In November 1987, the tenant of a Charlotte Avenue home made a horrifying discovery — the skeletal remains of two women were buried just beneath the dirt floor of the crawl space.
Almost immediately, Nashville police announced that they’d answered the question of who put them there. A man named James Shaffer, then serving a prison sentence in Kentucky for the kidnapping and rape of a 14-year-old boy, reportedly confessed to detectives that he’d murdered the women two years earlier when he was living in the house. In interviews with local television reporters — including the Banner’s Demetria Kalodimos — Shaffer reportedly said they were sex workers whom he knew only as Sheila and “Little Bit” and that he’d killed them in a fit of rage after he caught them trying to steal from him.
“Our main concern now is identifying the girls,” then-Metro Nashville Police Detective R.C. Jackson told the Tennessean at the time. “We certainly want to identify next of kin.”…