The Disappearance of Shirley Ann ‘Tippy' McBride
Shirley Ann Mcbride, aka Tippy.
It was the summer of 1984, and a tragedy was about to happen in Concord, New Hampshire.
Shirley McBride (who went by “Tippy”), her parents, and her four siblings had moved a year prior to the small town of Pittsfield, New Hampshire, population 4,000, which is about 25 minutes east of Concord. Her sister, Robin, joked, “It sucked. We were like hillbillies out here... that came from the city.” — that city being Manchester, New Hampshire, where Tippy had grown up. But there was a good deal on some land and a mobile home, and in September of 1983, the family made the move. In the 9 months after moving to Pittsfield, Tippy started skipping school and hitchhiking into Concord to visit her older half-sister, Donna. She didn’t like school in her new home. She was smoking weed and possibly using other drugs, and got suspended from school. They described her as a free spirit.
She was 15-years-old, 5 foot, 6 inches tall, about 110 pounds, and had long light-brown hair and blue eyes. Her front teeth were chipped and she walked with a marked gait—one of her feet turned inward. That was the origin of her nickname, Tippy. Her family described her as “a young woman trapped in a child’s body.” She asked her parents if she could move in with her older half-sister and her kids at the end of the school year. Her father Jack later said, “We couldn’t fight her. She was going to do what she wanted to do. When a 14- or 15-year-old wants to skip school, there’s nothing you can do about it unless you tie her to the bed or something.”
She moved in with Donna at the beginning of the summer of 1984 and would start hanging out in downtown Concord with a less-than-savory crowd. A Concord police lieutenant would later say, “Tippy hung out with some tough kids. She had some good friends, but she had some tough friends—friends that were known to the law. Tippy also would visit prisoners at the New Hampshire State Prison with Donna—an unusual thing for a 15-year-old girl to be doing.” They lived together in an apartment house just blocks from the very center of Concord, New Hampshire. Donna was 24 years old and had kids of her own.
Despite Tippy’s independence, she remained very close with her parents. Her father later said, “We were best friends—same way with her mother.” Before she moved in with her sister, she started dating a man who was 21 years old—6 years older than her. Part of her motivation to be in the city might have been to be closer to him.
It was common for her dad to drop by and check in on her—he drove through Concord for his daily commute. Early in the week of Monday, July 9th, 1984, her parents took her out shopping for some new summer clothes, and on Thursday they dropped by to visit with her. Tippy may have shared with them some of the problems that she was having with her boyfriend—they had been arguing a lot recently and they might have broken up.
The night of Tippy’s disappearance
Just a couple of days later on the evening of Friday, July 13th, Tippy and Donna planned to go out together to, quote, “play pranks on people they weren’t especially fond of,” but Donna backed out of their plan at the last minute. Tippy went alone instead, leaving around 9:30PM. She told Donna that she planned to go by one of her babysitting clients to pick up some money and then go see her ex-boyfriend at his work, Concord Litho—both destinations were within a short walking distance of their apartment.
According to newspaper reports, Tippy never made it to her babysitting client, and its unclear if she ever connected with her ex-boyfriend.
When she left she was wearing light summer clothes—denim overalls and a cotton shirt. The family, according to an article on crimewatchers.net, thought that Tippy might have been heading to her boyfriend’s work to put sugar in the gas tank of his motorcycle in retaliation for him dumping her.
Donna later recalled that it was a normal night and that there was nothing about Tippy that struck her as unusual.
Tippy didn’t come home on Friday night.
Tippy didn’t come home Saturday morning.
And Tippy didn’t come home Saturday night.
She had run away before, but those times she had taken personal items with her. This time was different. All of Tippy’s personal things were at her apartment, and she hadn’t checked in for two days. On Sunday, Donna was fed up and worried and reported Tippy missing to the Concord Police Department.
The search
The McBride family—her parents and her 5 siblings—reached out to all their friends and family to let them know that they were looking for Tippy. They went to places around Concord that teens would often hang out and asked if anyone had seen her. Her father, Jack McBride, said, “She’s always been in touch. I just can’t see her leaving without being in contact with somebody.” Donna said, “She liked it over here. She had a lot of freedom. She and I were very close. She told me everything. She’s never done this before.”
