Deconstruction: The Murder of Shanti Cooper Tronnes

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, campers, Grab your marshmallows and gather around the True
Crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie and I'm Whitney,
and we're here to tell you a true story that
is way stranger than fiction. Or roasting murderers and marshmallows
around the true crime campfire. There are some people who,

(00:21):
if they find themselves stuck in a hole, we'll just
keep digging deeper. Maybe they think they'll find some highly
improbable way out of their troubles. More likely, it's all
they know to do. This week's story is about a
man who kept doubling down on his lies and bad
decisions until the lives of those closest to him were

(00:42):
torn to pieces. This is deconstruction the Murder of Shanty
Cooper Trnis.

Speaker 2 (00:59):
So for this one, we're in Orlando, Florida. Late in
the afternoon of April twenty fourth, twenty eighteen, in the
upscale neighborhood of Delaney Park, David Trontes made an utterly
distraught call to nine one one, sobbing my wife. I
just found my wife. She's not breathing. I tried to
do CPR. I can't get her to breathe. He told

(01:21):
the operator he had found his wife, Shanty, unconscious in
the bathtub and hadn't been able to wake her up.
He'd carried her into the bedroom to try and give
her CPR on the floor, but it hadn't worked. She
was unresponsive. When police and paramedics arrived a few minutes later,
David was still distraught, his words barely intelligible between sobs.

(01:42):
The first thing that struck the responders was the strange
situation with the house. It was a beautiful, hundred year old,
forty five hundred square foot dream home from the outside anyway,
Inside it was a ragged shell, every piece of wood
and drywall torn out and away. It looked like it
was at step one of not so much a renovation

(02:04):
as a complete rebuild. David, Shanti, and Shanty's eight year
old son, Jackson, lived in a tiny apartment above the garage,
and in the garage itself. Shanty lay on her back
on a blanket on the floor beside the bed, very
obviously dead. In fact, her limbs seemed to be already
stiffening with rigor mortis, which was strange given David's story

(02:26):
of having just found her before the nine one one
call between sobs. David told officers that Shanty must have
slipped and fallen while taking a shower. That didn't seem likely, though.
If you're a cop for any length of time in
a pretty big city like Orlando, you're going to see
some shit, and you're probably going to be able to
recognize deliberate and extensive blunt force trauma to the head

(02:49):
when you see it. Mark's on her neck looked like
the kind caused by strangulation. None of their responding officers
thought Shanty had died as a result of an accident.
She'd been murdered in twenty eighteen. David and Shanty had
been together for five years and married for one. It
was the second marriage for.

Speaker 1 (03:08):
Both of them.

Speaker 2 (03:09):
They'd met on match dot com, with Shanty and Florida
and David up in Minneapolis. That wasn't far from where
he'd grown up in Stillwater on the Saint Cua River, which,
like a lot of Minnesota, looks like a beautiful little
town until you think of what the winters must be like.
Thank you. After college, David had gotten a job at
three M in Saint Paul. He told Shanty he'd been

(03:30):
an engineer, and he'd been so successful at it that
he'd been able to retire as a millionaire in two
thousand and eight when he was just forty years old.
But that wasn't quite the truth. He had worked for
three m but in sales, he'd been good at it
and made a healthy one hundred and forty thous a year.
Just good money. But it's not retire when you're forty money.

(03:50):
According to his first wife, Carol, David didn't retire. He
quit because he was burned out. Carol divorced David in
twenty thirteen. She stayed tight lipped about exactly why she
filed for divorce, so much so that when detectives asked
her about their marriage, Carol invoked spousal privilege so she
wouldn't have to answer any questions on the matter. Which

(04:11):
does spousal privilege even still count if you're divorced? I
genuinely don't know, So lawyers let us know.

Speaker 1 (04:17):
Like, no, right, that's the whole point of diverse. You're unspousing, Yeah,
unspousing each other?

Speaker 2 (04:25):
Right, But like maybe it would still count for stuff
that happened while the marriage was still ill legal. Like
that's what I'm wondering.

Speaker 1 (04:32):
I know, yeah, I mean yeah, I could be wrong.
I got my law degree from guy in a van,
so I don't.

