What we lose in the Shadows (A father and daughter True Crime Podcast)
What we lose in the Shadows (A father and daughter True Crime Podcast)
The Darkest Corners: Shawna Howe's Abduction and the Pursuit of Justice
Can you imagine the terror of witnessing an 11-year-old girl being abducted right before your eyes? In this chilling true crime episode, my daughter and I share the heartbreaking story of Shawna Howe, who was kidnapped in Oil City, Pennsylvania, in 1992. Together, we recount the harrowing details of Shawna's disappearance and the relentless investigation that followed.
Contact us at: whatweloseintheshadows@gmail.com
Background music by Michael Shuller Music
Speaker 1: Good evening and welcome to What We Lose in the Shadows.
Speaker 2: A father-daughter true crime podcast.
Speaker 1: My name is Jamies Keys.
Speaker 2: I'm Caroline. Our trigger warnings today are child abduction, child sexual abuse and child murder.
Speaker 1: You know, today, Care, we're going to be talking about the story of Shauna Howe. Shawna Howe was a young girl from oil city, Pennsylvania, and this was in 1992. Your grandparents actually used to have a cabin up near oil city and I can remember this going on, as we used to go up there on weekends and, you know, Memorial holiday and that kind of thing.
Speaker 2: So this was happening, like in the news, like this was going on.
Speaker 1: Right, it was in the news cycle in Pittsburgh, greater Pittsburgh, where we live, and then it was actually happening in oil city. So, I just remember this going on as we were up there visiting and so on, and that's terrifying.
Speaker 2: It is terrifying, it is terrifying And you like brought like the kids up.
Speaker 1: You know no kids yet. This was 1992.
Speaker 2: Oh, okay, where is oil city?
Speaker 1: All city is north and west. It's kind of towards Erie, Pennsylvania. Oh okay. It was around Halloween time. It was on Tuesday, October 27, 1992. Shawna Howe was getting ready to go to a Girl Scout troop meeting. It was around Halloween, so they were going to have a party after that And the Girl Scout troop was going to the local senior citizen home to sing Christmas carols because the season had begun And you know Christmas now begins slightly after July 4th.
Speaker 2: I remember being in Girl Scouts too. Absolutely Such a cute little thing to do with your children, or I guess they have Boy Scouts. Yeah, they have Boy Scouts. Yeah, not just thinking, there's Girl Scouts.
Speaker 1: So, the kids are getting dressed up for the Halloween party at the local church and they're going to sing to the senior citizens. And Shauna's family didn't have a lot of money And but she was a great kid and and you know, they were struggling a little bit.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So, Shauna decided to improvise a costume and she went as a gymnast. She had a turquoise and black leotard, you know, and stockings and long white gloves. How old is she? She's 11 years old, ok. Shawna's mother, lucy, was working that night And Shawna, you know, basically came downstairs and she was happy and her mother kissed her and said listen, shauna, remember, I'm going to have someone pick you up. You know someone? Yeah, she wasn't quite sure where, because she was going to be working that evening.
Speaker 2: She didn't know who was going to pick her up.
Speaker 1: She was going to ask her her stepfather or someone else, maybe one of the other mothers, ok, but she didn't tell her who she didn't tell her because this is before stranger danger, right.
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, i mean, things would happen, And I can remember missing a little.
Speaker 1: You know, children and stuff like that when I was younger, but not nearly as prevalent, and I don't know if it wasn't as prevalent or maybe it was just the fact that maybe they weren't reported as widely, and we weren't as news centric as we are now. Anyway, so, as it happens you know, when you're a busy parent with multiple children, sometimes things get hectic, and you forget. When the party broke up around 8 pm, Shauna and her friend Joel were waiting for someone to pick up Shawna at the free Methodist Church in Loyal City. Shawna and her friend decided to start walking in the direction of home And when they hit the point where their past diverged, shauna hesitated and asked her friend if she could walk her the rest of the way home, because Shawna was very afraid of the dark. Her friend was hesitant and said that she should walk to her house and she could have her dad walk her over to the house. And Shawna said you know, she was all right, she didn't want to impose on her father.
Speaker 2: Is that the last person to see her?
Speaker 1: The little girl. Yes, wow, her little friend. Oh, that's so sad.
