Unsolved Halloween Murders: #3 Shannon Olsen

Shannon Marie Olson, a.k.a. Shannon Earl, was born to Jacqueline Earl. She had dropped out of Southeast High School. 

On October 31st 1987, 15-year-old Shannon, disappeared from the South East Wichita area. She was last seen
when visiting a girlfriend's home in southeast Wichita about 11:00 p.m. She told her friends that she was going out to buy some liquor, but she left the house without her purse. At 2:50 p.m., Shannon's nude body was found floating face down in a sand pit in an area zoned to be an industrial park, near the corner of Thirty-third Street and Hill- side. Shannon's throat had been slit and she had been stabbed over forty times. Her carotid artery and trachea had been severed by the frenzied attack. Her hands were bound behind her back by her own bra. No weapon was found at the sandpit, and some of her clothes were missing from the scene. Several vehicles had driven over the murder scene before detectives could inspect the ground for tire tracks. It was presumed that Shannon's body had been dumped there, having been abducted from a secondary location.

Shannon had lived only two blocks from the BTK killer's victim, Shirley Vian. Despite this, when the BTK killer was caught, he claimed that Shannon wasn't one of his victims.

Shannon's case remains unsolved.

At the time of her murder, Shannon was five feet, six inches tall, about 135 pounds, and with brown hair and brown eyes. She had a pentagram tattooed on the outside of her right ankle she was wearing two gold rings: a friendship ring with clasping hands on her left ring finger and another gold ring on her right little finger. She was also wearing a silver chain-link bracelet on her right wrist and silver dangling earrings with little stars at the ends of silver strands.