Speaker 2 (04:38):
Know, and the van said freak candy on the side
of it. But twenty thirteen was also when David started
his Internet romance with Shanty, and if you want me
to speculate on whether the divorce or the match dot
Com profile came first, I'm gonna guess the latter. And
that Carol found out about David's Internet romance, there might

(04:59):
have others before Shanty too, who knows. Chanta was quite
a catch, beautiful and charismatic with her own successful financial
consulting business, A smart, successful woman sailing confidently on the
seas of life. She had recently gone through a messy
divorce from her first husband, a relationship she described to
David as toxic, and she wasn't messing around with what

(05:22):
she wanted from her next relationship. I am looking for
it all, Dave. One of her emails read, I want
to be in love so deeply, so pure and something
that is lasting and a growing living thing. That's a
really lovely way to describe a love relationship, a growing
living thing. Soon one or the other of them, was
flying either north or south every other weekend to visit.

(05:44):
Just a few months after they'd first connected on match
dot Com, David moved in with Shanty down in Orlando.

Speaker 1 (05:50):
At least initially, it seemed like a fairytale. Chanty gushed
to her friends about how all David treated her, and
they were intensely affectionate with each other, sometimes a too
much for Shanty's friends, one of whom described all their
lovey dovey stuff as quote a little nauseating at times.

Speaker 2 (06:07):
Lord not Bunny and snuggles again.

Speaker 1 (06:10):
In twenty seventeen, David and Shanty had a courthouse wedding
and Shanty got a beautiful, custom made diamond ring that
she loved to show off. That ring was important to her,
and it would also be important after her death. There
was no sign of forced entry into her home, no
sign of robbery or a struggle. There was cash and

(06:31):
an expensive watch sitting right out in the open that
weren't taken, but Shanty's beautiful diamond ring was gone. David
said he had no idea where it was. Is around
four pm by the time the police got to David
and Shanty's house, and one of the officers realized that
eight year old Jackson had been waiting to be picked
up from his elementary school for an hour. Oh lord,

(06:52):
he had the school called Jackson's dad, Jim Cooper, to
come get him. Jim wasn't told what was happening, but
he knew that something was bad wrong. Shanty would never
just neglect to pick up her son, So Jim made
what I think was a reasonable decision, but it was
one he would later call the biggest mistake of his life.
With Jackson in the car beside him, he drove to

(07:14):
Shanty's house. There was a bunch of police cars and
officers outside, with crime scene tape blocking the driveway. With
Jackson already starting to worry if something had happened to
his mom, Jim got out and asked an officer, what
was happening. Someone's deceased, he said. Jim knew right away.
He meant Shanty. That was the only way she wouldn't

(07:35):
have taken care of Jackson.

Speaker 2 (07:37):
Oh my god, that poor baby, eight years old.

Speaker 1 (07:40):
Oh David was both Shaunty's spouse and as far as
anyone knew, the last person to see her alive. That
meant he was the first person investigators needed to look at.
At the Orlando p D station, David surrendered his clothes
for forensic analysis and was taken to an interview room,
where he was soon questioned alternately by two HOMA side detectives,

(08:00):
Teresa Sprague and Barbara's Sharp. I'm sure you're all familiar
with the idea of good cop, bad cop. It's a
real interrogation technique, and it's real because a lot of
the time it works. Detective Sprague and Sharp used a
version where they both started out as the good cop
full of sympathy for David as he sobbed in the
interview room on the worst day of his life. And

(08:23):
when we say sobbed, we really mean sobbed. David was
a wailing wreck for hours and top tip here, if
you want to convincingly pull off some fake grief, maybe
snink a little bit of onion under your fingernail or something,
Because if you make weepy noises for hours and yet
not one single tear falls from your eyes, cops are

(08:45):
gonna notice. Yeah, they're not stupid. I mean, at least
force yourself to think about our tax and the swamp
of sadness or something. You gotta get those waterworks running.

Speaker 2 (08:54):
Oh my god, never never bring up our tacks. My
entire generation was friggin' traumatiz But that scene. Oh, I
can't even think about it now. Our tags don't give
into the sadness.

Speaker 1 (09:06):
Oh God, So it's that.

