Shilie Turner ran every place. She ran to the grocery store for her mother, Vivian King, and came back with two paper bags, filled, in 10 minutes flat.
She jogged to the laundromat with clothing bundles. She bounded past the track trophies and medals piled on the coffee table in the living room, up the stairs in her northwest Philadelphia home, two steps at a time.
“You have to understand,” said King, one hand on the portable telephone on her dining room chair. “Shilie was a runner, as simple as that.”
Turner did much of her running for the girls’ track team, a cherished institution at William Penn High School near Girard Avenue and Broad Street. She ran the anchor leg on several national championship relays. She was going to Clemson University on a full athletic scholarship if she could muster the necessary scores this spring on the Scholastic Aptitude Test. If she couldn’t get the scores, top junior colleges were lined up for her.
Turner was on schedule for great things. On Friday, Jan. 15, she ran 2 minutes 15.3 seconds in the 800 meters, a solid time for an early-season meet, in Kutztown, Pa. She had another track meet set for Monday, Jan. 18, Martin Luther King Day.
“She had been filling out college applications, training beautifully,” said Tim Hickey, her coach. “She was not freaking out over anything.”
Then, Turner vanished, without a trace. The 17-year-old senior, known as Shelly (as her name is pronounced) to friends and Shay-Shay to her mother, disappeared on the morning of Jan. 18, and has been missing now for four weeks.
“It comes down to the same three possibilities,” said Lt. Thomas Fournier of the Southwest Detective Divison of the Philadelphia Police Department. “Somebody grabbed her. Somebody killed her. Or she wanted to disappear.”
There have been no verified sightings of Turner, despite a $5,000 reward from her nerve-racked schoolmates and the posters stuck to the trees and telephone poles in her old neighborhood. The authorities say there are no suspects, despite a great deal of digging. Her precious track shoes, autographed by Florence Griffith Joyner after the national scholastic championships in Los Angeles, are still upstairs in her bedroom.
It was as if Shilie Turner stepped off the No. 15 bus very early that morning at the corner of 60th Street and Girard, in her lavender track suit and leather waist coat and Walkman, and jogged off the face of the planet.
“Before this, we had always known where she was,” Hickey said. “From the first day this time, I was convinced she was no runaway. If everybody’s story checks, the next news we hear is not going to be good news.”
The only story with a hole, so far, has been the one that Turner told her mother on Jan. 17. She said she was going to a party at the Benjamin Franklin Hotel that Sunday night with teammates. Instead, she went to the North Philadelphia home of Shaun Williams, a male friend who had recently transferred to William Penn.
At about 8:30 p.m., Turner called King from Williams’s house, fibbed again, and told her mother that she would be home late from the party, “when it was over.”
At about 2 a.m., Williams told the police, the two students went to the bus stop. Williams put Turner on the No. 15 bus, because it was very cold outside and she did not want to wait for the No. 10, which would have left her within half a block of her home.
The bus driver and a passenger verified that Turner got off the bus at 60th Street and headed north, past boarded-up stores and rowhouses. She lived about three quarters of a mile away, in the home she shared with her younger sister, Clara, her mother, and her stepfather, Clarence Jones, a district manager for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Sixtieth Street is not a good stretch, but there are worse blocks in North Philadelphia.
When Turner didn’t come home that night, her mother began to fret. When she found out that her daughter had missed the track meet and had not contacted her older sister, Trina Jenkins, King was near panic, pacing the floor the next night. By Tuesday morning, after Turner had failed to appear for the track meet or to check in with any relatives, her mother called the police.
“We interviewed relatives, coaches, friends, past boyfriends,” said Fournier, one of of the detectives assigned to the case. “It’s been kind of unusual, because we’re not getting any leads.”
The terrible possibilities are not lost on the girls’ track team at William Penn. Hickey started this team in 1973, coaching basketball and track and field after he returned from a stint in Tanzania as a Peace Corps volunteer. The school quickly became a magnet for female track stars from all over Philadelphia, and Hickey’s runners have not lost a meet in the last 10 years.
Hickey is a big believer in relays, because it fosters camaraderie instead of competitiveness among his runners. Turner anchored William Penn this season to times of 1:45.05 in the 800-meter relay; 4:00.1 in the 1,600; 9:30.92 in the 3,200, and 4:12.4 in the sprint medley. The school was listed among the national leaders in all those relays.
“Shilie ran cross-country, sprints, middle distances,” Hickey said. “She wasn’t the best in one event, but the best over all.”
Wherever William Penn went, it seemed, all eyes were on Turner. At a meet in Los Angeles, where she knew nobody, Turner rounded the final bend and there was a cheering section for her. Instantly. She once gave her medal to a rival runner, because she already had one from the same meet. She was easy to like. Without her, Quanda Buckner, her closest friend on the team, is having the toughest time.
“I always ran the third leg,” Buckner said. “I passed her the baton. We were going to go to the same college. We planned it that way.
“She’s on everybody’s mind a whole lot,” Buckner said.” The other teams feel our grief.”
In Turner’s absence, Buckner has moved to anchor. Michelle Wright, a junior, still runs the first leg on most of the relays.
“We don’t run as good,” Wright said. “It’s because we just don’t know what happened to her.”
Her schoolmates raised the reward money, and some wear lavender ribbons to remind everybody about Turner’s favorite color. They have knocked on doors in West Philadelphia, to increase awareness of Turner’s plight.
Hickey is no longer optimistic about finding the girl who could stand out in any crowd. Tall and athletic, at 5 feet 9 inches and 130 pounds, and with long black hair, Turner was wearing purple sneakers when she disappeared. She was quite recognizable.
“You have to realize that Shilie was a very social person,” Hickey said. “She couldn’t walk down the street without 20 people noticing her.”
Turner used to sit outside her home, on North Edgewood Street, waiting for Hickey’s van to pick her up and bring her to another adventure on a real track at some other school. She missed only two or three meets in her three years at William Penn. Once, according to friends, she left her mother and stepfather after an argument and stayed with her older sister for a couple of days. But she always kept in touch with the track team.
“She’d sit there on the sidewalk pavement, with her chin in her hands, waiting for the ride to the meet,” King said. “If she was supposed to wash the dishes that morning, there’d still be egg on the plates and she’d be outside, ready.
“She loved track meets, ever since she was 7 and running for Mt. Carmel Baptist Church,” King said. “She could handle all the pressures.”
The phone rang by King’s side, and it was the mother of Quanda Buckner. There was no news again, only heartfelt sympathy.
“It is hard to sleep,” King said. “I think sometimes that she’s alive; sometimes, she’s dead. I’m tired, and the phone keeps ringing with no news.”
Turner is supposed to call her older sister, who has a special beeper number. She is supposed to enter her birthday as a code to let the family know she is alive and healthy.
The beeper has remained silent.