Speaker 2: Definitely Let this be a lesson You know you can't impose. When you need to, you know, ask for help, ask for someone to walk you home. If your friend can't walk you home and shit. You know the little girl shouldn't have been walking alone back either. The other little girl.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: Exactly So, you know. Impose upon men to walk you home because you know people are less likely to attack people when they're with grown men. It's just the truth, Right? Sadly, Absolutely So. Men, walk your friends home, Right.
Speaker 1: The wolf's always at the door. That's something that I think is important.
Speaker 2: Oh God, well, I mean that's negative. That's a terrifying phrase.
Speaker 1: Where did that come from. Your grandma used to say that to me all the time and she would always say, no, you know, when are you walking home? I said I'm 16 years old, mom, I think I will be ok. She is the wolf's always at the door. Oh, that's so scary. She was old worldly.
Speaker 2: She was, she was terrified, she was intense, She was intense.
Speaker 1: But so shortly after an oil city resident named Dan Payton called 911, he was walking and saw Shawna walking on the opposite side of the street, going in a different direction. On West 1st Street He recounted seeing a tall, scruffy, looking shuffled man with a baseball cap on that same side of the street as Shawna And shortly after he passed he heard the girl scream What the hell? He immediately sprinted back to the corner of 1st and Reigh Street just inside to see the tall man pick up the little girl And he thought it looked like shove her into a little red car.
Speaker 2: Oh, my God.
Speaker 1: Now, this was 1992. Self-warrants had been invented, but they certainly weren't super popular at that point. Oh no, he didn't have a cell phone and he was far away from his house, so he frantically ran around to different houses knocking on doors and begging someone to call 911. That's a good idea.
Speaker 1: He told the operator that it looked like the little girl had been forced into a boxy red-colored car. Police were dispatched and they didn't find the car. Shawna's mother, in the meantime, had remembered that Shawna needed rice. So she called her husband, john, who was Shawna's stepfather, who waited there. He said well, i should go look for her. and he said no, no, what if she comes home? So he waited a little bit of time, but after she didn't come home, 10 or 15 minutes later he jumped in the car and he drove in the direction of the church. No, shauna Lucy called Shawna's biological father, who lived a couple of towns over, but he hadn't seen her either. Around 10 pm Shawna's mother reported her missing with police. Police immediately set up a roadblock to stop motorists and especially anyone in a red car, and they were going in and out of the town.
Speaker 1: They also sent a bolo or beyond the lookout with a hundred mile radius, with every police department within a hundred miles. The police had 20 or 30 officers doing a grid search of the area that Shawna was last seen.
Speaker 2: And that's the night of.
Speaker 1: That's the night of. Wow, but the next morning, shauna and her extended family started searching When Shawna's mother or city's a small community, it's a-.
Speaker 2: Shawna's the little girl. So Lucy started searching Right, lucy and her family started searching.
Speaker 1: So Oil City is an interesting place in that oil was first discovered in the United States in oil city, hence the name oil city. But since that time, since they found another parts of the world, another parts of the country, it had diminished. It had once been a great big town, but the people there are pretty close knit. So the next morning when they began searching, lusia got up and she looked outside and there were literally hundreds of people outside the house. So they did an enormous search and one of her Shana's uncles led a massive search party and they were covering huge swaths of land. Two days later they discovered their first clue. It was in a secluded, a wooded area most often used by teenagers to go parking or drinking. It was near Rockland Township, which wasn't too far away. Later that day her uncle found Shana's leotard.
Speaker 2: Oh, my God.
Speaker 1: They took it back to the lab and they found DNA. They tested the DNA and set up a profile.
Speaker 2: But they didn't have any match to it. No, the next morning, Oh was that back before, when you had to have like something to compare it to.
Speaker 1: The difference between now and then was that it had an advance to. They could just pull it from individual strands of DNA. They had to do a blood draw to pull the DNA out at that point. The next morning, in the area where they found Shana's leotard, a man who was camping nearby because this is kind of a wooded area and so on was walking across this old train trestle about 30 foot off the water. A train trestle Right. It's a train bridge, that basically where trains would go over, but it had been abandoned. Okay, the guy was walking across. He saw something on the bank below. On closer examination, he saw the little body on the shore, not more than five or six hundred feet from where the body seat was found. Now, the police and her uncle had fully searched that area the day before. That's so sad. So they came to the conclusion that she had been brought back to the same area Yeah, thrown from the bridge.
