Shannon Hughes

In the summer of 1987, Shannon Hughes, 18, and her husband, Scott, 20, were a young married couple starting their life together in the Roanoke area of Virginia. They had been married for just eight months. Shannon’s family remembers her as a loving person, small and petite at about 4-foot-11 and 95 pounds, but full of spunk. Her sister, Angela, recalled that you shouldn't let her size fool you. The young couple's future was violently stolen from them in a crime that would haunt their families and investigators for decades.

On the night of July 4, 1987, Shannon and Scott attended a holiday party in Montgomery County. They were last seen in the early morning hours of July 5. After leaving the party, the couple made a series of phone calls from a service station in Christiansburg, trying to arrange a ride back to Roanoke. It was the last time anyone ever heard from them. An initial search by investigators found no evidence of foul play, but the couple had vanished. For eight agonizing months, their families had no idea where they were or what had happened to them.

The painful mystery came to a grim end in March 1988. A surveying crew working along an embankment off Interstate 581 in Roanoke County discovered human remains. They were soon identified as Shannon and Scott Hughes. An autopsy revealed they had both been shot to death. Investigators believed the couple had been led down the embankment from the highway and killed along a creek at the bottom. Due to the long period of time the bodies had been exposed to the elements, much of the forensic evidence at the scene was lost.

The Virginia State Police and the Roanoke Valley Investigative Team pursued the case for years. A decade after the murders, in 1997, detectives announced they believed the murder weapon was a Ruger Blackhawk.357 revolver. They also stated their conviction that Shannon and Scott knew their killer and that the motive was likely revenge or anger. Police had a person of interest they were confident was responsible for the double homicide, but there was never enough evidence to secure a conviction in court. The case was reinvestigated in the 1990s, but law enforcement came to the same conclusion, lacking the evidence to bring charges.

For years, the families lived with the pain of not knowing who was responsible. Shannon’s sister Angela remembered wishing on every birthday for her sister to come back. After the bodies were found, a family member told a reporter, "It's a relief knowing where they are now, but it won't be over until we do know who's done this horrible thing." That complete closure would prove elusive.

As of March 2026, the case remains officially unsolved, as no one has ever been convicted of the murders. However, the family has received some measure of resolution. In recent years, a Virginia State Police special agent, Douglas Hubert, re-examined the cold case at the family's request. His investigation concluded that the person law enforcement had long believed was responsible for Shannon and Scott's deaths had since passed away. With no one left to prosecute, Agent Hubert met with the Hughes family to explain the investigation's findings and answer their questions, finally providing the answers they had sought for over three decades. He also returned some of Shannon's belongings, closing a painful chapter for a family that never gave up hope for the truth.