Speaker 2 (09:08):
David's story was that Shanty came downstairs a little after
nine am and then went back up to the garage
apartment to work. David took their dogs for a walk
in the park, did some yard work, cleaned the pool,
and the day ticked along with no further interaction between them.
I can't stress enough just how tiny the garage apartment
they were living in was. Even with Jackson out at school,

(09:30):
you'd have to work hard to keep from getting each
other's way. But somehow David and Shanty had nothing to
do with each other all day, No conversation, no text, nothing.
Around three forty five, David went up to ask if
he should go pick up Jackson from school. He said
hello as he entered the little apartment, but got no reply.
He could hear a trickle of water running and went

(09:51):
into the bathroom. Shanty was face down in the tub,
partially submerged in pinkish water. That trickled from the shower head.
She was bleeding from the head. Obviously she fell or
something happened. David told Detective Sprague that was clearly not
what had happened to Shanty, but for the moment, Sprague
kept quiet and let David keep talking. He insisted that

(10:14):
he and Shanty had been deeply in love with each other,
although he did admit things had been a little tough lately.
At the start of the year, Shanty had suffered through
a nasty case of appendicitis and had to have an
appendectomy ouch. She'd had a tough recovery. She was in
pain and had trouble eating, and a chronic illness like
that as a big stressor for both halves of a couple,

(10:36):
but David's stressed that they'd been happy, no affairs, no
financial problems, no serious arguments about anything, and David wasn't
the only person that police needed to look at. This
was Shanty's second marriage. Her first one to Jim Cooper,
had started happily but started to fall apart not long
after their son, Jackson, was born. Shanty had had an affair.

(10:58):
Jim still wanted to keep the marriage going going, but
Shauncey wanted out. That's a set of circumstances that could
make somebody real angry for a long time, especially with
a difficult, messy divorce on top of it. And when
Jim Cooper came in to talk to the Orlando investigators,
he didn't do enough to convince them of his innocence.
He's not cleared, Sprague said afterward. He would soon be

(11:20):
nearly cleared, though Jim just started a new job and
he'd been on site and surrounded by witnesses the whole day.
Neighbors had also reported a suspicious figure wandering around, a
rough looking dude who looked like Woody Harrelson, which just
pretty distinctive description, and local cops knew exactly who they
were talking about. But this was a nothing burger from

(11:42):
the get go. Everyone involved knew that a random stranger
just wandering in and killing somebody is vanishingly unlikely. But
the investigators did their work, and a detective found Woody
and interviewed him just as they thought. He had nothing
to do with the case at all other than David Trount.
This case was quickly running out of suspects, but what

(12:04):
possible reason could David Trantas have for killin us wife.
It was a question investigators would struggle to answer, but
they soon began to suspect it centered around their beautiful
old house on East Copeland Drive. David bought the place
outright for around six hundred thousand dollars in twenty fifteen.
Well maybe his finances were always a little murky, and

(12:25):
the deed named both David and his mother as owners,
so I'm guessing at least some of that six hundred
k came from mommy dearest, who'd followed David down to
Orlando not long after he hooked up with Shanty. Shanty
was not on the deed, which at this point was
fair enough. She and David weren't married at that point,
but even after they did get married, her name stayed

(12:45):
off the deed. He kept saying he'd add her to it,
and never quite got around to it. Given what happened next,
we should be clear that this house was not a
fixer upper. Okay, it was an old place, but it
was in beautiful can with hardwood floors and a tile roof,
a gorgeous pool, and everything neat and tidy. On the inside.

(13:07):
The decors and countertops and stuff like that looked like
what they were, which was an old person's choice. But
those were an easy fix, certainly, not something you'd have
to tear the house down to its bare bones to fix.

Speaker 1 (13:19):
Right right, David started renovating the place. This essentially became
his job. Shanty still worked hard at her career, but
David dedicated himself to puttering around in his new house.
I mean he could afford to because he was independently wealthy.
Although Shanty's friends and family quickly started to wonder about that,

(13:42):
Dave was well insert whatever polite term you want for
cheapest shit with his own money. Anyway, he spent Shanty's
money like it was water, and it was Shanty's money
tens of thousands of dollars at a time that was
paying for the renovation, and just to reiterate, Shanty's name
still wasn't on the deed. Shanty's money was remaking David's house.

