No New Info In Tippy McBride Case, Missing From Concord For 38 Years

CONCORD, NH — Around 9:30 p.m. on a Friday, July 13, 1984, Shirley Ann “Tippy” McBride left her half-sister’s apartment on Union Street to collect babysitting money and visit her boyfriend, who was working for a company on Old Turnpike Road, and was never seen again.

That was 38 years ago. Tippy was 15 at the time. On April 5, she would have been 53.

Police initially suspected she ran away — something she had done previously, a perception that would stick during the initial part of the missing person investigation.

When she disappeared, she left behind money, clothing, and other personal belongings. And in the past when she ran away, she always returned.

Tippy, who acquired the nickname because she had feet that tipped inward when she walked, was going through a disruptive time in her life — a young woman trapped in a child’s body, as family members described. Her will and desire to do what she wanted to do could not be controlled or stopped, her father, Jack McBride, told the press decades ago.

The problems appeared to culminate after an urban to rural move by the family.

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Many months before she disappeared, the McBrides moved from the West Side of Manchester to Pittsfield and were out of sorts. Tippy skipped school, smoked marijuana, and would often hitchhike into Concord to be with her half-sister, Donna Whitcomb Reil.

Tippy insisted on moving in with Reil and her parents agreed, despite their concerns.

After moving into the Union Street apartment, Tippy got a job babysitting and enjoyed being a bit freer than before, according to family members. She began a relationship with a man who was six years older than she was — making him a statutory rape suspect had anyone pressed the matter. There were rumored problems with her boyfriend, too, including a possible breakup around the time she vanished. There was also suspicion she was not actually going to meet him that night but was, instead, planning on pouring sugar into the gas tank of his motorcycle after he dumped her, according to the family.

After her disappearance, there were many suspects in the case, including her boyfriend, as well as ex-cons, bikers, and others who were interviewed. One man, who was part of the circle of friends connected to Reil, was accused of rape but acquitted later.

Reil, not wanting to get too deeply into the details of her past life, admitted a few years ago Tippy was a bit too much like her.

Tippy’s father, Jack McBride, who died in October 2015, followed the boyfriend around, spying on him, including at a bar on Loudon Road where bikers hung out called Chugger's, which is now known as the Pit Road Lounge. Jack McBride, at one point, would be arrested on a stalking charge for harassing the boyfriend. The boyfriend would be involved in a string of criminal incidents and court cases himself, dating back to the early 1990s, according to records (he has refused requests from Patch to speak about the case).

A year after she disappeared, a suspect emerged: Walter Davis II, 26, of Merrimack, who worked in Concord and would sometimes crash at a manufactured home park on Manchester Street.

Davis, who was 26, admitted to raping a girl in Concord and throwing her in a river, according to Stacie Murray Coburn, a professor from Nashua who grew up with the Davis family in Merrimack and was friends with his half-sister. Davis told his half-sister about the crime and had clothes that matched what Tippy was wearing when she vanished — denim bib overalls and a cotton shirt.

According to Coburn, relating the story years later, Davis attempted to burn the clothes but ended up giving them to his half-sister.

The McBride family met with Concord police, looked at the clothes, and believed they were Tippy’s.

After that, the family does not know what happened.

Davis was never arrested and the evidence somehow made it back into the hands of the Merrimack Police Department. Robin McBride, Tippy’s older sister, and her parents wondered for years why the Davis angle “didn’t pan out, for some reason,” she said last year.

During the next decade or so, there was not a lot of activity with the case and not a peep from the press. Despite a teenage girl up and disappearing, the media in Concord and in the state failed to follow up on the case for many, many years.

The McBrides requested and were granted a legal declaration that Tippy was no longer alive in 1996, so they could settle her insurance matters.

Seven years later, a new investigator began looking at the case. By that time, 2003, both Davis and Tippy’s mom, Shirley McBride, had died. However, there was optimism the case might be solved, especially with a fresh set of eyes on the evidence.

Years passed. A reward was increased to $5,000 via the Concord Regional Crimeline. And in 2008, Fox 25 TV in Boston featured the case on its “New England’s Most Wanted,” giving the case more coverage.

Police also approached the family requesting DNA samples — something they declined to do given their ill will toward the department and its past handling of the case.

For many years, Coburn thought about the clothing and wondered about Davis' claims. She realized, while doing research on cold cases, the incident occurred at the same time Tippy disappeared and the cases might be connected. Coburn also knew she gave a statement about the situation to Merrimack police and was curious if she could access her interview, in an effort to jog her memory.

In 2014, Coburn called Concord police about the case and a week later, detectives in Concord obtained the evidence in Merrimack.

Police returned to the McBrides, told the family they believed Davis killed their sister, and requested DNA again, to see if anything found in the clothing could be matched to the family, and this time, family members agreed.

Updates From Those Involved

Robin McBride said neither she nor anyone in her family had heard from police about the DNA or even any updates on the case for many years.

“It’s not a surprise,” she said. “There have been longer times when I haven’t heard anything from them. But I don’t call anymore. They told me what they suspected last time. So, what are we going to do about it? The dude is dead.”

Some of the resentment of police she once had has subsided, at least with the newer detectives who have been trying to solve the case. Robin McBride still feels, however, fury at Lt. Paul Murphy, the first Concord cop to investigate the matter, who continued to perpetuate the myth Tippy had run away. His “being so nonchalant” about the case led to Tippy being branded as someone not worth searching for, she said.

“I’m more mad at him, sometimes, than what really happened to Tippy,” she said.

Tippy’s sister also has wondered about the body and why it has not come to the water’s surface for all these many years, especially when other bodies have been found. She said it just did not seem possible that some part of her would not have turned up somewhere.

