On the evening of March 1, 2008, Melissa Winnie, a Holts Summit police officer with a promising career, reportedly walked into the backyard of an Audrain County farmhouse and took her own life.
Melissa Winnie
The weapon she used was the service revolver of her girlfriend, Karen Giboney, who was a Mexico, Mo., public safety detective. Giboney was asleep upstairs at the time, sick with the flu. She said she did not hear the single shot Winnie dispatched into her right temple.
It appeared to be a clear-cut suicide and a tragic end to the life of a 29-year-old woman who had been diagnosed with major depression and panic disorder.
But more than two years later, the investigation into Winnie's death remains open. It has been declared a suicide by the coroner and stated as such by the county sheriff. Still, two county prosecutors have examined the case and found neither enough evidence to charge a suspect nor enough certainty to close the case.
Audrain County Sheriff Stuart Miller said the case will remain open for the foreseeable future.
"The evidence that we have leads us to believe that Melissa Winnie killed herself," Miller said. "Her mother, like most parents, doesn't want to believe that, so we've left the case open. If more evidence develops, we'll follow through with the leads. And if that evidence leads us to a suspect and we can tie that suspect to the crime, we'll change our thinking from a suicide to a homicide."
But the victim's mother, Joanna Winnie, is firm in her belief that her daughter's death was a murder and part of a larger conspiracy. She is planning to sue both the Audrain County sheriff and the coroner for "not doing their jobs."
Giboney, who still lives in the rural home where the death occurred, said a cloud of suspicion hangs over her head because the case was never closed. She said she is treated like a murderer by people in her town.
"I go into the hardware store and people ask, 'Are you out on bail?' " Giboney said.
After losing her job in the aftermath of the death, Giboney said she has been effectively black-balled from finding another job in law enforcement.
Bob Westfall, a former highway patrolman and friend of Winnie's, said the investigation was "botched." He points particularly to the lack of an autopsy on the victim as evidence of a careless, superficial job. Lee Elliot, the prosecutor now charged with examining the case, said he does not have any active leads to follow, but he concedes there are numerous unusual aspects to the case.
"There are a thousand unanswered questions," said Elliot, prosecuting attorney for Montgomery County. "But I can't make a case out of unanswered questions."
So what really happened in the days leading up to Winnie's death and the investigation that followed? The Tribune was granted access to the case file and reviewed hundreds of pages of interviews and investigative reports. That, in combination with independent interviews, revealed the following account.
Melissa Winnie grew up in Miami, Okla., one of four children. A rosy-cheeked, outgoing girl, she was a self-described "wild child" before enrolling in the Southeast Missouri State University Law Enforcement Academy. Once there, she outperformed her mostly male counterparts and graduated as valedictorian in 2004.
After the academy, she joined the East Central Drug Task Force, a multi-jurisdictional operation including Audrain, Montgomery and Pike counties. The work involved long stretches of time undercover and association with unsavory characters. The first year on the job, Winnie was virtually alone in Pike County, developing contacts in the narcotics world.
"You've got to understand, 80 percent of the life of a narc is spent in the bars and partying," Giboney said. "It's not for everyone."
Winnie told her mother she found the work very lonely.
"She said, 'Mom, the only people I meet are buying drugs from me, or I'm buying drugs from them," Joanna Winnie recalled. "I can't meet any nice people."
But she was also one of the most productive members of the task force. At the time of her death, there were 30 cases involving 45 defendants that had to be dropped because of the loss of her eye-witness testimony, according to published reports.
"She was making more dope cases then the rest of the task force combined," said Westfall, a former investigator for the Audrain County prosecutor's office.
But straddling the line between right and wrong proved difficult. According to multiple accounts, Winnie drank heavily and engaged in casual sex with other task force members. Near the end of 2007, Winnie filed a sexual harassment complaint against a superior officer, saying he had instructed her to have sex with an informant in exchange for the man's testimony.
In an interview with the Tribune, Sheriff Miller acknowledged the harassment complaint but declined to state the specifics of the charges. Miller said the superior officer was forced to resign.
Winnie told friends and family that, after the harassment complaint, the work environment became hostile. Task force members shunned her, and she was assigned long, arduous hours. In early 2008, Winnie decided to leave the task force and joined the Holts Summit Police Department as an overnight road officer.
But she kept one contact from her old job. During her time at the task force, Winnie had become involved romantically with Giboney, a Mexico Department of Public Safety detective who specialized in child abuse cases. They had met professionally and had started going to movies together to unwind. The two had cemented their bond by buying a house together in Mexico that they were planning to rehab and "flip" for a profit.
But in the months preceding Winnie's death, their relationship had become strained. Giboney said Winnie had become convinced that she was being unfaithful to her, focusing on Dallis Shangraw, an ex-girlfriend of Giboney's.
Joanna Winnie said that during a Thanksgiving visit to Oklahoma, Giboney appeared possessive and didn't want Winnie spending time with her childhood friends. Their relationship had become off-again, on-again and, according to a friend's statement to police, the two women had agreed to break up in the near future if things didn't improve.
The stressors in Winnie's life came to a head on Feb. 16 when she abruptly left her shift at Holts Summit in the middle of the night and drove to her parents' home in Oklahoma. Joanna Winnie said her daughter arrived in the early morning hours in a state of panic.
"I've never seen her like that. She was afraid," Joanna Winnie said. "She wouldn't tell me who she was afraid of. She said, 'Mom, it has to do with work, I can't get into it.' "
But records of Winnie's psychological care at that time reveal a woman deep in the throes of panic attacks. On Feb. 22, reports indicate, she drove to the Ozark Center in Joplin for a "crisis appointment." There Winnie told a doctor she had suffered panic attacks since she was a child but recently found the combined weight of uncontrollable panic and obsessive compulsive tendencies affecting her job.
"It hits me so hard," she told the doctor.