It has been 43 years since Shawn Patrick Raymond walked out the door and never came back. Michigan State Police believe the 19-year-old Algonac man was murdered, but to this day, there have been no arrests, no charges and no answers — only a skull recovered from the Clinton River.
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Who killed Shawn Raymond? 43 years later, family still searching for answers in unsolved murder
It has been 43 years since Shawn Patrick Raymond walked out the door and never came back.
Michigan State Police believe the 19-year-old Algonac man was murdered, but to this day, there have been no arrests, no charges, and no answers — only a skull recovered from the Clinton River.
Now, the investigators who worked the case and Raymond’s sister are speaking out, hoping someone will finally come forward.
To his family, Shawn Raymond was more than a cold case. He was the second-youngest of five children — a brother with an easy laugh, a sharp sense of humor, and a reputation for making everyone around him feel welcome.
“He was an all-around fun, good guy. He was a great big brother. I looked up to him. He was this older, wiser, worldly guy,” said Kit Raymond-Reiter, the youngest of the Raymond siblings.
In high school, she said everyone wanted to be around Shawn, and he was the kind of person who rooted for the underdog.
“He was a go-getter. He didn’t like to sit still for long,” Raymond-Reiter said.
Shawn had just graduated from Algonac High School and was working at a local restaurant while making plans to attend Macomb Community College in the fall.
He had recently came out as gay to his mother, Shirley, who accepted him.
On the day of Shawn’s graduation, he was in his bedroom with music blaring. His younger sister, just 14 at the time, was emotional.
“He was getting ready for graduation. My mom and all of us were getting ready,” Raymond-Reiter recalled.
The song playing was “Every Breath You Take” by The Police. Kit slipped a handwritten card under his door. Shawn opened the door immediately — and couldn’t understand why she was so upset.
“I’m not going anywhere. I’m just graduating,” he told her.
Those words have stayed with her ever since.
On July 21, 1983, Shawn Raymond went with friends to Menjo’s, a popular gay bar in Detroit.
“I remember him going to work that night and then saying he was going out afterwards and he would see me tomorrow and I said, ‘OK,’” Raymond-Reiter said.
The next morning, he wasn’t home. At first, the family wasn’t alarmed.
“It wasn’t that unlike him to stay with a friend if they were out late and possibly drinking,” Raymond-Reiter said. “We didn’t worry right off the bat, but then the more time that went on, we started to get a little bit nervous.”
So, she went through Shawn’s old phone bill.
“I just went down the list, and I just started calling people asking if they had seen him,” Raymond-Reiter said.
No one spoke up.
Shawn’s mother, Shirley, called police.
But the family said, because of where Shawn had gone missing, they felt the investigation was not taken seriously. They later learned the case was allegedly dubbed “the fairy case” in its early days.
“I feel like back then in 1983 the police kind of turned a blind eye to it,” Raymond-Reiter said.
She said one person told her mother that Shawn had simply gone out to experiment and live his life — and that he would be back. Another officer allegedly told the family that if police had to stop and look for every missing person in the city, they wouldn’t have time to do their jobs.
“Panic set in and the nightmare began,” Raymond-Reiter said.
The people who had been out with Shawn that night either said they didn’t remember anything — or didn’t want to talk. Some retained attorneys.
“Why would you not want to clear your name or help this person out? Or help their family? Why did so many people want to get lawyers?” Raymond-Reiter said.
Days turned into months. Months turned into years.
There was no social media. No cell phones. In 1983, you waited for the phone to ring.
“A death is one thing. When you lose a loved one, it’s so hard to deal with, but you can wrap your mind around it, but having someone walk out the door one day and never return, that’s something I’ll never get over,” Raymond-Reiter said.
In September 1992, workers dredging the Clinton River in Mount Clemens discovered a human skull. It was turned over to Michigan State Police — and sat unidentified in storage for more than a decade.
In March 2004, Sarah Krebs with Michigan State Police got a call. At the time, she was a newly trained forensic artist fresh out of the FBI’s Forensic Facial Imaging course.
“The person said, ‘Hey, you know, we have this skull here. Do you want to work on it?” she said.
Krebs didn’t hesitate.
“Of course, I was really excited to have my first case in the forensic field. I jumped on it,” she said.
