Toni Gordon & Sheila Cummings (Charlotte Avenue Jane Does)

Case background and investigation

In November 1987 a resident of a house at 3509 Charlotte Avenue in West Nashville noticed something protruding from the dirt floor of the basement. It was a human skull. Metro Nashville police, called to the house on November 17, 1987, uncovered two complete skeletons in shallow graves beneath the home.

Detectives traced a former tenant, James Shaffer, a registered sex offender who was then in jail in Logan County, Kentucky. Interviewed there, he confessed to killing both women and burying them in the basement. According to his account as later described by Nashville police, he picked up the first woman, whom he knew as Sheila Cummings, near Broadway and 4th Avenue North in April 1984, struck her with a rubber mallet and stabbed her after she took money from his wallet, and dismembered her body. He said he met the second woman, whom he knew only as "Lil' Bit," around 12th Avenue North and Jefferson Street on July 4, 1985, and strangled her. Shaffer received two life sentences and died in prison in 2004.

Although the killer was known, the victims were not. For decades police could not confirm who either woman was, and the second had no name at all. By 2023 the Metro Nashville Police Department's cold case unit had sent bone samples to a laboratory in the hope that forensic genetic genealogy could identify them, and both sets of remains were exhumed in January 2025 for forensic analysis. That April police released a forensic rendering of "Lil' Bit," described as a Black woman about 5 feet 7 inches tall with a gold overlay on a front tooth, who was buried wearing a copper Grim Reaper ring.

On July 2, 2025, DNA from two daughters confirmed the first victim as Sheila Cummings, 23, of Elgin, Illinois; one of them had contacted the cold case unit after reading about the case online and said her mother had been missing since 1984. On November 9, 2026, police announced that forensic genetic genealogy had identified the second woman as Toni L. Gordon of Nashville, who was 31 when she was killed. Her relatives had believed she moved out of state and lost touch; they have been notified. Police credited DNA Investigative Solutions, Bode Technology, NamUs, the medical examiner's office and the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation with assisting in the work.