By QUINTON SMITH/YachatsNews.com
YACHATS – At every 5:30 a.m. every Thursday, Drew Tracy jumps into his truck and begins the 98-mile drive to the Eugene Police Department for an 8 o’clock meeting.
Once there, Tracy and three other retired law enforcement officials gather to sort out their chores for that day and the next week to help chip away at clearing the department’s 30 unsolved homicides or violent attacks dating back to 1962.
Eight hours later he heads home.
It’s a labor of love for the four cold case volunteers that include a retired Eugene detective, a former Eugene sergeant and an assistant U.S. attorney general from Mississippi.
“We’re just trying to help,” says Tracy, 67, who spent three decades as a top police official in the East Coast and still consults on anti-terrorism projects for the U.S. State Department. “The egos were gone a long time ago. We’re not going to get a promotion or a pay raise. We’re just trying to answer questions.”
Tracy has been a cold case volunteer for 4½ years after moving to Eugene in 2017 with his wife, Julie, to be closer to a daughter and her family and then to Yachats in 2018.
Many agencies across the country – including the Lincoln County District Attorney’s Office — have set up cold case units in the past 10-15 years as interest grew in cracking unsolved homicides or violent attacks. Eugene police established their all-volunteer unit in 2010 and has cleared five cases, said Rick Gilliam, the retired detective who acts as the unit’s supervisor. Those cleared cases involved suspects who have died but would have been charged with a crime were they still living, Gilliam said.
Much of the work is quiet and behind the scenes. When they believe their case is ready for resolution, the volunteers hand over their work to a police department detective and Lane County deputy district attorney. Then, it’s on to the next one.
The Eugene group’s work came into the open in June when it went public to seek tips on one of its oldest cases — a 1969 homicide in which the victim’s family and friends are now offering a $45,000 reward to help solve it.
“It is one of our oldest cases and the family is still around and interested,” Tracy said of their going public for help.
Eugene’s oldest unsolved homicide
Janet Shanahan, 22, was a student at the University of Oregon studying to become a teacher when she disappeared the night of April 21, 1969. She had been at a younger brother’s birthday party at her parents’ home, but left to run errands.
Shanahan, whose maiden name was Thomas, grew up in Eugene, graduated from Willamette High School, and married Christopher Shanahan 10 months before she disappeared.
Christopher Shanahan reported her missing the next day and with her sister went searching for his wife two days after her disappearance. They soon found her 1951 Plymouth in a ditch in an industrial area of Eugene. She was in the trunk; an autopsy determined she had been strangled.
The cold case unit has gone back through the case, Tracy said, but there is no biological or DNA evidence available and witnesses are dying or memories are fading.
Christopher Shanahan is now 75 and moved to the East Coast shortly after his wife’s death. Tracy said Shanahan “cannot be eliminated as a suspect at this point.”
While detectives talked with Shanahan years ago, Gilliam said, he’s “mostly been uncooperative.”
“He has not been cleared,” Gilliam said. “He’s still a person of interest to us.”
Long career in law enforcement
Tracy grew up and went to college in New York state and was working as a Head Start teacher when he landed a job as an air traffic controller in the Washington, D.C. area. But he was out of a job four years later in August 1981 when 11,359 members of the Professional Air-Traffic Controllers Association were fired during its showdown with President Ronald Reagan.
“I was just married at the time,” he said. “I have to get a job.”
Influenced by cousins who were cops, Tracy began applying to police departments around the Washington area. The department for Montgomery County, Maryland — the largest county in that state sitting just north of Washington, D.C. — was the first to call.
He started out as a patrol officer, became a corporal assigned to an investigative unit and then a surveillance unit, before joining the department’s Special Weapons and Tactics group as a sergeant. Because they adjoined the District of Columbia, the unit regularly trained with the FBI and other agencies. He became a patrol lieutenant, worked as an incident commander, then a captain in charge of special investigations.
He also picked up a master’s degree in business administration to “see law enforcement from a business perspective. You need to be able to ask, ‘What are best practices’?”
Tracy was at a conference in Colorado in April 1999 when the Columbine High School massacre occurred in Littleton, killing 13 people and wounding more than 20 others. He visited the scene, spurring him to start the nation’s first national training program for police response to active shooters.
