Mother tells of shooting son in self defense
By Bill Smith
12/04/2004
Dixie Shunk says she can't even remember picking up the shotgun that January night two winters ago. One second, her hands were empty. The next, the gun was there, the stock wedged under her arm and her finger reaching for the trigger. He was coming directly at her, she says, and she jerked the barrel up to meet him.
She said her son was screaming: "I'm killing you! I'm killing you right now!
"And I'm killing the rest of them, too!"
There was no time, she would say later, to drop to her knees and ask God to help her again, the way she had done so many times before. There was no time to run outside and hide behind the old shed until he finally gave up looking for her, or somehow try to comfort him and calm the storm raging within him.
There was no time to do anything, she would tell herself, but exactly what she did.
Even now, she says, she can hear the roar of the shotgun blast inside her head.
Dixie's husband, Joseph Shunk Sr., says he was at the kitchen table and he jumped, instinctively, when the gun went off. At first, he said, he wasn't even sure the noise had come from inside the house.
As the first charge hit, she said, her son froze in midstep and dropped to the carpet.
Had he stayed down, Dixie would say later, that would have been the end of it. But a moment later - at least based on the information Dixie gave police - he was moving again, starting to get up. She said she could still see the anger in his face.
She re-aimed and pulled the trigger once more.
If she heard the second shot, she can't remember it, she says.
On the afternoon of Jan. 8, 2004, a day when the midwinter air hung cold and damp around the town of Farmington, Mo., Dixie Shunk, 67, stepped into Visiting Room No. 1501 of Southeast Missouri Mental Health Center. She was wearing a blue-plaid flannel work shirt, the sleeves rolled up to her forearms.
Fresh makeup brought circles of soft pink to her cheeks. Her hair was white with traces of black.
She wore slacks and a pair of simple, white tassel-topped shoes over white socks.
She was carrying a manila envelope, and when she sat in the straight-back chair with the chrome legs, she cradled the envelope on her lap.
"These kids, they want me to leave," she said, referring to the men and women who worked at the state mental hospital where she had been held since the summer after an Iron County court had committed her there for the shooting. "They say, 'Dixie, you should go home. You ain't got no business being here.'
"It's not like I'm going to get any better," she said.
"He was my child."
Authorities say she must remain at the center until mental health officials and the court decide she no longer poses a threat to herself or others.
The death of Joe Shunk Jr. two weeks after Christmas was big news in Iron County. On the Wednesday after the shooting, the local newspaper, The Mountain Echo, ran two front-page stories on the case.
One was a dry, matter-of-fact police account of what had happened. The other, a longer piece, reported the Monday morning protest outside the office of Iron County Prosecuting Attorney Carl Strange, who had taken office just eight days before the shooting.
About 70 people had gathered outside the building on Shepherd Street, the newspaper said, many carrying hand-printed messages in support of Dixie. In a photograph that ran with the story, a woman in an overcoat and sunglasses can be seen pointing her sign toward the street.
"Free Dixie - the Victim," it said.
Among the demonstrators was Joyce Shunk, Dixie's daughter-in-law and the estranged wife of Joe Shunk Jr.
"He put her through hell," the paper quoted Joyce Shunk as saying. "He put us all through hell."
Dixie says she remembers the night of Jan. 9, 2003, like an old black and white movie running in slow motion.
She says she can still picture her brother and his family coming to the house in the early afternoon. It was a nice visit, she said, until Joe Jr. arrived and started acting crazy again.
At one point, Dixie said, Joe Jr. pulled her brother aside and asked if he remembered the police officer who had refused to help him find his wife after she had left him.
Dixie said Joe Jr. announced, with a strange lightness in his voice: "I know where he lives, and I am going there to kill him."
Later that night, she and Joe Jr. drove to the McDonald's in Pilot Knob to pick up dinner for the family.
All the way there and all the way back, she said, he was screaming and cursing at her. "You," he told her, "and your ever-loving Lord!"
Not long after they had returned home and finished eating, she said, Joe Jr. suddenly grabbed his son, Christopher, 14, who had been living with his grandparents, threw him onto the floor and began beating and choking him as the boy struggled to defend himself.
At one point, Dixie's granddaughter, Jennifer, who also stayed in her grandparents' home, would remember her father pushing her brother up against her bedroom door so hard that she thought it was going to break.
It was not long after - and Dixie maintained nearly a year later that the memory remained vivid - that Joe Jr. grabbed the loaded shotgun and held it to his father's head, before suddenly putting it down again near the kitchen stove.
As he came at her that final time, Dixie said, his words remain clear in her mind: "I'm killing you . . ."
