South Carolina’s 38 Year Cold Case Was Just SHATTERED by a Buried Gun –
Beaufort County authorities arrest a suspect in the 1987 killing of Margie Shuler. She was found shot in the laundry room of the Palmetto Apartments near Burton. Deputies say 76-year-old Cortez Lake is charged with murder. He would have been 38 years old at the time of the killing. >> On the evening of November 1st, 1987, a 12-year-old girl walked outside her apartment in Burton, South Carolina, looking for her mother.
She crossed the grounds toward the complex’s laundromat, where her mother had gone to fold a load of clothes about half an hour earlier. Her mother lay near the building beneath a tree on the pavement in a pool of blood. She had been shot. Deputies found a second trail of blood at the scene, separate from the victim’s.
The shooter had been wounded during the attack, and his blood marked the pavement as he walked away from the building. By morning, deputies had called every hospital from Savannah to Columbia. Nobody had come in with a gunshot wound. The blood he left behind sat in evidence for 38 years before anyone could read it. Her name was Margit Gergovich Shuler.
She was 34, a cardiac nurse. She had moved from Hungary to the United States in 1982 with her husband, Josef, a Navy Corpsman stationed at Parris Island. The family lived at the Palmetto Apartments on Harding Street in Burton, about 50 ft from the laundromat. In November of 1987, the Navy had deployed Josef to San Diego, leaving Margit and their 12-year-old daughter at the apartment alone.
Margit told her daughter she was going to do laundry and walked to the laundromat, a small building with coin-operated machines. Most of the apartments had their lights on and their doors closed. She did not come back. The daughter waited in the apartment, 10 minutes, and then 20. When enough time had passed that the wait stopped feeling normal, the girl went outside to find her mother.
Deputies from the Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office arrived just before 8:45. An autopsy performed the next day at the Medical University of South Carolina determined that Margit had died of severe blood loss from a single gunshot wound. The examiner placed the time of death between 8:15 and 8:45 that evening and also found that she had been sexually assaulted.
Deputies secured the scene and read what was on the ground. Two things told them what had happened. The first was a trail of Margit’s blood that ran from inside the laundromat to the base of the tree. Margit had been shot inside the building and had crawled out. The pattern of drops and stains marked her path across the pavement, the distance she had moved before she collapsed.
The second trail was the one that mattered. A separate line of blood led away from the laundromat in the opposite direction toward the far end of the apartment units. Investigator Bob Bromage, a retired major who had spent years on the Sheriff’s Cold Case Unit, later put the distance at 100 to 200 yards in the direction of Battery Creek Park.
Investigators came to believe the bullet that struck Margit had ricocheted off something inside the laundromat and hit the shooter. Whether that was right, whether Margit had cut him during her fight, or whether the firearm had malfunctioned, the trail of his blood gave detectives a biological record. He had bled enough as he walked that his loss had to have been substantial.
In the days that followed, deputies called every hospital that could have received him. They reached out to Charleston, Savannah, and Columbia. South Carolina hospitals were required by law to report any gunshot wound treatment to law enforcement, so a walk-in would have flagged. Nobody had come in with a gunshot wound within a 36-to-48-hour window.
Wherever the shooter had gone, he had not gone to a hospital. Deputies swabbed the second trail and placed the samples in storage. The biological record they had on the man was as much as the science of the time could give them. Forensic DEA analysis existed in research laboratories, but it had not yet reached small sheriff’s offices in rural South Carolina.
The sheriff’s office worked the case through the fall of 1987 and into 1988. In any homicide investigation, detectives look at the spouse first. Josef Schuller was in San Diego at the time, and military travel records and base sign-in logs confirmed his alibi. He was cleared early. With the husband eliminated, detectives turned to the apartment complex.
The shooter had left the property on foot, not by vehicle, which meant he was a resident or visiting someone who lived there. Detectives went door-to-door at the complex and built a list of every man with access, including residents, guests, maintenance workers, and former tenants. They cross-referenced alibis, checked criminal records, and looked for any history of violence or sexual offenses.
PART 2 ‼️
They also looked at men who had moved out in the days or weeks after November 1st. A sudden departure could mean something. By the end of 1988, the case had stalled. Every lead had been followed, and every name on the list had come back clean enough to release. Two years after the killing, in 1989, construction workers were excavating a site for a new hotel on Highway 21 near Robert Smalls Parkway.
The site was being graded for the foundation. During the work, one of the crew unearthed something from the dirt. It was a pistol. A .22 caliber French-made semi-automatic buried and forgotten. The site was about a mile and a half from the Palmetto Apartments. Detectives sent the pistol for ballistics testing, and the results came back conclusive.
Rifling marks on the bullet recovered from the scene matched the barrel of the buried gun. A shell casing the deputies had found on the pavement outside the laundromat in 1987 also matched. The pistol was the weapon used to kill Margaret Shuler. The killer had taken the weapon with him when he left the complex, traveled a short distance on Highway 21, and buried it.