Speaker 2: Oh, my God.
Speaker 1: Police actually also found her little shoes, and they were facing two different directions on the bridge, so that was a candy wrapper Right So openly, kind of mocking the police.
Speaker 2: It's horrible.
Speaker 1: The autopsy revealed that she had been sexually assaulted and that there was a shoe print on her face.
Speaker 2: Oh, my God.
Speaker 1: So someone either kicked her in the face or stepped on her face.
Speaker 2: The disrespect I mean, the whole thing is disrespectful, but like what?
Speaker 1: So the coroner concluded that the little girl had been kept alive for several days and that she had initially survived the 33 foot fall to the Rocky Bank below.
Speaker 2: But then she died like she bled out there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, from a traumatic pen trauma and that sort of thing. So from the formal autopsy they also found scratches on her knees and her hands. But the one thing they didn't find was evidence of ligature marks on her wrist that she had been restrained.
Speaker 2: Interesting.
Speaker 1: The community was terrified, and they began neighborhood watches. They canceled Halloween. Parents reorganize their schedules just to make sure that they were there for their kids to walk them back and forth, and if they weren't, they made arrangements with other parents to do the you know, to kind of like troop up and make sure that the kids were safe. Some kids were even enrolled in self defense classes. Some parents even went as far as to arming their kids with mace.
Speaker 1: The local police began an extensive search, since the DNA profile samples were collected from everyone associated with the little girl her father, her stepfather, her uncle, the camper that found the body. Even Sean, his 12-year-old brother, had the blood work done to collect the sample, but nothing. The FBI was brought in and concluded that due to the roadblocks and the secluded location, it was more likely a local And that person was probably still there. The FBI also worked up a profile. The male, probably in his 20s, maybe had some sort of downturn or personal financial crisis. One suspect that matched the profile lived a few houses down. Oh my God. His name was Michael And he was a registered pedophile. Oh my God, on the day that this happened he fled town.
Speaker 1: Of course, literally fled town and he ran away.
Speaker 2: It's giving your guilty.
Speaker 1: It certainly puts off that vibe, doesn't it? Yes? So the police asked for information on the man from the 911 caller. He said he was tall, he was skinny, a smoker, he had a baseball cap on. Eventually, a call to the police put forward the name of Ted Walker. What happened to Michael? Michael was gone. No one could find Michael. Oh my gosh, yeah, he was gone. He jumped on a bus and disappeared. Eventually, a call came into the police and they put forward the name of Ted Walker. He was a local man with maybe some sort of mental disability in some range. In some form. He was functional though. He worked at a local pizza shop and he did indeed have a red car, and when Shawna and the other young woman used to go in the pizza shop he was kind of inappropriate because he would come around the corner and he would ask the girls to give him a hug.
Speaker 2: Ew, you know. see, this is the thing People often will, you know, excuse this behavior for people. You know, if they know the person, if they're in their family or if they're, you know, older, like a town, like elder, they'll be like oh, that's just him, that's just them. You know it's okay because they're this And it's like no, it's not okay. You need to call out this inappropriate behavior And I'm not saying that every person who is inappropriate will lead to this But a lot of times when you listen to these cases, you look back and you see people are like yeah, i could see that because he was creepy. And it's like then why didn't you say anything? Then why didn't you call them out? Why didn't everyone know that this guy was creepy with kids And why were the kids going around? You know what I mean. Like we need to hold people accountable when they're creepy.
Speaker 1: Right, And Shawna's mother said that the girls, including Shawna, thought he was creepy. When the police questioned Walker, he said he didn't know anything about it, of course, And he voluntarily gave the police a DNA sample and in fact they wrote him out At that point in 1995, the local police had been working on it. Until 1995, a state detective named So how many years was this?
Speaker 2: Three years.
Speaker 1: I think so yeah, so it was an open case and they worked on it for quite some time. But in 1995, the State Police, Pennsylvania State Police, signed a new detective and his name was Richard Graham. He was assigned to the case and one of the first things he did was he called this FBI profiler a gentleman by the name of Robert Reser. He was a retired profiler. He contacted him and he said now, for example, if you've ever seen the Netflix show Mine Hunter, the main character, bill Tranch, is basically Robert Ressler. They took his exploits and that sort of thing and kind of Was it actually based on him?
