Margaret Guse Cline was a 56-year-old White/Caucasian woman whose life was taken during a robbery in Milwaukee on Thursday, February 8, 1979. Records place her birth on November 13, 1922, and identify her death as a fatal shooting. She was at work that day in a jewelry store on Milwaukee’s south side when what appeared to be an ordinary business day suddenly became the scene of a violent robbery.
According to the Milwaukee Police Department’s cold-case information, more than one suspect entered the jewelry store where Cline was working. During the encounter, she was shot multiple times. The assailants did not simply flee after the shooting; police records state that they proceeded to rob the store before escaping. The wording of the police account indicates investigators believed multiple perpetrators were involved, although the publicly available cold-case summary does not identify them by name or provide physical descriptions.
Surviving online references connect Cline’s killing with Sands Gifts & Jewelry, a south-side Milwaukee jewelry and gift business located at 3968 S. Howell Avenue, near Howard Avenue. The crime remained memorable to people who lived in the area at the time, and later discussions of the case describe the Sands robbery and killing as a significant local crime that received newspaper attention when it occurred. One archived discussion also refers to a contemporary newspaper report stating that Cline had three children, underscoring that the shooting left a family behind as well as an unresolved homicide investigation.
Despite the seriousness of the crime and the fact that investigators were dealing with multiple assailants, the publicly available Milwaukee police record does not identify anyone who was arrested or formally named as a suspect in Cline’s killing. No reliable online record located for the case documents criminal charges, a prosecution, a trial, or a conviction connected with her death. Milwaukee police continue to present the case as an unsolved cold case, indicating that the identities of the people who entered the store, shot Cline and carried out the robbery have never been publicly established through a criminal conviction.
Over the years, isolated names and theories have appeared in informal online discussions, but those claims are not supported by the publicly available police material and should not be treated as established suspects. The official record remains much more restrained: multiple suspects entered the store, Margaret Cline was shot repeatedly, the business was robbed, and the perpetrators escaped. Decades later, no verified arrest or prosecution has emerged in the publicly accessible information, leaving the February 1979 jewelry-store robbery and Cline’s killing among Milwaukee’s unresolved homicide cases.
