Rubin WeeksSheriff Mike Lee said the man accused of killing a Scott County teen in one of Mississippi’s oldest cold cases really didn’t seem surprised when deputies showed up at his door Tuesday morning.
In an appearance with Chief Deputy Brad Ellis on the Investigation: Homicide podcast, Lee said Rubin Weeks didn’t seem really phased by the fact that he was being arrested in the famous cold case.
“When we made entry into his camper he asked, ‘What is this for?’ and I explained to him that this is for the kidnapping and murder of Shondra May, I think it’s how I said it,” Lee said. “After that, it was just well ‘Let me get my medicine, let me prepare myself to go to Scott County.’ He never argued about what we were there for.”
“I think he probably felt this day was coming,” Ellis said.
As of Thursday night, investigators had been questioning Weeks since Tuesday morning — almost a full three days. He’s only been out of prison for a little over a year and a half after serving 30 years for a brutal rape in a situation that ended up being almost a replay of what investigators think happened to Shondra May.
Lee said Weeks is cool as a cucumber.
“This is the weird part — and we just kind of both noticed this and made comments throughout the interviews — that most people are scared of jail. They’re fearful of not knowing what to expect when they go to prison, and you kind of have that over their head that sometimes to help get a confession,” Lee said. “Rubin spent 30 years in prison with some of the worst guys in Missouri and so he is just as at home in our detention centers as he would be in his camper.”
Ellis said Weeks’ female companion did react to the arrest, but that he suspected she wasn’t terribly surprised either.
“I don’t know, it was a little strange, her reaction. You know, it wasn’t the whole, ‘You’ve got the wrong person,’ right? It was just kind of — I don’t know, it was just kind of strange — like she might have known something,” he said.
Searching for motives, patterns, additional suspects
Why Weeks would have allegedly killed Shondra is a question that may never be answered in detail, Lee said.
“He was a sexual deviant and again we know that from the victim and the way that she was treated in Missouri and she lived to be able to tell that,” Lee said. “And going back to some of his past statements, he has said that he has urges, and that’s kind of the way he described it.”
Weeks’ DNA has been entered into the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) given that he seems to have a defined method of operation, which leads some to believe there could be other crimes out there that could come back to him.
“We continue to get calls, especially here in the last few days, of things that we should investigate,” Lee said. “Possible other cases that occurred around or near Scott County around those times.”
So far nothing has hit, but Lee called for anyone who might remember something from that time to reach out to the sheriff’s department.
The question has arisen of whether there would be any additional arrests, and Lee said not unless they found that someone knew something or helped after the fact. He said part of the reason the case has gone unsolved for as long as it did was that Weeks allegedly acted alone. In addition, Weeks acted alone in the assault in Missouri, and the two crimes were incredibly similar.
“Understand that the best crimes are committed by single persons and that way you don’t have to worry about people talking,” he said. “When we see that multiple people commit a crime it’s good because we usually have people talking and we’re able to get suspects fast.”
In newspaper archives, Weeks’ name comes up in various cases, including one in which he seems to be an informant or a witness in a bank robbery. Lee said he has always seemingly looked for a spotlight in that way.
“Throughout time he has kind of interjected himself into things. Rubin is someone who does crave attention and so I think that the things that you read, it’s usually not because Rubin was involved. Like you saying he was an informant — things like that, I think, are things that he may have helped out with because he would have heard or wanted the attention from it,” the Sheriff said.
Lee said that in the late 90s, Weeks admitted to some things regarding Shondra’s case, but then recanted them, and authorities weren’t sure what to think.
“Without going into the specifics of the case … We know that he either used a blue light or his headlights to stop her,” Lee said, adding that Weeks had also mentioned at one point that he had told her he was a Scott County Deputy and needed her to come with him.
‘Justice for Shondra’
Lee said the long list of investigators that have worked the case ever since 1986 all contributed to Tuesday’s arrest.
“Neither myself nor Chief Ellis nor any of the MBI agents who have been with us day and night on this case would be where we are without what people in the past have done,” he said.
Lee was 16 years old when Shondra May was killed, and Ellis was six. Ellis said as he wheeled Weeks to the patrol car, it seemed unreal that this day had come. In his childhood in Leake and Scott Counties, Shondra’s name had come up as a cautionary tale parents told their children about being careful around strangers. Past that, he had watched his boss obsess over the case ever since he could remember.
“Ever since I’ve been at sheriff’s office, I don’t remember very much time going by where he didn’t have that case in front of him on his desk,” Ellis said. “It was just kind of a monumental type deal to say, ‘Hey, this is this is the guy right here and we got him.’ I’ve walked into his office many, many times and that case is all over his desk. He’s going through videos, he’s going through case files, and you know, to be a part of that was kind of surreal.”
Lee said that God has been with the investigation throughout the years, and that there was a moment it seemed like maybe God winked at him as Weeks was being arrested.
“We had some handcuffs that were engraved with Shondra’s picture and it said, ‘Justice for Shondra,'” Lee said. “They passed those cuffs to me to put them on Tuesday morning and the deputy from Madison County that was with us goes, ‘I engraved those. It’s my company that engraved those.’ Until the sheriff told him, ‘Hey we’re going to arrest…‘ he would have had no idea. And so things just come full circle, and the Lord puts us in in places we don’t expect.”
