True Crime Cover Story is a partnership between 5 On Your Side and CrimeStoppers to try to get answers in unsolved cases.
March 26 still viciously lives inside Sharon Webb.
March 26. Year 2000.
Sharon's 18-year-old daughter and two guys she met through a mutual friend were walking towards a parked car outside apartments on Greer Avenue in Hillsdale.
On an oddly warm Sunday night, Cara Davenport sat inside the 1983 brown Pontiac to go watch a movie when she was shot in the head.
"A lot of people, you go to sleep, you have a nightmare. You wake up and begin your day," Webb said. "I walk around every day in a nightmare."
Investigators believe two people ran up to the car and started shooting, killing Cara- a Hazelwood West graduate and a former cheerleader for the city's minor soccer league, the St. Louis Storm.
It's been nearly 18 years since her daughter was murdered, and time itself does not bring healing nor closure.
"There's not a day that goes by that I don't cry," she said.
It's tears of grief and shock, tears that are the result of injustice for her child's death.
"Probably to this day if I would pick the phone up and hear someone say, 'Chief, how are you?,' I would recognize Sharon Webb's voice without having to be told who it was," St. Louis County Chief Jon Belmar said.
Belmar was the lieutenant for robbery and homicide when Cara Davenport was killed.
Her death still lives with him, too.
"We still owe Cara Davenport a debt. And we still need to find her killer," he said.
The two men who survived the shooting were both murdered later on.
Six months after Cara's death, James Rossell was shot and killed in Wellston. No one was arrested.
In 2006, Tyrease Edwards was also shot in Wellston.
A man named Travion Williams pled guilty to murdering Edwards. Police believe it had something to do with a dispute over narcotics.
"Those things complicate cases," Belmar said. "You have to ask yourself and evaluate that and ask yourself, 'How did that happen? Is there a link? Let's take a look at these things together.'"
Webb said Cara met Rossell and Edwards through a mutual friend who was also at the Hillsdale apartments when she was shot and killed. Cara's mother said that mutual friend is still alive and refused to take a polygraph test after the shooting, which Webb found suspicious.
Though there are no concrete leads so far, the nearly two decade murder investigation created a strong bond between Sharon Webb and Chief Belmar, two people determined to find justice for Cara.
"He's [Chief Belmar] been a light in all of this for me. There's nothing I asked for that he didn't help me do," Sharon Webb said. "He's always been there for me whenever I pick up the phone and call him."
Cara Davenport's family remembers her for her laughter, spirit and her ability to find the good in others.
If you have any information on this case, please call Crime Stoppers' anonymous tip line at 866-371-8477 for a reward up to $5,000.
