June 14, 2022 • 40 mins
In an affluent seaside town, a horrible murder goes cold until a twisted game breaks the case wide open. Who did it and why will leave you shocked.
Today’s guests are producer Stephanie Lydecker and forensic expert Joseph Scott Morgan. Joseph recently worked on the KT studio's documentary Murdered and Missing in Montana, now streaming on Peacock. He also hosts his own podcast, Body Bags, which is available to download now.
To connect with Joseph, check him out on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/josephscottmorgan/
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Falling in love is the best feeling in the world.
You see stars, you feel giddy, But sometimes that makes
you do crazy things, and sometimes that means murder. Just
because the story starts out with once upon a Time
doesn't mean it ends happily ever after. Welcome to Crazy
and Love, a production of Katie Studios and I Heart Radio.
(00:24):
Today's guests are true crime producer Stephanie Ledecker and forensic
expert Joseph Scott Morgan. Over his career, Joseph's handled thousands
of death investigations. Joseph also recently worked on the Katie
Studios documentary Murdered and Missing in Montana, which is now
streaming on Peacock. Joseph also hosts his own podcast, Bodybags
(00:47):
Available Everywhere. Episode thirty one, the Case of the Game,
the cover Up, and the Fatal Attraction. At thirty two,
Annelisa Ramundo was the full package. Smart, successful, and beautiful.
(01:07):
The young woman was a pharmaceutical rep for Purdue Pharma,
A Harvard grad who got her masters at Columbia. Annelisa
wasn't just smart, she also had an intense passion for life.
One of Annealisa's proudest moments was being able to buy
her own home. It's a gorgeous waterfront condo in the
heart of downtown Stanford, Connecticut. In December two thousand, Anne
(01:29):
Lisa met Nelson Sessler while working at Purdue Pharma. Nelson
was new and he and Antelisa hit it off immediately.
Nelson was well liked in a good worker, but the
opposite of Anne Lisa. While she was lively, he was
quiet and subdued. However, the pair just seemed to work
and we're spending most nights together at Anne Lisa's house.
(01:51):
At her sister's wedding, where Annelisa was a bridesmaid, the
couple danced for all to see, wearing a purple dress.
Annelisa even hat the bouquet. But despite all signs pointing
towards the couple moving forward, Nelson just wasn't ready to commit.
In February two thousand and two, Anna Lisa left her
(02:13):
job at Purdue to work at a New Jersey based
company called Fharmaica. At first, she was making the two
and a half hour drive, but soon began working from home.
On November eighth, two thousand two, Anna Lisa and Nelson
had dinner plans with friends in New York City. It
was supposed to be a bit of a coming out
party for the couple, but the pair never arrived. One
(02:35):
friend called Anna Lisa twenty five times, hoping there was
a reasonable explanation for their absence, but sadly, by that
point Anna Lisa had been dead for several hours. At
around twelve pm earlier that afternoon, police got a call
from a woman saying she could hear her neighbor being
attacked by a man. The woman was very concerned, but
(02:57):
before dispatchers could get any more information in the caller
hung up. When police arrived at Anneliza's condo, they found
her body in the middle of the foyer. She had
been beaten and stabbed. Officers immediately noted that the apartment
was a mess. An Lisa had obviously put up a fight.
Officers also noticed there were no signs of forced entry.
(03:19):
It appeared that whoever killed the intelligent and strong woman
was let in with no issue. Here's Stephanie, the fact
that there was no forced entry. That's a very important fact,
right is that one of the first things you look for. Yeah,
actually it is, and you begin to think was the
perpetrator known? Were they somebody that had previously been welcomed
(03:41):
into the home, or were they intimate enough to have
a key to get in, or was there a door
window that was unsecured. You have to consider all of
those possibilities. So the fact that when you get into
the interior the place is just torn to helen back,
that's going to give you some kind of indication, and
that there was at least some mild resistance initially upon entry.
(04:05):
And of course you look for other things that you
might see outside. Joseph in talking about the autopsy in
this case, it was noted that there was a massive
amount of blood. Anything else that you can share with
us about the findings. Yeah, she was stabbed very forcefully
multiple times. As a matter of fact, it stated that
(04:27):
one of the stab wounds is so deep that it
goes through her ribs into her chest cavity, passes through
that open space that's called plural space, and enters her lung.
So you have to have a tremendous amount of force
going straight down. And the forensic pathologist says something very interesting.
When Dr Gilchrist made his determination about the cause of death,
(04:50):
he stated that the relative position of the perpetrator to
the victim gave him the impression that the individual was
directly above the victim as they drove the knife down
into the body. That means that the perpetrator is in
a dominant position over the victim, hovering over them. We
(05:10):
know that she's got multiple defensive wounds on her hands,
so at autopsy, when they classify this as defensive wounds,
you know, and this is this is the chilling part,
because there was hemorrhage, She had an awareness that she
was being attacked. She had an ongoing need to survive.
(05:31):
Her primal person kicked in at that point and and
try to fend this person off as they were attacking it.
And this is kind of striking as well. She's got
nine stab wounds on her body. Not only is she
attacked in the shoulder and the neck, but also she's
got disfigurement insults as well, which anytime I see someone
(05:56):
that is cut in the face and a knife attack,
to me, that smacks of something else. When you go
for somebody's face, that means that you're trying to destroy
their person. And I think that at a deep level,
people that attack folks in the face they're trying to
strip away the humanity of that individual. She's also sustained
multiple blunt force trauma to the back of her skull.
(06:19):
The scene is bathed in blood. It's everywhere. So not
only is the interior of this home bathed in blood,
guess what, the perpetrator is bathed in blood. In this
particular case, they would have been saturated through and through.
Now this term is thrown around a lot. This is
a classic case of overkill. Does it feel like there's
(06:41):
some sort of passion involved or something very personal at
stake when you're dealing with an overkill Typically, yeah, when
you're talking about a perpetrator of a homicide, you've got
one or two things when you have overkill. Either you
have a person that is a raving psychotic, They've got
some kind of psycho pathology going on in their mind.
(07:02):
But more than likely in these cases, you've got somebody
that's involved in love or money, jealousy, those things that
bring up that green eyed monster perhaps within us that
just kind of lashes out for that moment Tom and
they rush into this thing and you know, I Am
going to absolutely and totally eradicate you from the face
(07:24):
of this planet. Is there something if you are being
attacked to be aware of or to do. You fight
to the death. You do not get into the car
if somebody attacks you and there's a knife involved. Is
there anything that we should know to do other than fight?
Like hell, Look, at the end of the day, the
(07:44):
only thing you have that's worth having is your life,
and so you have to have a route of escape,
even in your own home. You want to try to
put as much distance between them in that instrument of
death that they're wielding. At that point, tom is possible,
and most people don't think about that. You know, we
use the term defensive. Defensive is something that rises up
within us. The next thing you know, this person is
(08:06):
all over You remember the individual that would perpetrate a
crime like this. They show up angry, they show up
in an agitating state. You're taken completely unaware. And I
would imagine when you see a scene like this that
is so big and messy and to your point and overkill,
immediately you start assessing the circle around her. It's getting
(08:28):
smaller and smaller and smaller. It's likely somebody in her circle,
somebody she at least knew well enough to open the
door a little bit. A lot of people like to
think they have a lot of friends. They have a
lot of relationships. You really don't, I mean true friends,
So that circle is small. And so when we're seeing
something from Jump Street at a scene that is this impassioned,
(08:50):
you pause for a second, say who hated her this much?
How many people's lives could she have touched that would
have brought about this much rage and anger directed toward her?
Because this isn't just like some random guy walking down
the street and punching a lady in the face and
then he walks on that. No, no, no, this person
took time. You know, for us as investigators, when we
(09:12):
see something that is this very impassioned, and I mean, boy,
this is over the top, it doesn't take too long
to begin to develop individuals that we would be very
keen to speak with and would want to talk to
them very quickly, because you know, remember what I said
early on, whoever did this, they would not just have
blood on their person. They could have tracked blood in
(09:35):
and out of the house, out down a sidewalk, because
and I see this a lot with sharp edged instruments,
it's not just the victim that gets injured, it's the perpetrator.
