Within the gazebo’s walls, hovering candle flames dance in the slight wind. To the right stands a balding, middle-aged man in a red shirt whose hands appear to be folded in prayer, but are actually clutching a microphone. His posture hunches forward toward a small TV whose screen displays glowing white text. Following the text on the screen, the man begins his rendition of the quintessential memorial service country song: Alan Jackson’s “Sissy’s Song.” The man somberly howls, “She flew up to heaven on the wings of angels, by the clouds and stars and passed where no one sees. And she walks with Jesus and her loved ones waiting. And I know she’s smiling saying…” Just as his twangy, southern Virginia accent stumbles over the verse’s final line, “don’t worry ’bout me,” the whole gazebo becomes suddenly drenched in light. Beyond the illuminated structure, one can see clearly the movement of some indecipherable thing. It appears to be a person wandering behind the gazebo, but the mysterious being never re-emerges, as if it had been hiding—or had never been there at all.
Along with this video, posted on a Facebook group titled, Search for Joy Schultz is over. May she RIP., is an accompanying message posted by one of the group’s admin, Dana Pfeiffer. It reads,
Do you believe in Angels ?
Watch near the end of video … The gazebo gets a brighter glow and you can see someone ( Joy) appear behind it. The family was inside the gazebo and No one else was behind this area. I believe Joy was there that night.
∞
Everyone in America knows the name Hannah Graham. When the eighteen-year-old University of Virginia student went missing on September 13, 2014—just one week after fifty-one-year-old Shenandoah Valley woman, Joy Schultz, was reported missing—the nation shook. People across the country kept their eyes peeled for Hannah’s youthful, freckled face. Meanwhile, Joy’s disappearance received little media attention and zero national attention.
“Joy is just another missing and imperiled adult we haven’t heard about,” said CBS6 reporter, Mark Holmberg of Richmond, Virginia in a WTVR news report. “Not only is she missing from her home, she’s missing from our collective consciousness.”
Holmberg’s assessment was correct; Joy’s case, like many other adult and minority missing persons’ cases, remained out of sight and out of mind for most Americans. But, it’s not just her appearance that distinguished Hannah’s case from Joy’s. As previously mentioned, Charlottesville is home to one of the best public universities in the nation, the University of Virginia. Also home to Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s estate and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Charlottesville is an extremely affluent city due to not simply its high rates of tourism and community of wealthy students and professors, but old money that dates back to the nation’s forefathers. With that money, in combination with their higher than average crime rate, the city maintains an impressive police force that even boasts its own SWAT team.
The Shenandoah Valley’s Page County police department is not nearly as well-armed; the Page County Sherriff and Police Department website gleefully proclaims, “The Page County Sheriff’s Office consists of more than seventy five employees.” In a county whose population density is 74 people per square mile—as opposed to Charlottesville’s 4,220.8—perhaps that number is sufficient. While Charlottesville’s notable features can be traced to some of the country’s first presidents, Luray is proud to have been founded on the thriving business of blacksmith named Lewis Ramey (eventually shortened to just Lew Ray, giving the town its current name) who operated near the Luray Caverns. This small and spread out town’s per capita income is a meager $16,205. With UVA’s undergraduate tuition coming up just $2,000 dollars short of Luray’s per capita income, one can see just how these two towns, just an hour and a half apart, constitute two different worlds.
However, Holmberg wasn’t entirely correct in belittling Joy Schultz as just some Page County nobody. Little did he know there exists a whole community, just below the surface of our collective consciousness, to whom Joy mattered immeasurably.
∞
In 1962, Joy Schultz was born Joy Lynne Crawford in Maryland, somewhere outside of Annapolis, or so her cousin, Bob Crawford, believes. Although they grew up together in Maryland, they never kept in touch. He knows that she moved to Virginia in the late seventies and settled in the Shenandoah Valley, a sleepy region that stretches from rural, western Virginia all the way to the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia. She graduated from Luray High School in 1980. After that she earned a Registered Medical Assistant Certificate in 1983 and a B.S. in Medical Administration from the University of Phoenix. Bob believes she moved to Florida for a bit in the 90s, but still the Shenandoah Valley beckoned her, and she soon returned. She often held down multiple jobs at once; she worked at the old K-Mart in downtown Harrisonburg; Wrangler, the western apparel store; a corporate food distributor, Sysco Foods; and Responsive Management, a government research calling center that conducts nature and wildlife surveys.
