40 Years Under a Floor Until Her Daughter CRACKED The Cold Case

Indexé : 2026-05-21

[00:00:00]Shocking discovery in the basement of a house in West Nashville sparks a more than 30-year-old mystery. Metro police want to make sure the two women who were murdered at that home decades ago are never forgotten. As News Channel 5's Emily Luxen explains, they hope technology and tips from you.

[00:00:17]>> In November of 1987, a tenant in a rental house on Charlotte Avenue in West Nashville crawled under the building with a flashlight to check the plumbing.

[00:00:26]The crawl space beneath had a dirt floor. When his flashlight swept across it, he saw two sets of human bones buried in shallow graves directly beneath the rooms where he had been living. The man who put them there had already confessed. He was sitting in another state's prison for an unrelated crime when Nashville detectives drove out to question him. He told them where each grave was and described how he had killed each woman inside the house. But all he could give them for names were two nicknames, Sheila and Little Bit. It took 40 years to put a real name to one of them. This is how they identified her. She had daughters back home in another state. She had come to Nashville at some point in the early 1980s. The only name that anyone in the city of Nashville knew her by was Sheila. The house sat on a workingclass stretch of Charlotte Avenue in West Nashville. The area in the mid 1980s was a mix of small businesses and rental houses spread along the road west of downtown. Tenants came and went on a regular basis. A man named James Schaefer had been the tenant of the Charlotte Avenue house in 1984 and 1985. By the time the bones were found in November of 1987, Schaefer was in a Kentucky prison, serving time for the kidnapping and sexual assault of a 14-year-old boy. He was a registered sex offender with a documented record of violent and predatory behavior that predated the Nashville killings by years. Metro Nashville detectives traveled to the Kentucky State Prison and sat across from Schaefer in an interview room. The detectives told him in detail what the current tenant had discovered under the floor of his former home on Charlotte Avenue. Schaefer confessed to both of the murders without hesitation. He described the exact locations of both graves beneath the house and the circumstances of each killing in a level of detail that only the person responsible could have provided. The first woman, he said, he had picked up near the corner of Broadway and 4th Avenue North on the night of April 21st, 1984. That stretch of Lower Broadway in the mid 1980s was known to be rough at night. The woman went by the name Sheila. According to Schaefer, she was a sex worker he had met that night. He strangled her inside the house and buried her body in a shallow grave in the dirt beneath the floor. The second woman picked up on July 4th, 1985 near 12th Avenue North and Jefferson Street.

[00:02:53]He knew only as little bit. He killed her inside the house and buried her body in a second shallow grave, dug into the dirt floor beneath the building alongside the first woman. Schaefer told the detectives that he had killed both women in fits of rage. Whether that was the truth or simply a version he had constructed to explain the murders on his own terms, investigators had no way to verify. Schaefer was subsequently charged with both murders in Davidson County. He was found guilty on both counts and sentenced by the court.

[00:03:23]Combined with the Kentucky conviction for the assault on the 14-year-old, he would spend the rest of his life in prison. In the most basic sense, the case was closed. A killer had been identified by name, had confessed in detail, and was behind bars serving a sentence that would keep him there for life. But in the sense that mattered most to the people who did not yet know they were families of murder victims, the case was wide open. The two women found under the floor of the house had no names. All Schaefer had given the detectives were two nicknames, the approximate dates of each killing, and the general locations in Nashville where he had picked the women up. That was all he could provide. He had no last names and no information about where either woman had come from. Somewhere out there, those two women almost certainly had people who were waiting for them to come home. Finding those people and giving the dead their names back became the department's problem. Identifying skeletal remains in 1987 without dental records, fingerprints, or a known missing person to compare against was close to impossible. The women had been buried in the dirt for an estimated 2 to three years before the current tenant found them. The remains had been in the ground for years, long enough for all soft tissue to break down completely.

[00:04:41]Their fingerprints were gone. Whatever identifying information they may have carried when they were alive, whatever personal effects or documents or connections to their former lives had been lost to time. Nothing was found with the bodies that could help identify them. No personal items of any kind were recovered from either of the two graves.

[00:05:00]Metro Nashville police carefully transported the remains to the medical examiner's office for examination. The bones were examined, measured, and cataloged. Each set of remains was assigned its own individual case number.

[00:05:13]One was filed under the name Schaefer had given, Sheila. The other was filed under Little Bit. The names Schaefer had provided during his confession at the Kentucky prison were the only form of identification the department had for either woman. After the examinations were complete, both sets of remains were interred in a local cemetery under markers that bore no names. The unsolved identification case sat in the Metro Nashville Police Department's records room. Detectives who inherited the file over the decades that followed reviewed the material periodically. They ran the limited physical descriptions, the estimated ages, and the approximate heights through Namos, the federal clearing house for unidentified remains and missing persons, and through every other national database available to law enforcement. Nothing useful ever came back from any of the searches they ran.

