Charles “Big Show” McEuen, a 53-year-old white male from Pine Bluff, Arkansas, spent his life rooted in the state where he was born, coming into the world in North Little Rock on July 1, 1964, to Frederick and Rosemary McEuen. Friends and family remembered him as an outdoorsman who loved fishing, hunting, and even the simple challenge of throwing knives, pastimes that pulled him toward quiet backroads and wooded streams rather than city lights.
He was part of a large family, preceded in death by his father but survived by his mother, several siblings, two daughters, and a cluster of grandchildren who knew him as much for his humor and nickname as for any flaws or missteps he carried into middle age.
Life for Charles had not been without trouble. Months before his death, in November 2016, he was booked into the Jefferson County jail on an absconder warrant tied to parole or probation, a charge that suggested a struggle to stay within the strict boundaries of supervision rather than an act of sudden violence. Records from that arrest list him as living in the White Hall–Pine Bluff area, giving a sense of how small the circle of his world had become: the same streets, the same neighborhoods, the same familiar faces woven through both his everyday routines and his encounters with the justice system.
In the early hours of Monday, July 3, 2017, those same surroundings turned deadly. Pine Bluff police were dispatched to a set of apartments in the 1500 block of North Haley Street, in the Dollarway area, after a call came in reporting that someone had been shot. Officers arriving at the modest complex went inside one of the units and found two people lying wounded on the floor: a man and a woman, motionless in the cramped interior of the apartment. Both had been shot, and there was nothing first responders could do; they were pronounced dead at the scene, their final moments sealed within the walls of a place that, until then, had been just another ordinary address off North Haley.
It did not take long for authorities to confirm that the man was Charles “Big Show” McEuen and the woman was 47-year-old Gloria Owler, also spelled Oyler in some reports. The Jefferson County coroner's office identified them and noted gunshot wounds to the upper body as the apparent cause of death, reinforcing what officers had seen in those first grim minutes inside the apartment. News of the double homicide filtered quickly through local media and social networks, transforming Charles from a familiar figure in a circle of family and fishing buddies into a name in headlines and brief crime reports.
In the days that followed, investigators tried to piece together what had happened inside that unit on North Haley Street. Police publicly acknowledged that they were dealing with a double homicide and that there was no suspect information to share. When the victims' names were released later that week, officials stressed that there were still no suspects in custody, a stark reminder that whoever had pulled the trigger had walked away into the same neighborhoods Charles had spent his life moving through. Appeals went out asking anyone with knowledge of the crime to contact the Pine Bluff Police Department, but no description of a shooter, no vehicle, and no clear motive were made public.
Over time, the details of Charles McEuen's death settled into the quiet of an unresolved case. Online memorial pages continued to describe his love of the outdoors and the family he left behind, while true-crime listings and discussion forums summarized the bare facts: that on July 3, 2017, he and Gloria were found fatally shot in an apartment on North Haley Street, and that the case remained without an identified killer. Years later, entries tracking unsolved homicides in Pine Bluff still present his story as unfinished, noting the double shooting and the lack of any publicly reported arrest or named suspect, a lingering absence where answers should be.
