Music was a thread in Stevie Borders’ short life.
When she was born in Macomb just before Labor Day weekend in 1982, Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” ruled the singles chart and Fleetwood Mac’s “Mirage” was the No. 1 album. At the center of Fleetwood Mac was Stevie Nicks, whose debut solo album “Bella Donna” from the previous year was still riding high.
As Stevie Nicks' rich and raspy voice poured from car radios and cassette tapes in the waning days of that Midwestern summer, Daryl and Donna Borders of Bushnell already knew what they were going to name their daughter and firstborn child.
“I’ll never forget when the nurse asked what's her name, we said Stevie. And they were like, oh no, no, no — you got to have something proper,” Donna said. “Okay, Stephanie. But she was always Stevie from day one.”
Donna said Stevie would listen to The Beatles as a baby in her rocking seat. She grew up in a house where the soundtrack to life was the music of the 1960s and 1970s — and new music as it came out.
“When she was a little girl, she used to say Tina Turner was her girlfriend and Huey Lewis was her boyfriend,” Donna said.
Stevie would grow up to have a beautiful singing voice of her own. When she performed in a variety show in high school, the petite, dark-haired girl went big, belting out Janis Joplin’s “Mercedes Benz” in a feather boa Donna bought her for the occasion.
“Everybody was like, wow,” Donna said. “She didn't even hardly stand five foot tall, but she was full of life.”
Dancing in the hail
Outside of her parents’ Bushnell home, Stevie had a loving extended family that was deeply involved in her life. She was close with Donna’s parents. On her dad’s side, she was in the middle of 11 Borders cousins in a tight-knit family that religiously attended the Cornerstone Music Festival held near Bushnell from 1991 to 2012, and they all got together multiple times a year.
Members of the Borders family interviewed for this story remember Stevie as a bright, outgoing girl who was always grinning. They remember her as someone who grew up surrounded by music, who loved to sing and dance, and had a beautiful, high singing voice. They say she was a good student who was well-liked by her peers, sang in the choir at school, went to church camp every summer, and was part of the Rainbow Girls service organization that volunteered at the Macomb hospital.
As a child, Stevie would often spend weekends with her Borders grandparents in Bushnell. When she got older, she’d go visit her dad’s brother and his wife – Curt and Diane Borders – and their kids in the Quad Cities over summer and holiday breaks.
“She was just adorable and sweet,” Diane said. “She craved attention and loved anything positive.”
One memory of Stevie as a child stands out to Diane, and the moment was captured in a photograph. Stevie and two cousins are in the driveway during a hailstorm. Stevie is in the middle, almost framed by the hail that’s falling around her, with one arm outstretched and a giant grin on her face.
“It's just her dancing in the hail,” Diane said. “That's probably my most fond memory.”
Stevie could also be a bit mischievous, one time mixing all the shampoo and conditioner together with her cousin, Conza Borders, while on one of those visits to Curt and Diane’s house. Conza is a few years younger than Stevie. She recalls growing up with a happy, laughing cousin.
“She was very silly. I remember her giggle. I will never forget her giggle,” Conza said. “When my older brother was around, it was just his goal to get her to laugh as much as he could because it was so silly. It just made everyone else laugh when she was giggling.”
When they were older, Conza and Stevie would sneak off to listen to music together.
“She loved Counting Crows. I remember that. Hootie and the Blowfish,” Conza said. “There are certain songs when they come on, she's who I think of.”
Curt’s daughter Michelle Borders was 12 years older than Stevie, so Michelle sometimes felt more like an aunt than a cousin to her. Family photos show a young Stevie often sitting on a teenaged Michelle’s lap at family gatherings.
“I babysat for her all through high school. So I was pretty close to her in that respect. Took a lot of care of her,” Michelle said. “Sweet, sweet baby. Always smiling, always happy, always just wanted attention. She went to anybody.”
When Stevie was 17, she got pregnant and dropped out of Bushnell-Prairie City High School. After giving birth, she was encouraged by her parents to give the baby up for adoption. At that time, Michelle was a married mother of three young boys living in Bushnell. Michelle and her husband at the time decided to adopt Stevie’s baby, and went through the legal process to do so.
“Who we adopted the baby from was never a secret,” Michelle said. “I told her, you’re always welcome. You can come over any time you want.”
The adoption was finalized long before Stevie went missing.
September to May
Stevie Borders’ early September birthday often overlapped with Labor Day weekend celebrations. That was true in 2000, when the whole Borders family got together for a Labor Day hog roast in Bushnell the weekend that Stevie turned 18.
It would be Stevie’s last time getting together with her extended Borders family.
“I think she was kind of happy at that party,” cousin Michelle said.
In a photograph from that day, she is holding the baby she gave birth to earlier that year. Her dark hair is cut short and it’s parted on the side. Her ears are double-pierced and she’s wearing a hemp choker necklace – which were popular in the day – and a metal, beaded necklace some family members had never seen her wear before.
