A Nashville woman whose family lost contact with her and assumed she had simply moved out of state has finally been identified as one of two victims buried in a dirt-floor basement on Charlotte Avenue, more than four decades after she disappeared. Metro Nashville Police say forensic genetic genealogy confirmed the remains belong to 31-year-old Toni L. Gordon, closing out a case that has haunted investigators since skeletons were unearthed there in 1987.
According to NewsChannel 5, investigators believe Gordon was killed in 1985, though her family had no way of knowing — they had lost contact with her and believed she had relocated out of state. Her relatives have since been notified of the identification, the station reports. The man accused of killing her, James Shaffer, reportedly referred to Gordon only as “Lil' Bit” in conversations with detectives.
Gordon's case sat alongside that of a second victim found in the same basement: Metro Police arrived at the house on November 17, 1987, and found two full skeletons buried beneath it, according to a NewsChannel 5 report on the case. That second woman was identified in 2025 as Sheila Cummings of Elgin, Illinois, who the Nashville Banner reports was 23 years old when she was killed. Metro Police reportedly learned at the time that she was about 20, a discrepancy the Banner's account and NewsChannel 5's earlier report do not reconcile.
How Cummings Was Identified First
Cummings's case broke open after her daughter contacted police upon seeing information about the case online, and DNA testing later confirmed the family relationship, per the same Banner account. Police exhumed her body in January to collect a biological sample for testing. FOX 17 reported that a woman called the Cold Case Unit in January after seeing information online and reporting that her mother had been missing since 1984 — and that two days later, both sets of remains were dug up for contemporary forensic analysis, according to FOX 17. Detectives ultimately confirmed Cummings's identity by matching DNA samples collected from her daughters.
Before Gordon's name surfaced, the unidentified second victim was known to investigators only by physical description. The Tennessean reported she was described as a Black female, 5 feet 7 inches tall, with an open-faced gold overlay on her right lateral incisor, and that she was wearing a copper Grim Reaper ring when she was found, according to The Tennessean. With Gordon now named, both women pulled from that basement have been identified.
Shaffer's Confession and Fate
Police said Shaffer confessed to both murders after the bodies were discovered, and the Nashville Banner reported that he told detectives he had killed the women two years earlier while living in the house. He ultimately received two life sentences for the murders and died in prison in 2004. A notice from Metro Nashville Police likewise describes the confession as covering the killings and burial of the women in the basement.
The DNA Science Behind the Breakthrough
Cases like Gordon's and Cummings's are part of a broader wave of resolutions powered by forensic investigative genetic genealogy, a technique the Nashville Banner describes as potentially useful across the stack of unidentified-remains cases Metro's Cold Case Unit is working through. MNPD Cold Case Detective Matthew Filter told the Banner the department currently has 24 open cases involving unidentified human remains, and that since 2019 the department has identified the bodies in 12 such cases.
Metro Police Detective Andrew Davis told NewsChannel 5 the technology “has been able to give us a lot of answers to a lot of our unidentified human remains cases as well as homicides.” The same report noted the process is costly, often running more than $7,500 per case, and that Othram Lab, which has partnered with Metro Police on nearly a dozen cases, says it has worked on at least 30 unsolved cases from Tennessee. NewsChannel 5 also reported that Nashville police had recently identified Philip Sydnor, Yadezia Jones and Marcus Rutledge in separate cases within the previous two months.