(14:07):
Did David have the skill and experience to take on
in undertaking of this size, Absolutely not, But he did
have the confidence to try his confidence a reasonable substitute
for said skill and experience, Again, absolutely not. It started
out as nothing too extreme, replace some of the flooring in,

(14:30):
a little bit of the dry wall, stuff like that.
But it really seems like David lost his damn mind
after one piece of the original interior was ripped out,
He'd change his mind on what he wanted to do,
or fire a contractor and move on to something else
without finishing off the first thing. He had multiple different
blueprints drawn up of what he wanted the finish house

(14:52):
to look like right in the middle of tearing it
to pieces. Inside. Soon there was no floor at all,
and the family had to walk across planks sitting on
the floor. Joists Shanty wouldn't let Jackson go in because
of all the bare nails, all the interior walls and
dry wall were taken out. The place looked like a

(15:15):
bomb went off. The likely genesis for all this insanity
was that David was a big fan of home renovation
shows and apparently believed that if you watched enough of them,
it meant you were qualified to do the work yourself.
You know, like how if you watch enough Roadrunner cartoons,
you can make a tunnel out of black paint.

Speaker 2 (15:37):
I watch a lot of Star Trek, I can fly
a spaceship.

Speaker 1 (15:40):
Obviously, sure of course, a staple of those shows is
where they take out existing work, often with sledgehammers, sometimes
to the extent of bulldozing a whole wall. Of course,
those people know what they're doing, and though it's fun
dramatic TV, the destruction is just prepper for the real work.

(16:02):
David doesn't seem to have grasped that his idea of
renovation was to tear everything to pieces and then maybe
someday get around rebuilding it.

Speaker 2 (16:12):
Yeah, it's like he just went in there with the
sledge here were like whoo whoooo. He was just having
fun gutt in the place. He didn't really think to
the next step.

Speaker 1 (16:21):
M Having hooked up with a putative millionaire and moved
into his dream project home, Shanty was living in a
tiny apartment over the garage, her twin bed crammed tight
up against Jackson's bunk bed. They cooked their meals on
a camping stove down in the garage. There was something
missing from this picture, of course, Shanty's husband, David. Not

(16:44):
long after they'd gotten married, David had started sleeping downstairs
on a couch in the cluttered garage with their dogs,
even when Jackson was away staying with his dad. It
was his decision. Doesn't every new bride dream of the
day her husband said he'd rather sleep in his own bed.
He told detectives it was because Shanty snored.

Speaker 2 (17:06):
Okay, earplugs are a thing, dude, y'all just got married.
Despite David's attempts to paint the rosiest of pictures, this
does not sound like a marriage where everything was sweetness
and light. Just a year after their wedding, they were
sleeping in separate beds. While Shanty's friends had found the
couple's overt affection nauseating early on in the relationship, by

(17:27):
twenty ten there was not much sign of that. A
friendly neighbor said she never saw them hold hands or
even touch each other. They were so frosty together that
the neighbor thought it was weird. Interviewing David, detectives pressed
him on whether the stress of the renovation project was
affecting his marriage. We love what we're doing to the house,
David said. We love the vision that we had for

(17:49):
the house. The word we seems to be doing a
lot of heavy lifting there. Everybody knew that the house
was David's project. David's baby, Shanty just paid for it.
At the time of her death, she'd paid about a
quarter of a million dollars and had started stressing to
her friends about not being on the deed if something happened,
if they broke up, she'd take a big hit. When

(18:12):
they'd started the house project, that hadn't been a concern
at all. The fact that it was a concern now
suggested Shanty was finding it all too easy to imagine
a future without David in her life. One of her
friends said Shanty called her crying one time not long
before the murder and said, I'm so scared and I
just need to get out. He knows I know too much,

(18:32):
and he won't let me go. WHOA, what was that about.
Shanty never brought this up again and brushed it off
when her friend tried to get her to say more,
but it was clear something had shaken her up badly.