“I remember that necklace she had on was not her,” Michelle said. “It just wasn’t her style.”
Stevie’s parents and younger brother would last see her the following weekend. Sept. 9, 2000, was a Saturday, and one week to the day since Stevie turned 18. Donna Borders said she was already in bed that night when her daughter yelled up the stairs that she was going out with a friend.
“See you later. We're going to go listen to music. Because one of the bars in town had a band,” Donna said.
Stevie did not come home that night. She did not come home the next day, or the day after that. Donna said that wasn’t entirely out of character, as Stevie sometimes stayed with friends or a boyfriend.
“We gave it a few days before panic set in. And when days turned into weeks, it was like, something's wrong,” Donna said. “We tried filing a missing persons report. We were told, well, she's an adult. She's just taking off. She’ll get in contact with you sooner or later.”
By October, when Stevie didn’t call or come home for her little brother’s birthday, they knew something was very wrong. Vance was born to Daryl and Donna five years after Stevie.
“They were inseparable,” Donna said. “She would never, never have done that. She would never miss his birthday."
The Bushnell Police Department could not locate records related to Stevie being reported missing that fall. In a voicemail left for TSPR following a Freedom of Information Act request, the city’s current police chief said some records from 1999 to 2001 were damaged due to a problem with the roof at city hall.
As weeks turned into months and word spread to Stevie’s extended family, concern grew about her whereabouts and her well-being. Curt and Donna Borders attended church with an Illinois State Police MEG Unit officer. So Diane told him their niece, Stevie, was missing, and they started receiving some guidance on what to do next. By the end of 2000, there was an official investigation into Stevie’s disappearance.
Stevie’s family wants to dispel any notion that people weren’t looking for her. There were missing person fliers all over McDonough County with her face on them. Family members were knocking on doors trying to get any information about where Stevie was — or what had happened to her. Diane called it a time of madness and chaos for the family.
“There's no describing the emotions that went on between September and May. There's the franticness, the dread, the explaining to your children,” Diane said.
Meanwhile, dark rumors began to fly. Between Christmas and New Year’s, a friend told Michelle they knew someone who knew what happened, but that person was afraid to talk to authorities for fear of retribution from those responsible for Stevie’s death. Someone told law enforcement in a nearby county in early 2001 that Stevie’s body was in a pond near Hermon. Someone else told Donna that her daughter’s body was buried under a garage.
“You have to shut some of it out because some of the stories I heard were horrific. But that's how small-town gossip works,” Donna said. “And there was a lot of gossip.”
Donna was also dealing with her elderly father, Stevie’s maternal grandfather, being ill during that time. He died in April of 2001, just weeks before Stevie’s body would be found.
“The saddest thing I ever had to do was when he was dying, telling him he would never see her again,” Donna said.
Body found near Avon
Twin Bridge Road is only a few miles long. It’s narrow and almost all gravel, except for the steel and concrete bridges where it crosses Swan Creek northwest of Avon and the Spoon River closer to St. Augustine — and except for a few small patches of pavement in front of the few farmhouses and outbuildings that stand along it.
May 18, 2001, was a Friday. Around 7:30 that night, authorities found the body of a white female at the bottom of a well in a wooded area along Twin Bridge Road, after bringing in excavating equipment. It would be weeks before the badly decomposed body was identified as Stevie Borders through DNA analysis, though the body was found in what Stevie was last seen wearing – a red shirt, black skirt, and black boots.
Illinois State Police and sheriff’s departments from four counties — Fulton, Knox, McDonough, and Warren — were on the scene when the body was found and were part of the initial investigation. Those four counties almost converge in the area where Stevie’s body was found. In a matter of eight or so miles, you can pass from McDonough County into Fulton County and on to Knox County along Illinois Route 41, with Warren County just to the west. Twin Bridge Road is actually right along the Fulton and Warren county line.
According to news reports at the time, the tip leading authorities to the well came from Knox County. So the teenage girl who went missing from McDonough County was found near the Fulton and Warren county line after that tip was received in Knox County. It was later determined that the investigation into her death would be conducted by Fulton County and Illinois State Police.
The DNA test results that confirmed the body in the well was Stevie were returned a month later. Toxicology studies had been completed at that time and were sent to the pathologist conducting the autopsy. Stevie was buried in Bushnell later that summer following a service at Martin-Hollis Funeral Home. It would be another couple of months before her family knew the cause of death, and they are still waiting for someone to be held accountable.
Donna Borders has never gone out to where her daughter’s body was found at the bottom of that well off that narrow gravel road.
“I can't even go out to the cemetery sometimes. It's hard,” she said. “My mother always said, a parent should never bury a child.”
