239. The Disturbing Case of Laurie Shaver
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You're listening to an Ono Media Podcast. Hey everybody, welcome back to the podcast. This is Murder With My Husband. I'm Peyton Moreland. And I'm Garrett Moreland. And he's the husband. And I'm the husband. Now, if no one's told you today, you rock. Hope everyone's having a great week. Hope everyone's had a great weekend. It's come on Monday. I always forget. So I hope everyone's weekend has been amazing. I'm still a little bit sick. So excuse my voice. Good thing Peyton's the one that's going to be talking majority of the time. We can listen to her pretty voice.

It won't matter. Reminder, we have bonus content, ad-free content, early release content over on Patreon, Apple subscriptions, Spotify. So yeah, you should check it out. I feel weird plugging, but I will just plug and chug. I need to calm down. I'm being weird. Gary, why don't you take it over and give us your amazing, brilliant 10 seconds.

So honestly, I've been sick and the only thing that makes me not congested is taking Sudafed and not the wimpy, crappy sugar pill placebo effect stuff that you get just in the aisle.

the same ingredients that are in NyQuil and so forth, but the good stuff behind the counter that the pharmacist has, right? You go up, you tell me when to feed, they log your license because you can make meth from it, yada, yada, yada, right? Started taking it. And when I take that stuff, not only am I not congested anymore, I am like a superhuman. I am hyper aware, just super attentive,

And then I was looking it up on Reddit. Okay, Reddit, I know. It wasn't just Reddit. Other sources were saying it too. Anyways, I was looking it up and they were saying that a lot of people that take, there's a word for it, but a lot of people that, stimulants, that take stimulants like Sudafed and so forth, when they become hyper aware or super focused, most likely they have ADHD. I might have ADHD. I don't know. Anyways, just letting everyone know, Sudafed works. I don't promote this. I'm not a doctor.

I just am explaining my experience with Sudafed. This is not an ad, I swear. I feel like, Loki, you are wandering into dangerous territory. You think I'm a druggie? No, but just telling people that Sudafed gives them the same effects as Adderall. Oh, no. I was just saying what I saw online, and people were saying that a lot of people that take stimulants, Sudafed is a stimulant.

depending on what, not the Sudafed PE, like the actual Sudafed. It's a stimulant and apparently like Adderall's a stimulant as well. Anyways, scared me a little bit because I was like, why am I so focused on this stuff? Garrett came home from pickleball and said, I...

That Sudafed made us, I could see where the ball was at all times. Everything was like in slow motion. I was just crystal clear. I felt like I had a new life. It kind of scared me. I'm not going to take Sudafed anymore unless I'm congested. So maybe I'll take some tonight before I go to bed.

Anyways, that's my 10 seconds. That's my experience. Any doctors, nurses, medical students, pharmacists want to comment? Go ahead. No at alls. No, I mean, I've done the research. I know my shiz. Yeah, that's what I got going. I start medical school next week, so I'm pretty excited about that. And on that note, let's hop into today's case. Our sources for this episode are WFTV9, Spectrum News 13, Inside Edition, Long Crime Trials, The Guardian, ABC7, Long Crime Network, and WESH2. Okay, so overall,

over the years, we have covered a lot of murders on this show. And we've also talked about many of the reasons that people commit violent crimes, kill out of greed or the desire to control or even punish a victim. Some people are simply cruel and enjoy making others suffer. But every now and then, you come across a story that is a bit trickier to understand. One where the killer's motives are in more of a gray area.

And that's what we'll be covering today. And to explain why that is, I actually have to go all the way back to the beginning. So here we are. We are meeting Lori and Michael Shaver. They were high school sweethearts. They grew up in a small rural town in New York State, and they went to a school with just 500 students in it.

The two of them met for the first time in the mid-90s when they had a class together in seventh grade. They began dating in their sophomore year of high school, but Michael dropped out before his graduation. So after Lori earned her diploma, her parents actually confronted Michael, her high school sweetheart, and they warned him that he'd have a hard time supporting a family with their daughter with no degree.

And with their encouragement, he got a GED. Now, Lori stood by Michael through all of this, and the two of them were married five years later in 2006. And then eventually they had a daughter together who they named Isabel. And once they were married, Michael got to pursue a lifelong dream of his. He'd always wanted to fly planes, and he was actually able to get his license and become a pilot.