I got to know Joy during my brief stint working for Responsive Management one summer. Although we hardly worked the same shift, I felt I truly knew her. This is not because I am perceptive or because I was, at the time, particularly eager to get to know her. I wasn’t. It was just that every person at our work at least knew her name if not adored her. I met her my first week on the job. Before each shift, all the employees would coral in the main foyer of the building—which was actually just a quaint two-story house on Franklin Street in downtown Harrisonburg. Our manager called roll to make sure everyone had showed up for the shift.
“Joy? Where’s Joy?” snapped Eva, my sassy manager who mostly wore army print capris and white flip flops. Everyone’s heads swiveled curiously around the room in search of Joy, who never missed a day of work.
“Heeeeere I am,” she sang as she descended the staircase that led up to the more private cubicles upstairs. Her crimson, cherub-esque face lit up the room and her laughter echoed through the otherwise quiet room. I didn’t know what she laughed at, but I had a feeling it might have been one of her own jokes. I don’t mean that she was conceited—not in the slightest—but she was the kind of person who unabashedly laughed at her jokes when they were earnestly funny—and they often were.
Once my coworker, Stephanie, who had taken maternity leave, showed up at work with her newborn baby. I overheard her complaining to Joy about the baby staying up all night and crying.
Joy, with her hands folded under her round tummy, advised, “What I use to do with my son was just dip the nipple of the bottle in some liquor and shove that thing right back in his mouth! Shut ‘im up every time!” Joy burst into laughter and even I myself, a mere onlooker to their conversation, couldn’t help but let out a giggle. Stephanie wasn’t as quick on the uptake; she paused for a second, then laughed meekly. As a new, inexperienced mom, Stephanie did not understand the humor in the situation. As Joy wiped tears of laughter from her eyes, I wondered to myself what lucky child became of such an unapologetically boisterous and jovial woman.
∞
Joy still worked full-time at Sysco Foods and part-time at Responsive Management when she went missing in early September of 2014. She was last seen with her husband, George Schultz, at a yard sale on Riverbend Road in Stanley, Virginia on the 6th of September. Although her husband was the last person with whom she had contact, it wasn’t until three days later that her employer reported her missing to the police. Because Joy never skipped work, many of her coworkers, especially those that maintained a close relationship with her beyond work, had an immediate, foreboding feeling about Joy’s sudden disappearance. They just knew.
“No one talked about it very openly,” said one of our Responsive Management coworkers, Jana. “I heard some suggestions that it was domestic violence related? Maybe involving her husband and stepson or something like that? But that’s all I know.”
Another of our coworkers, Luke, chimed in saying, “Yeah…people were saying they wouldn’t be surprised if it was related to domestic violence. And like, the husband and step son were reclusive after she went missing? And they put up a Beware of Dog sign or something…a lot of gossip-y type info.”
A few weeks passed. It was late September and Joy was still missing. Her coworkers were not the only ones trying to piece together her location. A photo of Joy’s face—her blue smiling eyes, angelic white-blonde hair, and rosy red cheeks—appeared all over the Shenandoah Valley’s local news channel, WHSV, mobilizing the Valley into action. On the 23rd of September, the FBI came to Page County, assisted by both local and state police, to search Joy’s home—a secluded, rural estate shrouded in the deciduous trees that line the rest of her street, state route 340. News reports claimed that upon searching the home, police suspected that Joy might have run away instead of being abducted or killed, as many had begun to believe. This was perhaps due to the fact that certain personal items, like her purse and cell phone, could not be located in her car or her home. However, in local news reports, the police did not disclose any specific reasoning or evidence as to why they believed she might have taken off—or escaped—on her own. They did, however, reveal that her car remained in the driveway and her clothes in her closet, making the case even harder to classify. Does a runaway bring their phone and purse, but not their car or clothes? Many began to wonder how much say Joy had in her own disappearance.
Two weeks later, after a whole month with no sight of Joy, her case was changed to not just missing, but missing and endangered and possible murder.
∞
Although I wasn’t a member of the closed Facebook group dedicated to bringing Joy home, I saw that Dana Pfeiffer was listed as an admin. So, I messaged her directly and asked about her relation to Joy, told her I was writing a story about Joy and hoped she could answer some of my questions. She responded almost instantly with,
Thanks , I personaly never had the chance to know her but lived in same town and county and felt enough attention to finding was being done so started the group
Was not done ^
Before I proceeded to engage with Dana further, I added her as a friend and perused her Facebook page to see what she was like. Her profile picture bore a silver ribbon with the words “Praying for Sweet Noah” written down the side with a little teddy bear and a cross. The words “Faith” and “Love” were also written at the bottom of the photo. Although familiar with golden ribbons as a symbol for soldiers and a pink ribbon as symbolic of breast cancer awareness, I didn’t know that one. I scrolled through her postings hoping to find more information. I quickly discovered that Noah was a missing boy from Pulaski County, a county just south of the Shenandoah Valley, who, within the past day, had been discovered dead in a septic tank in his own home. As I scrolled further, I saw that Dana had been following his case closely, posting about him and the status of his disappearance daily since he had been reported missing.