In the moments immediately after the shooting, the family said, Christopher ran from his sister's bedroom and tried to wrestle the shotgun from his grandmother's hands. But Dixie held tight to it, refusing, or unable, to let go.
When the police arrived, the family said, they instructed Dixie's two grandchildren to stand in front of their grandmother to keep her from looking at her son's body.
Then, they handcuffed her and hurried her into the squad car parked in the driveway. It was a short ride, just five miles south on Highway 21, to Ironton and the Iron County Jail.
Dixie said that that night, inside a locked cell, she sat on a cold table "and watched the demons of hell dancing around me."
She did not sleep.
Five days later, an Iron County sheriff's deputy would escort her to the family cemetery near Glover for a brief, graveside funeral.
As had been his request in the months before he died, Dixie said, her son's casket remained closed and no preacher spoke at the service.
Inside the white-walled, white-floored hospital visiting room last January, Dixie sat just across from her attorney, Ronald Pedigo, a Vietnam veteran with a reputation as a tough country lawyer from St. Francois County.
It was Dixie's husband who had first called Pedigo a few days after the shooting.
"You know," Pedigo had said then, "God takes care of his children."
That was all Joe Sr. needed to hear. "I want you to represent her," Joe Sr. said.
Nearly six months to the day after she had first come to Farmington, Pedigo had come to see her, to ask her about her family, her health and her life inside the hospital.
"You look good," Pedigo told her. "How have you been holding up?"
"My blood pressure was up this morning," she told him. And, she said, she wanted so much to go home.
"Joe needs me there," she said. "Christopher needs me there. I want to be with my family."
When Pedigo first met Dixie inside the Iron County Jail just days after the shooting, she was dressed in a black-and-white-striped jumpsuit, and her hands were cuffed together in front of her. Chains were wrapped and locked around her ankles, forcing her to move in small shuffle-steps when she walked.
"God takes care of his children," he had told her then, repeating the words he had spoken to her husband. "You are one of his children."
Pedigo had fought hard for Dixie, pushing, at first, for the charges to be dropped entirely and, later, negotiating for her insanity plea when she decided she could not withstand a trial.
It was, he had believed, a clear and compelling case of self-defense. Yes, he knew she had killed her son. There was no question about that. But Joe Jr. had left her with no choice. The entire family knew about the years of threats and physical and emotional abuse. And, within days of the shooting, most of the Arcadia Valley knew about it too.
The Rev. Joe "Bud" Lawson, who has known Dixie for 40 years, says that the decision to prosecute her for her son's death was wrong.
"It's just not fair, that's all," Lawson said.
"Dixie had a choice," he said. "She could do what she did or she could lose her whole family. It was just that simple."
Inside the hospital visiting room on that January afternoon, Dixie had taken the manila envelope and emptied it onto the top of a low wood table.
One by one, she picked up the photographs and looked at them through a mother's eyes.
"Joey," she had called him, even on the night she killed him.
"They made me write down his whole life, everything I could remember about it," she said. "I told them I don't want to talk about it any more. But they said as long as I'm here I have to talk about it."
One of the photos was on an election flier. "Elect Joe Shunk Jr. For Iron County Sheriff," it said. It was a picture of a young man in a sports jacket and tie, with a thin mustache and bushy hair piled high on his head.
"He had beautiful hair," she said. "He'd cut the front and I'd cut the back."
Joe Sr. recently had brought the pictures up to the hospital from the white house. She had told him it was time for her to hold them in her hands again and remember how he looked, as if she could ever forget.
In a small, carefully posed elementary school portrait, a smiling schoolboy with blue-gray eyes stood at a desk behind an open book and a red apple.
"To grandpa," it said on the back. "From Joe Shunk Jr. Age 11."
Tomorrow, Dixie told Pedigo, would mark the first anniversary of the shooting. She planned to watch her game shows on TV, read her Bible and work her crossword puzzles.
"As long as I'm looking up those words," she said, "I don't have to think."
If only things had been different, she said. If only Joe Jr. had been different.
"He came home that night to kill us," she said.
"What was I supposed to do? He was getting up again."
Two weeks after her meeting with Pedigo at the state hospital last January, Dixie took a red pen and wrote a rambling, 25-page letter to Prosecuting Attorney Strange. The original letter remains a permanent part of her court file inside the Iron County Courthouse.
"Have mercy on me and my family," she asked, "and let me come home."
"Joe Sr. is 71 years old. I'm 68.
"Life and time for us is running out."
Reporter Bill Smith
E-mail: billsmith@post-dispatch.com
Phone: 314-340-8125