Now, from there, the marriage had a lot of ups and downs. Michael, Lori, and their daughter, Isabel, ended up moving to Florida, and then they decided they didn't like it, so they moved back to New York. And then they changed their mind again, and they went back to Florida. And I can't judge, because Garrett and I have done this every year of our marriage.

Michael also ended up changing his mind at one point about his professional aspirations. At one point he decided, okay, I do not want to fly planes anymore. He then went into a special engineering training program. He then got a job working at Disney World and then Epcot. So there was a lot of shuffling around for this family. They were moving states. They were changing careers. They were making huge life changes. What's Epcot again? It is a...

Part of Disney World? Theme park that is part of Disney World. Yes. I've never been to Disney World. So for those freaking out, Garrett doesn't know it. I've never been to Florida.

And I've never been to Disney World. If I'm remembering right, Epcot is the one with like the big golf ball. It might not be a golf ball. I was really young when I went. Okay. It has this really big giant ball. Okay. So eventually though, they did settle down in a small town on the outskirts of Orlando, Florida. So now at this point, even though they weren't moving so much, Lori and Michael's relationship was complicated in other ways.

Reportedly, at this point in their marriage, Michael had become physically abusive. According to Lori, one night she got home from a workout at the gym, she took a shower, and as soon as she stepped out of the bathroom, Michael attacked her completely unprovoked. What?

What? Lori hadn't said a word to him, but still he reportedly came up to her and punched her in the face. Wait, that's insane. She claimed that another time Michael physically knocked her down onto a couch just because she wanted an Oreo. It was bad enough that at one point, Lori actually took out a restraining order against him. However, pretty soon after she filed for the protective order, she asked for it to be canceled.

And we can never say for sure what goes on in other people's lives. It's hard to know what led her to file for the restraining order and then cancel it right away. I don't want to speculate on it. They're still married. I think it is safe to say, though, that their marriage, their relationship is on the rocks. I am going to focus on what we do know, which is that by mid-November of 2015, the

Michael was out of the picture. According to Lori, around that time, he told her that he was done with the marriage, he was done with their daughter, and he was leaving her. He walked out the door without taking any of his possessions with him. Instead, once it was clear that he wasn't coming back, Lori decided to take all of his stuff and sell it for cash. And then on November 18th, he

He emailed his boss to say, hey, I'm quitting my job. This was a job that he had worked very hard to get, by the way. And interestingly, this resignation came after a full week of missed shifts. So he leaves his wife. She sells his stuff.

He misses work for a week and then he emails his boss and says, yeah, I'm not coming back. Now, before all of this, Michael had always been a very reliable employee. In his entire career, he'd actually never missed a shift without at least calling his manager to say he was sick. There was a family emergency. But beginning on November 10th, he began skipping work again and again, and it was completely out of character. And

And then that email he sent when he left his job didn't exactly sound like him either. But either way, Lori was now a single mother raising a seven-year-old alone. She didn't file for child support in part because Lori had always made more money than Michael and she knew he was out of work now. And even if he could afford to pay child support at all, the money would be small enough that she decides it's not worth her time to go through the court process.

And interestingly, she actually never officially files for divorce either. Apparently, she says the two of them had a verbal agreement about the terms of the split. Who'd send who money, who had parental rights over Isabel, other details. Lori and Michael says they worked it out between themselves without getting lawyers involved. Which I do feel like this happens quite a bit. So not a big, I don't know, raise argument.

Right. Awareness to me, I guess. But so technically on paper, Michael and Lori are married for years after he leaves. Yeah. Now, this was a little weird because Michael had never given any indication that he planned to abandon his family and his career. And he didn't tell anyone what he was going to do next. And besides that, Michael apparently became a bit of a recluse after he walked out on Lori and Isabel.

He hadn't met up with any of his old friends in person. He didn't find a new job. Nobody ever spotted him at the grocery store around town. And when Michael's mother got sick enough that she had to be hospitalized, his brother desperately tried to reach Michael, share the news, but he was impossible to get on the phone or to find in person.

And then Michael stopped making car payments and his vehicle got repossessed in 2016. His credit card company also tried to sue him for not paying his balance, but the lawsuit couldn't go forward because he filed bankruptcy. No one could find Michael to serve him with papers. Yeah.

