Anthony Hempstead, a 26-year-old Black man, was shot and left in the quiet back spaces of Cape Girardeau on June 28, 2014. Police later documented that he was found in an alley in the 800-block of Jefferson Avenue with gunshot wounds, and he was taken to a local hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
His killing hit the city at a tense moment.
The Cape Girardeau/Bollinger County Major Case Squad had only just been activated days earlier for a different homicide, and the department noted that only five days after disbanding from that earlier case, investigators were called right back out—this time for Hempstead. The annual report describes a fast, concentrated burst of work: the Major Case Squad mobilized, ran the early stages of the homicide investigation, and then—under bylaws limiting deployments—handed the longer arc of the case back to the Cape Girardeau Police Department to continue with assistance from squad members as needed.
Online memorial sources remember him as more than a name in a report. In tributes posted about him, he’s described by the nickname “Ant G,” and the page lists him as a father of two boys, with Eclipse Barber School among the places connected to his life. Those fragments don’t explain why he ended up bleeding in an alley, but they do underline what the shooting stole: an ordinary future, and a family that suddenly had to live with a blank space where he should have been.
Nearly two years later, the case turned in a more public direction. A March 5, 2016 news report stated that Cape Girardeau County Prosecuting Attorney Chris Limbaugh filed first-degree murder and armed criminal action charges against Terrance Bernard Vance, 29, of Cape Girardeau, in connection with Hempstead’s death, and that Vance was already incarcerated in the Missouri Department of Corrections in a prison in northwest Missouri when the charges were filed.
Beyond that charging decision, the publicly accessible online material I could retrieve here did not provide reliable, sourceable details about the exact date or circumstances of Vance’s arrest in the Hempstead case, whether any co-suspects were arrested, or how the case ultimately resolved in court. The clearest official description available in an accessible public document remains the police department’s own summary of the scene—an alley in the 800-block of Jefferson Avenue, gunshot wounds, and a death confirmed at the hospital—followed by the statement that the investigation would continue primarily through the Cape Girardeau Police Department with support from the Major Case Squad as needed.
