The Mary Stauffer Kidnapping Solved Case in Roseville
The Mary Stauffer kidnapping case is one of the most documented abduction cases in Minnesota history, a crime built on fifteen years of quiet obsession that erupted into fifty-three days of captivity, rape, and a murder that had nothing to do with the woman it was meant to silence.
In May 1980, thirty-six-year-old Mary Stauffer and her eight-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, known to the family as Beth, were abducted at gunpoint outside a Roseville, Minnesota beauty salon by a former student named Ming Sen Shiue.
What followed was a case that ended in conviction, but only after a six-year-old boy who happened to witness the abduction was killed, and only after Mary Stauffer herself found a way to free her daughter and herself from a locked closet.
Background
Mary Stauffer was a mathematics teacher who had spent part of her career at Alexander Ramsey High School in Roseville, teaching ninth-grade algebra. By 1980, she had left teaching, married, and was serving as a missionary with her husband and children in the Philippines, home on a brief furlough with her family when the case began.
One of her former students, Ming Sen Shiue, had been born in Taiwan in 1950 and moved to Minnesota with his mother and siblings as a child. His father, a University of Minnesota professor, died a few years after the family’s move.
Shiue sat in Stauffer’s algebra class during the 1965 to 1966 school year and developed what he later described as a crush on her, an infatuation that hardened over the following fifteen years into obsessive sexual fantasies, some of which he wrote down.
That obsession had already produced violence years before the kidnapping. In an earlier break-in, Shiue forced his way into the Duluth home of Mary Stauffer’s father-in-law, tied up the elder Mr. and Mrs. Stauffer, and searched the house looking for Mary, who was not there.
In the weeks before the 1980 abduction, court records show Shiue attempted to break into the Stauffer family’s apartment three separate times in May, a pattern of escalating surveillance that preceded the crime itself.
Accounts of Shiue’s youth describe a troubled adolescence well before any of this began, including violence toward his younger siblings and a juvenile arson case that led a court to order him into psychotherapy at age fourteen.
None of that early intervention appears to have addressed the fixation that was building toward Mary Stauffer specifically. Mary’s father-in-law, Irving Stauffer, was the victim of that earlier Duluth break-in, a detail that later helped investigators connect Shiue to the family once the 1980 kidnapping case was underway.
The Abduction
On May 16, 1980, Mary Stauffer and Beth left a beauty salon parking lot in Roseville when Shiue approached them with a handgun. He forced Mary to drive to a secluded location, where he bound and gagged both mother and daughter and put them in the trunk of Mary’s own car before transferring them to a van.
According to later reporting on the case, mother and daughter tried screaming from inside the trunk to draw the attention of passing drivers before Shiue stopped and covered their mouths with tape. As Shiue drove toward his home, he stopped in an Anoka County park, where a six-year-old boy named Jason Wilkman noticed Mary and Beth in the trunk.
Shiue forced the boy into the trunk as well and drove away. He later killed Jason Wilkman with a blow to the head and left his body in a wooded area near what is now the Carlos Avery Wildlife Management Area. The child’s body was not recovered until after Shiue’s arrest weeks later.
It is a detail that is easy to miss inside the wider Mary Stauffer kidnapping case, but Jason Wilkman was not a target of Shiue’s obsession at all, only a child in the wrong park at the wrong moment.
Shiue then drove Mary and Beth to his home in Roseville, where he lived alone and ran a small electronics repair business. He locked them in a closet roughly twenty-one inches wide and four feet long, a space Mary later testified seemed to have been prepared in advance, furnished with an old rug, two pillows, and a blanket.
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Fifty-Three Days in Captivity
What began that first night became a routine that repeated for the next seven weeks. Shiue would take Mary, blindfolded, into the living room, tie her to the leg of a couch, and rape her, at times recording the assaults on video.
Beth remained in the closet nearby throughout the ordeal. In early June, Shiue rented a motor home and took Mary and Beth with him to a job fair in Chicago, a decision that made the crime a federal offense under the Federal Kidnapping Act because it crossed state lines.
During the trip, mother and daughter were chained to a gas line inside the vehicle. They returned to Minnesota around June 14, and the pattern of captivity resumed, with Mary and Beth held in the closet most of each day and allowed out only to prepare food in the kitchen.
