Retired FBI Agent’s Long Career Began with Shauna Howe Case

| May 9, 2018

OIL CITY, Pa. (EYT) – Recently retired FBI agent Tom Carter’s prolific law enforcement career began with the case of the abduction and murder of 11-year-old Shauna Howe, of Oil City.

The case began with a phone call to police at 10:00 p.m. on October 27, 1992. Shauna Howe’s mother, Lucy Brown Howe, was worried that her daughter hadn’t returned home.

Shauna left for school earlier that day dressed in a gymnast’s costume. After school, she joined her girl scout troop to sing to residents at a home for seniors.

A few hours prior to Howe’s call, Oil City Police received a somewhat different call: a call from a concerned person who saw a little girl grabbed off the corner of West First and Reed Streets by a “tall, shaggy-looking man.”

Just a few days later, a piece of Shauna’s gymnast costume was found near an abandoned railroad bed in a rural, wooded area in Rockland, Pa. The morning after that, Shauna’s body was located about 200 yards from where the clothing was found. Her abductors had thrown her from a railroad trestle into a dry, rocky creek bed near Coulter’s Hole, along East Sandy Creek, in Rockland.

Shauna was the victim of a sexual assault and murder. The autopsy report stated that Shauna died from extensive blunt force trauma, which included fractured ribs and multiple lacerations and contusions, as well as hemorrhaging.

Agent Tom Carter, who had joined the FBI in 1991 and was assigned to Pittsburgh, was on the violent crime unit at the time of Shauna’s murder. He remembers the case with crystal clarity.

“That little girl lying there in that creek bed under the railroad trestle is something I’ll never forget,” Carter told the Post-Gazette. “That influenced my passion for kids. I couldn’t believe someone could do that to a little girl. It just hit home for me.”

Though one of his first cases, and one that stuck with him for many years, the Shauna Howe murder case was not a case that came to a quick resolution; the case went unsolved for more than a decade.

During that time, Carter’s career moved on. He spent a number of years on one of the earliest anti-gang task forces, a collaboration between the FBI, the attorney general’s office and city, county, and state police, eventually helping to dismantle the notorious LAW (Larimer Avenue/Wilkinsburg) gang.

After the success of the anti-gang task force, Carter settled into a new role, embedded in the Pittsburgh police homicide cold case unit, another multi-agency collaboration. His new role afforded him the opportunity to take a second look at that early case that still haunted him: the murder of Shauna Howe.

Investigators had DNA evidence that had been collected from when Shauna’s body was found, and Carter took to carrying cotton swabs to obtain DNA samples from possible suspects he encountered while investigating his other cases.

Sadly, Carter’s time on the cold case unit came to an end shortly after September 11, 2001, when the FBI began to focus far more on international terrorism. Carter then spent several years on a counterterrorism unit and even traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

By the time he returned to Western Pennsylvania several years later, where he started working child sex crimes from the FBI’s office in Cranberry, the Shauna Howe case had been solved.

It was 2002 when the Shauna Howe investigation had a major break. A DNA sample taken from James O’Brien, a man who was serving a prison sentence for attempting to kidnap an Oil City woman, turned out to match a sample of DNA on Shauna’s body. As the case developed, Shauna’s killers – Eldred “Ted” Walker and brothers James and Timothy O’Brien – were all brought to justice.

Though Carter wasn’t involved in the final break in the case, it was the kind of DNA sample collection he had done for so many years that finally brought the case to a close.

Late last week, Carter retired from the FBI, but at 57-years-old, he isn’t ready to give up his passion for law enforcement yet. This week he became the first retired FBI agent to take a position as an investigator with the Allegheny County District Attorney’s office.


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