She was bludgeoned to death in her apartment 25 years ago. Her family has no answers

Twenty-five years ago, a tragedy unfolded on the lower South Hill: A killer bludgeoned a young mother inside her apartment on Lincoln Street.

Danielle Shinaver faced an uphill battle in life. At 16, she married a 23-year-old man. By age 18, she was pregnant with the first of their three children. Her husband wound up in prison while bubbly, fun-loving Danielle cycled through homes, dating here and there, until police found her beaten to death at 25.

Her killing on March 14, 1996, remains unsolved, but Danielle is not forgotten. Family and friends keep her memory alive, and Spokane Police investigators believe this cold case holds the rare possibility of resolution.

•••

Terry Murbach had the unimaginable job of cleaning out his daughter’s apartment.

He had stuffed his pickup with Danielle’s furniture a few times prior when she collided with trouble. Once, she left her children with a babysitter and it turned into a three-day absence. She lost custody of her kids.

This move was excruciating. There was blood everywhere as Murbach and his wife tried to empty the apartment of Danielle’s belongings.

They tried to collect some clothes, including a coat that would later bring Danielle’s mother, Paula Lachenmeier, to tears. Danielle had loved to dress up as a child, slipping into oversized dresses and high heels just to “walk around and act goofy,” her aunt Terri Murbach said.

Terry Murbach told Danielle’s mother he looked around for bottles of booze that day in March 1996. He wanted to know if Danielle had slipped up, but there were none.

He couldn’t stay any longer. He left many of her belongings behind.

•••

Three months after Danielle’s neighbors found her badly beaten, half-nude body on the apartment floor, a farmer found the corpse of a 16-year-old girl in a field. A plastic bag was pulled over her head.

That same day, a man collecting litter miles away discovered another woman’s body with her head bagged.

Those June 14, 1996, discoveries marked the beginning of a laborious and aggressive investigation that years later caught Spokane serial killer Robert Lee Yates.

Danielle’s family believes the hunt for Yates perhaps siphoned the investigatory focus needed to solve Danielle’s homicide.

Her killing did not fit the serial killer’s pattern. She was not a prostitute. She was bludgeoned to death, not shot. And her head was not bagged.

Importantly, according to investigators, there was no sign of forced entry into her apartment.

Police believe she knew her killer.

• • •

Danielle was feeling “so hopeful” the last week of her life, her sister-in-law Jody Killam would later remember.

Maybe the sun helped. It was an unseasonably warm March that followed a brutal February, when one night’s low dropped to minus-22, the coldest recorded temperature in Spokane since Dec. 30, 1968.

That last afternoon of Danielle’s life, Wednesday, March 13, had clear blue skies with a high of 55 degrees. It was a taste of the coming summer she would not live to see, a summer she expected to spend with her children.

She was in the process of putting her kids’ rooms together, and she mused about their arrival daily.

Losing custody of them was a long story, one that started at age 16, when Danielle met the future father of her children, Scott Shinaver, then 23.

By age 13, Danielle was becoming difficult in the small ways to be expected, her mother said. Danielle didn’t want to have a birthday party at home anymore. She wanted to go out with her friends, maybe go to the skating rink, and her family couldn’t afford it.

Danielle’s younger sister Deina Allen remembered that just before Danielle met Shinaver, she got into one of the “big fights” with her parents.

Danielle worked in a park outside Bayview, where the family lived. One night, instead of coming home after work, she stayed out late. Worse, she sideswiped something while driving her dad’s beloved pickup. Late that night, she tried backing into the driveway in a half-baked attempt to hide the damage. Her dad spotted it first thing the next morning.

It was shortly after that argument Shinaver entered the picture, Allen remembered, and he was almost always with a friend his age.

“They were both loud and obnoxious and I just thought he was so old,” Allen said, recalling her perspective at age 13.

Shinaver was out at the bars “all the time,” Lachenmeier said, and Danielle was still six years shy of drinking age. He did odd jobs but nothing steady. Lachenmeier thought the money he had was running out, left over from years in the military.

Danielle’s parents fought the relationship and asked, “Do you want to sit at home while he’s out partying?” Danielle didn’t care, Lachenmeier said.

She would sneak out to see him, “but in such a tiny town, you can’t even go to the bathroom without somebody knowing it.”