And Noah isn’t the only missing person that Dana posted about; as I scrolled through weeks and weeks of her Facebook activity, I discovered a wealth of information about not just missing children, but adults and dogs too. One of the posts she shared came from a Facebook page titled, “Help Find Morgan Dana Harrington,” the Virginia Tech student that went missing after attending a Metallica concert at the John Paul Jones arena at the University of Virginia. It read,
VANISHED
“Someone Knows Something”
~the missing have no voice, but
you
can be the voice for the missing~
All it takes it two seconds of your time to share the fliers!
Her other shared links included, “Dramatic Ultrasound Photos Show Unborn Baby Grimacing in Womb When Mother Smokes,” and a photo that said, “I WILL NOT BE FORCED TO LEARN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE TO ACCOMMODATE ILLEGALS IN MY COUNTRY,” with an X through a box next to the word “Agree.”
While scrolling, I got another message from Dana telling me that she’d invited me into the Facebook group, that she hoped some of the other members could give me the information I’m seeking. I accepted the invite, hoping to talk to Joy’s closest friends and relatives. But, in spite of the group’s 148 person membership, I only spoke with one of Joy’s relatives, the previously mentioned Bob Crawford. It wasn’t not long before I realized that I was entirely unprepared for the world into which I entered.
∞
In mid-October, police found Schultz’s missing purse on the side of Interstate 81, the main road used for North-South transportation throughout the Valley. Shortly after, they also recovered her cell phone on the side of another road, this time along state route 33. As a result, the search parties throughout Maryland and Virginia increased heavily; with the addition of dive teams and the Page County Emergency Response Team to the already stacked roster of state and federal police, communities from all over Virginia and the greater East Coast comprised Joy’s search party. News footage taken from a helicopter showed an aerial view of squads of uniformed and plain-clothes men and women alike weaving through tall, yellowed grass like tiny ants crawling up the back of a sleeping lion. Together they combed through the Valley’s dense forests, neighbors’ farm lands, and in untamed patches of tall grass of which no man takes responsibility. If Joy were to be found, it would have been through the efforts of an army of well-intentioned strangers.
It is at this time that the name Keith Seal began appearing in news casts. Highlighted as an instrumental community member in the search for Joy, TV reels showed him trudging through thickets of woods with a ponderous look across his face. He was a young, white male with spiked, brown hair and five o’clock shadow and he had spent every day of the past five weeks searching for Joy.
Noting his dedication, I sought out Keith for more information. I assumed that, because he had such noteworthy dedication to Joy’s case, she must have made an indelible mark on his life—they had to have been extremely close. However, his response to my initial Facebook message proved otherwise:
Rachel, I never knew Joy. When I learned of her missing I felt I had to be a voice for her and help find her. I don’t really know anything about her personally but from what I’ve heard and the outpouring of love from her coworkers and friends she was an amazing woman. A woman who was determined to break away from the life she was living and start a life for HER. Something she deserved based on what I’ve learned about her husband.
Through further Facebook investigation, I noticed that Keith had posted the same profile picture three separate times and another one that seemed oddly similar. In the repeated profile picture, Keith emerges from a river in what appears to be a baptism, dressed in plain clothes—a striped button down and ripped jeans. His eyes are closed and both of his fists pierced the air in a bold gesture of triumph. Three large men—also in plain clothes—surround him. One holds his torso up as if he had pulled Keith out of the water himself. The other supports one of his upward-pointing arms. They are all smiling. The second photo is much the same. This time three sleeveless men support his upper body while the rest of his torso remains submerged in the water. His mouth is open as if taking his first, much-needed breath. One of his friends commented on the photo, You look free J, to which Keith responded, I feel it!!!
A part of me wonders if it is that very freedom that allows him to dedicate his life to Joy’s case. Perhaps it is a freedom that Dana also shares.
∞
In a news reel posted to the WHSV website at 3:57 AM on the morning of October 22nd, Janetta Crawford, Joy’s sister who had been appearing more and more frequently in local news reports, unknowingly made a harrowing prediction.