[00:06:06]The two Charlotte Avenue women joined hundreds of other unidentified remains in Tennessee and thousands more across the country. Without a missing person's report on file in any state linking a name to a physical description, the system had nothing to work with and no leads to pursue. As DNA technology advanced through the 1990s and into the 2000s, each development raised the possibility that the Charlotte Avenue remains could be identified. The FBI's national DNA database came online in the late 1990s, storing genetic profiles from convicted offenders and comparing them against evidence submitted from unsolved cases. But the database only worked if both sides of the equation were present. It needed a known genetic profile from a living family member or a missing person's case that had been linked to a biological sample. Without either of those, the Charlotte Avenue remains were beyond the reach of every forensic tool. the system had to offer.

[00:07:05]The bones were in a cemetery under nameless markers. The case files were in a cabinet in Nashville. Neither could provide the connection that investigators needed. Without a name or a family member to start from, there was nowhere to go. Somewhere in Illinois, more than 500 m north of Nashville, a woman named Sheila had daughters who did not know where their mother was. They had been children when she left, and they grew up without her. Birthdays came and went. Holidays came and went. She was not there for any of it. Not once.

[00:07:38]The absence never stopped being there.

[00:07:40]The daughters grew older year by year, and their mother stayed 23 in their minds, frozen at the age she had been when the family lost contact. They knew she had gone to Tennessee. At some point in the early 1980s, she had made her way to Nashville. The last contact anyone in the family had with her was sometime in the year 1984.

[00:08:03]After that, the phone calls stopped. The letters stopped coming. Nobody in Nashville or anywhere else in the country sent word about where she was or what had happened to her. The silence started in 1984, and it stretched across every single one of the next 40 years.

[00:08:19]It simply never broke. The daughters carried that absence with them through every stage of their lives. As they got older, they started searching on their own. The daughters checked missing person's databases in every state they could think of. They read through cold case pages on the internet for hours at a time, scanning descriptions and dates for anything that matched what they knew. They called police departments in Tennessee, in Kentucky, and in other neighboring states, asking whether anyone matching their mother's physical description had ever been found or identified alive or dead in any jurisdiction. Year after year, decade after decade, they sat at their computers and searched through databases and cold case pages and found nothing that led anywhere. Listings blurred together after a while, and the dates never matched up. Physical descriptions were always wrong or incomplete. Nothing they ever found pointed back to their mother. The daughters had absolutely no way of knowing that their mother had been dead since April of 1984.

[00:09:20]No police department in any state ever contacted them. No letter arrived from any government agency. Her body had been buried under the floor of a rental house in West Nashville for approximately 3 years before a tenant happened to find it. The man who had killed her eventually confessed to the crime in a Kentucky state prison and told police her first name, but that was all he could give them. All of that information had been sitting in a case file in the Metro Nashville Police Department's records room the whole time. The daughters were hundreds of miles away in Illinois. For 40 years, the two halves of the same story existed in separate cities in separate states with no bridge between them, waiting for something or someone to finally make the connection.

[00:10:04]I never gave up looking for her, one of the daughters said later. I always believed I would find out what happened to her. By the 2020s, a different approach had changed what was possible.

[00:10:15]Laboratories could now extract usable DNA from bone material that had been in the ground for decades and compare it against millions of records in consumer ancestry databases. If a distant relative of an unknown person had ever taken a commercial DNA test, the shared genetic segments created a trail that genealogologists could follow back to the unknown individual. In January of 2025, Detective Filter and the Metro Nashville Cold Case Unit decided to apply that approach to the Charlotte Avenue case. Filter arranged to have the remains exumed from the cemetery where they had been interred since the winter of 1987. The department partnered with Aram, a private forensic lab that specializes in extracting profiles from old and degraded material. Filter's plan was to collect bone samples, submit them to Aram, and run the resulting profiles against the ancestry databases. If any relative of either woman had ever submitted a sample, the connection would surface. Just 2 days before the exumation was scheduled to take place, Detective Filter's phone rang at the cold case unit. No bone samples had been collected yet. No DNA had been submitted to any laboratory for testing. A woman calling from a phone number with an Illinois area code was on the other end of the line. She told Detective Filter on the phone that her mother had gone missing from the family back in 1984.

[00:11:38]For most of her adult life, the daughter had been searching for any trace of her mother. She had tried everything she could think of over all the years, contacted every single agency she could find, and had come up empty every single time. Recently, during one of her regular searches, she had come across a listing about an unidentified woman whose remains had been found in Nashville in 1987. The details were on a cold case website. The Metro Nashville Police Department had publicized the renewed investigation as part of the push to identify both women before the exumation. That publicity had made its way to the corners of the internet where families of long missing persons spend their time scrolling through case after case looking for anything that matches what they know. As the daughter described the details of her mother's disappearance over the phone, Detective Filter listened carefully. The dates matched what was in the police file. The location matched as well. She described her mother's car and other identifying details, and they aligned precisely with information that Metro Nashville police had documented in the case file from the original 1987 investigation. Then the daughter said the name. Her mother's name was Sheila Cummings. She was from Elgen, Illinois, a city of about 100,000 people situated along the Fox River northwest of Chicago. Sheila had been just 23 years old at the time she disappeared back in 1984. She had left her family in Elgen for Tennessee at some point in the early 1980s and had never once returned home to Illinois.