Months after the Patch story about the case was published in April 2018, Robin McBride met Davis’ half-sister, Catherine Raymond. She was greeted by Raymond at her home in Weare with her saying, “I’ve been hoping to talk to you,” she said.

Robin McBride said Raymond did not recall the attempt to burn the clothes and suspected she could have been high at the time, she said. She did know about the clothes because she was wearing them when Merrimack police came to visit her after Coburn filed a complaint about Davis, she said.

Raymond said she remembered Davis stating something happened at a nightclub in the area with a girl who had been raped, Robin McBride said, but denied he admitted to her that he had done it.

“I asked Catherine, ‘Do you think he would have done that?’,” she said. “And she believed he could have. She said Davis had ‘an infatuation and obsession for her,’ and she thought, maybe, because they looked similar, he attacked Tippy.”

When Shirley McBride was in the hospital in March 2019, Raymond reached out to her again, too, to wish her well, she said.

Before moving to Weare, Raymond lived on Auburn Street in Concord, about a mile from Tippy's half-sister's apartment, and was a direct abutter to the controversial Northwest Bypass-Langley Parkway Phase 3 project.

She died in August 2019 at the age of 51.

The only nightclub in the area at the time was the Take 5 Music Hall, previously located on Garvins Falls Road, about a half mile from the river. The club was also connected to another Concord cold case — the death of David Braley, who was 21 when he was last seen there on Nov. 10, 1989, before he vanished. His body was pulled from the Merrimack River in Manchester on March 18, 1990.

Coburn had also not heard from anyone about the case but continued to think about it.

She was puzzled Raymond did not recall the burning clothes threat or the rape admission since that was what led her to file a report with the police in the first place. She said she and her mother, who brought her to the station to file the complaint, remember the specifics as clear as they were nearly 40 years ago.

“There was some reason why (Merrimack) police didn't do something about it,” Coburn said. “Not a cover, but some reason why they didn't pursue this. He was a clear target. He was a drug addict; he was known in town; he had a perversion to him ... police knew him by face and they knew him by name. There had to be some sort of law enforcement issue.”

At the same time, Coburn was still interested in trying to gain access to her taped interview, hoping it will reveal more details about the case, especially that early interaction with the Davis family.

Currently, though, all evidence and materials connected to the case are not accessible to the public or press, due to it being an open investigation.

Where The Case Officially Stands

The McBride case remains on the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office Cold Case Unit file, one of more than 130 missing persons or unsolved homicide cases.

Susan Morrell, a senior assistant attorney general, who is the cold case unit chief, said she could assure the public the case was still being examined.

“It’s not too late,” she said. “We have other cases that we have solved in the last several years (from the 1960s). So, it’s not too late. It all depends upon information that comes from the public. The more information, the more opportunity for somebody to come forward.”

As can happen with cold cases, a public examination can be “a great thing,” she said, as with the Denise Beaudin case, which led to a connection to serial killer Terry Rasmussen, and the identity of three of the Allenstown 4 victims found in barrels in Bear Brook Park in 1985 and 2000. Morrell said that case was “a fantastical story that is hard to imagine that it could have ever occurred,” with the case snowballing from one direction to another.

When asked about the prior suspects and information connected to the McBride case which seemed to point to some possible closure, Morrell said a lot of the information gathered with cases, often from families or people connected, cannot always be corroborated. While not speaking about specifics, information sometimes was not good enough to bring to court or to prove a case beyond a reasonable doubt, she said. Morrell likened statements, across time, to “rumor” or “lore” that could often be contradicted by other evidence.

This is why, Morrell said, investigators have to “maintain the integrity of our investigations” as well as “control of the evidence and flow of that information” that is released to the public in order to ensure “the credibility of witnesses … through the investigation.”

Morrell said the unit, which was formed in 2009, has better staffing than in the past although there were some vacancies. The unit staffs two full-time attorneys, when there used to only be a part-time attorney, as an example, along with a witness advocate, and others. The attorney general’s office and state police major crime unit also share resources. State police have a sergeant, a detective, an auxiliary trooper, an intelligence analyst, and a volunteer archivist, who Morrell commended for doing amazing work. Concord, Manchester, and Nashua also have their own investigators looking at cases — although those detectives often need to shift their time away from cold cases to work on other things, like, in Concord's case, the Stephen and Djeswende Reid double-homicide investigation.

“We all work together,” she said, “and try and share resources … everybody wants to help everyone else … it’s way better than it was; a significant improvement (than in the past).”

The departments also search for grant funding to help offset costs.

“It’s an ongoing issue,” Morrell said, “like everything else in state government.”

Despite no arrests or leads finding her or her remains, Deputy Chief John Thomas of the Concord Police Department said she had not been forgotten.

“The Concord police continue to work on the Shirley ‘Tippy’ McBride case, along with the assistance of the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office,” he said. “This case is still open and active. The Concord police remain vigilant on following up on any tips or leads that come into the department. There are detectives assigned to this case specifically. Like any historical or ‘cold,’ case, there are many challenges. We hope with modern technology and advances that have been made in the law enforcement world, will help to bring us closer to solving this case.”

During the past four years, Patch has reached out to close to a dozen people connected to the case, including former police officers, attempting to find out more information. None have agreed to speak about the specifics of the investigation, despite the presumption that Tippy, and her suspected killer, Davis, were dead, and the case being nearly four decades old.

For Robin McBride, the pain and wonder are still there, and never go away.

“If they really believe what they are saying, there is nothing they can do,” she said. “They can’t punish anyone now. But, whatever happened to Tippy is something we have a right to know. We have a right to know what happened to her.”

Anyone who has information relative to the Tippy McBride case or any criminal incident in the city can leave tips with the Concord Regional Crimeline at 603-226-3100. Information can also be submitted online to the website at concordregionalcrimeline.com.

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