Whether he did that on the same night or in the days that followed was never determined. Beaufort County sits in the low country surrounded by rivers, marshes, and tidal creeks. A gun thrown into any of those waterways would have disappeared. Instead, he chose dirt at a construction lot, expecting the site to be built over and the pistol to stay underground permanently. It almost did.
Two years and a hotel foundation were what separated the gun from never being found. The discovery gave detectives a physical chain. They had the gun that fired the shot and the genetic material of the man who fired it. What they still did not have was a name. The case went cold. As forensic technology advanced, the sheriff’s office returned to the second trail.
In 2005, a lab analyzed the biological material and developed a full DNA profile of an unknown male. The profile went into CODIS, the FBI’s national genetic database, which holds profiles from people who have been convicted of qualifying offenses or booked on certain charges. If a sample from a crime scene matches one in the system, it flags the connection.
The Shuler profile returned no match in CODIS in 2005. Over the years that followed, every original person of interest was eliminated either by voluntarily submitting a sample or by appearing in the database through later convictions. None of them matched. Each year, as new offenders were entered into CODIS, the system ran the Shuler profile against them.
The hits never came. Marget’s daughter had been 12 the night her mother was killed, and she grew up without her. She graduated from school, married, and had children in the years that followed. For nearly four decades, she waited for the answer to come. She was 50 years old when the name finally arrived.
Josef Shuler left the Navy in 1988, the year after his wife was killed. He stayed in Beaufort County. The family did not move back to Hungary or to another state. He raised their daughter and built a life less than 10 miles from the apartment complex where Marget had died. They lived with the knowledge that her killer had never been identified and that the man could still be nearby.
They had moved to the United States for a better life. Marget had died inside the country that was supposed to be the safer one. Josef has said since the arrest that he has often thought back on the decision to leave Hungary. He has said, “If the family had never moved to the United States, Marget might still be alive.
” Their grandchildren never met their grandmother. Marget had been 34 when she died, and by the time her killer had a name, she had been dead longer than she had been alive. For 38 years, the case file passed through the sheriff’s office. Detectives who had worked the case in 1987 retired and handed it off. Newer detectives picked it up, read the notes, and reached the same dead ends. Sheriff P.
- Tanner had taken office in 1999 and made cold cases a priority for the department. He created a cold case committee of retired law enforcement and civilians, a group that met regularly to pick at unsolved files from any angle it could find. Bromage said the committee had solved four cases since it began and reached a partial resolution in another.
The Shuler case was among the oldest unsolved killings in Beaufort County and the committee kept coming back to it year after year. In 2019, the office sent the biological material from the crime scene to Parabon NanoLabs, a forensic laboratory in Virginia that had built its reputation on extracting usable profiles from samples too old or too degraded for traditional analysis.
The material was 32 years old. It had been collected from pavement, sealed, and stored for more than three decades. Parabon used a process called forensic grade genome sequencing to develop a full genetic profile from the sample. The lab then searched public genealogical databases for partial matches, looking for relatives of the unknown contributor.
Traditional databases like CODIS search for exact matches among known offenders. Genetic genealogy works the other way, searching for relatives, cousins, aunts, uncles, anyone who has uploaded their own genetic data to a public database and who shares enough markers to indicate a familial link. Those partial matches are the starting point.
From there, genealogists build a family tree and work backward until a single person fits. The lab also generated composite sketches of the suspect through phenotype prediction, a technique that estimates physical characteristics like eye color, hair color, and facial structure from genetic data. The result was not a photograph. It was a pair of computer-generated approximations, one showing the man at age 25 and one at age 55.
For the first time in 32 years, investigators had a face to compare to the profile, even if it was only an estimate. The sheriff’s office released those sketches publicly in September of 2019, asking anyone who recognized the face to call in. Local news outlets ran the images, and they were posted to public databases used to track unidentified suspects.
The tips that came back over the weeks that followed did not lead to a name. The genealogy results went to a volunteer on the cold case committee. The volunteer was not a detective or a lab technician. He was a civilian who had signed on to help the department with unsolved cases and who had the patience to spend months tracing family trees.
The volunteer did that work. He started from the list of partial DNA matches Parabon had returned and built outward from there, tracing lines of descent and marriage across generations, matching names to dates to locations, and cross-referencing census records and public documents. Some branches led to dead ends.
Others led to people who had never lived in South Carolina. He checked state records, pulled birth certificates, and confirmed death dates. The work took countless hours, per the sheriff’s office. The volunteer kept returning to the Shuler family tree week after week until the branches converged at one person. He cross-checked dates, military records, and addresses against what the case file already contained, and the match held.
By the time he had a name to give to the sheriff’s office, he had checked enough of the lineage to be confident in the conclusion. He passed the name to Bramage. His identity was not released publicly, in keeping with the department’s practice for civilian volunteers. In the spring of 2025, Bramage and Detective Drayson went to his house.
