Miranda Pederson/Daily News Donetta Taylor walks the knob near where her brothers body was found Thursday in Horse Cave.

HORSE CAVE — During a private conversation between mother and son more than nine years ago, Arlene Grubbs saw a shooting star and made a wish.

“He said, ‘Mom, when I pass away, I want to be on the highest hill possible so I can get to heaven faster.’ When he died he was on the knob,” Millie Nunn said about her son.

Grubbs, a father, son, brother, husband and uncle was found shot to death near his deer stand on Jan. 12, 2002, in Horse Cave. He died on a hilltop overlooking Hart County.

His killer remains at large, Kentucky State Police Detective Chad Winn said. Grubbs was 41 at the time of his death. His murder is one of several cold cases that detectives at Kentucky State Police Post 3 are working to solve.

He was killed on a remote knob near a rock quarry. He had built a deer stand and planted soybeans on the top of the hill to attract deer. On the day of his death, he was excited about a new motion sensor camera he had received for Christmas, something he had hoped to use in the upcoming deer season. But he never made it back home that Saturday afternoon.

Grubbs’ killer shot him and took off on Grubbs’ four-wheeler. The killer was wearing a ski mask and drove through a neighborhood before abandoning the ATV.

“We need some justice,” Grubbs’ sister Donetta Taylor said recently, as she wiped away tears while a spring breeze blew through her front window screen. “Somebody needs to speak up. Somebody knows something.”

Nunn sat at the kitchen table inside her daughter’s Horse Cave mobile home as the two women reminisced about a man they both loved and lost. Taylor is Grubbs’ older sister by 10 months. He was born two months premature and was taken away many years prematurely from his mother’s life, Nunn said.

Grubbs’ killer took “half of my heart,” Nunn said.

For several years Nunn published poems, letters and reminders in the local newspaper to keep her son’s memory alive with the hope that someone would come forward with information about who killed him. To this day, she drives through town with a photo of her son on the back window of her car. His face is surrounded by angel wings. Taylor has a smaller photo on the back of her Subaru.

Grubbs was a home builder, a member of the choir and trustee at Horse Cave Baptist Church, a Gideon and a very vocal Christian.

When Grubbs was in church everyone knew it, Pastor Kevin Denton said with a laugh.

“When Arlene was in the house, you knew it. He got very excited about worship,” Denton said.

When everyone else was silent during a sermon, if Grubbs liked what he was hearing, people around him would hear a loud “amen” from the left hand side of the church, where he usually sat with his wife, Demetra, and their two children, Nunn said. Grubbs and his wife had been high school sweethearts at Hart County High School.

“It is very hard for me to talk to people about our situation,” Demetra Grubbs said in an email. She declined a face-to-face interview. “I just want to say that the phrase ‘time heals all wounds’ is definitely not true for me and my family. If anything, it just makes it deeper. With every birthday, holiday, birth of a grandchild, accomplishment and milestone the void and longing for him to be here with us becomes greater.

“People who are involved in such selfish acts do not have the conscience or realization of the long term impact they create on the lives of others. We are forever changed.”

Denton officiated Grubbs’ funeral, which drew a crowd of 500 mourners. Some 1,200 people showed up for the visitation.

“He helped people that no one knew about,” Denton said.

After Grubbs’ funeral, Denton and Grubbs’ family learned about many acts of kindness that Grubbs extended to others but never talked about. When another church member fell ill with colon cancer and was unable to work, Grubbs stopped by the man’s house every day to visit him, Denton said.

Grubbs traveled to Mexico on mission trips and was the kind of man who wanted to bring others closer to Christ, Taylor said. He stayed after his big sister to attend church regularly and outlined his favorite passage in her Bible, a notation she didn’t saw until a year after his death.

“They took our world,” Taylor said about her brother’s killer.

— If anyone has information about this or any other unsolved murder, call the Kentucky State Police at 782-2010.