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To get this episode of Forensic Tales ad-free, please visit patreon.com/forensictales. Forensic Tales discusses topics that some listeners may find disturbing. The contents of this episode may not be suitable for everyone. Listener discretion is advised. In the quiet streets of Yuba City, California, 94-year-old Grandma Dodie spreads joy with her homemade cakes. She's loved by all, not an enemy in the world.
One night, tragedy strikes as she is brutally beaten to death with her own cane. The community is left stunned. As the search for answers begins, one question echoes through the streets. Who could commit such a heinous act against a sweet elderly woman adored by all? This is Forensic Tales, episode number 216, The Murder of Leola Shreves.
Welcome to Forensic Tales. I'm your host, Courtney Fretwell-Ariola.
Forensic Tales is a weekly true crime podcast covering real, spine-tingling stories with a forensic science twist. Some cases have been solved with forensic science, while others have turned cold. Every remarkable story sends us a chilling reminder that not all stories have happy endings. As a one-woman show, your support helps me find new compelling cases and
conduct in-depth fact-based research, and produce and edit this weekly show. You can support my work in two simple ways. Become a valued patron at patreon.com slash forensic tales and leave a positive review. Before we get to the episode, we've got new Patreon supporter to thank. Thank you so much to Maddie H. for becoming the show's newest supporter on Patreon. Now, let's get to this week's episode.
On January 23rd, 2013, the police in Yuba City, California, a small town just north of Sacramento, received a phone call about a woman found dead inside her home. The caller, who was the decedent's son-in-law, said that he went to go check on 94-year-old Leola Shreves at her home in Yuba City because the family hadn't heard from her in a few days.
This was completely out of character because she was known to always talk to people, whether it was her kids, grandkids, great-grandkids, neighbors, or anyone else. So for no one to hear from her in the last few days was beyond strange. Now when the son-in-law got on the phone with 911, he said he thought Leola was dead, but the 911 operator wanted to make sure, so he asked him how he knew.
She said he should at least start performing CPR on her until the police could get there and find out exactly what happened. But the son-in-law seemed sure that it was too late. She was already dead by the time he got there. She didn't have a pulse and was cold to the touch, so she had probably dead for quite a while. Several minutes later, officers from the Yuba City Police Department arrived at Leola's home on Park Avenue.
At first, they thought they were walking into the home of someone who had probably just passed away in her sleep. At 94 years old, that wouldn't be entirely out of the question. But when they got inside the house, it was not what they expected. According to police reports, they walked into a brutal crime scene. The police found shards of glass everywhere. Utensils were thrown and scattered all over the place. The television screen was completely smashed in.
photos had been torn off the walls liola's bedroom door had been ripped off the hinges and there was a blood trail leading from the master bedroom out to the street this was anything but a case of an older woman simply passing away in her sleep when the cops got to the master bedroom they found liola lying on the floor next to her bed and her cane was lying on the floor next to her
It was obvious to detectives that someone had beaten her to death, probably with her own bloody cane found next to her. She had a huge wound to the back of her head. Her jaw and neck were both broken, and she also had 17 broken ribs like someone had beaten her across the chest. The blows to the side of her head were so nasty that both of her ears looked like they were ready to fall off.
There was also signs that Leola tried to fight back. Although she was 94 years old, this wasn't how she wanted to die. She had defensive wounds all up and down her arms and hands, but was overpowered by whoever did this. Based on when her family last heard from her, the police theorized that she'd been killed sometime between late January 18th and the early morning hours of January 19th.
She also had a January 19th newspaper on her coffee table that hadn't been touched. She also hadn't taken her pillbox medication from that morning either. This timeline explains why the son-in-law felt so strongly about her being already dead. Although it's a little strange that he didn't mention anything about the blood or the condition of Leola's body. He only told 911 that she was dead. That was it. He didn't say anything more.
Not surprisingly, Leola's murder not only shocked her community and family, but it also shocked the police. Who could beat a 94-year-old woman to death inside her own home and think that they're just going to get away with it? Leola Shreves checked every box when it came to being the perfect grandmother. Born in 1918 and after the death of her husband in 2001, she lived alone in a one-story home at 546 Park Avenue.
Despite her age, she was described as being fiercely independent. The only thing she wanted was her neighbors and family to stay in touch with her. And with 22 great-grandchildren and 13 great-great-grandchildren, she got a lot of phone calls from family members to keep her busy. Nothing about Leola's life screamed murder. She liked to cook and bake. She spent as much time as she could with her huge extended family.