His driver's license, pilot license, and passports, they all expired. And Michael never showed up to file the paperwork to renew any of them. Wait, that's insane, actually. So it's definitely strange, but nobody raised the alarm until early February of 2018. Now, remember, he leaves his family in 2015. So that was in part because Michael,

Michael was posting on Facebook this entire time. He had been, you know, emailing people. So even though nobody had actually seen him or talked to him on the phone, he was still living his life. He was sharing updates about it on social media. And it actually took until that February, years later, for a friend to sit down and think about this, just the strangeness of all of this, and realize, like, how

I think something's going on. So that friend decides to investigate and they call other people. They're like, hey, I know that you've corresponded with Michael and we've seen that he's been posting, but have you actually laid eyes on him? No one has. No one has even seen Michael that this friend can talk to since November 15th

2015. The week that he goes missing, misses work. So three years, basically no one has like, wait, even the ex-wife hasn't seen him. Well, it had been a little over two full years of him being completely out of sight and impossible to reach on the phone. Got it. So it was concerning and it was actually enough at this point. The

that the friend called the police and said hey here's what's going on like he's posting but no one's actually spoken to him or seen him in person since 2015 and so they report Michael missing and they say can you please find him and do a wellness check on him now interestingly

There was no record when police start looking into it of Michael renting any apartment, buying another house. To all appearances, it seemed like he still lived in the same home that he had once shared with his wife, Lori. And obviously, this is a house that Lori and their daughter, Isabel, are still living in.

So the police go to Lori's house and they say, hey, we've been asked to do a wellness check on Michael. This is like the address we can find. Can we search your house? And inside they don't find anything unusual. And Lori tells them she's like, hey, Michael left a long time ago. Like like I haven't seen him since 2015. We did. We decided to split. And that was that.

There was no sign that he'd been in the home or that anything alarming had happened. For sure. They look at her and go, is it weird that he hasn't asked about... Your child? Your child? To see your child? Yeah, this is where the red flags start coming in. So they go in the backyard. And in the backyard, they see a fire pit. And it had been stalled in May of 2016. So this was about six months after Michael left his wife and daughter and basically...

went missing and this fire pit had a concrete base this was a base that laurie had actually written her name in before the concrete set you know like a little fun thing to do at the house clearly this was something that laurie had helped install herself because she was there when the concrete was wet she hadn't called in professionals to pour the concrete she had done it and given the timing the police are like okay it's a little weird we're just going to take a closer look

Except when they approach Lori and they're like, hey, we're going to come back another time with cadaver dogs just to like go around the backyard. She refuses.

Not only that, but she says, you need to leave now. Like I'm canceling the current search that you are doing and you need to get off my property. And she said, leave immediately. Hey everyone, we are getting into an ad. And if you didn't know, new year's is fast approaching and it is time to get those resolutions in order. And my resolution, well, it starts with this and

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I've been getting buffer, but you know what Peyton's been doing? You know what Peyton's been loving? Peloton. This is true. That is his true story. Honestly, it has been a game changer for us. Garrett is into strength training or sometimes he honestly just tries to beat me on the leaderboard. I do spin class, yoga classes. There's always something that pushes us to go harder. And trust me, we love bragging rights. Peloton has so many options, whether you're looking for Pilates, a 5k training program, or just a quick 20

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So of course the police didn't need her permission to continue their investigation. They just needed to wait for a warrant to come through because technically they're going to go to a judge and say, Hey, this guy supposedly on paper still lives here, but no one's seen him for three years. We need to search the house and any judge is going to say, yeah, that's probable cause like go. So they get the warrant on March 9th. So remember this was happening back in February. It's now March. And on this day, uh,

They're so suspicious by Lori, like immediately kicking them out and saying, no, you, you cannot search for him here that they come in hard and they decide to excavate the fire pit. They're going to dig it up. Holy crap. So interesting because if they don't find anything, it looks really bad on them, but I feel like they're going to find something. I mean, I don't think it's really that, I mean, it's going to look bad for Lori, but everyone else is going to be like, well, they needed to search for him.

It's just like we dug up your whole fire pit. Your yard, basically. To be honest, we thought there was a body in there. Well, this does happen quite a bit when searching for missing people, like digging up someone's yard. And if you're Chad and Lori Daybell, you. That's true. Buried bodies there. So they excavate this fire pit and about three feet down underneath the concrete, they find. A skeleton.

Michael's body. No freaking way. Insane. He was buried underneath the fire pit. No way that she killed him. I did not see this coming this way. I didn't see that she was going to kill him. And...

