Jacqueline Sheehan disappeared in the early hours of April 15, 1998, after a night that began like hundreds before it. She had gone dancing with her boyfriend, Rodney Bice, and her mother at Suzie’s in Deltona, Florida. Friends later said she was in good spirits that night. She laughed, drank, danced, and for a few hours seemed free from the turbulence that had defined much of her relationship with Bice.
Fig.1 Jacqueline Sheehan disappeared in the early hours of April 15, 1998.
But when the couple returned to the Willow Park Apartments in Altamonte Springs, the atmosphere changed. According to investigators, the two argued over a car. Sometime around 2:30 a.m., Jacqueline stormed out of the apartment. Rodney Bice later claimed she walked to a nearby pay phone after leaving in anger. That was the last time anyone officially reported seeing her alive.
Fig.2 A bicyclist traveling near North Street in Longwood noticed a terrible odor drifting from a wooded area.
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Fig.4 Hidden beneath bushes and a Styrofoam panel was the decomposing body of 31-year-old Jacqueline Sheehan.
Five days later, a bicyclist traveling near North Street in Longwood noticed a terrible odor drifting from a wooded area. Hidden beneath bushes and a Styrofoam panel was the decomposing body of 31-year-old Jacqueline Sheehan. She was naked. No clothing or personal belongings were found nearby. The only item left with her body was a cheap ring investigators used to confirm her identity. Detectives determined she had not been killed where she was found. The cause of death was trauma to the head and neck.
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Fig.6 She was naked. No clothing or personal belongings were found nearby.
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To those who knew Jacqueline, the murder was incomprehensible. She worked as a waitress at Suzanne’s Oyster Reef & Pub and was remembered as outgoing, friendly, and energetic. Her best friend described her as someone who “got along with everybody.” Yet behind the image of a sociable young mother was a volatile relationship that detectives would spend years dissecting.
Jacqueline and Rodney Bice shared two children and had spent six years trapped in an unstable on-again, off-again relationship. Family members later described repeated violence between the pair. Jacqueline’s sisters told investigators she had suffered black eyes during ugly fights with Bice and had spoken openly about wanting to leave him. According to newly revealed discovery documents, Jacqueline feared Bice would eventually kill her. She reportedly told her former brother-in-law that if she were ever found dead, Rodney would be responsible. A friend later told police Jacqueline had confided, “Rodney is going to take my kids or he’s going to kill me,” only weeks before her death.
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Fig.10 The decomposing body of Jacqueline Sheehan.
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From the beginning, investigators were troubled by Rodney Bice’s behavior. Detectives Ray Parker, Lawrence Herron, and Bob Jaynes noted that he appeared vague, detached, and unemotional after Jacqueline’s body was found. He had waited five days before reporting her missing. Bice explained the delay by saying Jacqueline sometimes disappeared for days during cocaine binges. He claimed he became angry and threw away her possessions because he assumed she had left again. Yet toxicology reports later showed Jacqueline had no drugs in her system when she died.
Fig.13 Skeletonization of her head.
Fig.14 Her body showed signs of active decomposition.
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Bice admitted the relationship had been violent. He even told detectives his final words to Jacqueline before she vanished were: “Go right to hell.” Investigators also documented scratches on his arms and chest that were described as being consistent with injuries caused by briars, the same kind of vegetation surrounding the dump site where Jacqueline’s body had been concealed. Shortly after detectives searched the apartment and questioned him, Bice abruptly left town with the couple’s children in the middle of the night and traveled north.
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Fig.20 Skin slippage of the hand.
Despite mounting suspicions, detectives lacked enough evidence to secure a murder conviction. Years passed. Jacqueline’s children grew up. Rodney Bice remarried and attempted to rebuild his life while the case remained unresolved. But investigators never stopped watching him. They believed he would eventually reveal something only the killer could know. That moment may have come in March 2011 during a drunken phone argument between Bice and his father-in-law, Mark McGill. According to investigators, McGill shouted, “At least I didn’t kill my wife.” Bice allegedly responded: “Well, you got me there,” before hanging up the phone. Detectives considered the statement deeply incriminating.
Fig.21 The Willow Park Apartments in Altamonte Springs.
Fig.22 The apartment where Jacqueline Sheehan lived.
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The case began unraveling further when Bice’s wife cooperated with investigators and directed them to one of his longtime friends. That friend told police Bice had once said he intended to kill Jacqueline because her drug use made her neglect the children. He also claimed that months after the murder, Bice called him in desperation asking for help escaping to Boston, saying, “I need to get out of here before I get picked up for what I did.”
Detectives also believed Bice possessed knowledge that had never been made public. According to prosecutors, he knew Jacqueline’s body had been hidden beneath Styrofoam, a detail only investigators knew during the original investigation. That information became one of the cornerstones of the renewed case against him.
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In 2013, fifteen years after Jacqueline’s murder, Rodney Bice was finally arrested in New York and charged in connection with her death. For Jacqueline’s family, the arrest represented long-delayed validation after years of uncertainty and grief. Yet the ending would leave many disturbed.
Rather than face trial for murder, Bice eventually entered a no contest plea to aggravated battery. Prosecutors explained that evidentiary limitations made securing a murder conviction difficult after so many years. He received a sentence of three years in prison with credit for time already served, meaning he would spend only about two additional years behind bars. For many observers, the punishment seemed staggeringly light considering the brutality of the crime and the decades Jacqueline’s family spent waiting for justice.
Fig.31 Sheehan’s car.
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Even after the case, Bice continued to accumulate arrests. In 2018, he was charged in New York with criminal possession of a weapon, menacing, and attempted assault after allegedly throwing beer bottles at another man and attempting to strike him with a lacrosse stick. In 2022, he was arrested again for driving while intoxicated and aggravated unlicensed operation.
One of Sheehan’s sons, Nicholas Bice, was found dead in a homicide and apartment fire in Canandaigua, New York, in September 2017, he was 21-years-old.
Fig.35 Jacqueline Sheehan was 31-years-old.
Fig.36 Jacqueline Sheehan had two children with Bice.
Fig.37 Rodney Bice.
The murder of Jacqueline Sheehan remains one of those cases where investigators believed they knew the truth long before they could prove any part of it in court. The evidence painted a grim portrait of domestic violence escalating toward fatality, of warnings ignored until it was too late, and of a woman who feared exactly how her life would end. Her body was hidden in brush less than two miles from home, but the shadow of what happened to her stretched across decades.
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