Speaker 1: It was kind of loosely based on him not directly, though.
Speaker 2: Okay, so he didn't get any compensation for it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and, as a matter of fact, some of his exploits and so on also influenced the movie that I had you watch.
Speaker 2: But he didn't get any.
Speaker 1: He got some credit. Oh, okay, okay, Good, but he didn't write the book, got you. He was a model of that type of person that Jodie Foster's character played in Silence of the Land. Yes, and he even coined the phrase serial killer.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: When he was working on The Son of Sam Case. So immediately upon looking at that he came up with something right off the bat that no one had really thought of before. He said He noticed in the corners, photographs and so on, that the little girl didn't have any ligature marks on her arms or legs.
Speaker 2: Which is weird.
Speaker 1: Which is weird. And he said well, what does that mean? He says, apparently, well, there was more than one person that was holding her. And they're like well, why is that? He's like well, listen, they had her for three days.
Speaker 2: That's true.
Speaker 1: During that period of time. If it was one person, you would have to somehow restrain her. That's really a good point. So now we're dealing with more than one person And that was a revelation to them. They hadn't really thought of that before. And one of the things is they started looking at these two brothers immediately. They're called the O'Brien brothers, jimmy and Timmy, or Jim and Tim. They were violent, they were local.
Speaker 2: Who's name in these people?
Speaker 1: Sorry.
Speaker 2: Anyways.
Speaker 1: They were violent, and they were local. But in fact in 1995, a woman had been attacked leaving a bar in oil city. The attacker grabbed her and tried to shove her into the trunk, what the hell Terrified The woman. Fought back with everything she had. This person's reaction was to grab her, slam her on the sidewalk. He realized at that point that he'd created too much of a commotion So he fled, leaving the woman unconscious on the side. The next day the woman was able to give a full description and her attacker was picked that as Jimmy O'Brien. Wow Picked her out of a photo array right away. When questioning him in jail, they asked him about Sean and he expressed you know he'd been like he had no idea what had happened to her And he knew nothing about it. So Graham went back to the original officers on the case and asked if they had thought about the O'Brien's, because they came to mind right away.
Speaker 2: Because they're violent. Yeah, they obviously don't care about.
Speaker 1: And they both had had problems with minors and you know attacking. Oh Yeah, so they were Why?
Speaker 2: were these people out. I don't understand How the hell is our justice system Just letting these pedophiles run around like hello?
Speaker 1: Well, i guess, because you know jurisprudence, everyone's assumed innocent and that sort of thing.
Speaker 2: Which is important? Which is important?
Speaker 1: But you know, if you establish a pattern of doing this Right, let's use Use your mind. Correct, but they he went back to the original officers and they told him it couldn't have been the O'Brien's because they were in jail at that time.
Speaker 2: Oh.
Speaker 1: Also, neither of them matched the description. They were short, squat, little people, and it didn't match the description of the tall lanky person.
Speaker 1: So years went by and in 1997, just before Halloween another little girl, Shanae Freedun, was abducted. No, She was playing outside of her apartment. She was only four years old, Oh my gosh. But someone had said that she was taken by a white man dressed in black. Once again, Oil City came together and once again they had a huge search party of a hundred people They were looking for in wooded areas and so on, and thought that you know, would she be in this area? They eventually found her body.
Speaker 2: Oh, oh my gosh, this is horrible.
Speaker 1: She had been assaulted and thrown off the cliff.
Speaker 2: Oh my gosh like very similar to Very similar.
Speaker 1: So one of the members of the search party was a 17-year-old guy named Nicholas Bowen, and it was later discovered that he was walking past the apartment where Shanae and the other little girls and boys were playing, and they kind of made fun of him because he looked funny and threw some sticks at him.
Speaker 2: What the hell Wait. Okay, so this is separate. This is a separate incident. Yeah, this is just like a little boy, a little boy. This is not part of the search party.
Speaker 1: Yes, he was part of the research party and, as a matter of fact, he went up to Shanae's mother, and she was, of course, a basket case, as all mothers would be. And he hugged her and said we're gonna find your little girl.
