Her daughter was a North Myrtle cold case, until cops got an email 25 years in the making
A bedspread turned out to hold the key in solving a 25-year-old cold case.
On June 2, 1996, Shawn Neal was found murdered inside a North Myrtle Beach apartment. Police said there were suspects, but made no arrests.
For 25 years, there were no arrests in the case.
Neal’s family had to live with the fact that they didn’t know who killed Neal. Sandra Ames told The Sun News by phone from her North Carolina home that she dealt with her daughter’s unsolved case one day at a time.
“I couldn’t continue to be depressed like I was,” Ames said.
North Myrtle Beach never lost interest in the case reviewing it during their free time. Detectives took DNA from a bedspread connected to the crime and improvement in DNA testing compared to 1996 allowed them to name a suspect - Ronald Lee Moore.
“That’s how we were able to determine Mr. Moore committed this crime,” Detective Mike Swarthout said.
“I’m happy they caught him,” Ames said.
Solving the case
Growing up, Neal played flute in the school band, Ames said. She was also a “daddy’s girl” who is also the person that gave her the traditionally male-name.
Shawn Neal was 23 years old when she died, Swarthout said. She was from North Carolina and had a life there with her fiance. The former marine was also working as an escort in the Myrtle Beach area, her mom and police said, and was on a call when she was beaten and strangled. Her body was left hanging from a doorknob inside a Windy Shores II apartment on North Ocean Boulevard.
Moore was in-and-out of prison in the Maryland area during the 1990s. Maryland police charged with attempted murder two-months before Neal’s killing. He was free on bail in May and June 1996.
Swarthout said police don’t know why Moore was in North Myrtle Beach, “this might have been a pass-through.”
Moore spent time in Ocean City, Maryland and had friends in Louisiana, Swarthout said, leading to a theory he stopped in the Grand Strand while traveling between the two locations.
Maryland police arrested Moore in Baltimore just days after Neal’s killing, but it was related to the attempted-murder case.
In 1999, Moore was released on parole. He returned to prison a year later on more burglary charges, and officials accidentally released him in 2007. On Christmas Eve, police in Louisiana arrested Moore as a burglary suspect. Days later, he hung himself in jail.
Police now suspect Moore in burglaries, sexual assaults and at least one murder in Maryland.
Moore also gained international notoriety as a possible suspect in a 1999 Maryland killing, examined during season one of the podcast “Serial.”
Swarthout said police would occasionally look at their lone unsolved homicide case, though it never led them closer to a suspect.
In 2017, they took an earnest look at the case as Neal’s daughter pleaded with them. The daughter was 4-years-old at the time of Neal’s death, but continued to ask for help finding the killer.
Detectives looked at the bedspread found about a quarter-mile from Windy Shores II in 1996. They noticed an area that they missed in prior looks and sent it to a lab for DNA testing, Swarthout said.
That DNA sample had a match in a national criminal database. A police liaison told them they might have to wait a month for results because the lab hadn’t dealt with Maryland officials before.
“We basically begged him to rush the results,” Swarthout said at a Thursday press conference detailing their efforts.
Soon, detectives had Moore’s name and a suspect in the killing. But, Moore’s death meant North Myrtle Beach police couldn’t file charges or find out what happened in the North Ocean Boulevard apartment. Instead, the case is closed with a note the only suspect died.
“I think all of us up here expected, one day, it would be solved,” Swarthout said, though adding, “I would have loved to ask him why.”
Ames said Neal’s daughter called to tell her that police had a suspect name.
“It was surprising,” Ames said. But, she didn’t seem that upset knowing Moore would never be convicted in a court for killing her daughter. A higher power would sentence her daughter’s killer, Ames said.
“I put it in God’s hands,” Ames said.
This story was originally published February 13, 2020 at 4:43 PM.