She was kind and sweet to everyone she met. And most people didn't call her by her actual name. She was simply Grandma Dodie, which made her murder all more confusing. Before anything else, the police looked around Leola's home for evidence, and there was no shortage of it. The police found shoe prints and fingerprints all over the place. There was unknown DNA underneath Leola's fingernails.
There was a blood trail that started next to her body and went all the way through the house and out the front door. So investigators went room to room collecting all of it. At the same time the house was being processed, officers spent the next two days canvassing the neighborhood. That's when they stumbled upon one of Leola's neighbors who said she caught a guy trying to look into her dining room through a window. This happened the same day as the murder.
so the police couldn't help but wonder if the two incidents were somehow related. But not long after that, an even bigger tip came in. While the house was still being processed for evidence and neighbors were being interviewed, one of the lead detectives heard a scream. It was a scream that came directly from Leola's neighbor's house. And it wasn't only a simple scream. It was multiple screams like someone needed help.
So a few detectives went straight over there. When they knocked on the front door, detectives were met with 20-year-old Michael Patrick Alexander. He lived next door to Leola's house with his mom and older sister. And right away, Michael set off alarm bells in the detectives' minds. When they asked him if he had heard anything the night of the murder, he said he heard what sounded like a cat scaling a fence next door.
Now there was a wooden fence separating his house from Leola's. So Michael said he thought he heard a cat trying to climb it. But that was it. He didn't hear or see anything else suspicious that night. But right away, detectives weren't so sure about this tip. The wooden fence separating the two yards wouldn't have made that type of noise.
In fact, it probably wouldn't have made any noise if a cat was trying to get over it. So the cops thought it was a little odd that he would offer this type of explanation, or maybe he was trying to hide something. Then there was a bloody wound on one of Michael's knees. It looked like he had gotten it just a day or two earlier. But according to Michael, he got the cut by scraping it on a door inside his house.
He also seemed shaky and nervous the entire time. When they asked him about the screams that they had just heard, Michael said it was actually him screaming because he was losing in his video game, Call of Duty. Another explanation, the cops weren't buying. Everything about this interaction with Michael made detectives want to look in deeper into who he was. Besides the bloody knee, the weird story about the cat, and his nervousness,
The cops also found out about his past. Michael Alexander was born in northeast Washington State in 1992. In 2010, he moved next door to Loyola with his mom and older sister. He was what many people would probably describe as a loner. He didn't have many friends and spent most of his free time alone at home playing video games.
When he wasn't playing video games or Pokemon, he was watching other people play online or chatting with them in group chats about video games. When Michael was three, he was placed into a special education program at school. By third grade, testing of his verbal IQ measured him as intellectually disabled, with a score in the first percentile. Then by middle school, he was officially diagnosed with a learning disability.
In his school file, the therapist said Michael suffered from both PTSD and depression from an unspecified traumatic experience he went through as a young kid. This event has led to a lot of troubles like anxiety and emotional outbursts at school. This also led him to being suspended from school after a handful of times throughout middle school. In most of these incidences, he got in trouble for fighting with other students and even teachers.
In high school at Yuba City High School, Michael continued to have problems. At 15, he was arrested and given probation for allegedly threatening to kill a teacher and burn the entire school down to the ground. But what ultimately got him expelled from Yuba City High School was when he got caught choking another student in 2007.
So all of this screamed murderer in detectives' minds. He had a violent past. He lived directly next door to the victim. He had a bloody wound on one of his knees. He had a strange, unbelievable story about hearing a cat the night that the murder happened. And he seemed nervous when they spoke with him two days after it happened. All of this pointed to one thing—
Michael Alexander was prime suspect number one in Leola's murder. All of this was enough for detectives to ask a judge for a search warrant to search Michael's house, and they had no problem getting one. Once it was granted on January 25th, a handful of investigators went over to the house and completely ransacked it, looking for any evidence tying him to the murder.
While they searched, Michael was taken down to the police station to be questioned. The police didn't even bother calling his mom to tell her what was happening. At the Yuba City Police Department, detectives didn't waste any time and started grilling Michael more and more about the murder. Now, the detectives wouldn't classify this conversation as an interrogation, but instead referred to it as simply an interview.
