TULSA, Okla. — New Year’s Day will be the 29th anniversary of 26-year-old, single mother Shawna Louise Jones’ homicide.
Jones had two daughters, who were seven and nine when they lost their mother.
Her killer has never been arrested for her murder.
Raven Rollins is the founder and host of Sirens a southern true crime podcast, based out of Tulsa.
Rollins grew up in Ada, Okla. and has covered many crime investigations from her hometown through Sirens.
“We are going into our fourth season, so we’re an anthology. I know we have well over 100 episodes. We probably have at least 60 cases, if not more,” said Rollins. “We’ve been doing this since 2019.”
On midnight, New Year’s Eve, Sirens will drop their latest podcast episode on the unsolved Shawna Jones case.
Rollins heard about the case through some colleagues.
“The case of Shawna Jones that’s out of Henryetta, Oklahoma. It’s been 29 years. This is a cold case that happened on New Year’s Day, 1994. Shawna left home around 2:30 in the morning. She went to switch out her boyfriend’s work van with his personal truck back at his family’s place of business, and she also was going to take home the babysitter,” said Rollins. “She did in fact take home the babysitter. Everything was totally fine, but she vanished later. The next day, around 4:30, she was found near a friend’s pond.”
Rollins says this episode is over two hours. She and her co-host Professor Mandy McNeely go through the details of the timeline, the investigation, the evidence, the suspects, the witnesses and the impact on Jones’ loved ones.
“Listener discretion is advised because we try to be as transparent as possible with our investigation. Looking into this case, we try really hard to give our listeners all of the facts. And of course, sometimes you do have things that you have to keep to yourself because it may be an open investigation, but there are plenty of things that we can tell our listeners,” said Rollins. “I think that there are some pretty important things that we found in Shawna’s case, you know, that people need to be aware of.”
In Nov. 2022, Rollins began investigating the Jones case and reached out to Miracle Lea, one of Jones’ daughters, who now lives in Claremore. Rollins asked if Lea wanted to be a part of sharing her mother’s story.
Lea said she has always felt like God and her mother raised her. She says all of her mother’s morals live through her today. Lea was so grateful that Sirens had reached out and wanted to cover her mother’s case.
“Miracle was seven at the time that her mom was taken from her. Miracle has been really open. So, literally anything I ever wanted to know, even the hard questions,” said Rollins. “Miracle and I are the same age now. We were both born in 1986. We both grew up in small towns, both had strong capable mothers, and Miracle is now a strong, capable mother. And I just immediately was connected with her. Which is one of the biggest reasons why you know I took on this case even though you know my caseload was overflowing. We’re always overflowing. But I was like, I can’t say no to this one.”
Lea took Rollins and McNeely out to Henryetta to follow the last steps of Jones. Rollins and Lea described the experience as, “profound.”
“I feel like in a lot of these cases when you can get out to the area that it happened, it gives you a different perspective when you can actually lay your eyes on it and see the things that they could have seen or you know the sight, sound smells. And she took us out there and that was the first time that she had done that in a very long time,” said Rollins.
Lea said she hadn’t been back to all of those locations since New Year’s Day in 1994.
“We traveled back to the pond where my mother was found. The place where my mom worked on New Year’s Eve and inside the home where I last hugged her,” said Lea. “Something happened. Something life-changing and breathtaking.”
Lea says that she broke down and Raven embraced her at that moment.
“I think that changed her. It definitely changed us,” said Rollins.
The Sirens Shawna Jones case podcast will drop at midnight on New Year’s Eve on Spotify and Apple. You can also catch the podcast on the Sirens website.
“Anniversaries in criminology are important. There can be triggers around anniversaries for anyone who could have been involved. Anyone who could have seen something, heard something, whether they were, you know, involved, involved or not, whether they were just a passerby or if they were heavily involved. We know that people tend to start thinking about those things and those memories start coming up around the anniversary,” said Rollins. “We know you might be remembering something now. It’s the time to come forward.”
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