An excellent article….
Faulty assumption mars Shawano murder investigation
Published May 16, 2015 in the Green Bay Press Gazette
SHAWANO – Despite renewed attention by authorities, the mysterious murder of a young woman who was last seen nearly two years ago at a Main Street tavern remains unsolved.
Heather Szekeres, 32, disappeared after patronizing The Final Lap Sports Bar late into the night of June 21, 2013. She lived a few storefronts from the bar, sharing a downtown apartment loft with her husband, Robert, their 11-month-old baby girl, Serenity, and Heather's mother.
A Gannett Wisconsin Media Investigative Team review found that the Shawano Police Department didn't treat Szekeres' disappearance as suspicious at the beginning. That lack of urgency slowed efforts to solve the slaying, the I-Team found. Authorities have a suspect, Gannett Wisconsin Media learned recently. However, newly elected Shawano County Sheriff Adam Bieber declined to discuss those details except to say that Heather's husband is not the focus of the homicide investigation. "The husband is not considered a suspect," Bieber said.
Morgan Wright, an internationally recognized law enforcement expert based in Virginia, told Gannett Wisconsin Media that police complicated the case by not treating Szekeres as an endangered missing person from the start.
"In law enforcement, you can't just put blinders on," Wright said. "For God sakes, this was a mother with a small child." Wright said the failure of police to take proper action will likely lead to a tough road for prosecutors. "This will be a very tough case to get a (murder) conviction to prove beyond a reasonable doubt," Wright said. The investigation got off to a slow start, when Shawano Police Chief Ed Whealon and others in the department jumped to the conclusion that Szekeres ran away from Shawano, population 9,000.
Even after she had been missing for three weeks, Police Capt. Jeff Heffernon told The Shawano Leader newspaper that there was no probable cause to believe any crime had occurred. After the six-month mark, the police chief reiterated his initial theory that Heather left town on her own. "There's a history of this," Whealon told the Shawano newspaper. Gannett Wisconsin Media filed a public records request with the Shawano Police Department on April 22, seeking access to other missing persons reports involving Szekeres prior to her disappearance in June 2013. The city of Shawano has not yet responded to the request.
On Mother's Day weekend in 2014, a skull and a set of bones were found in a wooded area along a dead-end stretch of Peach Road. The body was found about 21/2miles from downtown Shawano where Szekeres was last seen. After extensive forensic and DNA analysis at a laboratory in Texas, the remains were positively identified last month as those of Szekeres.
Heather's friends, including Manda Glisch, were devastated by the news. Glisch became close friends with Szekeres when she lived in Shawano a couple years ago. "I would like people to remember Heather as a sweet girl who was a great mother and wife who worked hard to support her family," Glisch told Gannett Wisconsin Media.
Bieber, a former city of Shawano patrolman, remembers being on duty the day Rob Szekeres reported his wife missing. "It wasn't uncommon for Heather to not come home sometimes," Bieber told Gannett Wisconsin Media. "But then after a few days, the husband did want to report it as a missing person case." According to police, Heather's husband last saw his wife around 11 p.m. on Friday, June 21, 2013. Heather then left the apartment to have a drink with friends at the nearby Final Lap Bar. Rob told police he was home that night with the couple's infant daughter.
Heather's mother, Laurie Waddell, was also at the tavern late into the night, according to a friend of Heather Szekeres. When the friend and Waddell left together at about 1 a.m., Szekeres stayed behind. By then, the crowd thinned out, and less than 10 customers remained at the bar.
A few weeks after Szekeres went missing, her husband went on Facebook and posted comments that his job was hampering his search for his missing wife. Rob Szekeres worked as a long-haul truck driver. On Facebook, he claimed that his wife must have left him voluntarily. He also said he has given "100 percent cooperation" in the case to police, and a DNA sample.
"I am in no way a suspect," he posted on Facebook, July 8, 2013. "I love my wife dearly and wish she would just come home. I have a very demanding job that I have to keep doing in order to support my daughter. "If I could, I'd be home everyday helping everyone with locating (my) wife but I can't."
Within months, Heather's baffling disappearance faded from the community's attention. The Shawano Police Department didn't post any new information or updates about Heather's case. A "Find Heather Szekeres" page on Facebook went dormant just a few weeks after she disappeared. By the time Mark Kohl was appointed the new Shawano police chief last May, Heather's case had fallen to the back burner. Kohl replaced Whealon, who retired in April 2014. “We were kind of at a dead-end," Kohl told Gannett Wisconsin Media recently. "By no means was it closed, but we had no strong leads to follow up on."