Police initially assumed that Tippy was a runaway and would return in time. Tippy’s sister, Robin, said, “The police kept saying [to her], ‘You watch and see.’ She’ll come up. She just ran away.” Robin countered that Tippy had no reason to run away—her family loved and supported her, but Lieutenant Paul Murphy said, “Everybody thinks that... until they do.” Robin was incensed by Paul’s nonchalance.
After Tippy’s disappearance, police interviewed many people in her circle—including her boyfriend, ex-cons, and bikers. Police came around to the family’s way of thinking. Lieutenant Paul Murphy later said, “She left behind anything that a person would normally take if they were going to run away. You have the impression it might not have been her idea to leave.”
Police entered Tippy in local and national law enforcement databases for missing people, followed up on all tips, passed her photo around, and interviewed many people.
One time while Tippy’s parents were visiting with Donna during these initial weeks, a man came by on a motorcycle and said that he had just seen Tippy downtown. They followed him there, and although the girl looked like Tippy, it wasn’t her.
The family looked for her everywhere—one time they saw a girl in the background of a photo published in the New Hampshire Union Leader that looked like it could be her. Police interviewed firefighters and anyone else from the scene, hoping to trail the mysterious girl in the photo.
Tippy’s dad, Jack McBride, thought that her boyfriend knew more about his daughter’s disappearance and he followed him around. One time he followed him to a biker’s bar called Chuggers on Loudon Road in Concord. He pushed it too far, though, and would eventually be arrested on a stalking charge.
Despite the activity in the case, the media would not report of Tippy’s disappearance until August 1st—18 days after she vanished. The main newspaper in Concord—the Monitor—ran a 900-word article with a photo of Tippy at the top of page two of their Wednesday morning paper. More than half of the article was devoted to contextualizing her disappearance as common—hundreds of kids in Concord alone, it explained, were reported missing every year.
Another 15-year-old girl victimized
In Mid-September, 2 months after Tippy’s disappearance, there was an alarming bit of Concord news concerning another 15-year-old girl. She was taking a break at her job at the DeMoulas Market Basket Store when she was approached by two men, who were both between 27 and 37 years old. They forced her into the cab of their small, red Datsun pick-up truck. They kidnapped her, raped her, and then dropped her off later that night around 11:00PM at a busy intersection. A motorist picked her up, and after learning what happened to her, went to a pay phone to alert the police. They then took her to Concord Hospital where she was admitted and examined. The newspaper put out a description of the two men the next day: one had blonde hair and a moustache and wore a blue flannel shirt. The other had brown hair, glasses, and wore a brown leather coat. The red pickup truck had a distinct white cap over the bed and she recalled the first three digits of its license plate were 1 8 0.
It wasn’t clear if these violent offenders had anything to do with Tippy’s case, but the age of the victim and the geographical proximity caught the attention of everyone who was looking for her.
Late 1984 — News reports change tone
After five months with no sign of Tippy, another article ran in the Concord Monitor by a different author, and the tone was quite different. It opened, “All the 156 Concord children who were reported to be missing or to have run away between Jan. 1 and Nov. 30 [of this year] have been found—except one.” Sergeant Paul Murphy of the Concord Police, was, quote, “working every day on the search for [Tippy] McBride” and “a stack of files several inches high ... occupies the top bin of his desk.” The sergeant said, “We have questioned—I can’t count how many people—I would guess close to 100.”
In September of ‘84, Tippy’s parents offered a $200 reward for information and by January ‘85 increased that offer to $1,000. Tippy’s dad, Jack McBride, worked construction and had a modest income. It was difficult enough already to support a family of 5. But he and Tippy’s mother, Shirley Sr., along with her half-sister Donna, scrimped and ran ads in the Concord Monitor and the New Hampshire Union Leader to advertise the reward. The police had discouraged them from offering a reward for fear that it would bring out “all kinds of nutcases.” One nut that did contact the family laid out underwear in a city park close to where Tippy lived and took pictures, sending them to the family, claiming that they belonged to Tippy. There’s a special place in hell for people that prey on vulnerable families who are in the midst of tragedy and are desperate for answers.