So you will find these individuals that perpetrate these crimes,
they'll have cuts on their own person. They might even
stab and drive a blade through their own hand, and
(09:55):
not to mention, if that is the case, their blood
could potentially transferred her. That's why you have to be
very careful with the bodies. Immediately, police looked to Anne
Lisa's on again, off again boyfriend Nelson. He had arrived
to the crime scene to pick her up for dinner
when police broke the news to him. According to police,
when they told him Anna Lisa had been murdered, Nelson
(10:18):
didn't show any signs of emotion. He didn't even ask
them how she was killed. Additionally, officers asked Nelson to
wait in the condo complexes common room, and when they
came back to get him hours later, he was fast asleep.
So this was a major Tell your girlfriend, somebody who
(10:38):
are spending so much time with has now been murdered,
and you fall asleep while waiting for investigators at the
police station, you know, listen. Nelson denied being involved altogether,
but the police did say he was not being very forthcoming.
They had to ask him very specific and very pointed
questions to get any answers at all. He told the
(11:00):
police that he wasn't dating anybody else and that he
definitely did not know of anybody who would want to
harm Anna Lisa. But at the same time, he wasn't
giving any other extra details. Your loved one has been murdered.
It seems as though you would want every detail you've
ever known about them to be shared with officials so
that they could properly make their investigation effective and that
(11:24):
they could properly find the person who did this. Why
would he be so cavalier about it or why would
he not be forthcoming with information. If an individual is
involved intimately with someone, if you're sharing a bed with him,
you're the first person were coming for. Make no bones.
You know. You can protest your innocence all you want to,
You're gonna be questioned. That's the reality of it. We've
(11:46):
learned that from years and years and years of experience.
There's actually an old adage. You're more at risk with
a person you're in bed with and you ever are,
relative to a stranger walking down the street. You know,
and maybe they're not the perpetrator, but I'm going to
want them to cooperate as an investigator. I'm gonna want
to really strongly emphasize to them, Look, your girl is dead,
(12:08):
and not only is she dead, she's been butchered. And
there's somebody out there if you care about her, if
you care about her family. We don't know what's going
on here. We've walked into the scene. It's a blood
bath at the house. Is there anybody that hates her
this much? I'd want to know why isn't he up
on the balls of his feet, you know, why isn't
he wanting to give me information? Wanting to know when
(12:29):
was the last time that he talked to this poor
woman before this happened to her? He fell asleep? Yeah,
you're absolutely right, And some people will react that way.
They'll go into like a catatonic state, almost infantile. Sometimes
maybe that's how he deals with stressed. You have to
be very careful before you kind of metaphorically pull the
trigger and say this is my one and only suspect
(12:50):
investigation ins here, because then you shut off the flow.
If you get too overpowering with him, there's a high
likelihood he's gonna completely shut down, and then you really
do have a problem, because you have to be very
very careful when you're initially interacting with these individuals, and
sometimes that could go both ways, right. Sometimes yes, the
suspect can be like identified very quickly because it's an
(13:11):
assumption that they're a boyfriend or a girlfriend, or a
husband and a wife and this must be a fit
of rage, and that's very dangerous to just assume. But
on the flip side, if you had nothing to do
with it, in your person or the person that you're
dating is dead and has been murdered, at the bare minimum,
you would want to participate just to remove yourself as
a potential suspect, just to get that out of the way.
(13:33):
You have to be very open minded though as an investigator,
and I mean that in the strictest sense relative to
being open minded in this particular case, you know, you
have to key in on what's going on in the
totality of the circumstances. To the credit of police, they
were not myopic about just assuming that Analyze's boyfriend was involved.
(13:54):
You know, they actually did have another potential suspect. A
drifted scene apparently at the X near Analyzea's home when
she was murdered, and residents came forward saying that he
was a little bit about town, talking about the crime
and some of the circumstances about the crime that potentially
hadn't been made public yet, which is also very confusing. Police, however,
(14:18):
really didn't put apparently too much effort into it and
kind of brushed it off. What about the nine one
one call, for example? How important are things like that
to an investigation, Joseph, From the initial point of contact,
everything can be one are lost in that one millisecond
when that call comes in, because you don't know if
(14:38):
it's going to be an evidence rich call. And when
I say evidence, it's we're talking about things like circumstantial evidence.
Like I heard this, I saw that. One last thing
that I thought was an interesting and curious detail was
that this caller, they didn't call from a home phone
or a cell phone. They called from a pay phone.
(14:59):
If a non eleven CA all is initiated, you're gonna
know that point of origin relative to the nine love
and call. So that's a major piece of information, and
the fact that it did come from pay phone. From
an investigative standpoint, I would want to know the geographic
relationship between that stand if it's a free standing payphone,
(15:21):
just on the sidewalk to the crime scene. Is it
possible that an individual could actually stand at that payphone
and hear a domestic disturbance where you can give the
kind of detail that we're talking about the brutal nature
of this, And so you go out and you kind
of test this, and a lot of it's depending upon
the acuity of the individual that can actually hear the pitch,
(15:42):
the range, the spectrum of sound. Is it disguised by
buildings or structures. You know, I would assume that this
area where she lived, You've got multiple dwellings there, so
you'll have sound that's bouncing off. Also, water comes into
play that changes the dynamic of the sound as well.
From the very beginning, I'd want to find that phone.
(16:03):
I'd want to go there and if I can line
of sight eyeball that structure where she lived, I want
to know if I could hear something. I'd want somebody
to go inside of that home while I'm standing out
there and scream as loud as they could, and I'd
have my recorder there to see if I could actually
hear it. That way, we can validate it. Now, if
we can't validate it that way, you know, what I'm
(16:23):
going to surmise at that point, whoever made that call
may have had more intimacy at that moment time. They
may have had more proximity to the event, or maybe
they wanted to try to put some distance between themselves,
they felt some mercy, or they felt something with them.
Maybe it was a perpetrator. They don't want her body
(16:44):
to lay in there for a protracted period time. They
want this to be known to somebody that can happen
as well. So this is nuanced, man, I mean, it's
really nuance stuff when you begin to think about it.
This is the infamous bystand or effect. Right. Oftentimes you
make here something happening, we've been told, and you're afraid
to get involved, right, you don't want to be dragged
(17:05):
into it out of fear for whatever. Maybe you're not
supposed to be where you are right now that you're
making this phone call. Maybe you don't want to get
involved with something super scary and violent. So the pay
phone thing also could simply be that somebody wanted to
be anonymous and wanted to make an anonymous call and
call in a threat, and they didn't want to be
dragged into it. But they just wanted officials to know
(17:28):
that something really scary was happening, and they don't want
any involvement. Criminologists study what's called victimology. You have what
are called primary victims, then you have secondary victims, and
a person that makes a phone call like this, let's
just say they had nothing to do with These are
actually referred to as tertiary victims. And if the person
is not connected to it, they're so stamped, they're so
(17:49):
affected by it. I gotta tell somebody. I gotta unburden
myself with this. If there's a phone, I'm going to
go make a non eleve and call. I gotta tell somebody,
we're going to take a break. We'll be back in
just a moment. With no leads or DNA evidence, the
(18:18):
case went cold for five grueling months. That was until
another stabbing forty five minutes away would break everything wide open.
On March two thousand and three, Sheila devil Ou brought
her husband Paul to the e R. Paul had been
stabbed in a horrible accident. Luckily he would survive, but
(18:38):
when police heard how the forty four year old medical
school teacher ended up there, they were perplexed to say
the least. According to Paul, his wife Sheila, had been bored,
so she suggested a game that she had heard about.
The rules were simple. The pair took turns blindfolding and
handcuffing each other. Then they would put random items on
(18:58):
the other person's skin. The person who was blindfolded would
guess what it was. With Sheila blindfolded, Paul put a
shampoo bottle on her cheek. When it was Sheila's turn,
she thought a knife would be a good idea and
accidentally stabbed her husband. According to Paul, after the stabbing,
Sheila panicked. He told her to call nine one one immediately,
(19:20):
which he saw her run to the other room to do,
but the ambulance seemed to be taking too long, so
the couple drove to the hospital themselves. Paul also claimed
that in the hospital parking lot, Sheila stabbed him again.