Heather Anadell grew up in Milwaukee. Rob Szekeres lived in the Chicago suburbs. The couple married in 2008. They later settled in Shawano, where Heather's mother resided. Their marriage, by all accounts, was not bliss. In 2012, the couple was sued in Shawano County Circuit Court for outstanding bills they owed creditors. By October, Heather was suing her husband for child support. Court records from Shawano County show the couple had been separated for several months. Heather was living on public assistance and food stamps to provide for herself and her baby girl. At 12:56 a.m., Dec. 5, 2012, Heather called 911 to report her husband for domestic violence. Rob had fled the apartment and ducked into the Final Lap bar before the city police arrived. At the apartment, Heather told officer Brandy Pardy that her head hurt and tingled. During a heated argument, Rob grabbed a pillow and struck her in the face with the zipper, court documents show. “Heather stated this is not the first time Robert has been physical with her, fought with her or scared her. Heather stated Robert has anger issues and has broken things in the house in the past and (she) showed me the wall where Robert punched it and it cracked," Pardy stated. Heather's injuries were minor and did not require a trip to the hospital. Nonetheless, "she wanted to press charges because this cannot keep happening," the police report stated.
In January 2013, the prosecutor's office charged Rob Szekeres, then 30, with domestic violence battery, a misdemeanor. Soon afterward, the couple reconciled and resumed living together. Heather's husband pleaded no contest to a reduced charge of disorderly conduct. The judge fined him $506. Heather's Facebook account was updated on June 20, 2013. A photo of her and husband Rob in a swimming pool became her new profile picture. She was in her bathing suit holding a bottle of beer. Her arm was wrapped around Rob's shoulder. That same day, her Facebook cover photo was changed to show a photo of her husband holding their baby girl in his arm with a Final Lap bar sign in the background.
The next night, Heather disappeared from downtown Shawano. From that point on, Heather's Facebook account went dormant. By 2014, Rob Szekeres husband left Shawano and moved to Valparaiso, Ind. Last month, Szekeres announced on Facebook that he and his steady girlfriend, Andrea Lynn Heimbuch, had moved to Bridgman, Mich. The small resort community is near the Lake Michigan shoreline. He continues to work as a long-haul truck driver. Multiple attempts by Gannett Wisconsin Media to reach Rob Szekeres and Laurie Waddell were unsuccessful.
The tavern where Heather Szekeres was last seen was on the verge of being shut down by the city of Shawano, public records show. On June 3, 2013, the city notified the tavern owner, Sheila Davis, that her beer and liquor license for the Final Lap Sports Bar, 114 South Main St., would not be renewed. Davis was notified had she had submitted false or misleading information on her liquor license application. She resided in Missouri, not Wisconsin, as required by law. Compounding the issue, the bar had been the focus of numerous complaints and criminal investigations of the Shawano Police Department, according to public documents.
In December 2012, a 15-year-old girl reported she was sexually assaulted in the basement of the Final Lap. Darwin Davis, the bar's manager and husband of the bar's owner, is facing criminal charges of sexual assault of a child in connection with the case. He is also accused of sexually assaulting the girl at his residence in the Town of Wescott, a small community near Shawano Lake, according to court documents. Heather Szekeres was on a list of potential witnesses expected to testify for the prosecution against Davis, now 48, at his trial for sexual assault. The trial for that case has since been delayed numerous times and additional charges have been filed against Davis.
Felony obstruction of justice charges were filed against Davis in February. The former bar manager is accused of telling two of the case's witnesses to lie to the police about whether he had sex with the underage girl.
While Davis has not been convicted in the sex crime, he is a registered sex offender and convicted felon. He was convicted in 1994 in Langlade County for a sex crime there involving a child. Before opening The Final Lap in Shawano, Davis and his wife, Sheila, owned a bar in Antigo along State 45, but that bar burned down in 2010, just a few months after they opened it. The cause of that fire was electrical, Gannett Wisconsin Media archives show.
Darwin Davis remains in the Shawano County Jail. He faces seven felonies and three misdemeanors in connection with the alleged underage sexual assault. In summary, Davis has three court cases in Shawano County, accusing him of 18 crimes. Davis doesn't face any criminal charges in connection with the disappearance and death of Heather Szekeres. Gannett Wisconsin Media submitted a request through the jail to interview Davis about Heather's case, but Davis declined. Davis was not in custody at the time of Heather's disappearance, sheriff's officials confirmed.
Last year, the Shawano County Sheriff's Department took jurisdiction of the death investigation because Heather Szekeres' body was found in the county, rather than inside city limits, where she was last seen.
Sheriff Bieber called the murder probe "a very active case and a high priority case." "We have good evidence in this case," he told Gannett Wisconsin Media. "Obviously, with everything we know, my hope is to have charges brought this year, but that may not happen. ... We can't put a time frame on it." Time will tell whether the sheriff's office can overcome the lost time that caused the initial investigation at the city police department to stall and move in the wrong direction.
