a couple minutes ago.’ ”It wasn’t long before all roads to Sheley led to Bindy’s.
Still, “when you put all this together, you still have to throw in the unknown quantity called luck,” Lewis said. “It was our luck that he walked into Bindy’s, where people were watching television and saw him,” never mind that it was a cop bar.
“Luck is something you have no control over. But when you get that and you act upon it, that’s what makes a difference.”
Luck would have it that Butler, who doesn’t drink, ended up at Bindy’s.
“I’m just glad it’s over and he went quietly,” she said. “Could you imagine if he was still on the run and the Fourth of July came? He could have been in St. Louis with all these families celebrating Independence Day, and God only knows what could have happened.”
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