Walter Davis
Though it wouldn’t be reported on until 2018, a suspect had emerged in the first weeks of the investigation. Tony Schinella, a reporter for Patch.com, for the first time in 34 years, published a major update on the case and revealed some explosive new information:
In Mid-July of 1984, a young woman, Catherine Raymond, discovered her older half-brother, Walter Davis, who was 26 years old at the time, trying to burn some damp clothing in the fireplace. She found it very odd—especially because of Walter’s criminal history. Catherine and her mother confronted him, took the clothes, and stashed them in a closet. Walter admitted to Catherine that he had raped a girl and thrown her body into a river. Catherine called her friend, Stacie Coburn, over to her house. Catherine went to a wooden closet door with a weird old latch on it and pulled out an old grocery-style paper bag that was rolled up a little bit—closed up—and told Stacie the story. Catherine put the clothes back in the bag and tucked it back in the closet.
Stacie was alarmed. She called her mom—who promptly picked her up—and told her the story.
Stacie might have discounted the incident as unbelievable, but she already had a sense that Walter was a creepy guy. She was childhood friends with Catherine and recalled times when she was playing at her house and Walter would show up and try and join them. Catherine would confront him and often yell, “Get the hell out of here.” She would act protective—even to the point of being mean. At the time, it seemed a bit odd to Stacie, but looking back on it as an adult, she believes that Catherine was trying to protect her from a predator.
Stacie and her mother went to the local police station and told them what they knew. They were in the town of Merrimack, New Hampshire, which is almost 30 miles south of Concord, where Tippy was living. Within a few days, police retrieved the clothes from Catherine and questioned the family.
Walter explained that he worked in Concord and would sometimes crash at a trailer park on Manchester Street. He was just out of work and went to White Park Pond where he happened upon some clothes that were half-in/half-out of the water. He decided to pick them up and bring them home to his younger teenage sister, believing that they might fit her. Police were dubious that an older brother would discover wet dirty clothing in a murky pond, retrieve them for a younger sister, and then change his mind and burn them.
Merrimack PD shared the story with the Concord Police and learned of Tippy’s disappearance. Donna’s apartment was just a short walk from White Park Pond, where the clothes were allegedly ‘found.’ The Concord Police couldn’t believe the description of the clothing: denim bib overalls and a stained cotton shirt—the same outfit Tippy was last seen wearing.
Merrimack transferred the clothing to Concord who then asked the family if they recognized the clothes. Tippy’s parents and Donna came in separately to view the outfit, and they both confirmed that it belonged to Tippy. And they were both familiar with Tippy’s clothes—Jack had been shopping with Tippy for summer clothes and Donna did her laundry while they were living together.
It was a bombshell, and Donna said that police followed up. They searched Walter’s family home with dogs but found no other evidence. They asked Walter to submit to a polygraph examination, but he refused. Donna was asked to take a lie-detector test which she agreed to and passed, and she called Walter to ask him why he refused. She said, “When I got him on the phone and asked him some questions, he said that [he didn’t want to] because he had been in prison for rape before and that he didn’t have much faith in the ... test. He feared that somehow he was going to get framed for it.”
Walter’s criminal history is a little murky—in 2018 it was reported by Tony Schinella in Patch.com that he had only spent a week in jail back in 1987 according to the New Hampshire Department of Corrections for driving a vehicle after his license had been revoked—an infraction he incurred in Merrimack County. Other than that, no other criminal history. At the time of Tippy’s disappearance, Walter was known to police as a, quote, “glue-sniffer,” who always had a plastic bag with him.
To this day Walter has never been charged with the crime.
The clothes made their way back to Merrimack PD (even though Concord was leading Tippy’s investigation) and they were forgotten about for decades. Stacie called the Concord PD in 2014 to inquire about the case. She wondered if modern investigators were aware of the clothing and a tape-recorded interview that she hoped still existed. They were not. They contacted Merrimack and had the evidence transferred. Stacie was dumbstruck.
Concord PD met with Tippy’s family and told them they believed that Walter Davis was responsible for her disappearance—they believed that he had raped and killed her. In September of 2008, a local Fox channel in Boston featured the case on its “New England’s Most Wanted” segment. Consistent with the theory that Walter committed the crime, Concord Police Detective Todd Flanagan said, “We have developed information that she never left Concord and may in fact have met with foul play [the night she disappeared].”