(19:13):
One of David's favorite shows was A and E's Orlando
based zombie house Flipping, where a crew find homes that
are in really bad condition and often abandon and knock
them back into quality shape in just a few weeks. Now,
maybe David walked into the shell of his house and
said to himself, I've made a huge mistake and realized
he was going to need serious help to put the

(19:34):
place back together. The other alternative would be that he
deliberately wrecked the place in the hopes of getting on
one of his favorite shows, which would be bug Nuts Bonkers,
but who knows. Anyway, David had one of the Zombie
House Flipping hosts, builder Keith Orie, come over to take
a look at the place and see if it would
be a good fit for the show. Keith was impressed,

(19:55):
as in impressed by what a god awful messa place
was in. As he told twenty twenty later on Holy Cow,
there's no house on the inside of this house. He
was fairly alarmed. He couldn't quite work out how the
place was still standing, as David had knocked out a
lot of the interior walls and supporting structures. Guy, such
a turnip. If you never heard of a load bearing wall,

(20:17):
you dip shit. Guy is so dangerous. One of the
engineers Keith brought with him said, the only thing holding
up this house was two inches of stucco. The whole
place looked bizarre to Keith. No one in his industry
ever took a part interiors as extensively as this. Of course,
given the show he worked on, Bizarre and Alarming were

(20:38):
exactly negative traits for a property to have. The worse
the house, the better the show. Keith thought the house
was a good fit for Zombie House Flipping, and when
he spoke to the show's producers, they agreed they all
wanted to get a load of this disaster. So in
mid April, a week or so before Shanty's murder, Keith
went back to see David and Shanty to make sure
they were on board with the project. He'd been having

(21:00):
a lot of trouble getting them both together in person,
but really needed face to face confirmation from them both
before things could go any further. Shanty barely said a
word throughout the meeting and was palpably pissed at David.
The tension in the air was thick enough to spread
on a slice of sour dough. She did agree to
go forward with the show, but then flat out just

(21:20):
stormed out of the room, super awkward for poor Keith.
Shooting was supposed to start in May in the interview
room at Orlando PD. Hours into talking with David, detectives
Sprague and Sharp were about to turn the corner from
good cops to bad cops to try and shake something loose.
They had plenty of reason to be suspicious of him.

(21:42):
His story did not add up at all.

Speaker 1 (21:44):
He said he found Shanty half submerged in the tub
and carried her to the bedroom to try CPR. Police
arrived just a few minutes after he called nine one one.
If this story was true, Shanty's body would have been
soaking wet, and so should the carpet, but she was
barely even damp, and the floor not at all. The
bathtub did look like it had been stained by bloody water,

(22:06):
but not recently. The medical examiner confirmed the suspicions of
the responding officers. There was no way Shanty had gotten
those awful injuries by falling down in the shower. They
were a type familiar to homicide investigators. She'd been severely
beaten and then strangled to death, and not recently. Shanty's
body was already going into rigor mortis when authorities arrived

(22:29):
at the scene, to an extent you don't see until
hours after death, Shanty was definitely still alive. At around
eight thirty pm on the night before David called nine
to one to one, because she'd called to say good
night to Jackson, who was staying with his dad. Police
discovered that Shanty's cell phone hadn't moved after eleven thirty pm.
She'd gotten a work text around seven am and hadn't responded,

(22:50):
hadn't even read it. Shanty's friends all thought she worked
too hard. She wouldn't flake on a client like that.
So it looked like Shanty had been killed between eight
thirty and eleven thirty on the night before. David called
nine one one, and detectives thought they could pin down
the circumstances a little further when they found her. Shanty
had one diamond earring stud still in the other was

(23:12):
on the nightstand by the bed, So maybe she'd been
attacked while she was sitting on the bed taking out
her earrings getting ready to go to sleep.

Speaker 2 (23:19):
That is such a chilling image, just sitting there just
you know, you don't know anything's up, taking out your
ear rings. Oh boom, that's awful.

Speaker 1 (23:28):
Yeah, so scary. David, of course, had said he'd seen
Shanty on Tuesday morning, before he'd taken the dogs out
for a walk. Rigor mortis and data from her cell
phone indicated that Shanty was already hours dead by then.
When Detective Sharp started aggressively questioning David on why his
story didn't match the evidence, he just started whimpering, I

(23:49):
don't understand. I've told you everything. You're not a good liar.
Sharp told him, you're terrible at it. The evidence and
her body speak for itself, and your story is bs.

