Update - Shane Workman

Three bones, some clothing, a lighter, and a pocketknife. Those were the items found by a duck hunter checking his blinds on July 25, 2021. It took almost exactly five years to put the pieces together, but on July 23, 2026, those bones were identified as belonging to Shane Workman, who had been missing from Lewistown, Pennsylvania since 2017. 

Shane’s disappearance was met with rumors of set-ups, murder, or a voluntary disappearance. Despite an influx of tips, his case went cold. Shane’s family never gave up on him though, and while they now know that he’s never coming home, they’re still fighting for answers. As his father, Mike Hewitt, said, 

“We don't have to look for him anymore just his killer.”

Anyone with information regarding Shane Workman’s disappearance is urged to contact Detective Det. Mary Woods at (717) 248-6716 Ext. 427. If you are interested in helping with volunteer efforts, please reach out to voicesforvanished@gmail.com or visit voicesforvanished.com.

Subscribe to Day by Day: True Crime Stories

Buy the ebook! - And Then They Were Gone: True Stories of Those Who Went Missing and Never Came Home

Submit a case

Find us everywhere

Get episodes early and ad-free on Patreon

Merch store

For a full list of our sources, please visit our blog

[SPEAKER_00]: Three bones, some clothing, a lighter and a pocket knife.

[SPEAKER_00]: Those are the items found by Duck Hunter checking his blinds on July 25th, 2021.

[SPEAKER_00]: It took almost exactly five years to put the pieces together, but on July 23rd, 2026, those bones were identified as belonging to Shane Workman, who'd been missing from Louis Tom Pennsylvania since 2017.

[SPEAKER_00]: Sheen's disappearance was met with rumors of setups, murder, or even a voluntary disappearance.

[SPEAKER_00]: Despite an influx of tips, his case went cold.

[SPEAKER_00]: Sheen's family never gave up on him, though, and while they now know that he's never coming home, they're still fighting for answers.

[SPEAKER_00]: As his father, my cue at said, quote, we don't have to look for him anymore, just as killer and quote.

[SPEAKER_00]: When a person goes missing, there's a special kind of pain in the not knowing.

[SPEAKER_00]: I want to tell you the stories that those who never came home.

[SPEAKER_00]: Today, I want to tell you the story of Shane Workman.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Conan Gallagher, and this is, and then they were gone.

[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome back everyone.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's just me today.

[SPEAKER_00]: This is, as you can imagine, an unexpected episode that we're going to record.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so ether does not with us right now.

[SPEAKER_00]: But I wanted to hop on and give you a mini update on Shane Workman.

[SPEAKER_00]: As I'm recording this, it's all just now happening, so I wanted to update you, even though, you know, we don't know a ton of information, but any time we get some sort of resolution in one of the cases that we've covered, like, it really means a lot to me, so I just wanted to share it with you.

[SPEAKER_00]: We covered Shane's case back in November of 2024, and I'm recording this right after it was announced that Shane's remains were discovered.

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, it's always good to have some sort of answer when it comes to a long-term missing person.

[SPEAKER_00]: Shane disappeared nine years ago in April, and finding his remains really brings up even more questions just because of the circumstances and what we do now.

[SPEAKER_00]: If you'd like to get a refresh on Shane's case, I've re-released our original episode.

[SPEAKER_00]: You can find it right below this one wherever you're listening right now.

[SPEAKER_00]: So, if you don't recall, I recommend doing that, but if you've listened to that, if you're up on the story, let's get into the update on Shane Workman.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, just as a quick refresher, here are the basic facts of the case.

[SPEAKER_00]: On the 9th April 25, 2017, Shane was with a woman named Kelly.

[SPEAKER_00]: They were over at his parents house where Shane was living at the time.

[SPEAKER_00]: They spent time upstairs together in Shane's room before leaving.

[SPEAKER_00]: Shane returned a short time later alone and told his dad Mike that someone had been following them down the alley.

[SPEAKER_00]: You didn't seem too freaked out by this though, and a few minutes later, he told us down that he was running to Sheets to get something to eat and asked if you wanted anything.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, for those of you who are not in this general geographic area, Sheets is a gas station that has made to order food as well.

[SPEAKER_00]: So that's where Sheet was going.

[SPEAKER_00]: It was close by.

[SPEAKER_00]: Mike said he didn't need anything, and Sheet walked out the door.

[SPEAKER_00]: but he never returned.

[SPEAKER_00]: After Louis Town Police got involved when he was reported missing, they pulled the security footage from that sheets, but Shane never showed up in any of it.

[SPEAKER_00]: Several searches followed, but no trace of Shane was found.

[SPEAKER_00]: Almost immediately, both police and the family were inundated with both tips and rumors.

[SPEAKER_00]: One prevalent rumor was that Shane, who had battled with drug addiction, owed money to the wrong people.

[SPEAKER_00]: His father, Mike, was told pretty early on that someone had picked him up that night and dumped him in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, which is about 60 miles away from Lewis Town.

[SPEAKER_00]: Other rumors, so that he was safe, but he was in hiding.