So this meant they didn't need to read his legal rights, and he didn't need an attorney present. Plus, Michael was 20 years old and a legal adult, so they weren't required to tell his mom or anyone else that he was there. Over the next three and a half hours, the police grilled Michael, but he denied doing anything wrong.
He referred to Leola as someone he considered to be just like his own grandma, so he could never do something like this. The cops weren't buying his story. They brought up his violent past in school, and even Michael himself admitted he used to find himself in what he described as fits of rage, where he would get so angry he would black out for up to 15 seconds.
But according to Michael, he hadn't experienced one of these fits of rages in a really long time. But whatever he was selling, the police weren't buying. Once they realized Michael wouldn't confess to anything, they changed tactics. They told him they found his fingerprints and shoe prints at the crime scene. Michael was dumbfounded. He couldn't explain why they would have happened or why they would have been there if he didn't commit the murder.
But unbeknownst to Michael, all of that was a lie. The police hadn't found any of his footprints or fingerprints at the crime scene. In fact, none of the forensic evidence had even been tested yet. They lied to him about it to see if he would then confess. Now, although it's slightly controversial, it's perfectly legal for the police to lie about evidence to a potential suspect to try and gauge their reaction.
Now, at first, Michael continued to deny that he had ever stepped foot inside Leola's house. Even though he lived directly next door, he said he had never been inside. So, the cops went in a different direction. They decided they wanted to use some of what they knew about Michael and his issues against him. They painted this narrative that there were two sides of him, the good Michael and the angry Michael.
the Michael who experienced blackouts when he got angry. So the cops told him they were going to leave him in the interrogation room all by himself for a few minutes. So the quote unquote two sides of Michael could talk to one another and see if the angry Michael did this. When the officers returned to the room, Michael told him his other personality didn't do this.
He said he'd been with this other personality for so many years, he knew he wasn't lying about this. So the cops tried something else. They asked him what he thought happened to his neighbor Leola. That's when Michael said he thought the killer probably knocked on the front door and asked to come inside. But before Leola said yes, he pushed his way in and attacked her. Then the cops asked him how she was killed.
Michael said, quote, I don't know, maybe with his bare hands, end quote. As they continued to talk, detectives asked Michael if they could take a DNA swab of his mouth. They needed to compare it against the DNA found at the crime scene. And of course, Michael said yes. Less than 15 minutes later, officers came back into the room and told Michael that his DNA matched the DNA from the crime scene.
Again, this was yet another lie because this type of DNA testing normally takes days, if not weeks, to complete. There was no way for them to know within 15 minutes if his DNA matched. All of this was a ploy to try and get Michael to confess, which ultimately worked. He finally did confess. Do you know what I don't miss at all? That vicious week before my period each month.
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That's happy mammoth.com and use code tails for 15% off today. Despite not knowing any details of the crime itself or the crime scene, Michael Alexander confessed to Leola's murder. The cops asked him how he killed her. He said he didn't know he might've used a weapon or he could have used his bare hands. They asked him where in the house this happened.
He said the living room, but the living room was completely untouched and her body was found in the bedroom. For someone who supposedly committed this murder, they didn't know a single thing about it. But the police didn't care. They had a confession and that was all they needed. From the moment they had Michael's confession, the police stopped investigating the case and Michael was arrested on January 29th, 2013.
He was charged with first-degree murder, torture, aggravated mayhem, first-degree burglary, and attempted first-degree robbery. If convicted of all these criminal counts, he was looking at facing the death penalty. The Sutter County District Attorney went for the jugular. Three days after the charges were filed, Michael met with his public defender and immediately asked to take back his confession.
He said he had nothing to do with it and only confessed after the police came to him and said his DNA was found at the crime scene. But he insisted he didn't do it. The timing of this couldn't be better because at the same exact time Michael spoke with his public defender, the police already had a lot of answers when it came to the DNA evidence collected from the house. It didn't belong to Michael. It belonged to someone else.
Blood found throughout the house, including a mirror in Leola's bedroom, broken glass on her back patio, her living room wall, and the trail of blood throughout the house all belonged to someone else. The trail of blood even went past Michael's house down the street, like whoever the real killer was walked past his house and down the block.
The police ran the DNA against all of Michael's friends, as well as all of the parolees and hospital records, and no matches came back. They didn't even get a match when they compared it against the known profiles in the national database. A fingerprint found on Leola's bedroom door didn't match Michael's. The shoe print underneath the broken window didn't match. It wasn't the same size or shape as Michael's shoes.