“Going into the seventh week of this,” she sighed, “we’re convinced that she has been thrown in the woods somewhere and we’re looking for human remains.” Her face contorted in a painful mixture of frankness and despair.
Later in the evening on that same day, WHSV reported the discovery of remains thought to be Joy’s. And the following day, police disclosed the location. The remains were found along Beldor Road. This scenic stretch of narrow, two-way road steadily winds its way up the ominous mountains within the Shenandoah National Park and is rumored to have a “bad reputation.” One quote within the report, from Beldor resident Lois Shifflet, rang out as oddly cryptic. “Beldor has gotten a bad name in the past…But really the people who live back here are family-oriented. We have a close knit community and all that stuff that people hear is in the past. It’s really not a bad place to live.” Supposedly, Joy’s remains were not the first criminal activity to haunt this bucolic path. With little evidence to support her claims, I shrugged it off as an urban legend. Joy’s remains were found within 100 yards of the entrance to the Shenandoah National Park in a spot so remote and inaccessible that TV crews were unable to get close to it without losing satellite reception.
The police were led to this spot by none other than Joy’s husband, George Schultz. I found this odd, but recalled several previous news reports in just the few weeks following her disappearance that mentioned police already had persons of interest. With this discovery, I assumed that perhaps George had been a primary contender since the onset of the investigation. That day George Schultz and his stepson, also named George, were both jailed in different prisons for differing charges as the primary suspects in connection to what was no longer a missing person’s case, but a murder.
∞
When George, the husband, was jailed on preliminary charges of possessing a gun while being a convicted felon, he and Joy’s photos started appearing side-by-side in news reports. The married couple seemed, by visual comparison, to be an unlikely duo. Joy’s white hair glows atop her head and flows into tight curls that rest upon her back. George’s hair starts out black and fades into a pepper color on the tightly-shaved sides. Where Joy’s blue eyes appear understanding and alert, George’s eyes appear beady and dark, peering out from below heavy lids. Joy’s cheeks are robust and full, their apples the color of cherries. George’s hollowed cheeks cave in below the bones that jut out from his skull. His sunken cheeks give way to an unabashed frown, whereas Joy’s mouth turns up at the corners as if sharing some little secret with any person that gazes upon her photo.
Upon discovery of George’s criminal background, the duo appeared even more unlikely. In an article from the Shenandoah Valley Now website, Page County Sheriff, John Thomas, who searched the Schultz’s home, revealed that George was a, “multi-convicted… member of an ‘outlaw’ motorcycle gang,”—a claim that, during my research, proved difficult to back-up. Thomas claimed that Schultz belonged to a “1% motorcycle gang”; 99% of motorcycle clubs are non-violent with strict rules forbidding criminal activity, however, the 1% take pride in their organized crime.
While struggling to piece together background information on George or his supposed gang-related activity, I had a strange stroke of luck. While searching his name with various modifiers on Google, I came across one Twitter user, Shan Brown, or @us_patriot_3888. On the 24th of October, two days after George’s arrest, he tweeted, former member of OK Bandidos Motorcycle Club, George Schultz aka George Schuppan arrested along with a link to the most recent WHSV report. I sent him a direct message in the hopes of finding out more information, but never got a response.
However, @us_patriot_3888’s lone tweet opened up a whole new can of worms. Before I knew it, I had paid $5.38 to buy a digital copy of Out in Bad Standings: Inside the Bandidos Motorcycle Club (PART TWO) – The Making of a Worldwide Dynasty written by one Edward Winterhalder, a former member of a non-criminal motorcycle gang, Rogue Motorcycle Club. Within its pages I uncovered that George himself was, as the title of the book suggests, “out in bad.” This phrase is short for “out in bad standing.” When a person joins a 1% motorcycle gang, they are in it for life. Thus, to be “out in bad” is the result of forcible removal from the group, making the former member vulnerable to a plethora of physical punishments for the rest of their presumably short time on earth.
According to the book, George—then called George Schuppan—a member of the Chandler, Oklahoma Bandidos chapter, was ousted for several reasons. Initially, he had been busted by not only his fellow OK Riders, but by law enforcement too, for manufacturing and selling methamphetamine. Although the club knowingly engaged in criminal activities, Winterhalder noted in the book that the Bandidos in particular tried to avoid the unnecessary police attention that comes with drug business—a serious issue for many other 1% gangs. Upon this discovery, the OK Bandidos president decided to take away George’s red and gold patch, expelling him from the club. However, this task proved impossible when George soon went missing, holding onto his OK Bandidos membership with all that he had.