Throughout the seven weeks of the Mary Stauffer kidnapping case, Shiue continued going to work at his electronics business, leaving his captives locked away each morning and returning to resume the abuse each evening.
Later accounts from those close to the case describe Shiue as unpredictable and volatile during this period, at one point placing his hands over Beth’s face until Mary intervened to make him stop.
He also told Mary repeatedly that he loved her and that captivity was the only way the two of them could be together, a delusion investigators later linked directly to the fantasies he had been writing about her since his teenage years.
Watch the Full Story Unfold in Our Narrated Case Breakdown & Subscribe Too: 👉 Mary Elizabeth “Beth” Stauffer Kidnapping, Cold Case Solved: Roseville, Minnesota, 1980 | True Crime – 👇👇
The Escape
On July 7, 1980, the fifty-third day of captivity, Shiue shackled Mary and Beth to the hinge of the closet door before leaving for work, just as he had done many times before.
After he left, Mary found a way to free the hinge mechanism, freeing herself and her daughter. She contacted police, and officers arrived to rescue them. Shiue was arrested the same day at his electronics business.
Trial and Conviction
Shiue faced two separate trials. The first, a federal case centered on the kidnapping and interstate transport of Mary and Beth Stauffer, went before a jury in September 1980. After a ten-day trial, the jury convicted him on September 25, 1980, and he was sentenced to life in prison on the federal kidnapping charge.
The second trial opened in January 1981 in Anoka County District Court and addressed the murder of Jason Wilkman along with state charges of kidnapping and criminal sexual conduct against Mary Stauffer. Shiue’s defense argued that he was legally insane, presenting psychiatric experts who diagnosed him with paranoid schizophrenia.
Prosecutors countered with their own experts, who pointed to the meticulous planning behind the crime, including the prepared closet and the videotaped assaults, as evidence that Shiue understood exactly what he was doing.
During this trial, in a moment that shocked the courtroom, Shiue produced a knife he had smuggled in and slashed Mary Stauffer’s face while she was testifying against him, a wound that required sixty two stitches to close.
As he was restrained after the attack, Shiue reportedly vowed that if he were ever released, he would find and kill Mary and her daughter. The jury rejected the insanity defense and convicted him of second degree murder and the related state charges. He was sentenced to forty years in prison, to run concurrently with his federal life sentence.
Where the Case Stands
Ming Sen Shiue remains incarcerated, currently held at the Federal Medical Center in Rochester, Minnesota. His path toward possible release has been contested repeatedly over the decades.
At his first parole hearing in September 2003, the federal Parole Commission declined to set a release date, continuing his case to the expiration of his sentence based on a finding that he still posed a serious threat to the community.
Around 2010, with his federal parole eligibility date approaching, prosecutors in Anoka County sought to have him civilly committed as a dangerous sexual predator under Minnesota law, a proceeding that reflected ongoing concern from the state that he had not completed sex offender treatment while incarcerated.
As recently as 2026, a parole board again denied his release, citing the absence of an approved release plan, with his next opportunity for review roughly two years away.
The split between a federal kidnapping conviction and a separate state murder conviction is part of why the Mary Stauffer kidnapping case took two full trials to resolve.
Because Shiue crossed state lines during the trip to Chicago, the kidnapping itself fell under federal jurisdiction, while Jason Wilkman’s murder, committed entirely within Minnesota, had to be tried separately in state court in Anoka County, where the killing took place.
That structure meant Mary Stauffer had to testify against her captor twice, in two different courtrooms, within the span of a few months.
The case itself became widely known beyond Minnesota, eventually forming the basis for the television film “Abducted: The Mary Stauffer Story.” Mary Stauffer has spoken publicly about the case in the years since, including revisiting what it meant to confront the man who kidnapped her.
As his federal parole eligibility approached years later, Anoka County prosecutors pursued a separate civil proceeding seeking to have him classified and held as a dangerous sexual predator under Minnesota’s civil commitment law, citing his lack of completed sex offender treatment during his years in custody.
More than four decades later, the Mary Stauffer kidnapping case remains a reference point in discussions of stalking, obsession, and the failure of early warning signs, from a break-in at a relative’s home years earlier to three attempted break-ins in the month before the abduction itself, warning signs that were not treated with the urgency they deserved before they escalated into abduction and murder.
For the full narrated version of this story, visit the Cold Case Whisperer YouTube channel.
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