Melissa Winnie was only 7 months old when her aunt, Sharrey Lynn Case, was killed in 1977 in Belleville, Illinois. Her favorite painting is one of Sharrey holding her as a baby, just before she went missing. She says she always knew something bad had happened to her aunt. “My grandmother always preserved her room the way it was,” Melissa told Dateline. “So I was always able to ask questions.”
“I feel like a part of my identity and family belonging -- because I didn’t have the chance to know her -- was taken,” Melissa said. “If I would’ve grown up with her and it had happened later, maybe I wouldn’t feel as lost.”
Melissa says her family remembers Sharrey as a “very outgoing teen.” Before her death, Sharrey had recently started studying photography at Belleville Area College, was working at a skating rink/swimming pool, and as a cashier.
According to Melissa, on October 28, 1977, Sharrey’s mom dropped her off at her boyfriend’s mobile home and handed her $20. Her family was going on a weekend camping trip, but Sharrey stayed behind to work. When the family got home, Sharrey was nowhere to be found.
On November 1, they reported her missing.
Senior Detective Ben Vise joined the St. Clair County Sheriff’s Department in 2005. He says he first learned about Sharrey’s case when Dateline reached out for comment, so he took a look at the case file. According to Vise, eight weeks after Sharrey went missing, her body was found by a jogger on a dirt road under a pile of construction debris. That was December 19, 1977. Vise says she was fully clothed. A brown wool sock was stuffed in her mouth. She still had her car keys, jewelry, and the $20 bill her mother had given her. She had been strangled with a wire, which was still around her neck. According to Vise, the body was badly decomposed, but dental records confirmed it to be Sharrey.
Vise says the case file indicates that police interviewed Sharrey’s boyfriend, with whom she’d been staying that weekend, and he was never considered a suspect in her disappearance. Police also interviewed several of his neighbors in the mobile home park, but nothing of note came from those interviews. Police took the wire Sharrey was strangled with to area farm stores to try to identify who purchased it, but were told the style of wire hadn’t been produced in several years. “The guys did everything,” Vise said. “They talked to everyone they could.”
After reviewing the case file, Vise has determined there is follow-up that could be done, particularly with modern technology. “I do not think it was solvable in 1977, not without confessions,” he said. “But I do believe it’s a solvable case.”
Detective Vise says Sharrey’s file showed two hairs had been found under her nail during the initial investigation and were labeled “Item No. 12,” but the evidence could not be located. In November of 2005, St. Clair County paid to exhume Sharrey’s body in the hope of finding DNA evidence.
Melissa Winnie’s mother, Shirley Greathouse, had been the one to advocate for her sister’s exhumation. Melissa wasn’t involved in the process then, but heard about it from family.
“I do understand from my mother and my aunt and my grandparents both being there, it was very traumatic. It was very raw,” Melissa told Dateline. “It opened up more feelings, more questions.”
Detective Vise says that following the exhumation, investigators were able to recover another hair, but DNA testing confirmed it belonged to Sharrey.
Vise told Dateline that a potential person of interest was pursued at one point, a man named Gregory Bowman. He had a long history of violent crime, including convictions for the 1978 murders of two young women in Illinois. Those convictions had been overturned and Bowman was awaiting retrial when St. Clair County investigators first interviewed him about Sharrey’s case. Vise says he was re-interviewed in 2015 after being convicted of the 1977 murder of a Missouri teen. In the interviews, Bowman denied any involvement in Sharrey’s death. He died in 2016.
After reviewing Sharrey’s case file and watching a recorded interview with Bowman, Det. Vise doesn’t believe he was involved in Sharrey’s death. He and his boss are now actively looking into Sharrey’s case, and he believes it’s possible that more evidence could be found.
While the St. Clair County Sheriff’s Department doesn’t have a dedicated cold case unit, Det. Vise works on cold cases in his spare time. Since 2022, he has also been working on the case of Eulalia Chavez, whose story Dateline recently covered in its “Cold Case Spotlight” series.
“My goal is to just try to bring some closure to some people at this point,” Vise said.
Melissa’s mother died three years ago without getting answers in her sister’s death, so Melissa has taken over the search by pushing for publicity and doing her own research on the case.
She says when she started out, she wanted to see someone convicted, but now she just wants a resolution. “Over the years, it’s like, ‘Why?’ Because they’re gonna be 75, 80 years old,” she said. “We just really are focused on who did it, why they did it, and at least with those answers, we can fully accept it and let her rest.”
Anyone with information about Sharrey Case should contact Det. Ben Vise at the St. Clair County Sheriff’s Department at 618-825-5309 or Benjamin.Vise@co.st-clair.il.us.
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