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On the night of Saturday, July 3, 1993, 40-year-old Sheilah Doyle was leaving her nursing job at Little Company of Mary Hospital in Evergreen Park, Illinois at about 11:30 pm where she worked as a licensed practical nurse on the substance-abuse unit. Sheilah worked the 3-11 pm shift at the hospital which was about 30 minutes from Chicago as well as 30 minutes to her home in Palos Hills. When her husband, 44-year-old Bill Doyle woke up at 12:30 am, he realized that his wife wasn’t in bed as he expected her to be & when he looked around, he found that everything was as he left it when he went to bed. He headed downstairs to look for her, but didn’t see Sheilah anywhere in the house so he went to check the garage. There, he saw her new 1993 black Toyota Camry parked & her purse & work bag sat on the passenger seat, but still, Sheilah was nowhere to be found.
At this time, Bill & Sheilah’s 19-year-old daughter Kelly woke up & asked her dad what was wrong. Bill explained that he wasn’t able to find her mom anywhere. Kelly offered to drive her car around the area to look for her while Bill called the Cook County Sheriff’s office. Kelly came back home at the same time that an officer arrived at the house. They explained the situation & the officer asked for a picture of Sheilah for identification purposes. A second officer was called to the home for backup & arrived minutes later.
Both officers used their flashlights to search the garage, the house & the area near the house. They asked Bill for his spare set of keys for Sheilah’s car & asked Bill & Kelly to go back inside for a few minutes. Less than two minutes later, the officers came back into the house & told Bill & Kelly that the garage was a crime scene & “the lady in the picture was found in the trunk of her car.”
Kelly asked the officer if her mom was okay & he informed her that there was no pulse when they checked & Sheilah was deceased. At this point, no one was allowed to come or go from the home because it was a crime scene. At 1:30 am, Cook County Sheriff investigators arrived at the Doyle home & Bill was brought downstairs for questioning. This was when he was informed that his wife had been found shot to death in the trunk of her car. As Bill broke down into tears, investigators asked him questions about the events leading up to his wife’s murder. When police asked if Bill owned a gun, he informed them that he did not. Bill gave investigators permission to search the house & the search & questioning continued until 5 am. During this time, police also spoke with Kelly & an inventory was taken to assess if any of Sheilah’s belongings had been taken. They also looked through the items that were found on the passenger seat of her car. No one inside the house had heard a thing that night but it was the weekend of the fourth of July & the gunshot may have been mistaken as the sound of fireworks.
Kelly continued to ask investigators if their family members could please come to the house. She wanted additional support when her two younger siblings, 17-year-old Kevin & 8-year-old Kristin woke up & were informed of their mother’s murder. Kelly was able to call her aunt, her mom’s twin sister, Sharon. Sharon wanted to come to the house but Kelly told her that wasn’t possible until the police cleared the scene. At 4 am, Bill was brought into the Cook County courthouse in Bridgeview, Illinois for further questioning.
In the meantime, Kelly remained at the house with her siblings & her Uncle Ray, Sharon’s husband, arrived & was allowed inside the home at about 6 am. Bill came back home from the police station at 9 am; he was exhausted & grief-stricken but he knew he needed to tell his younger two children what happened to their mom.
17-year-old Kevin woke up at 9:15 am on Sunday, July 4 & came out of his room holding his clothes in one hand & towel in the other, on his way to shower. Kevin assumed the family would be getting ready to attend 11 am Sunday mass at Our Lady of the Woods church in Palos Park as they always did. As Kevin made his way down the hall & stairs, he was surprised to see a group of his family members gathered around the kitchen table. Furthermore, he saw his father standing at the end of the stairway, crying. Kevin asked his dad where his mom was & Bill broke the tragic news to his son. He explained that she had been murdered & found in the trunk of her car that had been parked in the garage. In shock, Kevin turned on his heels, walked back up the stairs & closed himself inside his bedroom where he spent much of the day.
8-year-old Kristin had woken up earlier that morning but was instructed by a family member to go back to bed since her dad had yet to come back from the police station. Kristin went back to sleep on the downstairs couch. When she woke up later that morning, Bill brought his daughter into the kitchen, sat her on his lap & told her that her mom passed away last night. With that, Kristin immediately started crying.
For seven weeks, the Doyle family carried on in a state of grief & fear, worried that the person who killed Sheilah would come back & kill them as well. The family racked their brains, wondering who would possibly be capable of hurting Sheilah & why, but were unable to come up with any ideas. Bill was viewed as a suspect in the case by both the police as well as the media. Sheilah’s murder was a top story on all the local news channels & newspapers.
On August 20, 1993, the lead investigator called the Doyle home & asked Bill if his wife ever shopped at the Evergreen Park Plaza Mall & if she did, was she ever in the habit of giving a hitch-hiker a ride. They also asked him when the last time Sheilah’s black 1993 Camry had been washed. Bill wondered why they were asking such questions & he was told that they had someone in custody who did not appear to be telling the truth.
The next day, August 21, two investigators came to the Doyle house to tell them that the suspect in custody’s fingerprints matched those that were found on the trunk as well as the driver’s side door jam of Sheilah’s car. Investigators learned that a couple of days before Sheilah’s murder, two men, unknown to the Doyle family, 21-year-old Gregory Jackson & his friend, 22-year-old Antwon Tyler, had accidentally shot a bullet into the hood of a car. They were playing with a gun when it went off, entering the hood of Gregory’s mom’s 1992 Toyota Camry. Now they were tasked with repairing their damage.
On the night of July 3, Gregory & Antwon, in addition to their friend, 16-year-old Marcos Gray, noticed Sheilah leaving her job at the hospital in Evergreen Park, when they decided to follow her. Gregory drove his Dodge Daytona & the three men followed Sheilah back to her home in the southwest suburb of Palos Township. The men also noticed the gold jewelry that Sheilah wore.