Bury him there. I mean, I think everyone was stunned. Like this is not how these things typically go, especially like the body just being in the backyard. This is nuts. Okay. When I know that it was under concrete, but like she, she kind of technically had a month to move the body.

Oh, she just probably knew she was screwed. Well, I mean, how do you get under the concrete without people noticing? Yeah. So it's just hard. So the body was under a blue tarp and had been tied up with a green strap. But here's where things get interesting. Michael had been reported missing in early February of 2018. So this was about a month previous to this search, right? Sorry to interrupt. Do you really think the dogs would have been able to smell it underneath the concrete? Uh-huh.

Yeah. Decomp. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Even like if a body was there at one point and has been moved, they can smell it. Oh yeah. I guess it still hits them. Okay. Yeah. So police are like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. He's been reported missing for a month. Like no one has technically seen him for over two years, but he only got reported missing a month ago. But given the rate of decomposition, when they find the body, they are like, well, okay,

He has been dead a lot longer than that. And it was impossible for the investigators to pinpoint an exact date, but they could tell that Michael had been dead for about two years, give or take. It had been so long that his body had almost completely rotted away. So like Garrett said, it was little more than a skeleton. And the police actually needed to check his DNA against his father's to confirm his identity. So they're not like for sure it's Michael, but I mean...

It was clear why Michael hadn't gotten a new job or found a new place to live, updated his address. But this also means that all of those Facebook posts that had been appearing on his timeline for years, Michael obviously couldn't have been making those on his own page. His killer must have been putting them up to hide the fact that he was dead and keep appearances alive.

And the police didn't have to wonder for long who the killer was. I think most people at this point are not. It had to be the person who had poured the concrete over the body because obviously the person who'd reacted so strongly and so negatively when the police had wanted to search the area around the fire pit, the woman who'd lied and said that Michael had left her when he was actually dead and buried in her own backyard. And that was his wife, Lori Shaver.

Now, Lori only looked even more suspicious when Michael's autopsy results came back. They showed that he had died of a gunshot to the back of the head. Holy crap, dude. Specifically from a .38 caliber gun. And as it turned out, Lori owned quite the collection of firearms in Florida, including a .38 caliber handgun. So next, the police pulled her digital records, which only implicated her further.

First, they saw that Lori hadn't sent a single text message or even tried to call Michael once since November 15th of 2015. Wow. Your husband, who is the father of your child, leaves.

And you never once try to get in contact with him. You never once even send a text message, a phone call, this person that you say you've agreed to co-parent with. This is definitely going to be a pretty open and shut case. But I would assume the defense is going to argue domestic violence, abuse, fearful for my life, so on and so forth. And again, even if Michael had left her, and even if she was completely okay with letting the marriage end then and there...

Like I said, she would have probably tried to communicate with him at some point because they probably would have wanted to file for divorce, which this is why she hadn't formally filed for divorce because she and Michael had reportedly worked all of the details out between themselves, except apparently none of those conversations ever involved a phone call or even a quick text about when to meet up. They just randomly were meeting up in person and having these conversations. Yeah.

But the investigators were confident that she had been posting as him on his Facebook account because they traced the IP address for the device that made those posts. And it was all from Lori's computer. So when Lori is confronted with all of this mounting evidence, she told the police, well, I'm not the only person that has access to that computer. She wasn't even the only person who'd made decisions about projects around the house, like installing the fire pit in the backyard, right?

See, after Michael's death, Lori had dated other men. She even remarried pretty quickly after his disappearance, even though her and Michael weren't technically divorced.

But she'd also had other boyfriends while Michael was still alive. According to her, the two of them had gone through a trial separation. And one day while Lori was at her daughter's school, she bumped into a man named Jeremy Townsend. And as soon as he laid eyes on her, Lori realized that he was noticing something specific about her appearances, namely that she had bruises, bruises that according to Lori had been left by Michael. So okay,

According to Lori, she meets Jeremy at her daughter's school and he writes her a note. It had his phone number on it. He slips it to her and it says, I know what you're going through. I can help you call me. And so that's what Lori did. She called Jeremy and then she fell for him and they started dating. She thought that Jeremy was someone who was safe, someone who could help her get away from her violent husband, help her build a new life.

But to hear Lori tell it, he wasn't who he seemed. First and foremost, according to Lori, Jeremy was a liar. He told Lori he was married but separated too, but then sometime after he and Lori started dating, he got back together with his wife and didn't tell Lori. So they were cheating, and according to her, she didn't even realize it at first.