In shock from everything that had happened. Paul could not
explain why she would do this. Police were immediately suspicious
(19:41):
of this story. Let's take a listen to a portion
of Sheila's interrogation with police. Hey, look, well tell me
I want to hear what I don't want. I want
you to be I'm very I don't want to talk
(20:01):
about it. I'm going to an accidentally, like which truth
is that we were playing? You? How he hand meet
this rock? Howid by hand? And more than one? Well,
let's discuss that. First off, this is a crazy game
for adults would be playing period. And now they're at
(20:23):
the hospital. Why would she stamp him again in the
parking lot? For me, that's an excellent question. You've left
me gob smacked here for a second because it sounds
made up to me. I can see people playing around,
all right, a couple that got a blindfold on, you know,
do with as you wish. All right, Now you're involving
sharp instruments. What kind of world are you existing in
here where this kind of thing is okay? And yeah, okay,
(20:46):
all right, I'll give you this one. I'll buy into
it and say that you had you had a bad
moment and it slipped and Paul got cut. But then
you add this extra spice to it, the aim this
is taking too long to get there, so you get
him in the car and they're going to the emergency room.
Oh and by the way, I think I'll stab you
(21:07):
one more time. You know, to me, that's super bizarre,
because what you're talking about right now, depending upon the
state that you're in, this is assault. At this point,
this is escalating very quickly. One could just be kind
of an accidental thing, but then you you married up
with a second event. Now you're getting into a very
dark area. At this point in time, you're verging on
(21:29):
assault with intent perhaps, and that's what's being implied here.
So as an investigator, when I hear this, I'm gonna
think somebody has a screw loose, or something else happened.
Maybe it got heated in the car on the way,
who knows, But it is super bizarre. And I gotta
tell you, if I was then investigator in this case,
I've had a lot of questions. Yeah, and maybe she
(21:49):
thought for a second that he was going to survive
this incident. This air quotes accident, and just to ensure
that wasn't the case, she'll StEB him one more time
in the parking lot and be off to the races.
After hearing the story, police found Sheila's cell phone in
the hospital parking lot. It must have fallen out as
they rushed inside to get Paul help. However, when officers
(22:13):
opened the call log, they discovered that Sheila had never
called nine one one. Instead, as her husband lay bleeding
on their living room floor, she called a man named Nelson.
Here's Stephanie. Yes, that's the same Nelson that was dating
an Alisa. So at that point police called Nelson back
and he admitted to them that he was in fact
(22:34):
having an affair with Sheila. So the question is obviously asked,
who is this Sheila. Some details that we know about
her is Sheila Davalou was a thirty three year old
biochemist who also worked with Nelson and an Alisa. Sheila
and Nelson met in summer of two thousand and one
at some sort of a work happy hour, and when
(22:56):
Sheila and Nelson met, he and Alisa were very much
still together. They were dating and also working together. Lo
and behold, Sheila and Nelson began having an affair and
things started to really heat up. Nelson apparently had no
idea that Sheila was married, and also told police that
at some point he was dating both women, but that
(23:17):
he had recently dumped Sheila and was getting very serious
with an Alissa. And we also know what happened to
Anelisa soon thereafter, and that she was murdered. It also
turns out that when Sheila was supposedly calling, she was
actually calling Nelson asking him to go to dinner with
her while her husband was bleeding out on the floor
(23:39):
having been stabbed by her. There's a term that lawyers
used for it, and it's it's in the canon of
criminal law many times, and it's a term that I
absolutely love. It's called callous indifference. You know, here Paul
is laying on the living room floor bleeding out. I mean,
the essence of who he is is actually leaking out
onto the floor of their home. Him, this person that
(24:01):
she's been intimate with, has shared a life with, and
here she is, she's she's calling up this other fella
to set a dinner date. This goes to this idea
of callousness. It also goes to a broader construct here
when you're looking at criminal behavior, where you begin to
think about an absence of empathy and inability to connect
(24:22):
with somebody else's pain. And in this case, we're not
talking about broke Paul get to the broken hearted part
later right now, I'm talking about physical pain. Writhing sad
Woon is actually one of the most painful things a
human can endure. It's not just the pain of this
thing being inserted into your body, but it's also the
(24:42):
awareness that you have been stabbed. So anxiety level goes up,
your heart rate increases, and you're pumping out more blood.
When the police told Sheila's husband Paul about Anna Lisa's murder,
it all clicks for him. Paul recounted to the police
that from months, Sheila had been telling him about her
very close friend at work named Melissa. According to Sheila,
(25:07):
Melissa was in love with a coworker, but he had
a girlfriend. As Sheila put it, Melissa and her coworker
belonged together, but this girlfriend was in the way. Paul
remembered that Sheila had almost seemed obsessed with this love triangle.
He wondered why his wife was so hung up on
someone else's drama, but it all made sense to him now.
(25:31):
Sheila was actually Melissa. She created fake name so she
could relive her obsession every day, even to her own husband. Okay,
so we have to break this down because now there's
a lot of players in this story. So in two
thousand and one, Sheila was married to Paul. At that time,
Nelsa was dating Ana Lisa, and then at some point
(25:54):
they're all working together and Nelson and Sheila start kind
of sneaking around. And now that Ana Lisa is dead
and Paul is in the hospital, it seems pretty much
that Schila and Nelson had to be involved. What are
the odds that both of their significant others have both
been stabbed? And again, Joseph, this is where I go off.
You know, my brain kind of explodes. People break up,
(26:17):
Relationships don't work out. Sometimes people break up all the time.
At what point does it go from that tragic and
sad and heart wrenching as that is in and of
itself to coming up with a plan that death and
murder is probably the most suitable answer. You sit back
and you hear about a case like this, and you
look at the person you think, did your mind work?
(26:38):
You know that you you think that you can actually
get away with this, But there's some kind of disconnect
with her perception of her reality as it applaues to relationships.
It's almost like it's running season or something, and they're
just nuts, you know, over these relationships and they have
to possess people and and do all these things. And
to your point, this idea that not only am I
(26:59):
going to a possess you in Analysa's case, I'm going
to destroy you. I'm going to rip you to shred.
There's going to be nothing left of you. As a
matter of fact, I'm going to take a sharp instrument.
I'm going to cut your face up as well. One
or other detail that I always thought was a little horrifying.
At one point, Paul even loaned Sheila night vision goggles
(27:23):
to help her, and Air quotes Melissa spy. So, in
other words, Paul had bought Chila these goggles that I
guess you can see in the dark as if she's
in the military, so that she could spy on Nelson
and and Elsa all the time. How psychotic is that.
Poor Paul is just thinking he's doing something, you know,
to keep her engaged, and now she's spying on the
(27:47):
man she's clearly obsessed with, and maybe the person in
her way. Yeah, this, and I think that that goes
to the psychopathy here they do, They go back and
they fantasize about these things. What's fascinating to me about
this is that this happened and this poor woman was murdered.
I think we're very fortunate because she had this rich
fantasy life. I think we're very fortunate that this poor
(28:09):
woman is the only person that was murdered, you know,
because she's creating this fantasy life with Melissa, this fictitious
name that has been created, and it wouldn't surprise me
if she had probably in her own mind, she has
an image of Melissa. I mean, she's creatd She knows
what her hair color is, she knows the clothing that
she wears, her eye color, what type of makeup she wears,
(28:30):
all of these things, because it's very rich. It's certainly
that's something that should be explored with somebody like this
that manifests this kind of behavior that's so interesting. So
she's sort of creating this image of somebody that maybe
she went to high school with and felt obsessive about
from a distance, or somebody that she worked with casually
and now studies them to the core. Well, it's true
because you talk about the callous indifference that is very
(28:53):
applicable here because after the murder, Nelson and Sheila actually
started to get back together. You know, Sheila would bring
him care packages and she was very very supportive. And
Nelson told people that you know, sometimes he was too
afraid to talk about Anna Lisa, and it was really
just nice to have Sheila around to confide in, and
(29:13):
she would allow him to talk about analysa very openly.