Shinaver was fun, got her out of the house and took her mudding in his truck, Lachenmeier said.

“I think it was just infatuation,” Allen remembered. “She was a young girl and he was paying a lot of attention to her and telling her all the things she wanted to hear. He had money, we didn’t – it was all the things that a young girl wanted.”

Danielle was 16 when she dropped out of Lakeland High School in Rathdrum and married Shinaver in a small church. Her parents, who married young themselves, didn’t fight their daughter’s will. They sat in the pews. There were no bridesmaids or groomsmen standing by the young couple – just Danielle’s little sister by her side and one of Shinaver’s friends across the aisle, Lachenmeier remembered.

Within a year, Danielle was across the country in Shinaver’s home state of Michigan, and soon was pregnant with their first child. At age 18 and seven months along, she left Shinaver and moved back in with her family in a trailer outside of Coeur d’Alene.

Lachenmeier said she assumed the split was permanent. Her whole family attended the birth, which Danielle handled with relative ease.

“That was the best experience ever,” Lachenmeier said. “I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t expect the reaction, all the crying – everybody was just so proud of that baby.”

When Danielle’s son was 2 months old, she moved back in with Shinaver. Her second son was born within a year of her first.

It was around that time Jody Killam, Shinaver’s sister, first met Danielle.

Killam remembers it as a cold night, though it must have been June, when the couple showed up on her doorstep. She wasn’t close with her brother. In fact, he’d threatened to kill her husband. All she knew about his life then was that he had left his pregnant wife for “this teenager over in Idaho.”

“They’ve got two kids and no home and they’re living out of their car. We just decided to bury the hatchet and start fresh,” Killam said. “Gosh, it just didn’t take long for her and I to get close.”

On Danielle’s 20th birthday, Aug. 25, 1990, Shinaver drove drunk with Killam’s husband in the car to get some beer. Killam’s husband didn’t return. When Killam thought to call the hospital, doctors were just pronouncing her husband dead from a car crash, she said.

“For a couple minutes we didn’t know which one died, her husband or mine, and I’m telling you that bonds you,” Killam said.

That crash also meant Shinaver would spend the next year’s worth of weekends in jail, Lachenmeier remembers. Those weekend nights became Danielle’s “party time,” she said.

Killam described Shinaver at that time as a mercurial father. She once saw him throw a full beer can at one of his sons for playing with his tools, she said. At another point, she said Shinaver tried to drive a truck through the front of the house.

“She was so freaking optimistic,” Killam said of Danielle. “She just didn’t have a radar for danger. Everybody got a second, third and 10th chance in her book.”

Danielle tired of Shinaver and partied more. It was during these times Danielle lost custody of her children, which by then included a daughter.

She left them in the care of a babysitter and didn’t return for three days.

The move sent her reeling and sparked more drinking, short-lived relationships and moving around North Idaho and Eastern Washington.

Then in December 1995, Shinaver was convicted for having sex with a 13-year-old babysitter and went to prison.

Shinaver, who lives in Montana, declined an interview regarding Danielle.

By March 1996, Danielle wasn’t in contact with her sister. But Allen, pregnant and living in Oregon then, was aware Danielle had been picking up the pieces.

Allen formed what would be her last memory of her sister after she carried socks, underwear and sodas through downtown Spokane and into a rehabilitation center.

“I just remember going to the worst place I’d ever seen,” Allen said. “I had to go home and take a shower. (The rehab center) was just nasty. It was awful. The green paint on the walls. The worst green paint I’ve ever seen. I just remember thinking, she shouldn’t be here.”

Terri Murbach also remembers Danielle in the months before her death asking for bail money. Terri Murbach said she didn’t have the cash.

Weeks later, Danielle said she was thankful to stay in jail, where she came to realize she needed to straighten up.

Around that time, Danielle found a cheap place to live at 901 S. Lincoln St. in Spokane. The building had been recently overrun by gang members, Killam said. As she helped Danielle carry boxes in, Killam recoiled at graffiti in the hallways. Danielle laughed and promised the old tenants were gone.

Danielle was right. It was a nearly empty building. Besides Danielle, the only occupants were a young pregnant couple who Killam remembers were 19.

They were the ones to find Danielle’s body.

Danielle called Killam the night of March 13, as she did most nights, and said she was having a get-together.