[00:13:15]The daughter had spent most of her adult life looking for her mother without success. And now scrolling through a cold case page in early 2025, she had found a listing with a set of details that matched everything her family knew about their mother's disappearance. It looked like it might finally be the answer she and her sisters had been searching for since they were children.

[00:13:37]The scheduled exumation proceeded as planned 2 days after the phone call.

[00:13:42]Forensic teams arrived at the local cemetery. The graves had been there since the winter of 1987, marked only with department case numbers instead of names. Teams carefully recovered bone samples from both sets of remains, packaged and labeled them, and prepared them for submission to the laboratory.

[00:14:01]DNA was extracted from the degraded samples recovered during the exumation and processed at the laboratory.

[00:14:08]Sheila's daughters provided their own biological samples for a direct comparison. Analysts at the laboratory ran the daughter's genetic profiles against the profile that had been extracted from the exumed bones. The results from the laboratory came back to detective filter within a matter of weeks. The DNA comparison between the daughter's samples and the profile from the exumed bones was a confirmed match.

[00:14:32]There was no ambiguity about the result.

[00:14:35]The woman James Schaefer had strangled inside a house on Charlotte Avenue on the night of April 21st, 1984 finally had a full name. After more than 40 years as an unidentified Jane Doe in the Nashville system, she finally had an identity. Her name was Sheila Cummings from Elgen, Illinois, 23 years old at the time she was killed. A mother whose daughters back in Illinois had spent the last four decades of their lives looking for her. In July of 2025, Metro Nashville police held a formal press conference at police headquarters and publicly announced the identification of Sheila Cummings. The public announcement came decades after Sheila's death and 38 years after her remains were first recovered from beneath the house.

[00:15:22]Detective Filter, who had led the cold case unit's renewed effort, spoke publicly about the case. It is a great feeling to know that after 40 years, you are able to finally identify somebody and return them to their family, Filter said. Metro Nashville Police Chief John Drake also spoke at the announcement.

[00:15:41]Every victim deserves to be identified and returned to their family. Drake said, "We never stopped working this case." The department had held the Charlotte Avenue file for 38 years, passing it through multiple generations of homicide detectives and forensic specialists. The timing was striking.

[00:16:00]Sheila's daughter had called the cold case unit just 2 days before the exumation was scheduled to begin. If the call had come a few months later, the science would likely have identified Sheila on its own through the genealogy databases. But the daughter in Illinois had been doing her own work at the same time the department was doing its work in Nashville. She found the right listing on a cold case website, recognized the details that matched her mother's disappearance, and picked up the phone. The call connected her to Detective Filter, the same investigator who was days away from exuming the remains. For four decades, Sheila Cummings had existed in the Metro Nashville police system as a case number and a nickname provided by her killer.

[00:16:43]She had existed as a Jane Doe in a filing cabinet for longer than she had been alive. After all those years and all those failed searches and dead ends, she finally had her full name back. Her daughters, who had spent most of their adult lives not knowing whether their mother was dead or alive, could finally stop searching for her. The second woman, the woman Schaefer called Little Bit, remains unidentified. Her remains have been tested and a genetic profile has been built from what remains. In April of 2025, Metro Nashville police released a forensic rendering of her face created using reconstruction techniques applied to her skull. The image depicted a young woman with dark hair and prominent cheekbones, estimated to have been in her 20s when she died.

[00:17:30]Police distributed the rendering widely through news outlets and social media channels. As of the announcement, no one had come forward with a name or any useful information. As of mid2025, no match has been returned from any of the genealogy databases. She remains a Jane Doe in the Metro Nashville system, identified only by the name her killer gave police. Somewhere out there, she may have a family that does not know where she went. Somewhere there may be a daughter or a sibling reading through the same cold case pages that led Sheila's daughter to pick up the phone.

[00:18:05]The Metro Nashville Police Department's page about the case is still active. The forensic rendering of her face continues to circulate online. A genetic profile built from her bones sits in a database somewhere, still waiting for a biological relative to appear. Her real name is still entirely missing. An old house on Charlotte Avenue in West Nashville. A dirt crawl space beneath the floor. Two sets of human bones that waited 40 years for someone to come looking for them. A daughter in Illinois who never stopped searching, who found the right page on a website 2 days before the science would have done the same work. One of the two women got her name back. The other woman is still out there waiting. If this case stayed with you, leave your thoughts in the comments. More solved cases in the