First of all, is that a tel that they were
both involved in this? Or could this just be that
Nelson doesn't have a clue about anything? And is you know,
just falling into Sheila's track? How toned deaf do you
have to be to have all of the swirling around
(29:35):
you that you can't pick up. Is she's such a
goddess and has so much to offer that you're going
to completely shut down your total situational awareness when you're
around this person again, It it brings you back to
this idea. You know, he's very fortunate that he didn't
want up in a pool of his own blood with
his throat cut. In two thousand four, Sheila was convicted
(29:59):
for the attempt did murder of her husband Paul and
was sentenced to twenty five years in prison. However, the
real bombshell would come eight years later in two thousand
and twelve, when Sheila stood trial for the murder of
Anna Lisa, the former biochemist turned fell and decided to
represent herself. Here's recordings of some of her time in court.
(30:22):
You had obviously stated that when I learned that you,
I looked distressed, that I had a distressed look on
my face, and you have previously stated that I looked
kind of crazy at that time, crazy angry. You had
lied to the police. Yes, I wasn't forthcoming to the police,
(30:43):
and what was the nature of that lie. I hadn't
told them that you had been my girlfriend in the
past and we had a relationship, right, and um, you
did that? Why I didn't want you to go through
the ordeal that I had gone through. This whole idea
of representing your self to me is always so curious.
And how much of a narcissist do you have to
(31:04):
be to believe that you do not have to go
to law school and that you will outsmart the United
States judicial system as a whole as you stand for
a murder trial. I spent a lot of times covering
trials on television. I'm around tons and tons of lawyers
and they all say the same thing. And that's this
idea that the person that chooses to represent themselves has
(31:25):
a fool for client. That's what it comes down to
most of the time going into the courtroom from me
and I went many many times as a witness, as
an expert witness to testify in cases. From the first
day I did it to the very last day I
did it, I was terrified. I mean, and of course
I'm not the one that's doing the questioning, I'm the
one being questioned. If you've never been into a courtroom,
(31:46):
I mean truly been part of the process, it's like
being let down into an alien environment. First off, the
language is different. You walk into a courtroom. I think
in New York they still say they call it to order.
They go oh yea, oh yea, oh yea. But it
has a rattle in home. It's not in sync with
everyday life, these little nuanced things. And then on top
of that, you are literally trying to represent yourself in
(32:09):
a life or death matter. You pile all of that
on top of it, and it blows my mind every
time I hear somebody that says I'm going to represent myself.
We're talking about homicide charge, you know where everything rest
upon this, So that gives you an idea is to
how confident someone would be to a fall The prosecution's
big piece of evidence that was ultimately used in Sheila's
(32:31):
case was DNA that was found on the bathroom SINC
handle and Analysa's bathroom, meaning Sheila's dan HAY was on
the SYNC handle in the bathroom. Sheila, of course, representing herself,
countered by saying that couldn't really prove much because there's
really no way of knowing how long that DNA has
been there. And remember they did all work together, so
(32:54):
it is possible that Sheila had gone there at some
point throughout her time, you know, spending time with Nelson
and an A Lisa. Is that true? Because we know
that DNA is the roadmap to all things and I
only know this because of you, Joseph. It is the
greatest timetable we have when it comes to forensics. It is,
(33:15):
and you have to think about the fragility of it
as well. If she's trying to implant this idea that yeah,
you know, I've been there, we worked together and so
it could have just wound up there. But you know,
then you have to think about the sourcing of the DNA, Well,
is it just some kind of passive touch DNA where
you have skin cells that are recovered or is the
point of origin a blood droplet? How do you explain
(33:37):
that away? And where was it found? Because DNA, you know,
it will degrade, and particularly on an open surface like that.
So to my way of thinking, maybe there's an off
chance that she could have shown up at some point
Tom and touched the surface and left her DNA behind.
But the fact that when you begin to do the
calculus relative to how fragile DNA and DNA evidence can be,
(34:01):
and the fact that it's adjacent to an area of
wash basin. Remember what I said, You know, relative to
being bathed in blood, you would have a need to
cleanse yourself from some level, or at your perception. But
the jury has to do the measurement here, the balance
the scales. How does this measure out? And for me,
(34:21):
the odds are astronomical, I mean just absolutely astronomical. First off,
that her DNA would be there in the first place,
and secondly that if she had touched it and it
was a passive event where she was there on a
friendly visit, not associated with the blood bath. By the way,
that's in the hallway immediately adjacent. You add that layer
(34:42):
to it, I think things begin to come real clear. Yeah,
let's stop here for another break. So remember the nine
(35:07):
one one call that we've discussed that happened at this
you know, pay phone very close to the scene. The
prosecution brought in voice recognition experts to say it was
actually Sheila who made the call, saying that Anna Lisa
was being attacked, kind of to throw them off her sense.
And this is the part that I love when we
(35:27):
come in clear with technology and you can't out beat
the system. So voice recognition, I'm sure if that gets
used a lot in your world. We talk a lot
in forensic science, and here's a term that she used
a lot in court. We use the term within a
reasonable amount of scientific certainty, the fact that you have
this big piece of evidence that's a real bounty. And
(35:48):
she also had a little bit of a lack of
an alibi as well. She said there was really nothing
that suspicious about her leaving work for hours on end
because she had done that multiple times before and again.
And an alibi, we know, is a very important piece.
If you're a biochemistry and you're working for a pharmaceutical company,
you don't walk into an area where you're actually doing
(36:09):
testing with medications and that sort of thing that's a
lockdown security area. So if she's saying that she's done
this multiple times, first off, she's painting herself into a
corner because guess what we can do as investigators. We'll
get a subpoena. We'll go pull the tomelogs on her
clocking in and clocking out. So by making that statement,
you're opening the door for investigators to say, Okay, we'll
(36:32):
put you to the test. And if she so chooses
to provide witness in her case, she's gonna be cross
examined about it as well. Remember the first part of
the narrative, they didn't have DNA. We moved forward in time, though,
and what is evolving at the same point in time.
We think back to the date and time when this happened.
We were not as sophisticated even back in two thousand
three as we were in two thousand twelve. The fact
(36:55):
that they waited this amount of time is key here
because you had an opportunity for technology to catch up.
This is a prom example of technology and DNA technology
specifically catching up with the tom's And since two thousand twelve,
we've even moved further down the line I'll guarantee you this.
We're going to see a lot more cases similar to this,
(37:16):
maybe not exactly, but where we have blood evidence. In
the past we could not have tracked down. The technology
is there now and it is going to blow the
doors off of everything. And not to mention the fact
that in Sheila's case, you know you spoke about earlier,
how it's sometimes the smallest detail that tips and investigation,
(37:37):
and that sometimes people think they're so clever that they're
going to outsmart the police. And in this case, it
was the telephone that she dropped accidentally in the parking
lot that really put her to the first test. And
now this little bit of a sample of DNA on
the sink that was left behind at this crime scene,
and those two things got her in the end, and
(38:00):
that ultimately, let officials do their thing, you will not
get away with it. The devil is in fact in
the details, particularly in a case like this, because there
are no master criminals, contrary to which you see on
television that's entertainment device. There's always some way somebody screws up.
And the more complicated they make things, the more intricate
(38:20):
that they make things, the higher the probability is that
you're going to get caught, and in this case, that's
what happened. Despite countering nearly every point the prosecution made,
Sheila was found guilty of Analysa Ramundo's murder on February ten,
two thousand and twelve. Prior to her sentencing, Sheila made
(38:40):
a rather bizarre speech and court, take a listen. I'd
like to, after thanking God, thank my family for their
continued support in the past two years. I'd like to
thank everybody at the Department of Corrections in both New
York and Connecticut. Her words did not sway the judge,
(39:02):
and she was sentenced to fifty years in prison. When
Sheila finishes her time in New York for the attempted
murderer Paul, she will begin serving out her sentence in
Connecticut for Anna Lisa's murder. Sheila will not be eligible
for release from prison until nine Shameless plug If you're
(39:24):
enjoying crazy and Love, leave us a review and listen
to season three of our hit series, The Piked and Massacre.