The good news was that Lori was gaining more confidence and realizing she didn't need Michael in her life anymore. This is according to her. She told the police that sometime around November 10th of 2015, so about five days before anyone last hears from him, she'd kicked him out of the house for good. So when she'd been going around telling her friends that he left her around the time, it was true. Lori also claimed she didn't know what happened to Michael after that, where he was living or why he'd quit his job. All of this was true.

All she had was a vague understanding that he had moved somewhere to the state of Georgia. And that's where things stood for six months. It's just so hard. How do you get around the fact that there's a body buried in your husband's body in your backyard? Right. How do you get out of that? I feel like you have to admit it and then you have to go...

Like I defended my life. Well, she's about to tell you. Because there's no other way. There's no other way you can go around it. She claims that he didn't die. He actually left and lived in Georgia and just didn't talk to anyone. She says. What? But then...

In May of 2016, she was at home when Michael suddenly appears out of nowhere, shows up at the house. He hasn't talked to anyone and he shows up back to their home and he begins attacking her yet again. And this incident was worse than anything that she had ever gone through before with him. He threatened to kill her. He pushed her down on the ground and then kicked her before stomping her head with his foot. Which...

- Knowing their past, I mean, this very well could have happened, correct? Unless their past was a lie too. - Yes, if you're trusting. - You have to trust everything she says because has she ever told her any friends about this? - We will get there. - We'll get there, okay.

So this is what Lori is telling police when they're confronting her with evidence. So she says he's kicking me and she says my life was in danger. So I fought back. She says the coral got out of hand. One thing led to another. And then suddenly Jeremy, her boyfriend, who is married, was in her house and he grabbed her gun and he fatally shot Michael in the back of the head.

So she says, it wasn't me. It wasn't me. She said, Jeremy was the one who killed him. She's like, it also wasn't a cut and dry murder because there's a gray area here. Now, while this was going on, according to Lori, her seven-year-old daughter, Isabel, was in the house.

And so she said she didn't want Isabel around to see her father's corpse. And she knew her daughter was too young and innocent to deal with the fallout of such a brutal act of violence. So she says that she panicked, put Isabel in the car and left.

And Jeremy stayed at the house with Michael's body to clean up the scene. So she's just blaming everything on Jeremy. I wonder what Jeremy thinks about this. So after she dropped Isabel off at school, Lori came home and by now Michael's body was gone and Jeremy had gotten rid of it. So Lori claimed she had no

way of knowing where the body was but once it was discovered years later she kind of pieced everything together so she's saying I had no idea that was under my fire pit but okay then why did you say no to searching the house well shortly before Michael had allegedly left her in November of 2015 he and Lori had been digging a pit in the backyard because they were planning to turn it into a duck pond and

Obviously, that project never happened between Michael leaving and his disappearance. The duck pond, I guess, just wasn't a priority anymore. So at some point after Michael disappeared, Lori began dating someone. This is not Jeremy. It's a different man named Travis Filmer. And in May of 2016, very soon after this supposed shooting, they planned to have a commitment ceremony.

So she's now she's with Jeremy and she marries Jeremy, except for now she's with Travis. Okay. Um, they couldn't have a wedding because Lori is actually still technically married to Michael who hadn't even been declared dead yet. So the ceremony was going to be an informal thing in Lori's backyard. So she and Travis decided they needed to fill the pit with something before the guests came. So they rented a cement mixer and filled the hole with freshly poured concrete and they turned it into a fire pit. Um,

Now, according to Lori, neither her nor Travis had any idea that Jeremy had buried Michael's body in that pit. And then by complete coincidence, she and Travis filled it just days later. Like we're talking days after the shooting.

Now, even if Lori didn't know exactly where Michael was buried, she did know he'd been shot to death. And everything she did after this was an attempt to cover up what happened. I mean, Jeremy wasn't the one posting the Facebook posts and he wasn't the one lying to her friends. She even told her family that Michael had been arrested and sent to jail when her family's like, hey, where's Michael? She's like, oh, he's in jail.

