In the winter of 1995, a 27-year-old woman named Ann Marie Shaw vanished from Manassas, Virginia, leaving behind a life that included two young children. She was last seen on December 3rd of that year. Ann Marie, who was of Filipino descent, had been in a relationship with Walter Thomas Godbey, the father of her children. Although they never married, she sometimes used his last name. Earlier in 1995, a court had granted her custody of their children and ordered Godbey to provide child support.
After she went missing, Godbey claimed that she had dropped their children off at his home and then left for the Philippines to visit her mother. However, this story was later questioned by Ann Marie's sister, who pointed out that their mother had passed away years earlier and that Ann Marie did not possess a passport. For years, her disappearance remained a mystery, a painful void in the lives of those who knew her.
The silence in Ann Marie's case was broken years later, not by a discovery of her whereabouts, but by an entirely separate and violent crime committed by Walter Godbey. In November 2001, he was charged with the murder of an AOL executive named Douglass Small, a crime for which he was later convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison. This development cast a dark shadow of suspicion back onto the unresolved disappearance of Ann Marie. Following Godbey's arrest for the Small murder, Ann Marie's sister officially filed a missing person's report, suspecting his involvement in her sister's fate. The investigation into Ann Marie's disappearance gained new momentum, and authorities began to uncover unsettling details. A search of Godbey's home revealed a hidden box containing Ann Marie's birth certificate, Social Security card, driver's license, and other personal items, things a person would not typically leave behind if they were starting a new life abroad.
Further investigation brought a grim resolution to the question of what happened to Ann Marie. Godbey's wife at the time told investigators that he had confessed to killing Ann Marie and had even shown her the body. She also claimed that Ann Marie's body had been dismembered and her torso buried in a wooded area in Fairfax, though searches of the location yielded no remains. Faced with this and other evidence, while already serving a lengthy sentence for murder, Walter Godbey was indicted in connection with Ann Marie's death. In June 2010, he pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter for his role in her 1995 slaying. He received an additional 10-year prison sentence. Despite his admission of guilt, Ann Marie Shaw's body has never been recovered, leaving her family with a tragic and incomplete sense of closure. The case of Ann Marie Shaw is a somber story of a young mother's life cut short, a disappearance that remained a cold case for years until the perpetrator's subsequent crimes brought his past actions into the light.Last Seen: Dec 3, 1995