New episodes are every Wednesday wherever you get your podcasts,
and don't forget to follow us on Instagram at Katie
Underscore Studios. Crazy in Love is produced by Stephanie Lydecker,
Jeff Shane, Chris Graves and me Courtney Armstrong. Editing and
(39:49):
sound designed by Jeff da Crazy in Love is a
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Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stay safe, lovers,
Falling in love is the best feeling in the world.
You see stars, you feel giddy, But sometimes that makes
you do crazy things, and sometimes that means murder. Just
because the story starts out with once upon a Time
doesn't mean it ends happily ever after. Welcome to Crazy
and Love, a production of Katie Studios and I Heart Radio.
(00:24):
Today's guests are true crime producer Stephanie Ledecker and forensic
expert Joseph Scott Morgan. Over his career, Joseph's handled thousands
of death investigations. Joseph also recently worked on the Katie
Studios documentary Murdered and Missing in Montana, which is now
streaming on Peacock. Joseph also hosts his own podcast, Bodybags
(00:47):
Available Everywhere. Episode thirty one, the Case of the Game,
the cover Up, and the Fatal Attraction. At thirty two,
Annelisa Ramundo was the full package. Smart, successful, and beautiful.
(01:07):
The young woman was a pharmaceutical rep for Purdue Pharma,
A Harvard grad who got her masters at Columbia. Annelisa
wasn't just smart, she also had an intense passion for life.
One of Annealisa's proudest moments was being able to buy
her own home. It's a gorgeous waterfront condo in the
heart of downtown Stanford, Connecticut. In December two thousand, Anne
(01:29):
Lisa met Nelson Sessler while working at Purdue Pharma. Nelson
was new and he and Antelisa hit it off immediately.
Nelson was well liked in a good worker, but the
opposite of Anne Lisa. While she was lively, he was
quiet and subdued. However, the pair just seemed to work
and we're spending most nights together at Anne Lisa's house.
(01:51):
At her sister's wedding, where Annelisa was a bridesmaid, the
couple danced for all to see, wearing a purple dress.
Annelisa even hat the bouquet. But despite all signs pointing
towards the couple moving forward, Nelson just wasn't ready to commit.
In February two thousand and two, Anna Lisa left her
(02:13):
job at Purdue to work at a New Jersey based
company called Fharmaica. At first, she was making the two
and a half hour drive, but soon began working from home.
On November eighth, two thousand two, Anna Lisa and Nelson
had dinner plans with friends in New York City. It
was supposed to be a bit of a coming out
party for the couple, but the pair never arrived. One
(02:35):
friend called Anna Lisa twenty five times, hoping there was
a reasonable explanation for their absence, but sadly, by that
point Anna Lisa had been dead for several hours. At
around twelve pm earlier that afternoon, police got a call
from a woman saying she could hear her neighbor being
attacked by a man. The woman was very concerned, but
(02:57):
before dispatchers could get any more information in the caller
hung up. When police arrived at Anneliza's condo, they found
her body in the middle of the foyer. She had
been beaten and stabbed. Officers immediately noted that the apartment
was a mess. An Lisa had obviously put up a fight.
Officers also noticed there were no signs of forced entry.
(03:19):
It appeared that whoever killed the intelligent and strong woman
was let in with no issue. Here's Stephanie, the fact
that there was no forced entry. That's a very important fact,
right is that one of the first things you look for. Yeah,
actually it is, and you begin to think was the
perpetrator known? Were they somebody that had previously been welcomed
(03:41):
into the home, or were they intimate enough to have
a key to get in, or was there a door
window that was unsecured. You have to consider all of
those possibilities. So the fact that when you get into
the interior the place is just torn to helen back,
that's going to give you some kind of indication, and
that there was at least some mild resistance initially upon entry.
(04:05):
And of course you look for other things that you
might see outside. Joseph in talking about the autopsy in
this case, it was noted that there was a massive
amount of blood. Anything else that you can share with
us about the findings. Yeah, she was stabbed very forcefully
multiple times. As a matter of fact, it stated that
(04:27):
one of the stab wounds is so deep that it
goes through her ribs into her chest cavity, passes through
that open space that's called plural space, and enters her lung.
So you have to have a tremendous amount of force
going straight down. And the forensic pathologist says something very interesting.
When Dr Gilchrist made his determination about the cause of death,
(04:50):
he stated that the relative position of the perpetrator to
the victim gave him the impression that the individual was
directly above the victim as they drove the knife down
into the body. That means that the perpetrator is in
a dominant position over the victim, hovering over them. We
(05:10):
know that she's got multiple defensive wounds on her hands,
so at autopsy, when they classify this as defensive wounds,
you know, and this is this is the chilling part,
because there was hemorrhage, She had an awareness that she
was being attacked. She had an ongoing need to survive.
(05:31):
Her primal person kicked in at that point and and
try to fend this person off as they were attacking it.
And this is kind of striking as well. She's got
nine stab wounds on her body. Not only is she
attacked in the shoulder and the neck, but also she's
got disfigurement insults as well, which anytime I see someone
(05:56):
that is cut in the face and a knife attack,
to me, that smacks of something else. When you go
for somebody's face, that means that you're trying to destroy
their person. And I think that at a deep level,
people that attack folks in the face they're trying to
strip away the humanity of that individual. She's also sustained
multiple blunt force trauma to the back of her skull.
(06:19):
The scene is bathed in blood. It's everywhere. So not
only is the interior of this home bathed in blood,
guess what, the perpetrator is bathed in blood. In this
particular case, they would have been saturated through and through.
Now this term is thrown around a lot. This is
a classic case of overkill. Does it feel like there's
(06:41):
some sort of passion involved or something very personal at
stake when you're dealing with an overkill Typically, yeah, when
you're talking about a perpetrator of a homicide, you've got
one or two things when you have overkill. Either you
have a person that is a raving psychotic, They've got
some kind of psycho pathology going on in their mind.
(07:02):
But more than likely in these cases, you've got somebody
that's involved in love or money, jealousy, those things that
bring up that green eyed monster perhaps within us that
just kind of lashes out for that moment Tom and
they rush into this thing and you know, I Am
going to absolutely and totally eradicate you from the face
(07:24):
of this planet. Is there something if you are being
attacked to be aware of or to do. You fight
to the death. You do not get into the car
if somebody attacks you and there's a knife involved. Is
there anything that we should know to do other than fight?
Like hell, Look, at the end of the day, the
(07:44):
only thing you have that's worth having is your life,
and so you have to have a route of escape,
even in your own home. You want to try to
put as much distance between them in that instrument of
death that they're wielding. At that point, tom is possible,
and most people don't think about that. You know, we
use the term defensive. Defensive is something that rises up
within us. The next thing you know, this person is
(08:06):
all over You remember the individual that would perpetrate a
crime like this. They show up angry, they show up
in an agitating state. You're taken completely unaware. And I
would imagine when you see a scene like this that
is so big and messy and to your point and overkill,
immediately you start assessing the circle around her. It's getting
(08:28):
smaller and smaller and smaller. It's likely somebody in her circle,
somebody she at least knew well enough to open the
door a little bit. A lot of people like to
think they have a lot of friends. They have a
lot of relationships. You really don't, I mean true friends,
So that circle is small. And so when we're seeing
something from Jump Street at a scene that is this impassioned,
(08:50):
you pause for a second, say who hated her this much?
How many people's lives could she have touched that would
have brought about this much rage and anger directed toward her?
Because this isn't just like some random guy walking down
the street and punching a lady in the face and
then he walks on that. No, no, no, this person
took time. You know, for us as investigators, when we
(09:12):
see something that is this very impassioned, and I mean, boy,
this is over the top, it doesn't take too long
to begin to develop individuals that we would be very
keen to speak with and would want to talk to
them very quickly, because you know, remember what I said
early on, whoever did this, they would not just have
blood on their person. They could have tracked blood in
(09:35):
and out of the house, out down a sidewalk, because
and I see this a lot with sharp edged instruments,
it's not just the victim that gets injured, it's the perpetrator.