Speaker 2 (24:00):
That detective is great and she seems to almost enjoy
letting him have it. That interrogation is a really interesting
one to watch. And I gotta say Tronti's is one
of the worst actors I have ever seen. And y'all
know that is saying something like he cries like a
car too, like wooooooo like it's it's like well enunciated sobbing,

(24:20):
it's bizarred.

Speaker 1 (24:21):
It's blue who who like he literally does boooo. Yeah,
it's it's it's really really something though, and something to behold.
They went after him hard, and if David had been
half a shaken up as he acted, he might have
broken but he didn't, and although the police thought he
was by far the most likely killer, after fourteen hours

(24:43):
they had to let him go and David lawyered up.

Speaker 2 (24:46):
But the investigation continued, of course, and it didn't take
long for David's story of a picture perfect marriage to
crumble into dust. Officers from the Department of Children and
Family Services interviewed Little Jackson, who told them Shanty hadn't
told anyone that David was verbally and physically abusive to her.
When Shanty wasn't around, David dropped any pretense at acting

(25:09):
like a parental figure to Jackson. He'd get furious at
the kid, scream in his face, and threatened to hurt
him and break his toys. Jackson was eight years old, prick,
and David's violent temper wasn't the only secret he was
keeping down the street a little from David and Shanty.
Ron Gordie lived with his partner Tom quite a while

(25:29):
before Shanty's death. Ron was out jogging one day and
saw Dave out doing some yard work with his shirt
off and wearing what Ron later called very very skimpy
little running shorts whom I. Ron stopped to chat and,
as someone who spent a lot of time in the
gym himself, complimented David on being in great shape and
said he liked David's new glasses. David gave him an

(25:50):
intense look and said, yeah, and now that I have
new glasses, you're much more attractive to me now that
I can see. What Ron had said was a friendly compliment.
What David said was a pretty blatant come on. It
made Ron uncomfortable. Most people who met David for the
first time thought he was gay, and that doesn't necessarily

(26:14):
mean anything, but sometimes it does. Not long after, a
friend of Ron's told him he recognized David from Club Orlando. David,
it turned out, was a regular visitor to Club Orlando,
a gem and private men's club downtown which offered patrons
the opportunity to relax in the hot tub, dive in
the pool, blow off some steam in the steam room,

(26:35):
and watch a movie in our video lounge, or socialize
in your own private room. It was a gem and
also very much a hookup spot for gay men wanting to,
you know, blow off some steam. David had been going
there a lot over the past eighteen months. Maybe sometimes
he just went there to work out, but at least
one employee caught him twice. Well, let's just say he

(26:57):
was being very friendly to two different men, once in
the steam room and once behind the building. If the
same guy catches you in the act two different times.
I think it's pretty safe to assume you're mainly going
there for sex. David was a frequent visitor. He'd gone
most recently one week before Shanty's death. He'd gone there

(27:18):
the day after the two of them got married. Now,
there are lots of different shapes of relationship, and some
of them certainly include hooking up with strangers. But Shanty
was the opposite of a shrinking violet. She was open
and forthright, and her friends knew her about as well
as it's possible to know someone, and none of them
thought that there was any chance in all the nether

(27:40):
hills in the universe that Shanty knew about David's visits
to Club Orlando, or that she would have been okay
with his infidelity if she did. But had she found out?
Was that possibly a motive for her murder? Remember what
she'd said to her friend, he knows I know too
much and he won't let me go. She'd been talking
about David's secret sex life. Did he want to make

(28:02):
sure it stayed a secret? And there was also another
possible motive, the one we see most often in spouse
murder cases. Money. David was the beneficiary of Shanty's three
hundred and fifty thousand dollars life insurance policy, and he
started trying to claim it within a few weeks of
her death. He also had access to Shanti's investments, which

(28:22):
had a value of nearly a million dollars. He started
moving money hundreds of thousands of dollars out of their
joint bank account. Unbeknownst to him, the police were monitoring
his bank accounts. When a murder suspect starts hoarding money,
it's odds on that they're about to make a run
for it. So, even though the case against him was

(28:43):
still just taking shape, prosecutors decided to not take that
risk and arrested and charged David Tranis in August, four
months after Shanti's death. Cops put the old Habeas Gravis
on him at his mom's house, where he'd been staying
since the murder.