Concord planned to test the clothing for DNA and they took samples from a brother and sister of Tippy’s for familial comparison. Investigators were concerned that the clothing might have been dry-cleaned—though there were still rust-colored stains on them that they theorized might match sediment from a river.
Tippy’s sister, Robin, went back to searching the area, focusing on areas near the Merrimack River that runs through Concord. She looked in and around storm culverts—which had a number of rust-stains—and spoke to the homeless to see if they had seen a body.
Neither detectives nor the family would ever get the chance to question Walter again—he died in the middle of 2003 after a long illness.
Boyfriend as a suspect
In 2005, Concord PD told the press that Tippy’s 21-year-old boyfriend—who has never been publicly named—was still a suspect and had been from the beginning. The detective also said that he was not cooperating with the investigation.
We don’t know if he is still living today. If he is, he would be about 60 years old today.
Bear Brook body
On November 10th, 1985, 4 months after Tippy’s disappearance, a barrel was discovered in Bear Brook State Park, just 20 minutes from Concord, that contained the body of an adult woman and a little girl. These bodies would remain unidentified until 2016.
They were transported to Augusta, Maine, where they were examined by Dr. Marcelle Sorg, New England’s only forensic anthropologist. The bodies had been there for some time, and the amount of decomposition didn’t seem a match for Tippy.
1996 - Tippy declared legally dead
In 1996, 12 years after her disappearance, the McBride family petitioned the court to declare Tippy legally dead. They been paying on her life insurance policy for all those years and it had been long enough. Her family harbored no illusions that she would be returning home. Her father said, “From the start, we never expected her to be living. There was no way Tippy would ever leave like that.”
On March 29th, 1996, the probate court granted their request, and her financial matters were settled.
Around this same time they requested records from Concord Police and received a report that was heavily redacted. Robin described the report as “unreadable” lacking any relevant information.
Tippy’s parents pass
In 2003, Shirley Sr., Tippy’s mother, died at her home at the age of 63.
12 years later, in 2015, Jack McBride, Tippy’s father, died at the age of 87. Jack never gave up hope to find the body of his daughter. He blamed himself for her disappearance since he didn’t keep her living at home in Pittsfield. Even five years after her disappearance, he drove around Manchester looking for her every weekend, with a personalized license plate that read TIPPY. He suffered a workplace injury and got a $70,000 settlement in November of ’89. He set aside $5,000 of that to increase the reward fund for Tippy, keeping up hope, saying, “I’ve always thought that the people who might know something would be the street-wise people. To those people $5,000 might look awful good.” He ran an ad in the Concord Monitor for three days, but no one called with information.
Family’s despair
Robin doesn’t feel like there is much productive discussion with the Concord PD. She said, “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.”
2018 - Tony Schinella, Patch author, reignites case
In 2018, soon following the publication of the Patch article with the revelations about Walter, Tippy’s sister, Robin, met with Walter’s half-sister, Catherine. Robin went to Catherine’s home in Weare, NH, just 20 minutes from Concord.
Catherine told Robin that she didn’t remember that Walter had tried to burn the clothes. Perhaps to cast some doubt on her memory as an adult, she said that she could have been high at the time as a kid. She did recall the clothes, though, because she said that she was wearing them when the Merrimack Police came to collect them—which is strange—why would she be wearing them? Could that explain why they had been professionally laundered? She remembered that Walter had told her one time, that, quote, “something had happened at a nightclub in the area with a girl who had been raped,” but he denied that he done anything.
Robin asked Catherine, “Do you think he would have done that?” and Catherine replied, “He could have.” Catherine said that Walter had an obsession with a girl that looked similar to Tippy and thought, perhaps because of their similar appearance, he could’ve attacked Tippy.
Stacie was surprised to hear that Catherine didn’t recall Walter burning the clothes or admitting to rape. Stacie said that both she and her mother remember those details very clearly—despite the passage of nearly 40 years.
Any opportunities to further question Walter’s half-sister evaporated in August of 2019 when Catherine passed away.
Who will fight for Tippy?