So you will find these individuals that perpetrate these crimes,
they'll have cuts on their own person. They might even
stab and drive a blade through their own hand, and
(09:55):
not to mention, if that is the case, their blood
could potentially transferred her. That's why you have to be
very careful with the bodies. Immediately, police looked to Anne
Lisa's on again, off again boyfriend Nelson. He had arrived
to the crime scene to pick her up for dinner
when police broke the news to him. According to police,
when they told him Anna Lisa had been murdered, Nelson
(10:18):
didn't show any signs of emotion. He didn't even ask
them how she was killed. Additionally, officers asked Nelson to
wait in the condo complexes common room, and when they
came back to get him hours later, he was fast asleep.
So this was a major Tell your girlfriend, somebody who
(10:38):
are spending so much time with has now been murdered,
and you fall asleep while waiting for investigators at the
police station, you know, listen. Nelson denied being involved altogether,
but the police did say he was not being very forthcoming.
They had to ask him very specific and very pointed
questions to get any answers at all. He told the
(11:00):
police that he wasn't dating anybody else and that he
definitely did not know of anybody who would want to
harm Anna Lisa. But at the same time, he wasn't
giving any other extra details. Your loved one has been murdered.
It seems as though you would want every detail you've
ever known about them to be shared with officials so
that they could properly make their investigation effective and that
(11:24):
they could properly find the person who did this. Why
would he be so cavalier about it or why would
he not be forthcoming with information. If an individual is
involved intimately with someone, if you're sharing a bed with him,
you're the first person were coming for. Make no bones.
You know. You can protest your innocence all you want to,
You're gonna be questioned. That's the reality of it. We've
(11:46):
learned that from years and years and years of experience.
There's actually an old adage. You're more at risk with
a person you're in bed with and you ever are,
relative to a stranger walking down the street. You know,
and maybe they're not the perpetrator, but I'm going to
want them to cooperate as an investigator. I'm gonna want
to really strongly emphasize to them, Look, your girl is dead,
(12:08):
and not only is she dead, she's been butchered. And
there's somebody out there if you care about her, if
you care about her family. We don't know what's going
on here. We've walked into the scene. It's a blood
bath at the house. Is there anybody that hates her
this much? I'd want to know why isn't he up
on the balls of his feet, you know, why isn't
he wanting to give me information? Wanting to know when
(12:29):
was the last time that he talked to this poor
woman before this happened to her? He fell asleep? Yeah,
you're absolutely right, And some people will react that way.
They'll go into like a catatonic state, almost infantile. Sometimes
maybe that's how he deals with stressed. You have to
be very careful before you kind of metaphorically pull the
trigger and say this is my one and only suspect
(12:50):
investigation ins here, because then you shut off the flow.
If you get too overpowering with him, there's a high
likelihood he's gonna completely shut down, and then you really
do have a problem, because you have to be very
very careful when you're initially interacting with these individuals, and
sometimes that could go both ways, right. Sometimes yes, the
suspect can be like identified very quickly because it's an
(13:11):
assumption that they're a boyfriend or a girlfriend, or a
husband and a wife and this must be a fit
of rage, and that's very dangerous to just assume. But
on the flip side, if you had nothing to do
with it, in your person or the person that you're
dating is dead and has been murdered, at the bare minimum,
you would want to participate just to remove yourself as
a potential suspect, just to get that out of the way.
(13:33):
You have to be very open minded though as an investigator,
and I mean that in the strictest sense relative to
being open minded in this particular case, you know, you
have to key in on what's going on in the
totality of the circumstances. To the credit of police, they
were not myopic about just assuming that Analyze's boyfriend was involved.
(13:54):
You know, they actually did have another potential suspect. A
drifted scene apparently at the X near Analyzea's home when
she was murdered, and residents came forward saying that he
was a little bit about town, talking about the crime
and some of the circumstances about the crime that potentially
hadn't been made public yet, which is also very confusing. Police, however,
(14:18):
really didn't put apparently too much effort into it and
kind of brushed it off. What about the nine one
one call, for example? How important are things like that
to an investigation, Joseph, From the initial point of contact,
everything can be one are lost in that one millisecond
when that call comes in, because you don't know if
(14:38):
it's going to be an evidence rich call. And when
I say evidence, it's we're talking about things like circumstantial evidence.
Like I heard this, I saw that. One last thing
that I thought was an interesting and curious detail was
that this caller, they didn't call from a home phone
or a cell phone. They called from a pay phone.
(14:59):
If a non eleven CA all is initiated, you're gonna
know that point of origin relative to the nine love
and call. So that's a major piece of information, and
the fact that it did come from pay phone. From
an investigative standpoint, I would want to know the geographic
relationship between that stand if it's a free standing payphone,
(15:21):
just on the sidewalk to the crime scene. Is it
possible that an individual could actually stand at that payphone
and hear a domestic disturbance where you can give the
kind of detail that we're talking about the brutal nature
of this, And so you go out and you kind
of test this, and a lot of it's depending upon
the acuity of the individual that can actually hear the pitch,
(15:42):
the range, the spectrum of sound. Is it disguised by
buildings or structures. You know, I would assume that this
area where she lived, You've got multiple dwellings there, so
you'll have sound that's bouncing off. Also, water comes into
play that changes the dynamic of the sound as well.
From the very beginning, I'd want to find that phone.
(16:03):
I'd want to go there and if I can line
of sight eyeball that structure where she lived, I want
to know if I could hear something. I'd want somebody
to go inside of that home while I'm standing out
there and scream as loud as they could, and I'd
have my recorder there to see if I could actually
hear it. That way, we can validate it. Now, if
we can't validate it that way, you know, what I'm
(16:23):
going to surmise at that point, whoever made that call
may have had more intimacy at that moment time. They
may have had more proximity to the event, or maybe
they wanted to try to put some distance between themselves,
they felt some mercy, or they felt something with them.
Maybe it was a perpetrator. They don't want her body
(16:44):
to lay in there for a protracted period time. They
want this to be known to somebody that can happen
as well. So this is nuanced, man, I mean, it's
really nuance stuff when you begin to think about it.
This is the infamous bystand or effect. Right. Oftentimes you
make here something happening, we've been told, and you're afraid
to get involved, right, you don't want to be dragged
(17:05):
into it out of fear for whatever. Maybe you're not
supposed to be where you are right now that you're
making this phone call. Maybe you don't want to get
involved with something super scary and violent. So the pay
phone thing also could simply be that somebody wanted to
be anonymous and wanted to make an anonymous call and
call in a threat, and they didn't want to be
dragged into it. But they just wanted officials to know
(17:28):
that something really scary was happening, and they don't want
any involvement. Criminologists study what's called victimology. You have what
are called primary victims, then you have secondary victims, and
a person that makes a phone call like this, let's
just say they had nothing to do with These are
actually referred to as tertiary victims. And if the person
is not connected to it, they're so stamped, they're so
(17:49):
affected by it. I gotta tell somebody. I gotta unburden
myself with this. If there's a phone, I'm going to
go make a non eleve and call. I gotta tell somebody,
we're going to take a break. We'll be back in
just a moment. With no leads or DNA evidence, the
(18:18):
case went cold for five grueling months. That was until
another stabbing forty five minutes away would break everything wide open.
On March two thousand and three, Sheila devil Ou brought
her husband Paul to the e R. Paul had been
stabbed in a horrible accident. Luckily he would survive, but
(18:38):
when police heard how the forty four year old medical
school teacher ended up there, they were perplexed to say
the least. According to Paul, his wife Sheila, had been bored,
so she suggested a game that she had heard about.
The rules were simple. The pair took turns blindfolding and
handcuffing each other. Then they would put random items on
(18:58):
the other person's skin. The person who was blindfolded would
guess what it was. With Sheila blindfolded, Paul put a
shampoo bottle on her cheek. When it was Sheila's turn,
she thought a knife would be a good idea and
accidentally stabbed her husband. According to Paul, after the stabbing,
Sheila panicked. He told her to call nine one one immediately,
(19:20):
which he saw her run to the other room to do,
but the ambulance seemed to be taking too long, so
the couple drove to the hospital themselves. Paul also claimed
that in the hospital parking lot, Sheila stabbed him again.