Tracy went on to became the Montgomery department’s assistant chief, trained at the U.S. Drug Enforcement commander’s academy, the FBI’s academy and executive institute, and was the multi-jurisdiction operations commander during the D.C. sniper attacks of October 2002 in which 10 people were killed and three critically wounded.
In 2004 Tracy was diagnosed with Stage 4 head and neck cancer. He underwent 36 rounds of chemotherapy and radiation, then surgeries, and was given his last rites but survived. His weight dropped to 118 pounds.
Over the next 10 years he rebuilt himself to regain the fitness to compete in the Police & Fire World Games’ “Toughest Competitor Alive” competition. It is an international competition of police and fighters involving 10-decathalon-like events over two days.
In 2000 Tracy won his over-40 age group. In 2015 he won the competition’s over- 55 age group.
“I did it because I was once an elite athlete,” he said. “I was close to death and I told myself I had to get back. I was going to win it again.”
He retired from Montgomery County in 2011 and then held interim chief jobs in Tacoma Park, Md. and for George Mason University.
He began consulting for the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service in 2010 when it came looking for “subject matter experts,” Tracy said. The agency oversees protection for 275 U.S. embassies and offices in 170 countries, works on counterterrorism efforts, and helps manage security programs for international events.
This year Tracy will spend 12 weeks in Southeast Asia and Africa on State Department anti-terrorism assistance programs.
“I don’t exactly go to the vacation places of the world,” he said.
Tracy is also involved in Yachats. He was appointed to the board of the Yachats Rural Fire Protection District in 2020 and is a member of a citizens work group trying to get the city of Yachats’ permission to help work on long-stalled water security issues.
Chance recruitment
Tracy was wandering around the Lane County Home & Garden Show in 2017 when he stopped at a booth where the Eugene Police Department was recruiting volunteers. He chatted with volunteer coordinator Lindy Smith, who mentioned its cold case unit.
“I used to oversee a cold case unit,” he told her.
After a background check, he was in.
“In retirement you want to be challenged,” Tracy said. “I like keeping my hand in investigations. And, I’m a person who has to be busy.”
Tracy has become the unit’s self-taught expert on using genealogy databases and DNA – called investigative genetic genealogy — to trace potential cold case suspects via their relatives. It’s a burgeoning field that has led to high-profile cold case arrests across the country.
“He’s basically our go-to guy as it relates to DNA,” Gilliam said.
Each night at home in Yachats, Tracy retreats to a small office at the top of his house to work genealogy databases.
“I basically work it six days a week from home,” Tracy said. “We use it where we have hit the wall, where there’s no suspect.”
” … you’re going to be frustrated”
Cold case work is slow and tedious. Long ago witnesses – if they are still alive — have to be tracked down to see if they want to talk. Memories fade. Evidence and records can be scattered.
The Eugene unit selects four cases at a time so they always have something to do if progress on one slows. They familiarize themselves with each, going through all the records from the case. The Shanahan investigation has 3,000 pages of records, for example.
Where there is potential DNA evidence from the case still in storage, the volunteers re-process it – lab techniques are exponentially better than years ago – and send it to the Oregon State crime lab in Clackamas.
“You’re the fourth generation of eyes looking at some of these things,” Tracy said. “But you’ve got to do your homework … and you’re going to be frustrated.”
Gilliam says the Eugene unit is fortunate to have someone with Tracy’s wide experience who oftentimes brings a different point of view.
“We all have a little bit of different flavors and ways of thinking,” Gilliam said of the four volunteers. “He’s from New York. He’s not bashful about volunteering his opinion. But he has all these ideas to get results and a lot of energy.
“We only meet formally once a week, but his energy goes way beyond that one day a week,” Gilliam said.
And that’s how the unit hopes to catch a break with the Janet Shanahan case. People who know about her death are getting older “and may want to unburden themselves” by helping crack the case, Tracy said.
“It’s a 1969 case. We have no biological evidence,” he said. “Only a confession or a witness will help solve this case.”
And Thursday, the cold case volunteers meet again to see if they can help find Janet Shanahan’s killer.
- Quinton Smith is the founder and editor of YachatsNews.com and can be reached at YachatsNews@gmail.com. After retiring from The Oregonian newspaper in 2008, he volunteered for two years as a member of the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Department cold case unit.
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