The man was 76 years old, retired, and had been living quietly in Beaufort County his whole adult life. When the detectives tried to ask him about the killing on Harding Street, he refused to answer their questions and would not provide a sample. According to Bromage, Lake did not seem rattled by the visit, only unwilling to talk. The conversation was short.
The detectives left without what they had come for, but they had seen him in person and were now certain the family tree work had taken them to the right address. The investigators went to a circuit court judge and obtained a search warrant to compel a DEA sample, which they then submitted to the Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office Forensic Services Laboratory.
The judge had granted the warrant on the strength of the genealogy work. According to Bromage, the analyst called him back a few days later and asked him if he was going out for a lottery ticket. The DNI from the warrant sample was a perfect match to the unknown male profile that had been sitting in the system since 2005, the one developed from the blood the shooter had left on the pavement at the Palmetto Apartments.
After nearly four decades, the second trail had a name. On November 18th, 2025, Beaufort County investigators served an arrest warrant for murder. His name was Cortez Sabino Lake. Lake was 76 years old. In November of 1987, he had been roughly 38, four years older than Margaret. He was originally from Illinois and he had enlisted in the United States Navy, which stationed him at Parris Island.
He was a Navy corpsman, the same role Margaret’s husband Josef held, and he worked in a dental clinic on the base. Josef had no recollection of crossing paths with Lake during their time there. What investigators disclosed was where Lake lived in 1987. He had an apartment in the same complex as Margaret Shuler on Harding Street in Burton.
Lake’s unit sat between 600 and 800 feet from the laundromat. Margaret’s was about 50 feet. They were neighbors, and Lake had access to the same laundromat where Margaret went to fold laundry on the last night of her life. Investigators served the warrant at Lake’s home in Beaufort County, and he went into custody at the Beaufort County Detention Center.
The arrest came 38 years and 17 days after the killing. The day after, the Sheriff’s Office held a press conference with Sheriff Tanner speaking alongside Bromage. Tanner told reporters that Lake had been hiding in plain sight for 38 years. There was no perfect case and no perfect crime, the Sheriff said, and law enforcement had to use the skills it had.
The future of the work was in science and technology. He thanked the cold case team and the volunteer who had spent months on the family tree work. After his discharge from the Navy in 1988, Lake stayed in the area. He took a job at Beaufort Memorial Hospital as a respiratory therapist and worked there for more than 30 years before retiring.
He lived with a woman in the area. His criminal record was almost empty, and the co-workers and neighbors who had known him as a quiet respiratory therapist for three decades had no reason to think anything was unusual. Both Tanner and Bromage spoke about the possibility that the Shuler killing was not Lake’s only crime.
“From experience,” Bromage said, “the person they had arrested was often not a one-and-done. There was a good chance,” he said, “there were other things out there to find, especially given how long Lake had lived in the area without anyone connecting him to the killing on Harding Street.” He said he would especially like to talk to anyone who had lived at the Palmetto Apartments in 1987, people who might still have something useful to share.
Even small recollections after nearly four decades could matter. Tanner addressed the same point more broadly, asking anyone with a personal story involving Cortez Lake to come forward, whatever decade it traced back to. Anyone with information was asked to contact the Sheriff’s Office directly or to submit a tip anonymously through Crime Stoppers of Beaufort County.
Romage also said he had updated Josef Schuller with the new details. Josef was thankful after 38 years that someone had finally found her killer. The killing had devastated his life and his daughter’s, Romage told reporters, and the family had been carrying the impact for decades. On December 3rd, 2025, Lake’s attorney filed a motion asking the court to reconsider his bond.
On December 12th, a circuit court judge named Robert J. Bonds granted that request and set bond at $100,000. Lake’s family and a local bonding company posted the amount that same evening, just after 5:00 in the afternoon. He walked out of the Beaufort County Detention Center the same night. The conditions of his release placed him on house arrest from 8:00 in the evening to 6:00 in the morning, barred him from contact with Margaret’s family, and barred him from possessing firearms.
During the day, he was free to move about the county. On January 29th, 2026, a Beaufort County grand jury indicted him on murder charges. Lake is out of custody and awaiting trial. For 38 years, Lake had lived in Beaufort County without anyone in law enforcement ever asking him a question about Margaret Schuller.
He had never been a person of interest, and his name had never appeared in any case file. The blood he left on the pavement sat in a storage locker. The pistol he buried was pulled from the dirt 2 years after the crime. Neither piece of evidence pointed at him for nearly four decades. None of it carried his name.
It took a laboratory in Virginia, a genealogical database, and a volunteer with the patience to follow a family tree to its end. Lake is at home tonight, sleeping in his own bed. Marget has been dead 38 years. A woman walked to the laundromat on a November evening in 1987. Her daughter went looking for her when she did not come back.
The man who shot her left his own blood on the ground, and it took 38 years to read it. If this case stayed with you, leave your thoughts in the comments. More solved cases in the playlist.