Speaker 1 (28:58):
It was an easy arrest. Had been sitting out on
the porch and did whatever the officers asked him to do.
He didn't say a word, and he didn't look the
least surprised. Along with the arrest warrant, investigators were able
to search David's mom's house, and among David's stuff, they
found Shanty's most prized possession, her diamond engagement ring that
she was never without. It was worth thousands of dollars,

(29:20):
and it seemed very likely that David had pulled it
off Shanty's finger after she was dead so that he
could make some money from it later. He had previously
told investigators he had no idea what had happened to
the ring.

Speaker 2 (29:32):
Well played, man, that was a very sound decision keeping
that ring and lying to the detectives about it.

Speaker 1 (29:38):
First's this, he's the next of kin. He would have
gotten it anyway.

Speaker 2 (29:43):
Yeah, Like it's bizarre and he's really bad at this.

Speaker 1 (29:47):
He just wanted to make it look like a theft
I get. I don't know. Nice, stupid, stupid. With the
revelations about David's secret life during his marriage to Shanty,
detectives were curious about his first marriage to care Up
in Minneapolis. As we said earlier, Carol was not keen
to share much with investigators, going so far as to
invoke spousal privilege to cut off inquiries. She didn't believe

(30:11):
David was capable of murder. She said he'd never shown
any violent tendencies in the fourteen years they'd been together.
She refused to say anything bad about him, But investigators
also spoke to David and Carroll's friends, and they suggested
a very different story. Within a year of marrying David Trantis,
Carol had gotten sick with mysterious stomach pains and digestive issues.

(30:34):
In fact, her symptoms were astonishingly similar to the illness
Shanty had suffered that led to her getting her appendix removed,
which struck not long after she and David got married.
In both marriages, David was the one preparing most of
the food. Carol's health had declined so rapidly from her
normal healthy self that several friends wondered, is he poisoning

(30:56):
her camper's? Is it a good sign when your friends
think your new husband might be trying to murder you?

Speaker 2 (31:03):
Yeah, I'm gonna say no.

Speaker 1 (31:05):
M Yeah. Carol gave a flat no when detectives asked
if she thought David had been poisoning her. As for Shanty,
the hospital still had the appendance they'd removed from her,
but the fluids it was stored in would have removed
any evidence of poisoning. This line of inquiry was all
pretty vague and speculative, but it was soon given new
life because David, like many a dumbass before him, had

(31:29):
trouble keeping his mouth shut in jail. Of course, his
cellmate was a stoner type dude named Edward Gismondi. David
recognized him. Edward, like David, had been a regular visitor
on the DL two Club Orlando, the discreet men's club
where everyone apparently has a perfect photographic memory for faces.

(31:52):
David and Edward discovered they shared an interest in hallucinogenic drugs,
and during one of those conversations, David brought up Sappo,
a poison derived from the giant leaf frog of the Amazon.
David said, you could put the stuff in salsa and
poison someone without them ever knowing, which is a very

(32:13):
specific little nugget of knowledge to have. He said. The
beauty of it is it can't be tested for Edward
told investigators.

Speaker 2 (32:23):
David also apparently admitted to Edward that he had killed Shanty.
He said they'd argued, then David had blacked out, and
when he came to Shanty was dead on the floor.
I blacked out is a fairly run of the mill
excuse used by murderers, particularly domestic murderers, and that's hardly
ever true. So all of this was pretty damning, but

(32:43):
also of limited actual use because Edward Gismondi was shady
as shit, a registered sex offender whose secondhand testimony was
not very likely to convince anybody. But there was another
twist coming. With David and jail awaiting trial, his defense
attorney made a weird call to the prosecutor. He hadn't
been able to sleep at night. He had evidence he