Adverse effects of cocaine
While lab and autopsy reports in Stevie’s death have not been released, Trooper Joshua Robinson, a spokesperson for Illinois State Police, told TSPR that pathologist L.W. Blum determined Stevie’s death was due to “adverse effects of cocaine.”
That’s a broader term than cocaine toxicity or cocaine intoxication, or what people call an overdose. A death from adverse effects of cocaine means the drug caused fatal reactions in the body, but it does not imply that a high, toxic, or overdose-level of cocaine was detected post-mortem.
A Fulton County coroner’s jury convened in September 2001 and accepted the pathologist’s findings about the cause of death. According to a news report, the coroner’s jury deliberated for less than ten minutes before ruling that the manner of death — whether it was a homicide or not — could not be determined at that time. The coroner’s jury then referred the case back to law enforcement for further investigation.
Curt and Diane Borders — Stevie’s uncle and aunt — were in the courtroom in Lewistown that day. Diane remembers the reading of Stevie’s cause of death — hearing the words “adverse effects of cocaine” and learning that the death was drug-related.
“It wasn’t as if she was full of them,” Diane said. “It sounded more like she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was very confusing and bewildering. We walked away saying, that says nothing.”
Law enforcement would classify the case as a homicide, which remains part of an open investigation to this day, as does the concealment of Stevie’s body in the well on Twin Bridge Road.
“In the absence of other injuries or diseases, this was deemed a drug induced homicide,” ISP spokesperson Robinson said. “Borders' body was placed in the well after her death, in an apparent attempt to conceal her body. This is part of the active investigation.”
State police also say that persons of interest were identified in the case. Robinson said a complication in solving the homicide was that someone who initially was cooperating with authorities stopped doing so.
“A press release of the discovery of Stevie’s body was put in a Knox County area newspaper,” Robinson said in an email to TSPR. “When the article ran that her body had been found, it allegedly caused a Confidential Informant to stop cooperating with the investigation.”
Illinois State Police say they will investigate new leads in the drug-induced homicide of Stevie Borders and the concealment of her body. Anyone with new information is asked to contact the Division of Criminal Investigations Zone 4 Macomb Major Crimes Work Unit at (217) 782-4750 or ISP.CRIMETIPS@illinois.gov.
Operation Trapline
Drug-induced homicide is a Class X felony in Illinois, which is the most serious class of offense other than first-degree murder. The charge was first added to the state’s criminal code in 1989 amid the crack cocaine epidemic and the War on Drugs. The charge, which carries a sentence of 15 to 30 years in prison, can be brought against anyone who delivers a controlled substance to another person who dies after consuming the drug.
That doesn’t mean that an exchange of money has to occur for it to be considered a drug-induced homicide. Whether Stevie Borders willingly consumed drugs after leaving her parents’ home on the evening of Sept. 9, 2000, was plied with them, or consumed them in any other scenario, whoever provided the drugs to her is liable for her death under this law.
While Stevie’s death was attributed to adverse effects of cocaine, a rapidly growing illicit drug concern in west central Illinois at the time was methamphetamine production. Homegrown drug operations called clandestine labs had snaked up from southern Illinois and Missouri. Meth “cooks” were producing the potent drug by combining over-the-counter cold medicine containing ephedrine and pseudoephedrine with other readily available chemicals, like anhydrous ammonia or lithium from batteries.
By the summer of 1999, anhydrous ammonia thefts were on the rise in McDonough County and law enforcement officials were warning retailers to be on the lookout for suspicious purchases of meth-making materials, though it would be years before the sale of meth precursors such as cold medicine containing ephedrine and pseudoephedrine would be strictly regulated by law. In 1999, there were 125 clandestine meth lab related seizures in Illinois, according to DEA data. In 2004, there were more than 800.
With easy access to precursors and materials readily available in agricultural communities, methamphetamine production proliferated in rural areas, including west central Illinois, in the early 2000s. The epidemic ravaged small towns, straining local police forces and affecting many families. Small towns like Avon were early epicenters of the home-cooker meth era. Three men were even arrested for stealing anhydrous ammonia from a Warren County farm on 40th Avenue, which connects to Twin Bridge Road in rural Avon, while Stevie’s body was in that well.
In late 2001, the U.S. Department of Justice announced a new task force to help state and local agencies stamp out meth production in Fulton and McDonough counties. It was called Operation Trapline. In the coming years, dozens of people from Fulton, McDonough, and other west central Illinois counties would be indicted on federal meth charges — and serve time in federal prison.
Available records in Borders’ death
Authorities were tight-lipped about the investigation into Stevie Borders’ death after her body was discovered in 2001. Today, some local agencies have no records related to it at all. Requests sent to the Knox, McDonough, and Warren sheriff’s departments returned no reports related to the discovery of Stevie’s body, although all three agencies were on scene at the time, according to news reports.
