Episode 15: Dale Shields
Hello,
For the past month, I’ve been down a rabbit hole of missing or possibly murdered men in the midwest. Mainly in Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Minnesota. There are a couple of others from other states in here as well.
I have a mass list and as I was working on the first one I had on the list I discovered this one. I decide to do this one since there are a couple of men on this list who were found in the same River that he was.
Dale was born on November 7th, 1967. He was a graduate student in Accounting at Michigan State University.
On Saturday, November 17th, 1990, at 9:30 that morning, Dale’s body was spotted by a woman passing by face down in shallow water on the south bank of Red Cedar River behind Shaw Hall on the MSU campus. He lived in the neighboring Owen Graduate Hall at the time. They are unsure how long exactly he was in the water. He was last seen by friends the night before at a hockey game at Munn Ice Arena, which is about a 4 mins drive/16 min walk from where he was found.
It took 2 divers an hour to pull the body out of the water. It was snagged on something that was 10 to 15 feet from the bank. It never said what it was snagged on. The newspaper article below stated that it was so cold at that time that they didn’t want to expose the fire officials to it. Dale was found in blue jeans, a blue jacket, and red and white converses.
There wasn’t a lot of information on his death. I found his page on the Footprints at The River’s Edge blog which really only mentions a 1994 article in Michigan State University's student newspaper, The State News, that briefly mentioned his death. It also mentioned that Shields "had been to a party and had been drinking but was reportedly not intoxicated when he fell into the river.
Here are some random facts on the case.
Police suspected no foul play, and quoted in the newspaper article I found that “We don’t believe it was foul play, We tend to believe it was accidental.” They did interview some friends and family but it was ultimately ruled an accidental drowning.
Shields' roommate said he had doubts about the "accidental death theory." That was really all the information I found on that.
There was a comment on the blog post from a previous coworker who stated that “He was a bit difficult to work with sometimes, but I never had a problem with him. Sometimes he could come across as abrupt or rude, but nothing more than that.’
The last drowning in the Red Cedar River before this one was in 1978.
What really happened?
He could have just fell in the water. There is a petition currently to make Red Cedar River safer since the barricades around the river aren’t complete and there isn’t a lot of lighting in the area. This has led to several people falling into the river and drowning.
He could have encountered someone and they could have knocked him into the water.
This case has been ruled as an Accidental Drowning.
References
Below is an article about the recovery of the body from the Lansing State Journal.