It would become her first cold case — and her first identification.
The case presented unique challenges from the start. Only the cranium had been recovered — no mandible, or lower jaw. Drawing on her background in anthropology, Krebs contacted her former professor at Michigan State University and borrowed a mandible from a skeletal remains collection to complete a 3-D facial reconstruction.
“From a skull alone, you can only determine a couple of things—race, ancestry and age,” Krebs said.
The remains were determined to belong to a white male between the ages of 18 and 40. There were only a few teeth remaining in the cranium. Notably, two bicuspids were missing, which appear to be shifted with orthodontics. That detail helped investigators build a more complete profile of who this person might have been.
When the facial reconstruction was released to the media, a Michigan State Police sergeant at the same post where Krebs worked recognized the image. He had grown up in the same area as Shawn. He called Krebs immediately.
Krebs was able to confirm the match using dental records. The skull belonged to Shawn Raymond.
“My first skeletal case. He was my first identification and it was based off the first tip I got,” Krebs said.
The Raymond family would go on to develop a deep bond with Krebs, a friendship that has now spanned more than 20 years. Kit said the family felt they had been blessed with an angel.
The identification set the trajectory of Krebs’ entire career, eventually leading to the founding of her nonprofit, “Missing in Michigan.”
“It really became the course of my entire career because of Shawn,” she said.
Before leaving for retirement, Krebs packed the case folder and took it home with her.
“When a cold case detective takes the case home with them, they are never going to give up on it,” she said. “I want to see it through and that’s why I’m here today in my retirement. It’s my number one case.”
For retired Michigan State Police Detective Lieutenant Patrick Young, Shawn’s was also one of his first cold cases. Young graduated high school in 1983 — the same year Shawn disappeared.
After the skull was identified, Young worked backward — gathering records from the previous decades, building a timeline and re-interviewing anyone who may have had information.
Investigators created what they call a “whiteboard,” mapping out potential witnesses, friends, locations, and dates to piece together what happened.
The last confirmed sighting of Shawn Raymond was at Menjo’s, where he was observed getting into his car and leaving. From that point forward, no one has come forward to say they saw him alive again.
Shawn’s car has never been found. Investigators say they ruled out accidental drowning early on — in part because of the missing vehicle.
“We investigated this not necessarily as a missing person but as a homicide,” Young said.
Young said he believes the car’s disappearance alone points to more than one person being involved.
“In order for a car to disappear, I feel that alone would require more than one person,” he said.
Investigators also found that Shawn’s license plate had been run through LEIN — the Law Enforcement Information Network — within roughly six months of his disappearance.
Records indicated it was the Detroit Police Department that ran the plate. The officer who ran it was later located, but he couldn’t recall why he had done so. Young said the officer was actually placed under hypnosis, and eventually came to believe he had run the plate at the request of Canadian authorities — not an uncommon practice at the time.
Regardless, the plate was never flagged as connected to a missing person.
“It just didn’t get entered the right way, so it never raised any alarms,” Young said.
Over the years, potential witnesses have declined to be interviewed, with some retaining attorneys. Others began cooperating — then pulled back.
“On several occasions folks talked to us. When we would get deeper into the case, they would get uncomfortable and wouldn’t want to discuss the case anymore,” Young said.
The case is currently maintained by the MSP Lapeer Post.
“It is the simple question— what happened?” Young said.
“Somebody has answers out there and they have had answers the whole time,” Krebs said. “We need the answers to close this and without somebody coming forward, we are not going to know.”
Shawn’s mother passed away years ago along with one of his older brothers. Another brother also now has dementia. Kit and her sister reside in Florida.
“Shawn was such a good person, he was a trusting person and I think he probably trusted the wrong people,” Raymond-Reiter said.
But Raymond-Reiter refuses to stop talking. She refuses to let her brother be forgotten.
“Somebody has been living with this for a very, very long time and I think it’s time for them to come forward and give what’s left of my family some resemblance of peace,” she said.
And whenever “Every Breath You Take” comes on — especially on the hardest days — she knows her brother is right there with her.
“Whenever I hear that song, of course I think of him. Whenever I’m having a bad day or things are not going OK, I’m thinking of him — boom, that song comes on,” Raymond-Reiter said.