So she's just changing story after story depending on who she's talking to. I want to know what Jeremy... Where's Jeremy? What does Jeremy think about all this? So Lori told the police...

why she kept the lie up for so long. She said it wasn't necessarily because she was worried about being charged with murder. She's like, I didn't murder him. It wasn't my fault. It was more that she was scared of losing custody of her daughter, Isabel. She said if anyone ever learned about the violence and the abuse that had been in the household and that this death had happened while the child was home, she was worried that child services might take Isabel away. I don't know who saw. I don't know. I'm picking nobody's side right now. So

Police, they don't believe Lori's story fully. They're like, we think there's lies in here at some point. That was because it didn't really fit the facts because there were some issues around the timeline. Lori said Michael left her in November, but obviously didn't die until May. Those were her words. She left and then he randomly showed back up.

And she couldn't offer any explanation about where he had been for those six months. And during those six months, he had stopped paying off his car and credit card. He had quit his job and he was impossible for his friends and family to reach. She also couldn't explain why he would just leave all of his possessions behind for her to sell and then profit off of.

It seemed a lot more likely that Michael really did die back in November and Lori's story about him coming back and attacking her was a lie. And then when the investigators asked Jeremy to corroborate Lori's account, he's like,

What? He doesn't deny just his role in the shooting, but he also denies a bunch of details about their relationship. They're like, this is what she told us about you two and that you shot him. And he's like, whoa, whoa, whoa. I didn't shoot anybody. This is insane. And also he said, I had been dating Lori, but it wasn't while I was separated from my wife. He said, we were never separated. He said, Lori and I were having an affair. Yeah.

And then my wife found out and I ended things. He's like, wait, I never told her I was separated. Like, I don't know where that random detail came in from. Could you imagine someone coming to your house and being like, hey man, this girl said you killed somebody. And that you like were separated from your wife and then lied to her about it. And you buried a body. And he's like, wait, I just had an affair with her. Yeah. And so he claims, he's like, not only is she lied about all this, he says all of this happened before Michael even went missing.

He's like, so like she was out of my life before Michael even went missing in November. Okay. Did she not think that they were going to go ask Jeremy? There's something like, Oh, Jeremy did it. Shucks. Thanks everybody. It gets even better because Jeremy's like, wait, also I need to let you know, like I have proof about the fact that this happened all happened before Michael went missing. He says, because my,

Michael was actually instrumental in exposing me to my wife as a cheater. He said he discovered what Lori was up to, contacted Jeremy's wife and said, hey, this is what's been going on. And then once she learned the truth, it turned into this huge mess that blew up. And Jeremy was like, hey, I will end things with Lori. Like she's married to Michael. And he and his spouse eventually worked through their issues. She agreed to stay with them. They patched things up. And he said, I haven't been with Lori. I haven't seen Lori since.

since then. And he's like, and at the time of Michael's death, whether you believe that death was in November or May, I hadn't seen Lori. Like I was completely no contact with her. So someone is obviously lying. It's either Lori or Jeremy. And either way, the police knew that Lori had been actively covering up Michael's homicide. They're like, well, we know she lied about this because she was actively pretending to be him on social media.

And so they think that Lori is the one lying and Jeremy is the one telling the truth. They think she's the guiltier party. So on September 17th, 2020, they arrest Lori for the murder of her husband. So where we're at right now in the case, I think that Lori is, I mean, I think she's the guilty one. I feel like it's pretty obvious.

Crazy Jeremy was just thrown under the bus like that. He's like, what is happening to me right now? I'm just living my life. Well, I also think it says something that he, it would have made him look better to say he was separated from his wife when he was dating Lori. But he was like, no, no. He's like, no, straight up. I was cheating on my wife. I'm fine being a cheater. I'm not okay being a killer. Like I'm going to just tell you what happened. Exactly. And I also think that this story, it was,

if true makes her look even more guilty because the only outlook of their marriage we had so far was that he was physically abusive. She had a month to think about this and she chooses, I'm going to blame it on Jeremy. Like they thought they were just going to go arrest Jeremy and be like, all right, Jeremy did it. I,

I think maybe she was hoping that because Jeremy was her affair partner, Michael would have been so mad at him and Jeremy would have been mad at Michael and it would have been this love triangle. So maybe there was like motive there for Jeremy to kill Michael. That's just crazy. Like the police are going to do their investigation. But I think the fact that Jeremy's wife can kind of back his story and be like, yeah, no, it was a mess and all this happened, but like, this is how it ended. Yeah.

Kind of makes Lori's hope that this would look like a love triangle be smashed. Yeah. Because it seems like everything was settled by the time Michael went missing. Yeah. Are you a professional pillow fighter or a nine to five low cost time travel agent? Or maybe real estate sales on Mars is your profession.