In shock from everything that had happened. Paul could not
explain why she would do this. Police were immediately suspicious
(19:41):
of this story. Let's take a listen to a portion
of Sheila's interrogation with police. Hey, look, well tell me
I want to hear what I don't want. I want
you to be I'm very I don't want to talk
(20:01):
about it. I'm going to an accidentally, like which truth
is that we were playing? You? How he hand meet
this rock? Howid by hand? And more than one? Well,
let's discuss that. First off, this is a crazy game
for adults would be playing period. And now they're at
(20:23):
the hospital. Why would she stamp him again in the
parking lot? For me, that's an excellent question. You've left
me gob smacked here for a second because it sounds
made up to me. I can see people playing around,
all right, a couple that got a blindfold on, you know,
do with as you wish. All right, Now you're involving
sharp instruments. What kind of world are you existing in
here where this kind of thing is okay? And yeah, okay,
(20:46):
all right, I'll give you this one. I'll buy into
it and say that you had you had a bad
moment and it slipped and Paul got cut. But then
you add this extra spice to it, the aim this
is taking too long to get there, so you get
him in the car and they're going to the emergency room.
Oh and by the way, I think I'll stab you
(21:07):
one more time. You know, to me, that's super bizarre,
because what you're talking about right now, depending upon the
state that you're in, this is assault. At this point,
this is escalating very quickly. One could just be kind
of an accidental thing, but then you you married up
with a second event. Now you're getting into a very
dark area. At this point in time, you're verging on
(21:29):
assault with intent perhaps, and that's what's being implied here.
So as an investigator, when I hear this, I'm gonna
think somebody has a screw loose, or something else happened.
Maybe it got heated in the car on the way,
who knows, But it is super bizarre. And I gotta
tell you, if I was then investigator in this case,
I've had a lot of questions. Yeah, and maybe she
(21:49):
thought for a second that he was going to survive
this incident. This air quotes accident, and just to ensure
that wasn't the case, she'll StEB him one more time
in the parking lot and be off to the races.
After hearing the story, police found Sheila's cell phone in
the hospital parking lot. It must have fallen out as
they rushed inside to get Paul help. However, when officers
(22:13):
opened the call log, they discovered that Sheila had never
called nine one one. Instead, as her husband lay bleeding
on their living room floor, she called a man named Nelson.
Here's Stephanie. Yes, that's the same Nelson that was dating
an Alisa. So at that point police called Nelson back
and he admitted to them that he was in fact
(22:34):
having an affair with Sheila. So the question is obviously asked,
who is this Sheila. Some details that we know about
her is Sheila Davalou was a thirty three year old
biochemist who also worked with Nelson and an Alisa. Sheila
and Nelson met in summer of two thousand and one
at some sort of a work happy hour, and when
(22:56):
Sheila and Nelson met, he and Alisa were very much
still together. They were dating and also working together. Lo
and behold, Sheila and Nelson began having an affair and
things started to really heat up. Nelson apparently had no
idea that Sheila was married, and also told police that
at some point he was dating both women, but that
(23:17):
he had recently dumped Sheila and was getting very serious
with an Alissa. And we also know what happened to
Anelisa soon thereafter, and that she was murdered. It also
turns out that when Sheila was supposedly calling, she was
actually calling Nelson asking him to go to dinner with
her while her husband was bleeding out on the floor
(23:39):
having been stabbed by her. There's a term that lawyers
used for it, and it's it's in the canon of
criminal law many times, and it's a term that I
absolutely love. It's called callous indifference. You know, here Paul
is laying on the living room floor bleeding out. I mean,
the essence of who he is is actually leaking out
onto the floor of their home. Him, this person that
(24:01):
she's been intimate with, has shared a life with, and
here she is, she's she's calling up this other fella
to set a dinner date. This goes to this idea
of callousness. It also goes to a broader construct here
when you're looking at criminal behavior, where you begin to
think about an absence of empathy and inability to connect
(24:22):
with somebody else's pain. And in this case, we're not
talking about broke Paul get to the broken hearted part
later right now, I'm talking about physical pain. Writhing sad
Woon is actually one of the most painful things a
human can endure. It's not just the pain of this
thing being inserted into your body, but it's also the
(24:42):
awareness that you have been stabbed. So anxiety level goes up,
your heart rate increases, and you're pumping out more blood.
When the police told Sheila's husband Paul about Anna Lisa's murder,
it all clicks for him. Paul recounted to the police
that from months, Sheila had been telling him about her
very close friend at work named Melissa. According to Sheila,
(25:07):
Melissa was in love with a coworker, but he had
a girlfriend. As Sheila put it, Melissa and her coworker
belonged together, but this girlfriend was in the way. Paul
remembered that Sheila had almost seemed obsessed with this love triangle.
He wondered why his wife was so hung up on
someone else's drama, but it all made sense to him now.
(25:31):
Sheila was actually Melissa. She created fake name so she
could relive her obsession every day, even to her own husband. Okay,
so we have to break this down because now there's
a lot of players in this story. So in two
thousand and one, Sheila was married to Paul. At that time,
Nelsa was dating Ana Lisa, and then at some point
(25:54):
they're all working together and Nelson and Sheila start kind
of sneaking around. And now that Ana Lisa is dead
and Paul is in the hospital, it seems pretty much
that Schila and Nelson had to be involved. What are
the odds that both of their significant others have both
been stabbed? And again, Joseph, this is where I go off.
You know, my brain kind of explodes. People break up,
(26:17):
Relationships don't work out. Sometimes people break up all the time.
At what point does it go from that tragic and
sad and heart wrenching as that is in and of
itself to coming up with a plan that death and
murder is probably the most suitable answer. You sit back
and you hear about a case like this, and you
look at the person you think, did your mind work?
(26:38):
You know that you you think that you can actually
get away with this, But there's some kind of disconnect
with her perception of her reality as it applaues to relationships.
It's almost like it's running season or something, and they're
just nuts, you know, over these relationships and they have
to possess people and and do all these things. And
to your point, this idea that not only am I
(26:59):
going to a possess you in Analysa's case, I'm going
to destroy you. I'm going to rip you to shred.
There's going to be nothing left of you. As a
matter of fact, I'm going to take a sharp instrument.
I'm going to cut your face up as well. One
or other detail that I always thought was a little horrifying.
At one point, Paul even loaned Sheila night vision goggles
(27:23):
to help her, and Air quotes Melissa spy. So, in
other words, Paul had bought Chila these goggles that I
guess you can see in the dark as if she's
in the military, so that she could spy on Nelson
and and Elsa all the time. How psychotic is that.
Poor Paul is just thinking he's doing something, you know,
to keep her engaged, and now she's spying on the
(27:47):
man she's clearly obsessed with, and maybe the person in
her way. Yeah, this, and I think that that goes
to the psychopathy here they do, They go back and
they fantasize about these things. What's fascinating to me about
this is that this happened and this poor woman was murdered.
I think we're very fortunate because she had this rich
fantasy life. I think we're very fortunate that this poor
(28:09):
woman is the only person that was murdered, you know,
because she's creating this fantasy life with Melissa, this fictitious
name that has been created, and it wouldn't surprise me
if she had probably in her own mind, she has
an image of Melissa. I mean, she's creatd She knows
what her hair color is, she knows the clothing that
she wears, her eye color, what type of makeup she wears,
(28:30):
all of these things, because it's very rich. It's certainly
that's something that should be explored with somebody like this
that manifests this kind of behavior that's so interesting. So
she's sort of creating this image of somebody that maybe
she went to high school with and felt obsessive about
from a distance, or somebody that she worked with casually
and now studies them to the core. Well, it's true
because you talk about the callous indifference that is very
(28:53):
applicable here because after the murder, Nelson and Sheila actually
started to get back together. You know, Sheila would bring
him care packages and she was very very supportive. And
Nelson told people that you know, sometimes he was too
afraid to talk about Anna Lisa, and it was really
just nice to have Sheila around to confide in, and
(29:13):
she would allow him to talk about analysa very openly.
