60 Years Ago, Her Sister Was Kidnapped, Murdered And Left Near Devils Tower

The women now feel like sisters, but it’s a terrible thing that binds them. For nearly 60 years, they’ve carried a burden that’s impacted them in different ways that’s kept them tethered to the past as they had to live the rest of their lives.

For Diana Clinton White, it’s the loss of her sister, Denise, who was 9 when she was kidnapped from a Kansas City motel in 1965. Two years later, her body was discovered by two cowboys in a ravine on private ranch land in the shadow of Devils Tower in northeast Wyoming.

For the Shaw sisters — Jodi Ferguson, Jan Farella and Kim Myers — the murder and lingering fears shrouded them for decades. Their father, Dick Shaw, along with Mike Kelley, were the cowboys who found Denise’s remains.

No one has ever been charged for the crimes as the case has grown ice cold, but never forgotten or given up on.

The Shaw girls have lived in fear of the killer coming back to silence them as well as the displaced grief for the Clintons that they couldn’t comprehend.

Last weekend, White drove from her home in Missouri to meet with the Shaw sisters and their mom Myra and brother Rick to confront the demons that had haunted them all for decades.

White also placed a headstone to mark the spot where her sister had been found all those years ago.

“I faced the place that made it final; she was never coming back home,” White said. “This place symbolized that she was gone from this world forever. This place became ‘the evil’ in my head and my heart.”

It was finally time to let it all go, she said.

The Shaw sisters, too, felt that same sense of resolution.

“Even though our families' lives were connected in a very horrific way, we found closure together in a pasture with bison passing through and a gentle breeze reminding us that God was wrapping his loving arms around us,” Jan Farella said.

Innocence Lost

White keeps a big folder of newspaper articles dating back to the day her sister was kidnapped and the frustrating ensuing investigation by the Kansas City Police Department and FBI.

Her mother kept the clippings hidden from White in a manila folder on the top of the refrigerator.

She found them as a teen, started reading and returned to the folder anytime her parents weren’t home.

White was 6 years old when her sister was abducted. All she remembers from that day is waking up at home with an older neighbor girl in bed with her.

White wanted to know why she was there. The girl told White her mother said she couldn’t tell, but eventually the girl relented and told White her sister had been kidnapped.

“What does that even mean,” White remembered asking, knowing only that it wasn’t good.

The pair began crying, but ultimately stopped at her friend’s urging. She wasn’t supposed to know. The two went into the kitchen, where the friend’s mother was making breakfast.

White tried to act normal. Then a news bulletin about the kidnapping blared over the radio, and she lost it.

It was the day she lost her innocence, as well as her best friend and the older sister she idolized, White said.

Taken In The Dark

News clippings reporting on the kidnapping and investigation pieced together the facts her parents had tried to shield her from.

Denise had spent the night July 7, 1965, with her grandparents, Dorothy and Chelcie Reynolds, who were night managers at Great Plains Motel in Kansas City. The motel and adjoining restaurant and bar sat off U.S. Highway 71, isolated from homes and other businesses, according to a July 2015 article by The Associated Press (AP).

Around 2:20 a.m., the lobby doorbell rang, stirring Dorothy from her sleep. At first, she thought it was just a routine, late-night check-in when a man pulled out a long-barreled revolver and asked Dorothy to hand over all the money.

He took $246 from the register, then led Dorothy to the back bedroom where Chelcie was sleeping, passing Denise asleep on a daybed on the way.

He bound the couple with tape and gagged them with rags before escaping into a vehicle idling in the parking lot.

It took the couple around 20 minutes to free themselves, and when they went to check on 9-year-old Denise, she was gone. She had been snatched from her bed wearing only a blue-and-white gingham nightgown.

The Reynolds were the only ones to have seen the gunman. Apart from a partial fingerprint on the tape, the robber left no evidence. Dorothy described the man as young with dark hair and “well-formed, handsome features” with “very blue eyes” and a soft voice, according to AP reports.

One witness described seeing a 1962 cream-colored Ford in the parking lot while others said it was a 1959 or 1960 white Oldsmobile.

Despite a swift and massive search by both the Kansas City Police and FBI, Denise was not recovered, the AP reported. At one point, the FBI even tracked down more than 2,000 owners of white 1959 Oldsmobiles in Kansas and Missouri.

Cruel Aftermath

Prior to her kidnapping, the Clintons insisted their daughter memorize their phone number.

For this reason, they answered the dozens of calls that came in every day. Many were sympathetic and kind. Others were downright cruel.

Some were vile and sexual in nature. Others were from children saying, “Mommy, Daddy, come get me.”

