For family of Jamie Stickle, search for clues to her death never ends
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Jamie Stickle had been a popular Downtown bartender who raised money for an endless array of charitable causes. -
Jamie Stickle's mother, Margie Walls (left), and stepmother, Judy Stickle, visit her grave at Park Place Cemetery in Uniontown.
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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.
First Published February 6, 2012 12:00 am