Speaker 2: Okay, so the 17-year-old is searching And someone else is coming up to make fun of him during the search party.
Speaker 1: No, no, no.
Speaker 2: This all happened.
Speaker 1: This happened earlier in the afternoon. Okay, he was walking past the place, the kids were playing outside and the kids thought he looked funny and dressed all in black and so on, and they were making fun of him and threw sticks at him. Geez, he responded by coming back, abducting her, assaulting her, murdering her and throwing her off a cliff.
Speaker 2: So that's who assaulted Shanae?
Speaker 1: That's who assaulted Shanae right.
Speaker 2: What the hell.
Speaker 1: Now it was so. Similar police wondered if he could also have been, you know, shana's killer. How did they find him? Because the police officer one of the police officers noticed he was hanging around and he just a vibe.
Speaker 1: Yeah, just a vibe, and police go by that kind of thing a lot of times. And the guy walked up to him and he started questioning him. He said what are you doing here? Why are you so associated with this case? And his answers and his looking away and looking at his feet and the guy was just like you know what? come with me.
Speaker 2: You got to trust your intuition. It'll tell you a lot, just like you know, just like have you seen Scandal, of course you made me want to. I love Scandal so much. It's like Olivia Pope says like trust her gut, she is a badass, she's a great icon, although she does have drink a lot of wine, but that's OK. Anyways, back to the story. Wait, so you're giving, you're giving a lot of suspects. So we have the one guy got on the bus, right, he disappeared. Michael, right, and then we have Jimmy and Timmy.
Speaker 1: Jimmy and Celia O'Brien.
Speaker 2: Timmy and Jimmy, the two twins pedophiles, horrible. And then we have Ted Ted Walker. Ted Walker, right, The creepy guy.
Speaker 1: Tall skinny smoker.
Speaker 2: And then we have the guy just now.
Speaker 1: Nicholas.
Speaker 2: Bellin That did. that was murder. Who did murder Shanae right?
Speaker 1: He did And he under under under direct examination. he folded because he was only 17 years old. He said that he got really mad and that you know when they were making fun of him. and and that's what happened. Now they did a DNA profile on him And, of course, it didn't match the DNA that they found in the shot.
Speaker 2: I feel like, with these young boys, with these teenage boys, what really needs to happen is sitting down and discussing their feelings and being able to, you know, understand what they're feeling, and not just immediately jump to physical violence.
Speaker 1: Absolutely.
Speaker 2: Because I mean, I know this was a while ago and I know it still happens today. Sure.
Speaker 1: And.
Speaker 2: I feel like they can't express their emotions because it's unmanly. but that is such a stigma that hurts men and women and non binary people, and it's just. it's disgusting Like emotions are part of our experience as humans. We have to be able to understand them and not act on them in violent ways.
Speaker 1: So, having grown up, about that time, you know you, it really depends because, yeah, i mean my dad, for example. He was a World War II veteran, tough guy, big guy, strong guy, but a very gentle guy at the same time And but he was a very you know, men, don't cry, you know, suck it up Like. I remember I was hurting a baseball game one time and he said you're right, i'm like, yeah, you guys will then suck it up and get back out there, jesus. So there was a, there was a definite. It was a different mind frame.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we need to get rid of that because we do this kind of. Yeah, like I'm a cheese mode, like it's not okay.
Speaker 1: Well, but not only that. there's also a problem in that so many people are so sensitive about everything Like so. so what? some little kid makes fun of you, right.
Speaker 2: Yes, why An entitlement?
Speaker 1: Right. Why react with violence? violence to a child, right.
Speaker 2: Or even even to an adult, like if people make fun of you, like you just got to like look at yourself and be like you know what? Fuck them.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's exactly right. Like, keep it pushing people. People need to get a little bit of a thicker skin now.
Speaker 2: A thicker skin, but also like be in touch with your emotions, be able to feel these and understand, like, oh, that hurt my feelings, but that person's opinion doesn't matter to me. That person, it wasn't being nice. let's keep it going.
Speaker 1: You know what? I read something somewhere not long ago and when someone is kind of making a derogatory remark or something, there is a I can't remember if it was, i think it was Kerry Grant or something. I read something I'll quote from him. If someone would say something like that to him, he would always say three words mind your manners, that's funny.