DNA found underneath her fingernails wasn't a match. Hair found on one of his jackets didn't match. Not a single drop of blood found anywhere was a match. And none of Leola's blood was ever found on Michael's clothing. But still, the police and now prosecutors thought they had their guy. After all, they had a taped confession. To try and explain the unknown DNA, the cops went back to Michael, who is now in jail, and
and asked him who his accomplices were. Surely, the DNA had to belong to someone who committed the murder with him. But Michael continued to deny everything. He took back his original confession and said that no one helped him because he wasn't there and he didn't do it. One of the police's mean theories for a motive was financial. They thought Michael committed the murder so he could rob Leola.
That's also why he was charged with attempted first-degree robbery. But nothing was taken. Her purse and jewelry were still inside the house, and $4,000 in cash was left untouched in an unlocked safe. Plus, according to Michael, he didn't need to kill someone just to steal money. He said his mom had just let him use her ATM card earlier that day to buy whatever he wanted, so he didn't need the money.
21 months go by and Michael is still in jail awaiting trial. Even though all the physical and forensic evidence pointed towards someone else, the police and prosecutors weren't letting up. They started to interview inmates housed at the same jail as Michael to see if he had talked about the murder at all. They taped his phone calls with his mom and older sister. They also got a search warrant to monitor both of their Facebook accounts.
They did anything and everything they could to try and make up for the lack of physical evidence. But as the months eventually turned to years, there wasn't enough evidence to keep him in custody. After over three and a half years in jail, prosecutors announced they were dropping all charges against Michael on August 19, 2016, just two days shy of his 24th birthday. In their motion to dismiss in front of the judge, the prosecutor said, quote,
End quote. But even after they officially dropped the case, the prosecutor made no mention of Michael's innocence.
Never once did they say they thought he was innocent. They simply said they didn't have enough forensic evidence. They also didn't rule out the possibility that they would re-arrest and recharge him in the future. They also failed to apologize to Michael or his family for keeping him locked up for the past three and a half years. Right after the prosecutor filed the motion to dismiss, Michael was released from jail and reunited with his mom and sister.
but he would never get back all the time that was spent behind bars. And trying to reintegrate into everyday society wasn't easy. He struggled to find a routine and get a job. Even though all of his criminal charges were dropped, it wouldn't be easy explaining to potential employers what he was doing for the past three years. Plus, Yuba City, California isn't a big place.
By that point, everyone knew about Leola's murder and his arrest for it, so the stigma followed him everywhere. Michael eventually landed a job at one of Sutter County's many rice mills. It wasn't ideal, but it was a job. And he did his best to try and move forward from what happened. At the same time, the Yuba City Police Department was back at square one trying to solve Leola's murder.
If Michael didn't do it, that meant someone else did. By April 2018, every police department across the country heard about the arrest of Joseph James DeAngelo, a.k.a. the Golden State Killer. But it wasn't only the news about his arrest that caught everyone's attention. It was all about the new DNA testing that was used, genetic genealogy.
The police in Northern California were able to use unknown DNA collected at many of the Golden State killers' crime scenes to locate his relatives. And once they had identified relatives who had uploaded their DNA to public databases, they were able to narrow it down to Joseph James D'Angelo. Well, as soon as the police in Yuba City, California learned about this type of DNA testing, they decided they wanted to try it on their case.
In late 2018, the lab in Richmond took the DNA and uploaded it to various databases like GEDmatch and 23andMe. And once they did, they instantly got a hit to a 31-year-old woman. Now, this wasn't the killer, or at least the cops didn't think that she was. But she did have two brothers and an uncle that could be. All three of them shared DNA with Leola's killer.
So all the cops needed to do was narrow this list down from three suspects to just one. A few months later, in February 2019, detectives pinpointed a 29-year-old Yuba City guy, someone who lived only about a half mile away from Leola's house. Over the next month, detectives watched his every move. They followed him to work. They watched him shop at the grocery store.
Detectives even went to his weekly Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Wherever the suspect went, detectives followed closely behind, waiting for their chance. Then, on April 2, 2019, after the suspect's weekly AA meeting, they noticed he was chewing on and spitting out sunflower seeds.