[SPEAKER_00]: And again, Shane, you know, was in from all accounts, active addiction at the time and there was talk that he had some legal issues.

[SPEAKER_00]: So people were thinking that he could be hiding either from the police or people he owed money to or something along those lines, but his family never thought that's what happened because Shane would have gotten in touch with them.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's what they always said.

[SPEAKER_00]: basically even with his issues like he never just went off the grid.

[SPEAKER_00]: He never stopped contacting people.

[SPEAKER_00]: He had a daughter who was, I believe, 14 at the time, who he loved.

[SPEAKER_00]: He was like so close with her and he wouldn't have just ghosted her, basically.

[SPEAKER_00]: As the years passed, Shane's family seemed to be more and more convinced that the answer to what happened on the night of April 25, 2017, laid with Kelly.

[SPEAKER_00]: Not only that, but they believed that she may have set Shane up.

[SPEAKER_00]: Mike talked about this in his 2023 interview with Fox 43 saying, quote, she's in jail now.

[SPEAKER_00]: That girl knows something.

[SPEAKER_00]: I know she does, but you can't force it.

[SPEAKER_00]: She can sit on that story for the rest of her life.

[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know how she can sleep.

[SPEAKER_00]: I know I can't sleep at night," and quote.

[SPEAKER_00]: Alicia, who's Shane's ex-girlfriend and the mother of their daughter, Alexis, has been passionately fighting for answers in Shane's case.

[SPEAKER_00]: Just one week before Shane's family was notified about his remains being identified, she posted on Facebook that she was still trying to get answers from Kelly.

[SPEAKER_00]: According to Alicia Kelly had agreed to sit down and talk to her, but every time she's reached out, Kelly just couldn't do it.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now this post that I got that information from was on Facebook and it was in response to yet another anonymous tip that had come through.

[SPEAKER_00]: Here's some information from that tip.

[SPEAKER_00]: According to the tipster, a woman she was in jail with around 2017 started talking about Shane's case.

[SPEAKER_00]: And this is what that woman said happened.

[SPEAKER_00]: quote, Shane became frightened in the car at the corner sheets when they got on the highway and he knew something was wrong.

[SPEAKER_00]: So basically what she's saying is that when Shane left his parent's house to go to sheets, he actually met up with people.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, it sounds like these are people he may be owed money to or had some involvement with that was drug related.

[SPEAKER_00]: So they convinced Shane to get in the car, but he quickly realized that this was not a good situation.

[SPEAKER_00]: So the tipster went on to say that the woman told her that, quote, he jumped out of the moving car and ran down over the highway and it took a few hours for the blank to find them.

[SPEAKER_00]: But when they did, they beat him to death, or so they thought, because they went back hours later, and he was still breathing.

[SPEAKER_00]: So they beat him some more and rolled him down over the bank.

[SPEAKER_00]: End quote.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, when she says the bank she means a river bank, and this river bank was allegedly somewhere where white flowers bloomed, that had been searched multiple times before.

[SPEAKER_00]: Based on what we know, because of their remains having been found, it doesn't sound as though they were found in an area that was searched before at all, in chains' case.

[SPEAKER_00]: But this story is similar to the ones that Alisha has heard.

[SPEAKER_00]: Alisha made another post on Facebook and according to her quote, I've heard so many stories from three black guys tried drowning him, Shane could fight and hard to they couldn't.

[SPEAKER_00]: So they had to shoot him to his body was dumped in the Susquehanna river, to he was buried along the river.

[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know what to believe anymore.

[SPEAKER_00]: End quote.

[SPEAKER_00]: I do need to point out that Kelly has spoken again a lot of this is on Facebook and if you've listened to our original episode on this, that was the theme of that episode as well.

[SPEAKER_00]: These people in Louis town have been posting extensively on Facebook about this case.

[SPEAKER_00]: And that's everybody from Sheen's friends, his family, to Kelly herself, to just, you know, rant to people who kind of know other folks in this story, it's been a lot.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so obviously, because it's all face, but posts none of it can be 100% verified.

[SPEAKER_00]: So you're looking at all these stories and you can believe them.

[SPEAKER_00]: You cannot, but my general sense from reading years and years of these posts is that there are definitely some people who have some knowledge of what actually happened that night.

[SPEAKER_00]: So while I wouldn't believe any one of these posts or stories or whatever fully, I think that's some of them do hold some measure of truth.

[SPEAKER_00]: So Kelly, like I said, Kelly herself has posted as well, and she's always denied being involved in Sheen's disappearance.

[SPEAKER_00]: And there are plenty of people in Sheen's life who do not believe her when she says that, but she has her defenders as well.

[SPEAKER_00]: As one Facebook user pointed out, maybe she truly doesn't know what happened to Shane.

[SPEAKER_00]: She was also an active addiction at the time and may truly not remember or really realize what happened on that night nine years ago.

[SPEAKER_00]: So what did happen to Shane?

[SPEAKER_00]: This is what we found out from the DNA dough project and the Lewis town police.