White said they later learned a man in downtown Kansas City was paying those kids to make the calls. She remembered a whistle sitting by the phone they’d blast for crank calls.

Meanwhile, FBI agents camped out in their basement for weeks, monitoring the phone for anyone calling to ask for ransom. No one did.

In her mind, White imagined her sister tearing off tiny bits of her nightgown and tossing them out the window like breadcrumbs for police to find her. White had the same nightgown in pink that their mother had made for them.

“I willed her to do this with everything inside of me,” White said.

With Jesus Now

Two years later, Denise’s skeletal remains were found by cowboys Mike Kelley and Dick Shaw in a makeshift grave in a ravine underneath brush and debris. Alongside the bones were a coiled rope and a child’s Timex watch that was still ticking.

White was initially excited when her mother picked her up early from school that day in September 1967 to tell her that her sister had been found.

“Great,” White had told her mother. “Is she on her way home?”

She wasn’t, her mother explained: Denise was with Jesus now.

White said walls went up inside of her as she attempted to process what all of it meant. Her sister, her best friend, was not coming home ever.

“As a child, you just block it out because it’s too much that you just couldn’t deal with it all,” she told Cowboy State Daily.

Her mother, however, was at peace because at 4 years old, Denise’s soul had been saved. It was Easter when the young girl told her mom that she understood that Jesus had died for their sins.

“Mommy, you know, when they talk about Jesus’ blood, it’s not really like our blood,” White recalled her sister telling their mother, who asked what kind of blood was it.

It’s red like ours, Denise had responded, but it has the power to save the whole world.

“She had the comprehension, and her salvation came early,” White said of her sister.

For her part, White said she took solace when she learned that tiny pieces of fabric were also found strewn among her sister’s remains.

Questioned By The FBI

Kelley, who is now 85 and living in Dickinson, North Dakota, remembers the day he found Denise’s skeleton.

He was a young cowboy on the Campstool Ranch in Hulett in his early 20s and had been out herding cattle that day with Shaw. The herd separated with half going to the left and the other right.

Kelley followed left through the unlocked gate on the Maurice Hauber ranch and down a deep draw. He saw what looked like bones and got off his horse to take a better look. He saw a skull and believed it to be decades-old remains belonging to a Native American.

It was Shaw who noticed the fillings in the teeth, and the two called then-Sheriff Henry Oudin. Denise was later identified by her dental records.

Kelley remembers finding the watch, in particular.

“Oh my, God, it was still running,” he told Cowboy State Daily.

The body was removed and that was the last Kelley heard about it, until three weeks later when he saw a dark vehicle parked on the shoulder of a road. Again, he was bringing cows down when a guy stepped out in the rain.

“Are you Mike Kelley?” he’d asked.

Kelley answered yes.

“We want to talk to you,” he said.

The guy identified himself as FBI, and Kelley told him to follow him up to the ranch house, where the agent proceeded to grill him about his connections to Kansas City. Had he ever been there and when? Kelley said he hadn’t as the agent repeated the question several times, repeating that they were looking for a guy named Mike Kelley.

“I’ve never been there,” Kelley told him, and finally the agent left.

That was the last he’d heard about it until recently when Jodi Ferguson called him to ask if he could lead them and Denise’s sister to the spot where her body had been discovered.

“Well, I was a little nervous about it to start with,” he said. “But I went back because I wanted to know if they’d found the guy that abducted her.”

In the end, he said he was glad he went, calling White a “really nice person.”

“It was really, really sad. But nice, too,” he said.

Never The Same

Shaw died in October 2012, but Ferguson had the opportunity to discuss the mystery with him prior to his dying. The two wondered what had happened and if her killer was ever found. They found articles on the internet about the Clinton family and all they’d been through.

That was an eye-opener for all of them.

For years, they all had carried a misplaced grief for the family but hadn’t really considered how it had impacted them.

“I think we felt a little guilty that they had it so tough and we didn't,” Ferguson said of the Clinton family. “I don't think I realized that it was hard on us kids too, until later, because our focus was always on Diana's family and what they must have been going through.”

Kim Shaw, now Myers, was the oldest at age 12 and remembers the day clearly. The other two sisters were 7 and 9.

They all had been roping in their arena on their ranch with friends when their father came home and got out of his pickup. He seemed different and told them it had been a long day.

He looked sick, Myers remembered, and told them it was because he had smoked. He was trying to quit and taking pills to help. The cigarette made him sick, he explained.

Then he told his daughters about finding the skeleton.

“Nobody really talked about it after that, even Dad,” Myers said.

It was a complicated jumble of emotions, Myers said, but at the time, they mostly feared for their lives because the murderer was still at large and maybe he’d come looking for the person who’d found the dead girl.

