Disappeared.
Dropped off the face of the earth. Was never seen or heard from again.
This summer marks thirty-six years since BoBo Shinn vanished. Presumably kidnapped and murdered, probably by a serial killer. Her body has never been found. Police, family, and friends know no more now about what happened to her than they did the day she disappeared.
We actually knew her brother, Jay Shinn, who was about my sister's age, better than BoBo herself. He'd taken art lessons along with my sister (who was better at it than I was) and myself from Margie Chamberlain.* That had eventually petered out, but I pretty much knew how to paint in oils by the time I started college. But I wanted to learn how to handle pastels and also watercolor, and that's how I got to know BoBo herself, whose class I attended once a week as one of maybe a half a dozen or so students. I only remember three pictures I completed, the most successful of which was a watercolor of a landscape beneath a green sun.
I was away from Magnolia that summer, up at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville (thanks to a modest scholarship from my church, for which I'll always be grateful to Rev. Hoffius) -- my first time away from home for more than a week at a time, in a city I'd never seen before. I loved it: meeting the person I consider my mentor (Dr. T. C. Duncan Eaves), soaking up the resources in a town that seemed filled with bookstores and a huge university library, making contact with an Inkling for the first time (an exchange of letters with Nevill Coghill). But two bizarre events marked that sumer.
The first was the death of my uncle Aubrey (or Uncle Orb, as we called him) -- at sixty-two about average for a Rateliff (of his four brothers, one died in his mid-thirties, one in his mid-fifties, and the other two in the late sixties/early seventies). I felt bad not being able to go to his funeral (being without a car and at the opposite end of the state), but at least all indications were that he died suddenly and peacefully, apparently of an aneurism; a cigarette he'd lit but not had time to smoke was still in his hand, all one long uncrumbled row of ash.
The other was BoBo's disappearance, which I heard about it on my weekly phone calls home. Whereas what happened to Uncle Orb was obvious and final, everything was up in the air about BoBo. Who left behind everything but the clothes she was wearing, not even taking her purse, keys, car, or shoes. There are some people who choose to just walk away from it all (like the guy whose two years spent hitchhiking around the country is retold in INTO THE WILD). This was not one of those cases.
And finally, this past Sunday, they held memorial services for BoBo, attended by her surviving family, and put up a grave marker for her in the local cemetery (where my father is buried). After all these years, it's a letting go. But it's still unsettling that no one knows who killed her, and where she's buried. And we probably never will.
Rest in Peace.
--John R.
P.S.: thanks to my sister, mother, and Janice, who all forwarded the news as if appeared on the Magnolia Times website and in the Magnolia Banner News paper. Here are the links.
http://www.bannernews.net/news/2014/07/18/mary-jimmie-bobo-shinn-988910.php
http://www.magnoliareporter.com/news_and_business/local_news/article_c1024fd4-0f96-11e4-9a16-0019bb2963f4.html#.U8sCcnj9SP0.facebook
*from Margie Chamberlain, a local character -- but that's a subject for a different post
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