[SPEAKER_00]: On July 25, 2021, a duck hunter found three bones, two femurs in a tibia.

[SPEAKER_00]: On a rocky islet in the Susquehanna River, in Lancaster County, near Ealy Island, about sixty miles away from Lewis Town.

[SPEAKER_00]: Remember, one of the stories that Alicia had heard involved Shane being dumped in the Susquehanna River.

[SPEAKER_00]: While Ealy Island has never come up in anything that I've seen over the years, only three bones were found in that area.

[SPEAKER_00]: The Susquehanna runs right through Harrisburg, so the early story that Mike was told about Shane being taken to Harrisburg could also have some truth to it.

[SPEAKER_00]: In addition to the bones, the hunter found remnants of a pair of pants and a belt, along with a lighter and a pocket knife.

[SPEAKER_00]: The remains are examined, but as was just three bones, making an identification wasn't easy.

[SPEAKER_00]: An anthropologist from Elizabeth Town College examined them and reported that they belonged to a male.

[SPEAKER_00]: The limited information they had was then uploaded to Names.

[SPEAKER_00]: Louis' employees didn't initially key into these remains as possibly belonging to Shane.

[SPEAKER_00]: Instead, Uparallan township police believe that they might have belonged to one of their missing person's cases, so they had a rapid DNA test done.

[SPEAKER_00]: Unfortunately, that test came back inconclusive.

[SPEAKER_00]: Uparallan then used a cybergenic slab in the Pittsburgh area, which gave them back enough information to exclude their missing person.

[SPEAKER_00]: And this is when the DNA dough project became involved.

[SPEAKER_00]: They enlisted several labs and were able to create a viable sample from DNA extracted from the femur bone.

[SPEAKER_00]: The DNA dough project then used genetic genealogy to narrow down who these bones could belong to.

[SPEAKER_00]: Here's an excerpt from their press release that goes over the process.

[SPEAKER_00]: quote, they quickly discovered that some of the unidentified man's ancestors were from Abelachia, while others were Irish immigrants who settled in Philadelphia.

[SPEAKER_00]: As the research progressed, the team identified a couple from West Virginia as the great grandparents of the Susquehanna River, John Doe.

[SPEAKER_00]: Shortly thereafter, following just three weeks of research, they made a significant discovery.

[SPEAKER_00]: We were looking to our family of interest when we realized that one branch had relocated from Arizona to Pennsylvania, said Team Leader Monique Platt.

[SPEAKER_00]: The crucial breakthrough came just minutes later when we found a missing person report

[SPEAKER_00]: That missing person, of course, was Shane Workbin.

[SPEAKER_00]: On July 23, 2026, a DNA sample from Shane's mother could firm the match.

[SPEAKER_00]: Shane's family was notified on August 4, 2026.

[SPEAKER_00]: In their press release, Luz Town Police said that Shane's case is still an active and ongoing investigation.

[SPEAKER_00]: They said that they have evidence based on Shane's bone records

[SPEAKER_00]: While it doesn't sound like Shane's family has gotten the whole story over the years, it definitely sounds like they've been in contact with people who have real information about what happened on April 25th, 2017.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, police just have to follow up on that.

[SPEAKER_00]: If you listen to our original episode, you know that this case was brought to me by Ryan who runs voices for vanished.

[SPEAKER_00]: She has been working closely with Shane's family for years on this, and she actually just texted me, I got it literally right as I was coming down to record this.

[SPEAKER_00]: And she told me that they are going to be organizing and conducting ground searches in the Harrisburg area.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, this is going to take some time, it's a large area to be covered, and there are a lot of areas along the Susquehanna that are quite shallow, but there are also areas where it's quite wide, deeper, and with a faster flow.

[SPEAKER_00]: Basically, what they're going to try to do is they're trying to find more remains.

[SPEAKER_00]: We have three bones, and while that is enough to thankfully make the identification,

[SPEAKER_00]: We want to find the rest of Shane's remains so he can be returned to his family and put to rest properly.

[SPEAKER_00]: If anyone is in the area would be willing to help, they can reach out to them at Voices for Vanished at Gmail.com or through their website, VoicesForVanished.com.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'll also put those links in our show notes.

[SPEAKER_00]: Like I said, as I'm recording this, this is all just breaking news, but we will keep you updated on any major developments in Shane's case, and I sincerely hope that findings remain to brought his family some small measure of peace, and that they will get the answers and the justice that they're looking for.

[SPEAKER_00]: Anyone with information regarding Shane workman's disappearance is urged to contact Detective Mary Woods at 717-248-6716-extension-427.

[SPEAKER_00]: You can see all the sources for this episode all with photos and videos at our website and then they were gone.com.

[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for joining me for this update episode and we will see you here next week for a brand new episode.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then they were gone as hosted by Kona Gallagher and Ethan Fleck.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'll research writing and editing is done by me, Kona Gallagher.

[SPEAKER_00]: The music is the store, by Katza.

[SPEAKER_00]: Additional music is provided by Kai Engel.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then they were gone, is a little monster production.

[SPEAKER_00]: Hey, you can do it!