(33:05):
needed to turn over. When detectives had first arrived at
David and Shanty's house, they'd noticed that the sheets on
Shanty's bed were clean and looked like they'd been hurriedly
put on the bed. They'd also found blood evidence on
the bed frame. David's explanation was that he and Shanty
had had sex while she was having her period, which
somehow involved the bed frame getting messy. Anyway, investigators had

(33:29):
long thought that David had replaced bloody sheets with clean ones,
but they'd never found the bloody sheets. Now, David's lawyer
said he'd hired a private investigator to remove the sheets
from the home. The story was they wanted to run
their own tests to show that it was menstrual blood
on the sheets, but they'd never run any tests at all,
and the sheets had just been sitting inside a paper

(33:50):
bag in a bank locker. Either the defense attorney suffered
an attack of conscience or he'd found out his PI
was not as tight lipped as he could be, but
either way he turned over the sheets. They certainly had
Shanty's blood on them, but possibly due to the time
they'd spent in storage, there was no way to determine
what kind of blood it was. Prosecutors never really nailed

(34:11):
down a precise motive for why David Tranta's killed Shanty.
That's not particularly unusual in cases without a confession. Real
life isn't like a detective novel where all the pieces
have to slot satisfyingly together. It's MESSI had Shanty wanted
to pull out of the Zombie House Slipping show and
wreck both David's chance to be on TV and his

(34:33):
chance to fix the damage he'd done to the house.
Had she found out about his secret sex life with
other men and said she would divorce him? Did David
just do it for the money between Shanty's life insurance
and her investments, David could be over a million dollars
richer if she died. Having multiple believable motives for murder

(34:53):
wasn't exactly a plus for David's new defense team. Besides,
the prosecution didn't need to prove why David had killed Shanty,
just that he had. David's trial was delayed both because
of COVID and because he was found to be mentally
incompetent due to his schizophrenia diagnosis. Now a lot of people,
including Jackson, who'd known David since he was three years old,

(35:17):
thought he was faking mental illness who knows, but in
twenty twenty three, a judge ruled that David was competent
to be tried. There was really only one explanation for
Shanty's death that made any sense at all, and that
was that David Trontas had killed her. In October of
twenty twenty three, a jury agreed, and David, now a
fifty five year old man with a man bun and

(35:39):
a big, bushy beard, was found guilty of first degree
murder and sentenced to life in prison. I mentioned that
because it's interesting because he was really clean cut and
like chiseled looking and tan and stuff. When he went
in and he came out looking like a totally different person.
It was interesting. There are still some question marks for
me on this one. Did David marry Shanty with the

(36:00):
intention of killing her? Now? If, and this is a
big if, because obviously we have no proof of this,
but if he was actually poisoning her, then I think
that's a distinct possibility. And we've seen that before many times.
Remember Paul Curry poisoning Linda with the salad dressings with nicotine.
I mean, he was planning on killing her from day one.

(36:21):
That might account for the love bombing Shanty's friend so
in the beginning, when he couldn't seem to keep his
hands off her affection that seemed to totally dry off
after they made it official. And then there's the fact
that he never put her on the deed to the house,
even though he was using her money to renovate it. Well,
probably never know for sure, but if I were a
betting man, I'd put my money on it that David

(36:43):
intended this murder from day one. And if that's true,
it's absolutely bone chilling. Shanty seems like a really lovely person.
At David sentencing her son. Jackson spoke about her with
pure love. She was the best mom in the world,
he said, and he missed her every day. It's really
scary to think how the rest of your life could

(37:03):
be irreparably altered by something as mundane as going on
a date with a guy from match dot com. Whether
he began their marriage with murder in mind or just
decided to do it so he could be on Zombie
House Flippers, David Trones will have the rest of his
life to think about his choices. I hope that brings
those who love Chaunty at least a tiny atom of peace.

(37:25):
So that was a wild one. Write campers. You know
we'll have another one for you next week, but for now,
lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until
we get together again around the True Crime Campfire. And
if you haven't booked your spot yet on the Crime
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(37:48):
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go to Crimewave atsea dot com slash campfire and take
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Thank you so much to Maggie b Sean, Benia, Colotta,
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(38:11):
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(38:32):
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