So once their suspect walked into the meeting, a couple of officers swooped in seconds behind him and picked up the sunflower seeds to send off to the lab to be tested. Then three days later, they had their DNA results. The DNA collected from the sunflower seeds matched the unknown DNA collected at Leola's crime scene. So who was this mystery man from Yuba City?
Well, his name is Armando Arias Cuadras, a guy with a criminal record that included a conviction for physically assaulting his wife in 2014. In that incident, his wife was a patient at the hospital, and while drunk, he put his hands around her neck and almost choked her to death. So undoubtedly, this guy has a temper. When it comes to Leola's murder, the police found out he lived only a few blocks away.
And he even stayed in the Yuba City area throughout the entire six-year investigation. He didn't bother trying to run away or even hide. More than six years after Leola's murder, on April 11, 2019, the police knocked on Armando's front door and told him he was under arrest for first-degree murder.
They told him that through genetic genealogy, they were able to tie his DNA to the unknown DNA collected all over the crime scene. It was finally game over. The police aren't sure whether Armando Cuadras was the creeper Leola's neighbor saw peeking through her window, but they were confident he was the murderer. The DNA evidence spoke for itself.
Right after his arrest, detectives sat down for an interview. Initially, he denied knowing anything about the murder and claimed he wasn't there. But when investigators confronted him with the blood evidence, he changed his story. He admitted to being there and, quote, stomping somebody out, but claimed he didn't know that it was a 94-year-old woman. He said he thought it was just another man.
He also said he was really drunk at the time, so he could have mistaken Leola for another man. At least, that's what he said. On top of the DNA evidence, the police had other evidence linking him to the murder. Armando made contact with law enforcement near Leola's home at 3.30 a.m. on January 19, 2013. In fact, he was only about 300 yards away from the house.
He was briefly stopped and questioned by the police, was eventually let go because he wasn't actually doing anything wrong, and they didn't know about the murder yet. According to the police report, Armando was extremely intoxicated and had a nasty cut on one of his arms. He was transported to a local hospital for treatment, but was subsequently let go. Unfortunately, after Leola's body was discovered two days later...
The police didn't make the connection between their interaction with Armando that night and the murder. If they had, he would have been arrested just hours later, and the case wouldn't have taken over six years to solve. Prosecutors decided to throw the book at him. On top of charging him with first-degree murder, they also charged him with one count of torture with great bodily injury, aggravated mayhem, and first-degree burglary.
As to count one a first-degree murder, prosecutors also charged him with special circumstances, alleging the murder was committed during the commission of a robbery. His original trial date was scheduled for October 2020. Although all the evidence seemed to point toward a slam-dunk conviction for the prosecution, Armando still decided to take his case to trial.
But like many other trials, his was delayed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Fast forward to January 2021. All the COVID delays were over and done, and the case finally went to trial. In the end, Armando was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to the maximum, life in prison without the possibility of parole. He was also convicted of two other charges, including aggravated mayhem and burglary.
Although Armando is the only one who knows what the motive was behind killing a 94-year-old grandma, the police and prosecutors believe the main reason was robbery. Some might say there are two victims in this story. One, of course, is Leola Shreves herself. But the second victim, and the first person accused in all of this, is Michael Alexander.
Michael has continued to struggle to move on with his life even after Armando's arrest. He bounced around from job to job. When job applications asked if he had ever been charged with a felony, he always had to check the yes box. Even though he was never convicted of a crime, the weight of everything still looms over his head.
He sued the Sutter County, the Yuba City Police Department, and two of the detectives who worked on the case for $10 million, but ended up settling outside of court for $50,000. That's all he got after spending years behind bars and being accused of being a murderer that, for a murder, he never committed.
Sutter County and the police department have also denied any wrongdoing and said that they had nothing to do with this quote-unquote false confession. The department maintains they did nothing to elicit a false confession, and Michael did so on his own free will. And since he falsely confessed to it, Michael can only blame himself.
They also don't take any responsibility for the DNA and blood evidence collected from the house that they knew didn't belong to him. DNA evidence and genetic genealogy were what finally solved Leola's murder. It might have brought justice under the eyes of the law, but will the family ever have closure?
In a statement made right after the sentencing hearing, Leola's family said that no punishment the court could hand down would ever be enough because none of it would ever bring Leola Shreves back. To share your thoughts on the story, be sure to follow the show on Instagram and Facebook. To find out what I think about the case, sign up to become a patron at patreon.com slash forensic tales.
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