Diane Shields Found Murdered - UNSOLVED
Atlanta Cold Case
Diane Shields
EERIE SIMILARITIES TO MARY SHOTWELL LITTLE CASE
Over 50 years ago in the spring of 1967, Diane Shields was found murdered which brought back the painful memories of the unsolved case of the missing bride, Mary Shotwell Little, into the news due to eerie similarities. The 22 year old victim, Diane Shields had worked in Little’s office in downtown Atlanta and had lived with some of her roommates.
Hearing about the killing the next day, Clint Chafin, superintendent of Atlanta detectives, told East Point police, “That sounds like our Mary Shotwell Little case.”
(Photo & Excerpt from the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Sunday, March 21, 2004 by Jim Auchmutey, Gerdeen Dyer and Pat Koester)
DIANE SHIELDS IN SOME WAYS – Followed in the footsteps of Mary Shotwell Little, then was found murdered.
(Photo & Excerpt from the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Sunday, March 21, 2004 by Jim Auchmutey, Gerdeen Dyer and Pat Koester)
May 19, 1967, Shields left work in her blue and white Chevy Impala. She never made it home.
Diane Shields was a pretty blond secretary from Gunterville, Alabama. Transferred into personnel after Little vanished, she occupied Mary’s old desk and befriended her former colleagues. For a time, she roomed with some of them in their Buckhead duplex. She eventually moved out to live with her sister in College Park and took a job as a receptionist with another company downtown.
On May 19, 1967, Shields left work in her blue and white Chevy Impala. She never made it home.
East Point Police spotted the car at 2:30am near the drive-in window of a laundry on Sylvan road. Bloods was dripping from the rear end. Finding the keys in the ignition, they opened the trunk to discover Shields’ body crammed upside down between a spare tire and a cardboard box. Amon other things, the box contained a copy of “Betty Crocker’s New Dinner for Two”; the receptionist had planned to marry in July.
Shields was fully clothed and had not been sexually assaulted. Nor had she been robbed. She was still wearing a diamond engagement ring. A scarf and a piece of paper had been stuffed down her throat, as if to silence her.
ATLANTA COLD CASE
Victim: Diane Shields (Engaged to be married)
Murdered: May 19, 1967 leaving work.
Originally replaced Mary Shotwell Little position, Mary had at the Citizens & Southern National Bank.
Age: 22
"That sounds like our Mary Shotwell Little Case"
(Photo & Excerpt from the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Sunday, March 21, 2004 by Jim Auchmutey, Gerdeen Dyer and Pat Koester)
Hearing about the killing the next day, Clint Chafin, superintendent of Atlanta detectives, told East Point police, “That sounds like our Mary Showell Little case.”
His hunch intensified when it came out that Shields had received roses at the bank and pretended they were anonymous, just like Little’s. (They weren’t; they came from a baby-sitting client.) The news touched off several days of jittery speculation that a “rose-killer” was loose in Atlanta.
The parallels were enough to scare some women who had roomed with Shields and Little. On the weekend after the murder, two of them phoned Ponder tin terror and asked if they could come the agent’s house. “My wife and I sat up with them in the living room,” he remembers. “They were scared to death.” They were especially leery of one of their co-workers, although they couldn’t tell Ponder why she would want to harm them. As it turned out, she was as frightened as they were. Ponder thought the similarities in the Little and Shields cases were mere coincidence. On his recommendation, the FBI stayed out of the second investigation.
Most of the police who worked the homicide disagreed with his assessment. To this day, Melvin Banks, East Point’s chief detective on the case, believes that someone implicated in the internal investigation at C&S was responsible for Shields’ death. “They’re connected, no question,” he says. But East Point was never able to make an arrest. As with Little, the case file is nowhere to be found.