George’s standing soon went from bad to worse when his fellow riders discovered that he was what Winterhalder eloquently called, “a big rat.” George had been giving information to federal authorities about a fellow Oklahoma 1% motorcycle gang, the Outlaws. This cooperation eventually led to his federal indictment on May 1st, 2001 for manufacturing methamphetamine and possessing firearms, more specifically, a machine gun. According to Winterhalder, “you could only dance so long without having to pay the piper.”
It is unknown when or why George Schuppan, the ex-OK Rider, became George Schultz, a family man settled down in the quiet Shenandoah Valley. However, one might assume that, given his criminal activity, a name change was necessary. The name George Schuppan did not die there. George’s now 23-year-old son, Schultz’s stepson, Zachary—who goes by his middle name, George—bears the burden of his father’s delinquent namesake. With that knowledge, one might not be surprised to learn that, of the father and son duo, Schuppan (the stepson) was the one to be preliminarily charged with the murder of his stepmother, Joy.
∞
Overwhelmed by the wealth of information on the Facebook page dedicated to Joy, I made a general post asking for group members, especially those related to her, to come forward with any information they had. Because I could only find so much information on her personal life and upbringing online, I hoped that by making a general post, those closest to her would help me get to better know the woman to which I was dedicating my time. My post elicited a response from a woman named Tamie Courtney that read,
I lived above her an her husband a lil over a yr an he was a douche 2 her but she always had a smile on her face deff 1 of tha sweetest woman i had 2 pleasure 2 know :-):-)… Didnt live there when her stepson lived there but was told they got along good . She worked 2 jobs 2 support her lazy husband heard she was leaving him an b 4 they kiled her…she was jus an all around great person …
Tamie’s insight echoed eerily the words of Dana Pfeiffer and Keith Seal, two people who, like Tamie, hardly knew Joy, yet somehow knew the gruesome details of her unhealthy marriage. One news report from the Shenandoah Valley Now website states that, “From the outset, the sheriff’s office knew Joy was planning on leaving but not where she was going. Joy was the primary breadwinner…and felt like she was being used.”
Moments after she posted her response to my post in the Facebook group, Tamie messaged me personally, saying
Didn’t want 2 put this on fb but they pulled her teeth out an cut her fingers off tring 2 hide her identity. An was told she was shot @least 8 times . An as said b 4 he wasn’t good 2 her always belittling her .wud here him fussing an yelling @ her all tha time . I hope this info helps :-):-)
∞
According to safehorizon.org, a domestic abuse resource site, one in three female homicide victims are killed by their current or former partner each year. After all of my research, and getting to know Joy—if only posthumously and voyeuristically—I felt that I needed to do something in her memory.
In late April, I planned Cool Aid, an annual charity benefit concert hosted by the student-run radio station, WXJM-FM. As the station’s big events coordinator, I had the responsibility of choosing the musical acts and deciding what charity would receive the show’s funds. Traditionally the proceeds from the show have been donated to a nature or wildlife beneficiary, but in Joy’s memory, I selected a local domestic abuse shelter and resource center, First Step, as that year’s beneficiary.
The night of the show, two representatives from First Step showed up with a stack of fliers and informational pamphlets. I set them up alongside the bands’ merch tables and sat down to read one. Before even opening the pamphlet, I examined their logo on the front—a small house with a heart in the center. Just below the logo, they had included their address: 127 Franklin Street—just three doors down from Responsive Management, where Joy and I worked.
∞
On December 8th, the remains were confirmed to belong to Joy Schultz. One week later, police obtained a search warrant for the Schultz property. In the back yard, police discovered burnt furniture. And in the basement they found one immaculately clean spot where the now charred couch in the backyard once sat, the same spot where Joy sat when she was shot and killed. In the secured affidavit, both the stepson and husband admitted to wrapping her body in tarp and disposing it off Beldor Road. Neither admitted to shooting her.
The affidavit also stated that on November 15, just a few weeks after his initial incarceration, George Schuppan, the stepson, confided in a fellow inmate about the motive for his stepmother’s death: money. He and his father had conspired to kill her in order to reap her $200,000 life insurance. It was an ill-conceived idea from the get-go: life insurance only releases funds in the case of a death, not a missing person. By killing her and hiding her remains, they only made their possibility of wealth even smaller. And on top of that, little did he or his father know that on September 5th, just one day before her disappearance, Joy changed the beneficiary on her life insurance from her husband, George, to one of her brothers. Joy knew. And she outwitted them.
By: Rachel Kenney 