Her two young neighbors and two male coworkers from McDonald’s were sprawled on the floor watching TV, Danielle told her.

Killam remembers Danielle giggling into the phone about one of her coworkers, something like, “I think he thinks he’s going to get lucky, but not tonight.”

The get-together broke up around 2 a.m., and her coworkers told police they left her alone in her apartment, police said at the time.

Danielle didn’t show up for work the next morning.

• • •

Lachenmeier was in bed reading on the evening of March 14, 1996, when she heard a knock.

“It just scared me,” she remembers. “You know, who’s here now?”

At the door, she peered through the peephole. What she saw didn’t make sense, a man she didn’t know. She asked him to step back. Then she saw, warped and rounded, police with her ex-husband, Terry Murbach.

She hadn’t sat down yet when they told her Danielle was dead. She wished she had.

“I couldn’t hardly stand up. I remember I was leaning against a wall and I couldn’t believe it,” Lachenmeier said. “I said ‘No, she went to the store or something.’ I kept telling them they were wrong. I remember arguing. I insisted it wasn’t her. It was frustrating because they wouldn’t listen to me.”

Police didn’t tell her details, but if they had, she would have known Danielle was found nude from the waist down and the brutality of her killing was such that it took dental records to identify her.

Allen, late into her pregnancy, was also in bed when she got a call from her dad who, she thought strangely, asked her to give the phone to her husband. Allen’s husband broke the news to her.

“I remember staying up all night and just sitting on the couch rocking back and forth, waiting for the doctor’s office to open so I could see if I could fly,” she said.

For Killam, the messengers were the young husband and wife who were among the last people to see Danielle alive, and among the first to see her dead.

“I closed the door in their face, thinking it was kids pranking,” Killam said. “They knocked again and I said, ‘Listen here, you bastards, this is not the first time I’ve got this kind of call.’ I about croaked.”

This was the woman who had so recently put on her brightest pink lipstick and chased Killam’s sons through the home, warning she would “kiss your whole face” – the woman who, on her birthday every Aug. 25 for the previous five years, had cried beside Killam for her husband, whose death shared the day of Danielle’s birth.

This was also the woman who loved line dancing, cooking a feast and singing along to “Fishin’ in the Dark” – all details that, for 25 years since that knock on the door, Killam has found “excruciating.”

• • •

Shinaver was in prison, on the sex conviction, during the spring of 1996.

The first person who came to Lachenmeier’s mind was a boyfriend, maybe just a man Danielle knew.

The last time Lachenmeier saw Danielle, she came to visit the kids and pick up some things from her mother’s home. On the way there, Danielle learned the taillights on her pickup had stopped working.

“She couldn’t go anywhere at night; it just wasn’t safe, and nobody would help her,” Lachenmeier remembers.

Danielle ended up staying the night at her mom’s apartment.

Danielle’s friend came over to help her and “was just mad as a hornet at her – called her every name in the book right in front of me, her mother, with little kids there,” Lachenmeier said. “It took me by surprise. I’d never met the guy before.”

Lachenmeier said she learned later from Danielle’s coworkers that the man had been coming around the McDonald’s on Third Avenue. It seemed he wanted to be her boyfriend and she was not interested, as she was in the process of getting her kids back.

Killam also remembers the man, not really a boyfriend, with whom Danielle had started spending time. Killam didn’t think he had ever been to Danielle’s apartment, but she did remember he was a felon living in a big house outside of Spokane with several other men on parole, which struck Killam as weird and dangerous.

Danielle called it a “super cool” house with a pool. It was a little bit of a drive to get to, Danielle told Killam.

“She was, like, the most optimistic girl you would ever want to meet,” Killam said. “Always believed better things are coming and ‘Don’t worry about it’ – that will forever be her in my head, overly optimistic sometimes.”

With Danielle’s two male coworkers who had come over March 13 and her aggressive male friend already in the suspect pool, another man emerged as a “top suspect” in her death, according to a Spokesman-Review article at the time, though he was not arrested or charged. He had been an acquaintance when Danielle and Killam offered the man a ride in 1995.

He snapped, aimed a gun at them and set Killam’s car on fire, Killam said. Danielle was set to testify against him before he avoided a trial with a plea deal.

•••

Danielle’s daughter has no memories of her, Lachenmeier said. Her second son has few.