Speaker 2: This reminds me recently of this book I read called The Four Agreements, which is an old book, but I just read it and it is so good. And one of the agreements you have to make with yourself is to not take things personally. Because when you don't take things personally, you realize, oh, i'm in my own little world and I have my feelings, my thoughts, my beliefs. other people have theirs And if they don't like me, it really doesn't have anything to do with me, like maybe I triggered something in them that they don't like or whatever, but that's just that's them. Keep your bad energy over there, because this is my life and you're not. you're not gonna influence me.
Speaker 1: You know what I found it over the years? that if someone says something, it's important to let them know, they might think they're being funny, and if you just say, i don't know, are you upset with me, you're kind of making me feel bad with that comment, and sometimes that's all it takes. Oh, I'm sorry, i was just trying to be funny. I'm more often than that's a better way to deal with things than like walking over and slugging the guy Yeah, what are we doing?
Speaker 2: We are not apes, like we're not chimpanzees out in the wilderness, just like you know, trying to get the last coconut or whatever, like no.
Speaker 1: Do monkeys eat coconuts ?
Speaker 2: they, do they not? Okay, whatever Banana maybe, sure, but the point being, we are intelligent human beings, like we need to act and be as such. Read a book. Okay, go back to the story. I'm sorry, that's okay.
Speaker 1: No, that's great, But no but so years go by and this case is a cold case by this point, and in 2001, detective Graham was investigating a violent robbery. Even though he carried a caseload of at least 60 or 70 open cases, shauna was never far from his mind.
Speaker 2: How was his one?
Speaker 1: It was every detective that I've ever seen, or seen in a police show or whatever. But most detectives carry one case that they're just like. I can't get over that. I'm gonna solve that damn thing.
Speaker 2: Probably more than one, honestly.
Speaker 1: So, by 2001, though, there'd been a decent advancement of DNA, and he was able to determine DNA that was swabbed not only from Shawna's outfit but from her mouth, that it matched right, so that it was one attacker.
Speaker 2: So this was from a different attack.
Speaker 1: No, the DNA that they had taken from Shawna. They had made advancements in DNA research.
Speaker 1: Oh yes okay, makes sense. So they could say the DNA from her mouth and the DNA from her leotard was the same. Okay, and the technician? they'd come a long way in terms of that. and the technician assured him that if you find a mask to the DNA, you have found your killer. So over the years he purposely took DNA samples from as many violent criminals as he could. He was sent to the county jail to interrogate Timmy O'Brien and asked him for a DNA sample. One of the twins.
Speaker 1: One of the twins Or brothers are they twins I don't know if they're twins or not. I think they're just brothers.
Speaker 2: Terrible twins.
Speaker 1: Terrible. O'brien was startled at first, but after consulting with his lawyer he agreed And the DNA was not a match. So when Graham was first given the case, he was told that the O'Brien's were ruled out because both of them were in jail. Right, but is the years Were they not? But the years went by. He wondered On a hunch. He followed up with a corrections officer and was told yes, they had been arrested, but they had bailed out.
Speaker 2: Oh my God, i don't know.
Speaker 1: They were not in police custody at the time of the abduction.
Speaker 2: So I don't understand How did they? why did they think that they were?
Speaker 1: Because in the rush of things and people rushing around trying to find the little girl, so yeah, and they told them that they were not in custody at that point. But they immediately thought of the O'Brien's because they were violent, they had done child offenses before, so they immediately came to mind. But someone remembered that they had been arrested that day on a violent domestic abuse case, but they didn't check, but they didn't back check.
Speaker 2: Oh my God, and how many years later is this? This?
Speaker 1: is in 2001. By that point the detective Graham, so it's been nine years, yeah, and by that point detective Graham was retired And he had passed the information to the new person in charge, whose name was O'Toole Detective O'Toole. But, mr Graham, Detective Graham went to Shauna's mother who had kept asking police my God, have you forgotten about my daughter Right? What about my daughter? Where's the justice for my daughter Right? And he went to her and said listen, i'm retired now. I have nothing better to do. I promise you I'm going to find her killer.
Speaker 2: Aw.
Speaker 1: So, along with the new evidence and knowing that the O'Brien's weren't actually in jail, they had ruled out the one brother. But detective Graham, along with Detective O'Toole, said what about James O'Brien?