About thirty minutes later, Sheilah pulled into the attached garage of her two-story brick home in the Mill Creek subdivision. While Gregory stayed behind the wheel, Antwon & Marcos exited the car, sneaking into the garage behind Sheilah, as she unknowingly got out of her car. They grabbed her in an attempt to rob her while Sheilah fought back. The two men forced Sheilah into the trunk of the car & Antwon shot her once in the back of the head. They closed the trunk as well as the garage door & fled from the scene, stealing nothing from Sheilah.
A witness who was near the home at the time Sheilah was murdered said that around midnight they heard a scream & a gunshot & then saw two people run from the Doyle’s garage, get into a nearby car & drive away. The car was described as a white, mid-sized, two door with a wide red panel running along both sides of the car’s body. The roof as well as the lower part of the car were also white.
These men attempted to rob Sheilah in order to get the money to pay for a new hood of the car they had shot. According to a south suburban Toyota dealer at the time, a brand-new hood for the damaged Camry would have cost $385 & a used one would have been even less. 40-year-old Sheilah had lost her life over less than $400.
The men chose Sheilah at random based on the car she was driving. When Sheilah fought back, the two men panicked & murdered her. 21-year-old Gregory Jackson, 22-year-old Antwon Tyler & 16-year-old Marcos Gray were charged with first-degree murder & attempted armed robbery. Despite being only 16, Marcos was being charged as an adult. All three men provided statements admitting their involvement in the case.
Bill was stunned that his wife & the mother of their three children had lost her life over the hood of a car. One of the three men indicated that they later threw the semi-automatic pistol they had used into Lake Michigan near the 31st Street Beach only hours after the shooting. The area where the gun was said to be disposed of is anywhere from 6-15 feet deep.
Gregory Jackson’s bond was set at $100,000 & Antwon & Tyler’s was set at $1 million, largely due to their criminal past.
Gregory Jackson’s family had recently moved into their new, two-story house in Country Club Hills & he was set to start his senior year at Eastern Illinois University where he was majoring in education & minoring in history & had maintained a B-minus average. He had just finished his summer school classes. Gregory had been a member of a black fraternity on campus, Alphi Phi Alpha, which had recently been banned from campus after campus police videotaped members beating pledges during a hazing incident. He had also been a student representative of the alumni association. He & Antwon had known each other from Percy Julian High School in Chicago where they both graduated in 1990.
Antwon was living with his mom at the time & was the father of an 8-month-old daughter & was on probation for a drug possession charge from December 1992. He was also on “conditional discharge” from a misdemeanor theft charge from January 1993.
Despite being only 16 & the youngest of the group, Marcos Gray had been awaiting trial on an attempted murder charge from a gang-related shooting. Only a few months before Sheilah’s murder, on March 28, 1993, Marcus drove up to a car full of mostly women & children & shot the driver dead. Fifteen minutes earlier, he robbed another man at gunpoint. In May of 1993 he shot a man in the shoulder & hand. After Sheilah’s murder, in August of 1993 he pushed a 7-year-old girl off her bike & threatened to kill her family.
In September of 1994, Antwon Tyler, who, by this time was 24-years-old, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole after being found guilty of first-degree murder & armed robbery. After three trials, at age 19, Marcos Gray, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole on January 4, 1996. He was also sentenced to 55 years for the March 28, 1993 murder he committed.
In January of 1995, at age 23, Gregory Jackson was acquitted by a jury of the murder & attempted armed robbery after his attorneys argued that he was in his car outside the home & had no idea what Antwon & Marcos had planned when they followed Sheilah into her garage.
At the time of Marcos’ sentencing, Sheilah’s youngest daughter Kristin was ten-years-old & read a victim-impact statement: It would mean so much to me if you put put Marcos Gray behind prison bars for the rest of his life because I would not want another little girl like me to have her mom taken away. I miss my mom so much. My mom can never hug & kiss me anymore or tell me she loves me, because Marcos Gray took her life away from me. In the closing arguments, it was said that Sheilah had dedicated herself to saving lives but that Marcos dedicated himself to destroying them.
Sheilah’s three children, Kelly, Kevin & Kristin founded the Sheilah A. Doyle Foundation in 2009 in their mother’s honor. Their goal was to provide support to children ages 7-17 whose parent, legal guardian or sibling fell victim to homicide. With this, they developed Camp Sheilah & a college scholarship program to transform a child’s tragedy into a bright future. The goal is to provide coping skills, grief guidance & the idea that they don’t have to walk this difficult journey alone. To date they’ve awarded 20 scholarships worth $100,000 & have impacted more than 300 families.
Kevin Doyle remembers going back to school where he attended Carl Sandburg High School & as he walked through the halls on his first day back after his mother’s devastating murder, he felt completely isolated & helpless as he heard the murmurs of whispers around him, ‘hey, that’s the kid whose mom was murdered.’ This feeling of helplessness prompted the creation of the foundation. Oftentimes when a child has lost a loved one to violence, conversation about what happened can be difficult since telling people about it can be taboo. This suppression can lead to negative outlets like drugs & violence. This foundation provides an automatic community where people come together who understand each other’s pain which allows for ongoing growth & healing.
References:
- Chicago Tribune: Nurse died for car part, prosecutors say
- Sheilah A. Doyle Foundation
- Chicago Tribune: Sheilah Doyle
- Casetext People v. Gray
- Chicago Tribune: Palos Township murder brings 2nd life sentence
- ABC 7 Chicago: ‘Tragedy found us’: Camp Sheilah helps families of murder victims heal from horrendous memories
- Chicago Tribune: Sheilah Doyle death