On April 11th, 2016, Tippy’s sister, Robin, published a memoriam in the Concord Monitor entitled “Happy Birthday, Tippy.” She would have turned 47 on April 5th. She wrote, “I hope this gets put on the front page. You deserve a front-page birthday card. I hope they have birthday parties in heaven. Dad is there this year, so if they don’t... he will change that. I love you, Tippy. Until we see each other, again, your big sister.”
Robin has been diagnosed with a terminal form of cancer and is in ill health. She said, in her last interview, “After I go … I’ve got one brother … but there’s nobody else to look for her. If I don’t keep pushing now, there is no one who is going to ask after that.”
We reached out to Donna for this episode, hoping to learn more about Tippy’s life, but were unable to reach her.
Never too late
In 2006, Tippy was added to DoeNetwork, an online database of missing people, and she remains classified, to this day, as a missing person. Her case is filed under her legal name, Shirley Ann McBride, case #311DFNH.
It is never too late to make a difference in a case like this, and it is my hope that Tippy’s remains can be recovered and returned to her family.
If you have any information about Tippy or her disappearance, please contact the Concord Police Department at 1 (603) 225-8600 or leave a tip here
This text has been adapted from the Murder, She Told podcast episode, The Disappearance of Shirley Ann 'Tippy' McBride. To hear Tippy’s full story, find Murder, She Told on your favorite podcast platform
Connect with Murder, She Told on instagram @MurderSheToldPodcast
Click here to support Murder, She Told
168 Merrimack Street, Manchester, NH - McBride family home until their move to Pittsfield, NH
25 1/2 Union Street, Concord, NH - Donna Whitcomb's Apartment (Shirley’s older half-sister) (Tony Schinella/Patch)
25 1/2 Union Street, Manchester, NH - Donna Whitcomb's Apartment (Shirley’s older half-sister)
Shirley “Tippy” McBride
Shirley “Tippy” McBride (Tony Schinella/Patch)
Tippy’s sister, Donna, 5 years after her disappearance
Sources For This Episode
Newspaper articles
Various articles from Concord Monitor, Nashua Telegraph, New Hampshire Sunday News, Sun Journal, and the Boston Globe here.
Written by various authors including Annmarie Timmins, Ben Stocking, Bill Sanderson, Carrie Sturrock, Cassidy Jensen, Cissy Taylor, Gerry Davies, Robin McBride, Sarah Vos, Scott Hilyard, Sharon Voas, and Shawne Wickham.
Online written sources
'Shirley Ann McBride' (Charley Project), 10/12/2004
'311DFNH Shirley Ann McBride' (Doe Network), 1/12/2006
'Shirley Ann McBride New Hampshire 1984' (Web Sleuths), 1/30/2008, by SheWhoMustNotBeNamed
'Shirley "Tippy" McBride' (Oak Hill Research), 9/5/2008, by Scott Maxwell, Ronda Randall
'NH Shirley 'Tippy' McBride' (Web Sleuths), 12/18/2008, by hmg
'Missing Person NamUs #MP2052' (NamUs), 5/26/2009
'Cold Case Unit Shirley Ann "Tippy" McBride' (NH DOJ), 4/28/2012
'Shirley Ann McBride New Hampshire 1984' (America's Most Wanted Fans), 4/2/2016, by Scumhunter
'After 3 Decades...' (Patch), 4/10/2018, by Tony Schinella
'311DFNH - Shirley Ann McBride' (Crime Watchers), 4/1/2020, by Romulus
'Help Bring Me Home Shirley McBride' (National Center for Missing & Exploited Children), 7/29/2020
'Cold Cases' (Concord NH), 9/25/2020
'Northeast Missing' (Facebook), 10/23/2020
'$5K Reward' (Eagle Times), 5/7/2022, by Cassidy Jensen
'Missing Teenager Shirley Ann...' (WMUR 9), 7/13/2022, by Natalie Benoit
'No New Info In Tippy...' (Patch), 7/14/2022, by Tony Schinella
'Tippy McBride' (International Missing Persons Fandom), 8/2/2022
Photos
Photos from Tony Schinella via Patch.com, Google Maps and various newspaper articles.
Credits
Vocal performance, audio editing, and research by Kristen Seavey
Writing, research, and photo editing by Byron Willis
Research by Ericka Pierce and Bridget Rowley
Murder, She Told is created by Kristen Seavey