A 1992 mugshot of Rubin Weeks from The Clarion-Ledger archivesAfter 39 years, authorities may have finally found the answer to one of Mississippi’s oldest and best-known cold cases: the 1986 death of Shondra May.
Rubin Weeks, who was one of the original suspects in the case, was arrested this morning.
Weeks was questioned in the homicide early in the case. He was in and out of jail on various charges, but in 1991 he was arrested in a kidnapping and rape case in Jackson, Missouri. After admitting to the rape, he was sentenced to 30 years in prison.
Shondra May was 17 years old and working at McDonald’s on February, 1986, but a slow night led to her being allowed to go home early. She stopped at TG&Y to buy a Valentine’s card and headed home.
That’s the last anyone knew for sure about Shondra’s living whereabouts. Her car was found stopped in the road just before her driveway after her mother started calling around trying to locate her.
All Shondra’s things were still in her car. Her purse, her keys… everything but her driver’s license. The engine was off, but the radio was on, and the driver’s side window was cracked.
It was almost like she had evaporated.
On what would have been her 18th birthday, Shondra’s nude body was found bound with industrial tape and wrapped in bags in Baker’s Creek near Bolton in Hinds County, just south of the Champion Hill Road Bridge. She had been missing for 22 days.
Autopsy results indicated the presence of red hairs on Shondra’s body. Weeks is a red-haired man.
Scott County Sheriff Mike Lee was 16 years old when Shondra disappeared. Now as the Sheriff of Scott County, he and a task force of other investigators from central Mississippi teamed up to finally close the case that has gripped central Mississippi for decades.
According to archived articles from The Clarion-Ledger, court records show that both May and the clerk in Missouri were taken from their cars, raped, and restrained with tape.
The Missouri victim told police that after stalking her and lying in wait for her, Weeks flashed his lights on her on a rural road, and when she pulled over he pulled a knife. Then he forced her in his car and drove her to a neighboring county and raped her near a barn, binding her with tape and leaving her after she begged for her life. Police would later say the tape was simliar to that used in May’s case.
Even after admitting to the crime, Weeks began demanding a DNA test in 2004. It confirmed that it was, in fact, Weeks who had raped and sodomized the Missouri girl.
The Scott County Times reported that in 1992, Weeks reached out to the Scott County Sheriff’s Department, wanting to talk to them about “his role in the crime.”
Authorities at the time told the Clarion-Ledger that it appeared May was kept alive for at least a few days after she was kidnapped, and that she had recently had sex before she was found.
In 1988, the Scott County Times reported that Weeks also gave information to authorities in the case of a bank robbery plot in 1987.