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So Lori was charged with second degree murder, domestic violence and accessory after the fact, all of which she pled not guilty to. And her trial actually began in September of 2024. So just this year, this is recent. There, the prosecutors laid out all of their evidence that Lori was a liar. This is the strategy they take.

They said she killed Michael herself. Jeremy was not involved and she didn't do it in self-defense. They believe it was a cold-blooded crime. They also presented evidence that supported their timeline that Michael was killed in November, not May, like she was claiming. When they interviewed her neighbors, they noticed a terrible stench coming from Lori's backyard since that fall. This is well before the day that Lori claims Jeremy shot Jeremy.

Michael. And interestingly, Lori had adopted a new pet pot bellied pig shortly after her neighbors begun complaining about the odor.

And anytime someone would mention the smell, she'd like, oh, it's just my new pig. Oh, I thought it was because pigs eat anything. Well, they do. And so I thought there was something else. No, she uses it. She's like, oh, it's just my stinky pig. And the neighbors are like, it's not the stinky pig. They're like, the smell was here before you got the stinky pig. So this was just one more lie to add on. I mean, at this point, Lori has so many lies tacked on to her story that it's...

It's a little alarming. However, when it came to the defense case, Lori and her attorneys actually took a pretty shocking strategy, not one that you would think. So earlier I mentioned that according to Lori's testimony to the police, Jeremy had shown up and killed Michael after Michael attacked her. I left out one part of her account, and that's because the public didn't know these details until trial.

So I left it out, but now I'm going to tell you in the same way that the public found out. So Lori and Isabel, her daughter, both told the police more details than that originally. And these were details, like I said, that weren't released to the public until right before the murder trial. And it's because they were sensitive.

And they both got into everything when they were called as witnesses. Okay. So at this point, Isabella's 15 at trial and she's just one week away from her sweet 16th birthday when she takes the stand. And,

And she was only seven when Michael died. And Isabel explained that violence had been common in her house when she was young. She said Lori and Michael, her parents fought almost every day and it wasn't unusual for those fights to become physical. She said when Michael finally walked out on her mother in the fall of 2015, she felt like she could breathe a sigh of relief.

that they'd never been close michael her dad had always been strict and each time he got home from work she would hide in her bedroom because she wanted to avoid her father so she said life became easier when he wasn't around except isabel testified at trial that one night in may she came home to find michael on the patio behind the house fighting with her mom yeah she's seven you'll

at this point yeah and in her mind she's like i knew he wasn't supposed to be there because they were separated um he was supposed to be out of both of our lives and yet here he was grabbing laurie and throwing her on the ground and laurie was begging him for mercy and michael was screaming that he'd kill her and he pushed her down onto the concrete floor he began hitting her and kicking her and then he put a foot down against her face and pressed her head down

And at that moment, Lori stopped screaming and seven-year-old Isabel became terrified. Again, this is courting to Isabel. She told the jury that she ran away all the way to her mother's bedroom where she knew her mom kept a gun close to the bed. Isabel grabbed the gun. She ran out to the patio and she aimed it at her father's head and she pulled the trigger.

What's happening? There's no way. So I want to keep in mind that according to everyone at this point, seven-year-old Isabel had never been taught how to use a gun. She'd never held a gun because she was too young to be holding a gun.

But Isabel testified on the trial that she did what she had to do. If she hadn't shot Michael, according to her, her mother would have died that day. Now, even though Isabel said that she managed to hit Michael in the head, she said she didn't kill him. She just hurt him badly. And Lori decided in that moment not to call ambulance to help Michael. Instead, she called Jeremy to come over and get rid of Michael. So you're telling...

So the daughter's story is, oh no, Jeremy didn't shoot him. I did. But no, Jeremy was involved. He came and helped get rid of the body. I don't know if Jeremy did that. I don't know. I think I'm on Jeremy's side right now. So it all was a mother's desperate attempt to shield her daughter from the consequences of one tragic life or death decision. Lori said this is why she also lied about Michael leaving her and being out of touch because even though she knew that Isabel had killed Michael to save her,

she feared this would create trouble in their family. Child services might take Isabella away once they learned that she was the one who had the gun, that there had even been a gun to access and that she'd use it to kill her father. Now, as moving as that was,

Isabel's story still doesn't explain the timeline discrepancies. Again, there is so much evidence that Michael actually was killed back in November. But Isabel corroborated her mother's story on the stand saying the shooting happened in May. And on top of that, Michael's autopsy showed that he'd only been shot once in the back of the head.