Speaker 2: Mm-hmm.
Speaker 1: So he was in jail for a violent assault against a young girl. Oh my gosh. So they were able to get a warrant and match the DNA from the rape Mm-hmm because he was in custody. Right And guess what? It was a match. The DNA tech called Detective Graham and he said I want you to be the first one to know.
Speaker 2: You got your guy. You got your guy.
Speaker 1: So that was the case. It's interesting. What a piece of shit. But people knew they were violent, but people didn't necessarily know that he'd been a sexual predator, but that's the thing.
Speaker 2: That's the thing. That's what we need to pay attention to, because we know people in our community is sadly, that are violent or are creepy towards women or just like give you a bad vibe. Pay attention to these things, guys, because this is like the precursor to sometimes this happening. Sometimes, no, they stop at the creepy inappropriateness But let's call this out or stay away from these people and let other women, other children, other men, no, let people know that this person is not a good person.
Speaker 1: Right, And during that time her mother was basically looking around the internet, And by that point the internet was much more popular. And something else happened. In 1994, a young girl in New Jersey named Megan Kanka was raped, killed by a registered pedophile who lived across the street from her. It caused an outcry and the general public eventually led to the creation of Megan's Law, which makes it criminal for an offender not to register with local authorities.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and for other local people not to know that you live close to a pedophile.
Speaker 1: Right And they set up a national database and Shawna's mother noticed that there were at least 20 sexual offenders that lived nearby them.
Speaker 2: Jesus, you know, a crime junkie has a really good podcast on or a really good episode about Megan Kanka, and that's where I actually learned it about her case and like how it impacted. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It's called Megan's Law and it's been a dot that all over the country and almost every state at this point. Yeah, so finally they were able to also get corroborating evidence from Ted Walker. So in fact Ted Walker was the tall, lanky man. Yeah, right, so he did help him. Ted Walker was indeed the one that grabbed Shawna.
Speaker 1: It was Ted Walker's car, oh my gosh, that she was shoved into, driven by the O'Brien brothers. So he grabbed the little girl, handed them off to the O'Brien brothers. Now, like I said, he had a mental disability. So they had told Ted who, by the way, they were staying in Ted's house. Ted had a house and basically he would let some of the younger folks just kind of crash there if they didn't have other places to stay. So they were staying with Ted. He grabs the little girl, hands her off to the other O'Brien's and they told him we're just going to show how incompetent the local police are. We're going to grab this person and then we're going to release her again a few hours later And that's what he told police.
Speaker 1: But every time they talked to Ted Walker, his story changed every time. So he agreed to make state's evidence against Jimmy and Timmy O'Brien, and that's how they brought the case. Ted Walker, for his assistance in doing all this, was sentenced for 40 years in prison. In 2005, a Banango County jury found both O'Brien brothers guilty of first degree murder and rape, along with kidnapping. Both men were put in prison for the rest of the lives, with zero chance of ever getting out of prison.
Speaker 2: That's what I like to hear at the end of these cases, because sometimes you hear they get out somehow. if it's like second degree murder or something. It's like oh, we didn't plan it, No, but I'm glad that these two pieces of shit are in jail forever.
Speaker 1: And Ted Walker is not a young guy, so 40 years is nearly a death sentence for him too.
Speaker 2: And he should be out of prison. Are they still alive? Yes, when did?
Speaker 1: this happen. This happened in the 90s. Okay, so they're old? Yeah, but as far as I'm aware, all three people are still alive, but never getting out of prison, which is the most important thing.
Speaker 2: Even Ted Walker.
Speaker 1: Even Ted Walker.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 1: So so yeah, that's a horrible, horrible case, but it you know what it also that, and Megatron, because the situation led to improvements in law, and I think when people finally go to their elected congresspeople who should be on top of this stuff anyways and demand change, that's when change happens. Very true, very true, very true. So that's the case of the horrible Halloween.
Speaker 2: That is a horrible Halloween case. Follow the show on whatever streaming site you're listening on.
Speaker 1: And remember. All of the source material will be available in the show notes.
Speaker 2: And follow us on Instagram at what we lose in the shadows And let us know if you want to hear a specific case.
Speaker 1: Or if you just want to give us some feedback.
Speaker 2: Okay, join us in the shadows next Tuesday. Bye.