That fall when the hunters came, none of them were relaxed, especially after dark. The place was never the same for the family and they sold their ranch and moved to another not long thereafter.

No Clues

Meanwhile, the killer remained at large. Over the years, the investigation continued but grew colder with no real clues.

At one point there was a suspect. The AP reported that police were looking for a 32-year-old former mental patient, Lee Hays, who was wanted for questioning in a spate of recent robberies in the Kansas City area.

Though reporting suggests the police didn’t believe Hays was the kidnapper, the Reynolds ID’d him as a “look-alike.”

In 1970, new information emerged to suggest that Denise had been kidnapped by a Platte County man and her body has been buried near a barn for seven months before being moved to Wyoming, according to an August 1970 article in the Kansas City Star.

Other reports suggested Denise may have been taken to a barn prior to her murder and buried there for months before being moved to Wyoming.

The reality of what might have been done to her sister by her kidnapper was something that hit White hard as an adult and something she still struggles with today, though she tries not to think about it.

At this point, though the investigation is technically still open, White has zero hope of it ever been solved.

Sharing Memories

In 2014, the kidnapping and killing of another little Missouri girl galvanized longtime friends and family of Denise to connect over their shared memories. White created the “Remembering Denise Clinton” Facebook page in 2015 a year before the 50th anniversary of her death.

White was touched by all the former classmates, friends and family who remembered her sister and took the time to share their fond memories and the many ways that Denise had touched their lives.

On the anniversary, they all got together at a park in Missouri to release balloons in her honor.

Ferguson found the page and asked to join.

She also sent White a message, identifying herself as the daughter of one of the cowboys who had found her sister’s remains and asking if she could share a few local newspaper articles.

White didn’t see the message until months later when she finally responded.

The two shared a few messages. Ferguson felt an immediate connection, but it would take White a few years to come around.

Finally in April, White reached out and asked if Ferguson could show her the place her sister was found so she could put down a memorial.

Facing Demons

White’s not quite sure how she’d gotten to that point of wanting to face the place she had always considered evil. The name itself, Devils Tower, said it all.

It began this past December when she started to feel like the Holy Spirit was gnawing at her, telling her she needed to visit the place where her sister’s body was found.

“I don’t want to go there. Why would I want to go there?” White recalls thinking. “There’s nothing but evil there.”

Still, it nagged at her.

Maybe it was a number’s game. White had just turned 65, and her sister was abducted in 1965. Also, as Dick Shaw’s passing reminded her, none of them were getting any younger. That meant that when they all died, none of the family would know where Denise had been found.

The fact that Ferguson was so supportive made it easier to stay the course. Ferguson and her sisters jumped into gear to get permission from the current ranch manager, George White, and made plans to travel from their respective homes in Colorado and South Dakota to be there along with Kelley.

Healing Grounds

None of them were overly eager to make the journey July 27 for their own personal reasons.

White, because she didn’t want to enter the “evil” grounds and the Shaw sisters, who hadn’t been back to the spot for decades, feared the “dread of going back” to a dark time in their childhood.

Seeing the spot in person hit White a bit hard when she saw the ravine in which her sister had been left to rot under piles of leaves and dirt.

That bothered her, and she asked if they could place the gravestone up the hill in a spot with trees and sun. The men obliged and cemented the stone in place as White’s husband, John, put solar lights on the four corners along with a wind chime and artificial flowers.

The group, along with their spouses, held hands and said a prayer together for Denise and took pictures.

“And just like that, it was done,” White said. “I stood still behind the marker and looked up and saw trees in the distance, the beautiful meadow and the road that brought us here and it was peaceful.”

And despite the gravity of the moment, all felt a sense of peace under the warm sun and slight breeze as bison grazed in the distance.

Ferguson had been eager for White to experience the Devils Tower she knew.

“It’s such a spiritual place, and I wanted Diana to see the peacefulness I was hoping,” she said.

White, too, felt the peace.

“It was the most healing, wonderful morning I’ve experienced in a long, long time,” White said. “What started out as an evil place in my head and heart has now changed into a peaceful memory of honoring my sister and the men who found her.”

It wasn’t until they were leaving that White said she felt her sister’s presence and remembered the girl she’d idolized. The neat and proper girl, who was her polar opposite, but also willing to stick up for her little sister while simultaneously indulging her mischief.

The sister who had been taken far too young, but who was now properly put to rest after nearly six decades.

And though White knows the solar lights are likely to eventually get tromped on by bison at some point, it gives her comfort.

“In my head, in my mind, I will always see this place with the lights on,” she said. “And at night, she won’t be in the dark anymore.”

Jen Kocher can be reached at jen@cowboystatedaily.com.