At school, kids teased Danielle’s eldest son, then age 7, after her death. They at one point chanted “You don’t have a mother,” to the “neener, neener, neener,” melody, Lachenmeier said.

For Mother’s Day in 1996, not quite two months after Danielle’s murder, the boy’s class painted plates for their mothers. He painted two, one for his grandmother who was raising him and one for his late mother.

He brought them home and said, “Here, I don’t even want them anymore,” Lachenmeier remembers.

The children, now adults, find it too difficult to talk about their mother, Lachenmeier said.

• • •

Seven months passed since Danielle’s death when Killam wrote a letter, published in The Spokesman-Review, begging anyone with any information to come forward.

“I am beginning to lose hope that the murderer will be found,” she wrote.

It’s been 25 years.

Lachenmeier read through the police records at least once years ago and felt despondent.

“All these people are out there driving around, walking around and you feel so alone,” she said. “Don’t these people know my daughter was killed?”

Terri Murbach, Danielle’s aunt, has kept in touch with police, including Sgt. Zac Storment, one of a few who take on cold cases in what spare time they can find.

“It’s an active case,” Storment said. “This is a case I have genuine hope for.”

Storment said he couldn’t speak to the details of the case but could speak to generalities about cold case investigations.

The Spokane Police Department does not have a dedicated cold case unit, as do some Washington departments of similar size, such as Tacoma.

“We need the people, time, the man hours to be able to do it,” Storment said. “It’s prioritization with the department. What’s more important? Allocating people to solely do the new stuff on an incoming basis, or is there a greater need to put closure on these cases and support the public in the belief that we never give up?”

In 2020, the department’s major crimes unit was up against an unprecedented task with 21 homicide victims, triple the number of cases in 2019.

Lieutenant Troy Teigen, who oversees the officers who take cold cases up voluntarily, said it takes an intense commitment to justice to follow through on decades-old cases with little funding.

Storment said, of the more than 100 cold cases in the Spokane Police Department records, “there’s a big number where all it would take is a genuine effort, not this part-time stuff.”

New DNA advances mean hope for a lot of those cases.

In 2020, police said they were able to solve the case of a 13-year-old girl stabbed to death in 1985 when they used genetic genealogy, which compares DNA samples from crime scenes to pools of genetic information gathered by companies like Ancestry.com. From there, scientists narrow down the search to a handful of possible suspects, usually all close family members, who can be eliminated one by one through testing.

Storment said the cost of the testing, sometimes a few thousand dollars, is negligible.

“We could GoFundMe these, for God’s sake, but it’s the time we need,” he said.

In some cases, Teigen said police are concerned about using up precious DNA samples for partial reads when new technology in a few years might be able to glean more information from the same sample.

“We’ve heard the horror story cases where they consumed DNA and they lost it,” Teigen said. “We don’t want to be overzealous and consume up or wash away everything that might be available that we can’t process now but they will be able to use in a few years.”

All of Danielle’s loved ones suspect it would have taken more than one person to kill her. Danielle didn’t pick fights, but she could hold her own, they said. Allen remembers, through laughter, how Danielle went after a man her mother dated after he hit Lachenmeier.

The day Killam learned Danielle had been killed, she went with a TV reporter to look through the window of her best friend’s apartment, she said.

“I’m looking in her window thinking, my God, how many people were in here attacking her? It was literally like the worst imaginable scene possible,” Killam said. “She fought like hell.”

Lachenmeier fantasizes about reading a “nasty letter” to the killer if he gets his day in court, describing all the things he stole from Danielle, like meeting her grandchildren who are just babies today. Sometimes she has said, only half-joking, how she’d like to get him alone in an alley and beat his head, “like he did her.”

“To me, I just don’t want people to forget her,” Allen said. “I have come to the resolution that he will not be caught for this. But he will get his justice in the end. It probably won’t happen in this lifetime, but in another world.”

Allen and Lachenmeier both feel adamant that Danielle is with them sometimes, in fleeting moments.

Danielle is a super sweet smell. Like cotton candy, like the perfumes Danielle liked to wear.

“You’d get this smell and there’s no flowers, nothing around that smells like that, and it just makes you think, jeez,” Lachenmeier said. “I remember saying, ‘Danielle, are you here? We love you, we miss you.’

“And it would go away almost as fast as it came. Just, you’d take one breath. And you know it’s her. Gotta be.”