For family of Jamie Stickle, search for clues to her death never ends
Monday, February 06, 2012
By Sadie Gurman, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Jamie Stickle had been a popular Downtown bartender who raised money for an endless array of charitable causes.Margie Walls can't live a day without a "Jamie moment," when the sight of a woman's brown hair or a whiff of Tiffany perfume will flood her mind with memories of her daughter.

But with memories come unending questions.

"I mostly think about how she died and did she suffer?" Ms. Walls said, gazing at her daughter's grave. "Was she afraid? She probably was. ... I can feel her fear."

Wednesday marks a decade since firefighters found Jamie Stickle's badly burned body in the driver's seat of her fiery Jeep outside her North Side apartment, a case that has yielded only frustration for detectives and her anguished relatives, who have all but lost hope for answers.

"There's just so many questions," said her mother, who believes aspects of the investigation remain undone. "It's just like every day that goes by just makes it worse."

Ms. Stickle, 33, had been a popular Downtown bartender who raised money for an endless array of charitable causes and seemed, at least to those close to her, to have no enemies. But at the scene of her death, detectives found signs of an attack. Ms. Stickle's belongings -- money, a cellphone, lipstick, keys -- were strewn outside her apartment. There was blood on the pavement and the handle of the Jeep's door. Yet investigators still don't know, officially, whether they have a homicide on their hands.

The Allegheny County medical examiner's office, still a coroner's office when Ms. Stickle, 33, died, has been unable to make a ruling on the manner of the Uniontown native's death, in part because she was so badly burned.

"Once you rule a death undetermined, it tends to stay that way forever unless something new comes up," medical examiner Karl Williams said this week upon a quick review of the Stickle case file. "The best possible thing would be to turn up some new evidence."

But detectives, who investigated Ms. Stickle's death as a homicide, never found the hard evidence needed to capture her killer. Today the case is considered open but inactive, as police await a tip or a clue that would prompt them to explore it once again.

"At any moment, we could pick it back up," said Lt. Daniel Herrmann of the city's major crimes division.

Ms. Stickle spent the night of Feb. 7, 2002, working at and then visiting bars on Liberty Avenue, Downtown. Around midnight, she had finished her shift as a manager at the since-shuttered Sidekicks and went for a drink at Pegasus, where she stayed until about 1:15. Police said was last seen alone, walking into a Downtown parking garage sometime after 2 a.m.

Less than two hours later, firefighters were called to quash the flames in her Jeep, which was parked in the lot of George Warhola Scrap Metal on Chesboro Street. After the blaze was extinguished, they discovered Ms. Stickle's body.

Homicide detectives Joe Meyers and Bill Fisher soon got to work. They spent ensuing months talking to bar owners, patrons and friends of Ms. Stickle's in the gay and lesbian community, who rallied around police efforts to learn what had happened.

"In my tenure it was one of the cases we worked hardest on," said Mr. Meyers, who has since left the city's force and is a lieutenant for the Carnegie Mellon University police. "Any lead that did come in, we followed up on. We just didn't have what we needed to make an arrest."

Hundreds of interviews, and re-interviews, filled a pair of bankers boxes. But the detectives soon exhausted their leads. Before he left for his new post, he turned the case over to a pair of cold case detectives to give it "an extra set of eyes."

"Unfortunately, they couldn't didn't find anything we missed," he said.

In touch with Ms. Walls, then-Detective Meyers told the grieving mother, one of several whose phone numbers held a special place on his desk, not to lose faith.

"There's somebody out there who knows what happened to this girl," he said.

Years past. Friends stopped holding annual candlelight vigils. They also stopped calling Ms. Walls.

Nightclub owner Scott Noxon, who met Ms. Stickle as the owner of Sidekicks and Pegasus, was among a group of friends who raised thousands of dollars as a reward for information about her death. He said the efforts of "United for Jamie" generated more than $12,000, which still sits, unclaimed, in safekeeping at the Lambda Foundation.

Though Ms. Stickle's death was the stuff of rumors at his bars, Mr. Noxon said, "Nobody ever said anything" that put police on the right track.

As years passed, Ms. Walls grew discouraged. At the height of their frustration, Ms. Stickle's sister hired a private investigator whose work turned up nothing of consequence. Police stopped calling her, and she eventually stopped calling them, tired of hearing that they had nothing new to offer.

"You get to the point when you think they just forgot about her," she said.

On a crisp afternoon last week, Ms. Walls was joined at the cemetery in Uniontown by her husband, Dick, as well as Ms. Stickle's father, Jim, and his wife, Judy. Divorcing when Ms. Stickle was young, the parents said they have come together since her death, visiting the cemetery during painful times, such as holidays and birthdays. Ms. Walls can also catch a glimpse of her daughter's grave from a window in her home, where Ms. Stickle grew up a tough tomboy, the lone girl on the high school basketball team.

She had moved to Pittsburgh to be with a girlfriend several years before her death, working a series of jobs, mostly in bars and restaurants, to make ends meet.

"She loved city life," her mother said. If Ms. Stickle had fear for her safety, she never expressed it to her mother even in the last days of her life, when she was enduring a break-up with a longtime girlfriend. She seemed upbeat in their final phone conversation, making plans to return to Uniontown for the weekend.

But despite their questions, Ms. Stickle's relatives say they still hold out hope -- for the undiscovered clue, for the unreported tip, for the phone call that will put their questions to rest.



Sadie Gurman: [email protected] or 412-263-1878.