Joseph Anthony Bogue Jr. was 26 years old when he was killed in St. Louis. His body was found on Wednesday, May 11, 2011, and the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department investigated his death. The Washington Post's homicide database, which tracked killings in St. Louis through 2017, lists it as a homicide that remained open with no arrest.
Beyond his name, his age and that date, almost nothing about his death has been made public. No news story about the killing, obituary, memorial page or family fundraiser could be found for this account. He surely had family, friends and neighbors who remember who he was, but none of that has entered the public record.
Because so little has been released, even the basic circumstances remain unknown to the public. The record does not say how he was killed, whether he was attacked indoors or on the street, whether he knew the attacker, what time of day it happened, or whether he died at the scene or later at a hospital.
It does not say whether anyone else was hurt or whether investigators ever identified a suspect. The online listing for his case gives the date as the day his body was found, which leaves open whether he was killed that day or earlier.
An online case listing on CrimeTea, a site that catalogs unsolved killings, also lists Joseph Anthony Bogue Jr. as a murder victim and the case as active, with St. Louis Regional Crime Stoppers named as a contact. That listing adds no new details, but it shows the case was still counted among the city's open killings years later.
A few things stand out. He was white, at a time when the great majority of homicide victims in St. Louis were Black men, and he carried his father's name, as the "Jr." in the record shows. The suffix also means that searches for his name can turn up his father, which makes it harder to find any trace of the younger man's own life and of what happened to him.
The location recorded in the Post's database places his death in the city's central corridor, in the Midtown area, a mix of institutional buildings, apartments, businesses and busy streets not far from Saint Louis University. A place like that has steady foot and car traffic, and people who lived, worked or studied nearby in May 2011 may remember the police activity that followed.
St. Louis has long had one of the highest homicide rates of any large American city. The city recorded more than 100 homicides in every year of the early 2010s, and the yearly totals later climbed to 188 in 2015 and 205 in 2017. In many of those years, fewer than half of the city's killings ended in an arrest. Cases with few public details, like his, often faded from view quickly.
No arrest, criminal charge or court case connected to the death of Joseph Anthony Bogue Jr. could be found in news archives or public records. More than 15 years later, there is no public sign that anyone has been held responsible. Anyone who knew Joseph Bogue, who saw him in the days before his body was found, or who heard talk afterward about what happened to him, may be able to help. Even a small detail, such as a name overheard, a car seen leaving the area or a conversation remembered, can help detectives move a case forward. Anyone with information can call the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department Homicide Division at 314-444-5371, or call CrimeStoppers at 866-371-TIPS (866-371-8477), where tips can be anonymous.