First of all, is that a tel that they were
both involved in this? Or could this just be that
Nelson doesn't have a clue about anything? And is you know,
just falling into Sheila's track? How toned deaf do you
have to be to have all of the swirling around
(29:35):
you that you can't pick up. Is she's such a
goddess and has so much to offer that you're going
to completely shut down your total situational awareness when you're
around this person again, It it brings you back to
this idea. You know, he's very fortunate that he didn't
want up in a pool of his own blood with
his throat cut. In two thousand four, Sheila was convicted
(29:59):
for the attempt did murder of her husband Paul and
was sentenced to twenty five years in prison. However, the
real bombshell would come eight years later in two thousand
and twelve, when Sheila stood trial for the murder of
Anna Lisa, the former biochemist turned fell and decided to
represent herself. Here's recordings of some of her time in court.
(30:22):
You had obviously stated that when I learned that you,
I looked distressed, that I had a distressed look on
my face, and you have previously stated that I looked
kind of crazy at that time, crazy angry. You had
lied to the police. Yes, I wasn't forthcoming to the police,
(30:43):
and what was the nature of that lie. I hadn't
told them that you had been my girlfriend in the
past and we had a relationship, right, and um, you
did that? Why I didn't want you to go through
the ordeal that I had gone through. This whole idea
of representing your self to me is always so curious.
And how much of a narcissist do you have to
(31:04):
be to believe that you do not have to go
to law school and that you will outsmart the United
States judicial system as a whole as you stand for
a murder trial. I spent a lot of times covering
trials on television. I'm around tons and tons of lawyers
and they all say the same thing. And that's this
idea that the person that chooses to represent themselves has
(31:25):
a fool for client. That's what it comes down to
most of the time going into the courtroom from me
and I went many many times as a witness, as
an expert witness to testify in cases. From the first
day I did it to the very last day I
did it, I was terrified. I mean, and of course
I'm not the one that's doing the questioning, I'm the
one being questioned. If you've never been into a courtroom,
(31:46):
I mean truly been part of the process, it's like
being let down into an alien environment. First off, the
language is different. You walk into a courtroom. I think
in New York they still say they call it to order.
They go oh yea, oh yea, oh yea. But it
has a rattle in home. It's not in sync with
everyday life, these little nuanced things. And then on top
of that, you are literally trying to represent yourself in
(32:09):
a life or death matter. You pile all of that
on top of it, and it blows my mind every
time I hear somebody that says I'm going to represent myself.
We're talking about homicide charge, you know where everything rest
upon this, So that gives you an idea is to
how confident someone would be to a fall The prosecution's
big piece of evidence that was ultimately used in Sheila's
(32:31):
case was DNA that was found on the bathroom SINC
handle and Analysa's bathroom, meaning Sheila's dan HAY was on
the SYNC handle in the bathroom. Sheila, of course, representing herself,
countered by saying that couldn't really prove much because there's
really no way of knowing how long that DNA has
been there. And remember they did all work together, so
(32:54):
it is possible that Sheila had gone there at some
point throughout her time, you know, spending time with Nelson
and an A Lisa. Is that true? Because we know
that DNA is the roadmap to all things and I
only know this because of you, Joseph. It is the
greatest timetable we have when it comes to forensics. It is,
(33:15):
and you have to think about the fragility of it
as well. If she's trying to implant this idea that yeah,
you know, I've been there, we worked together and so
it could have just wound up there. But you know,
then you have to think about the sourcing of the DNA, Well,
is it just some kind of passive touch DNA where
you have skin cells that are recovered or is the
point of origin a blood droplet? How do you explain
(33:37):
that away? And where was it found? Because DNA, you know,
it will degrade, and particularly on an open surface like that.
So to my way of thinking, maybe there's an off
chance that she could have shown up at some point
Tom and touched the surface and left her DNA behind.
But the fact that when you begin to do the
calculus relative to how fragile DNA and DNA evidence can be,
(34:01):
and the fact that it's adjacent to an area of
wash basin. Remember what I said, You know, relative to
being bathed in blood, you would have a need to
cleanse yourself from some level, or at your perception. But
the jury has to do the measurement here, the balance
the scales. How does this measure out? And for me,
(34:21):
the odds are astronomical, I mean just absolutely astronomical. First off,
that her DNA would be there in the first place,
and secondly that if she had touched it and it
was a passive event where she was there on a
friendly visit, not associated with the blood bath. By the way,
that's in the hallway immediately adjacent. You add that layer
(34:42):
to it, I think things begin to come real clear. Yeah,
let's stop here for another break. So remember the nine
(35:07):
one one call that we've discussed that happened at this
you know, pay phone very close to the scene. The
prosecution brought in voice recognition experts to say it was
actually Sheila who made the call, saying that Anna Lisa
was being attacked, kind of to throw them off her sense.
And this is the part that I love when we
(35:27):
come in clear with technology and you can't out beat
the system. So voice recognition, I'm sure if that gets
used a lot in your world. We talk a lot
in forensic science, and here's a term that she used
a lot in court. We use the term within a
reasonable amount of scientific certainty, the fact that you have
this big piece of evidence that's a real bounty. And
(35:48):
she also had a little bit of a lack of
an alibi as well. She said there was really nothing
that suspicious about her leaving work for hours on end
because she had done that multiple times before and again.
And an alibi, we know, is a very important piece.
If you're a biochemistry and you're working for a pharmaceutical company,
you don't walk into an area where you're actually doing
(36:09):
testing with medications and that sort of thing that's a
lockdown security area. So if she's saying that she's done
this multiple times, first off, she's painting herself into a
corner because guess what we can do as investigators. We'll
get a subpoena. We'll go pull the tomelogs on her
clocking in and clocking out. So by making that statement,
you're opening the door for investigators to say, Okay, we'll
(36:32):
put you to the test. And if she so chooses
to provide witness in her case, she's gonna be cross
examined about it as well. Remember the first part of
the narrative, they didn't have DNA. We moved forward in time, though,
and what is evolving at the same point in time.
We think back to the date and time when this happened.
We were not as sophisticated even back in two thousand
three as we were in two thousand twelve. The fact
(36:55):
that they waited this amount of time is key here
because you had an opportunity for technology to catch up.
This is a prom example of technology and DNA technology
specifically catching up with the tom's And since two thousand twelve,
we've even moved further down the line I'll guarantee you this.
We're going to see a lot more cases similar to this,
(37:16):
maybe not exactly, but where we have blood evidence. In
the past we could not have tracked down. The technology
is there now and it is going to blow the
doors off of everything. And not to mention the fact
that in Sheila's case, you know you spoke about earlier,
how it's sometimes the smallest detail that tips and investigation,
(37:37):
and that sometimes people think they're so clever that they're
going to outsmart the police. And in this case, it
was the telephone that she dropped accidentally in the parking
lot that really put her to the first test. And
now this little bit of a sample of DNA on
the sink that was left behind at this crime scene,
and those two things got her in the end, and
(38:00):
that ultimately, let officials do their thing, you will not
get away with it. The devil is in fact in
the details, particularly in a case like this, because there
are no master criminals, contrary to which you see on
television that's entertainment device. There's always some way somebody screws up.
And the more complicated they make things, the more intricate
(38:20):
that they make things, the higher the probability is that
you're going to get caught, and in this case, that's
what happened. Despite countering nearly every point the prosecution made,
Sheila was found guilty of Analysa Ramundo's murder on February ten,
two thousand and twelve. Prior to her sentencing, Sheila made
(38:40):
a rather bizarre speech and court, take a listen. I'd
like to, after thanking God, thank my family for their
continued support in the past two years. I'd like to
thank everybody at the Department of Corrections in both New
York and Connecticut. Her words did not sway the judge,
(39:02):
and she was sentenced to fifty years in prison. When
Sheila finishes her time in New York for the attempted
murderer Paul, she will begin serving out her sentence in
Connecticut for Anna Lisa's murder. Sheila will not be eligible
for release from prison until nine Shameless plug If you're
(39:24):
enjoying crazy and Love, leave us a review and listen
to season three of our hit series, The Piked and Massacre.
New episodes are every Wednesday wherever you get your podcasts,
and don't forget to follow us on Instagram at Katie
Underscore Studios. Crazy in Love is produced by Stephanie Lydecker,
Jeff Shane, Chris Graves and me Courtney Armstrong. Editing and
(39:49):
sound designed by Jeff da Crazy in Love is a
production of I Heart Radio and Katie Studios. For more
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