Investigators said they didn’t believe the public was in any kind of danger, but the words did little to calm neighbors’ nerves. Law enforcement also said they were interested in speaking with any person who may have been approached to either purchase or take possession of a rifle in and around Marion County or surrounding communities since June 19, 2015. and noon, and law enforcement requested the public’s assistance in identifying any people or vehicles in the vicinity of the home during that time period. Nothing, however, appeared taken investigators found Shirley’s purse, containing credit cards and $140, undisturbed, as was an envelope on the dresser containing $1,700 in $100 bills.īill told the Register he wasn’t allowed to check his safe in the basement, where he kept the gun Jason had given him, to see if it was missing. Shirley Carter was shot twice in the back at this rural Lacona home in Marion County, Iowa, on Friday, June 19, 2015.īill said that because he wasn’t allowed to look around, he couldn’t see that drawers in the office and bedroom had been pulled out, their contents dumped on the floor.

The county sheriff arrived at the home just moments after Bill, and asked Bill to leave the house the home ended up sealed for several days. They’d been married more than 50 years, 48 of them in that farmhouse. By all accounts, he and Shirley were devoted to each other. Though he has told the story countless times, Bill Carter still cannot tell it without sobbing so convulsively he can barely speak. Jason came in from the deck and showed him a bullet hole in the fridge. The second disintegrated her heart,” Bill said. “The first shot took off the bottom of her heart. Shirley had been shot twice through the back. “It looked like she was sleeping,” he told Register reporter Rekha Basu. The caller was his adult daughter, Jana Lain from Centerville, who said she’d just received a phone call from Jason, who’d told her he had found their mother dead in their parents’ kitchen.Īfter arriving home, Bill said he found his wife’s body on the kitchen floor in a pool of blood, her arms folded across her chest.

In an in-depth Des Moines Register article published a year later on June 20, 2016, Bill recalled how he was returning home in his 18-wheeler semi when his cell phone rang. Neighbors in Shock over Shooting Death of ‘Good Grandmother’ –, June 22, 2015īill said Jason was 17 minutes behind him in line, and that while Bill went on to haul another load from elsewhere, Jason went to his parents’ house.

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