Other agencies have records, but declined to release them. Illinois State Police answered emailed questions about the case but denied TSPR’s FOIA request for records related to Stevie’s disappearance and death, saying the release of them could interfere with the investigation.
The Fulton County Sheriff’s Office declined to release case statements and lab reports, citing the same exemption under the state’s FOIA laws — that disclosure of the records could interfere with the investigation. But the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office did release several supplemental case reports that reveal information never previously reported about the investigation into Stevie’s death. It’s also information Stevie’s family didn’t previously know.
In early 2002, a Fulton County grand jury investigated potential criminal actions related to Stevie’s death. While grand jury proceedings are strictly secret under state law, a police report documenting the chain of custody for evidence considered by that grand jury is public record.
In the report, an officer documents receiving an envelope of telephone records of suspects, whose names are redacted. The telephone records from July, August, and September of 2000 had been requested by the grand jury investigating Stevie’s death. The officer also reports turning them over to Illinois State Police for further investigation.
Given the secrecy of grand jury proceedings and that no indictment was returned, it’s not clear what charges prosecutors were pursuing at that time, only that the grand jury was investigating Borders’ death and requested those phone records.
Another report reveals investigators traveled to Terre Haute, Ind., in June of 2004 after an inmate at a federal prison there sent a letter to the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office. The inmate wrote that he had been cellmates with someone for around two weeks earlier that year and, as a result, had information about a homicide. The inmate hoped there would be a trial where he could testify in exchange for some down departure on his own sentence. Investigators from Fulton County and Illinois State Police interviewed that witness and a suspect in Stevie’s case who was a federal inmate at that prison at the time. Names and details of those interviews are redacted in the report provided to TSPR.
Five years later, a state police investigator again traveled to Indiana to interview someone who claimed to have information on a homicide that occurred in western Illinois. This time, it was to the Vanderburgh County jail in Evansville, 110 miles south of that federal prison in Terre Haute. A man in custody there then shared what he knew about the case. Names and details of the interview are also redacted in that March 2009 report.
Collateral damage
In the months prior to her disappearance, Stevie had given birth to a child and given the child up for adoption. Her cousin Michelle Borders believes that Stevie was going through some changes that summer, not just with her fashion choices but perhaps with the weight of the last year of her life.
“I think she was probably dealing with some postpartum depression that goes undiagnosed a lot of times,” Michelle said.
On the refrigerator in Michelle’s home hangs the last known photograph of Stevie, the one where she’s holding the baby at the Labor Day hog roast days before she left her parents’ house to hear that band in a Bushnell bar.
In the early years of the investigation, Michelle would receive regular updates on the case from an Illinois State Police Master Sergeant, until he passed away in 2010. Since then, she’s heard nothing from law enforcement, but has tried to piece together narratives and has tried to understand what happened to Stevie.
“We think that she just wanted attention and she got it from the wrong set of people,” Michelle said.
Donna Borders believes her daughter had experimented with drugs, although not cocaine, as a teenager, but said she stopped when she got pregnant. At the time of Stevie’s disappearance, she had a pending misdemeanor charge of possession of drug paraphernalia in McDonough County, and also had been ticketed for a curfew violation. But after dropping out of high school and having the baby, Stevie had earned her GED at Spoon River College and was thinking about the future.
“She wanted to go on to school and do something with kids. She either wanted to be a teacher or work in a daycare,” Donna said.
In the years after Stevie’s disappearance and death, her parents would divorce. Her father Daryl — a Vietnam veteran — died in 2014. Donna and Stevie’s brother Vance still live in the Bushnell home where Stevie grew up listening to music. When some songs come on these days, they are hard for Donna to hear.
In the dining room, there’s still a pencil sketch of sci-fi orbs drawn by Stevie hanging on the wall.
“Besides singing, she was an artist,” Donna said.
Rumors and stories clouded by time still float through the little towns along that stretch of Route 41 in west central Illinois where four counties almost converge. The family has theories of what happened to Stevie. But in the absence of arrests and court proceedings, there’s no publicly available record documenting who gave Stevie the drugs that night, who was with her when she died, and who put her body in that well.
“She was collateral damage, basically. Her death was collateral damage," Donna said. “But she wasn’t something to be disposed of. She didn’t get in that well herself. Stevie was a person. Not disposable. And she had a family that loved her.”
The family has always believed that friends and associates of Stevie’s from that time know a lot more than they’ve said.
“The only way the guilty will get what they deserve is for you to start speaking out,” Donna wrote in a letter to the editor of the Macomb newspaper, published on Oct. 30, 2002. “I know some of you are fearful for your lives, but we are all at risk as long as those involved still walk free among us. If you really loved Stevie as much as you have told me, give her the peace and closure she deserves.”
Stevie’s family hopes that now, 25 years since they last saw her, the people who know what happened to her are ready to talk.
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