But for Isabel's story to be true, he should have had two bullet holes because according to her, he wasn't dead yet. And they called Jeremy and Jeremy delivered the fatal shot and buried the body. Plus the testimony Isabel gave on the stand was different from what she'd told police originally. And I'm not sure what the discrepancies were. Her initial statement to the detectives wasn't released to the public.

She was seven. So it's not possible to compare them, but it was enough for prosecutors to suggest during the trial that Isabel isn't being truthful. They're like, this is not what she originally, and we don't know how different, we do not know how different those testimonies were, but we do know at trial, prosecutors were like, it was a completely different story than what she originally told police. This is nuts. They believe that Isabel was coached, that

that she didn't want her mother to go to jail. And so she was coached by the defense. That is so sad. To testify to this. She had been encouraged to take credit of the shooting so Lori could be spared. I just think that if as an attorney, as the defense, that should be illegal. And here's the thing. How is that not illegal? Many of Lori and Michael's friends and family members

came forward and were like, we never heard that Michael was abusive. We hung out with this couple. We were around this couple. We knew this couple. There had been no signs of violence coming from them. Which, for those in a DV situation, we know that's not always true. Right. It can be hidden. It can be hidden. But this is just for the case. But I do think it's important to note that a lot of their friends who hung out with them came forward and said,

If anything, it seemed like Lori was the one who was abusive to Michael. Actually in public, like in front of people, she had threatened Michael. She had physically attacked him. And on one occasion, other people saw that Lori had pulled a gun on Michael. Wow.

So interestingly, this incident where Lori had threatened to shoot Michael was right before his disappearance. So it kind of did come across like Lori was controlling and dangerous and she was victim blaming her husband by acting like he was the aggressive one. So his their friends and family come forward and they're like, we don't think he was actually abusive. But mom and daughter are saying he was abusive.

Now, I will say we are getting into a gray area. The signs of abuse are not always obvious from the outside, especially if you don't know what to look for. So it is possible that Lori could be telling the truth. Michael could have been abusive and his loved ones may never have noticed or realized it. Some people are good at hiding these things. And we do know that Michael was charged with battery in September of 2014, a year before his disappearance. And he did plead guilty to those charges. He didn't attempt to fight them.

But one of Lori's former friends testified that she knew Lori had been hurting herself and blaming Michael for it. According to that friend, Lori had openly admitted to this friend that she had given herself bruises and cuts to tell everyone it was from Michael. She added that she'd been in therapy to deal with these compulsive lies, that she had trouble with lying. But since this was a private conversation between Lori and a friend,

I mean, how do you know who's telling the truth? This is just what a friend testified to at trial. It's also possible that Lori told the friend that the abuse wasn't real when it really was. Yeah. I mean, again, we're in a very tricky situation. She could have been trying to protect Michael. It's also possible that

that Laurie and Michael were both abusive toward one another. We know that that also happens. However, when it comes to homicide, things tend to be a bit clearer. Either Laurie was guilty or she wasn't. That became the core question during her trial. Was Laurie a victim who'd covered up her husband's justifiable shooting in a moment of desperation or a cold-blooded killer who'd been faking abuse for years so she could get away with murder?

The jury actually only deliberated for five hours and they came back with their verdict. They found Lori guilty, guilty of second degree murder. Yeah. A hundred percent to all appearances. The jury did not buy her story about how Isabel had really pulled the trigger and then how Jeremy had come over to finish. Um, and as of this recording, um,

Lori hasn't been sentenced yet. Those hearings are scheduled for the end of this November 2024. And in the meanwhile, after the ruling came down, Lori's attorney said that they plan to appeal the verdict. So even though the trial is over, it's very clear that there will be more to this story in the future.

Now, this is clearly a very recent trial, even though the murder is older. And there's a lot that we still don't know. I mean, in the eyes of the law, Lori is guilty. But her story feels a lot less cut and dry than those of some convicted killers. I mean, it's been almost 10 years since Michael died. So for his sake, I hope that we can sort through the misinformation and somewhere find some truth.

Because everyone, no matter what they may or may have not done, does deserve justice. And that is the actually pretty current story about Lori Shafer and Michael's death.