The Man Who Wasn't There: The Murder of Shannon Mohr

If there’s one constant in the kind of people we cover, it’s this—they’re liars. Con artists trying to scam their way into money, murderers denying their crimes, spouses with secret affairs, liars, all of them. This week’s case is about a man who checks all three of those boxes, a man who learned that, if he didn’t have a conscience, deceit could make him more money that hard work ever did. Once he’d learned that lesson, nothing was going to stop him from lying his way to more and more wealth. Certainly not the continued health and well-being of his wife.

Join Katie and Whitney, plus the hosts of Last Podcast on the Left, Sinisterhood, and Scared to Death, on the very first CRIMEWAVE true crime cruise! Get your fan code now--tickets are on sale now: CrimeWaveatSea.com/CAMPFIRE

Sources:
https://www.mlive.com/news/jackson/2014/11/man_infamous_for_killing_wife.html https://www.cetient.com/case/people-v-davis-1751715
https://www.newspapers.com/article/detroit-free-press-um-2a/75455510/
Bonnie's Blog of Crime: https://mylifeofcrime.wordpress.com/2013/06/29/psycho-for-love-david-davis-killed-his-new-wife-shannon-mohr-for-the-insurance-money/
"Unsolved Mysteries" Wiki: https://unsolvedmysteries.fandom.com/wiki/David_Davis
A&E's "American Justice," episode "The Shannon Mohr Story"

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, campers, Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true
crime campfire. We're your camp counselors.

Speaker 2 (00:06):
I'm Katie and I'm Whitney, and we're here to tell
you a true story that is.

Speaker 1 (00:10):
Way stranger than fiction or roasting murderers and marshmallows around
the true crime campfire. If there's one constant in the
kind of people we cover, it's this. They're liars, con
artists trying to scam their way into money, murderers denying

(00:31):
their crimes, spouses with secret affairs, liars, all of them.
This week's case is about a man who checks all
three of those boxes, a man who learned that if
he didn't have a conscience deceit could make him more
money that hard work ever did. Once he learned that lesson,

(00:53):
nothing was going to stop him from lying his way
to more and more wealth, certainly not the continued health
and well being of his wife. This is the man
who wasn't there the murder of Shannon Moore.

Speaker 3 (01:16):
So campers for this one. We're in Hillsdale County, Michigan,
where fields and woods stretch out across the land and
there's really just one little town. This is about as
country as you can get. July twenty third, nineteen eighty
was a beautiful, clear day, more like spring than summer,
and in the early evening, Shannon Moore Davis and her
husband David headed out from David's farm for a horseback ride.

(01:41):
They were still newlyweds. They'd met less than a year
ago at the wedding of mutual friends. Shannon, a twenty
five year old nurse, hadn't been doing great at the time.
She'd just broken up with her firefighter fiance and was
back living with her parents in Toledo. When David Davis,
tall and charming, approached her at the wedding room, She
fell for him almost right away. The more she learned

(02:03):
about him, the more fascinating he became. How he'd been
orphaned as a child, then played in the Rose Bowl
for the University of Michigan football team, then won multiple
medals for valor in Vietnam. After the war, he found
great success as a real estate developer and owned farms
all across the country. Not that his life was all

(02:23):
sunshine and roses until he met Shannon, David had thought
he'd never find love again after his fiancee had died
in a terrible car accident on her way to their wedding.
Now thirty five, he had decided to live a simpler
life in Hillsdale County as a farmer. Shannon was swept
off her feet, and so was David at the wedding reception.

(02:46):
The first time he saw Shannon, he told a friend,
that's the woman I'm going to marry. He was right.
Just seven weeks after they met, they got hitched in Vegas.
As you might imagine, Shannon's parents, Bob and Lucille, weren't
exactly thrilled by this sudden turn of events.

Speaker 1 (03:02):
At least at first.

Speaker 3 (03:03):
It just seemed like a dumb thing to do. What
was the rush? But David was charming with lucillele and
went hunting and fishing with Bob. Most of all, he
made Shannon happy, so her parents quickly came around. They
liked David, and they liked visiting the farm. They were
there on that day in July along with Shannon's nephew

(03:24):
and watched the couple ride slowly off on horseback along
the country lanes. They stopped off for a little while
at the farm of David's friend and neighbor, Dick Britton
then headed off along the trails through the woods. Twenty
five minutes later, David came racing back on horseback across
the fields. He was sweating and had blood on his shirt.

(03:45):
He told Dick that Shannon had fallen from her horse
and hid her head on a rock. She was hurt,
real bad. They drove back to where she'd fallen at
the edge of the woods. Later, when the adrenaline wasn't
pumping so hard, Dick Britton would think the scene was
weird enough that he went back out there with his
wife to look around. They noticed, and I absolutely would

(04:06):
not have circular bruises on two tree branches and recognized
them as marks where horses had been tied. About seven
feet behind each branch were piles of horse poop, again
suggesting the horses had been tied up there. What had
gotten Dick's attention in the first place was the fact
that Shannon had her shoes off and her blouse was
almost completely unbuttoned. Now, y'all, you ever hear of somebody

(04:29):
who fell off a horse so hard and knocked their
shoes off and unbuttoned her clothes, and this was not
rocky country. Shannon would have had to be incredibly unlucky
to fall and hit her head on something hard enough
to seriously hurt her like unbelievably unlucky. For now, though,
the most important thing about Shannon was that she wasn't

(04:51):
moving and her skin was a bluish gray. She had
streaks of blood on her chest. She was in serious trouble.
They got her into Dick's car and hurried to the hospital.
At the hospital, it was immediately clear that they couldn't
help Shannon. She wasn't breathing, her heart wasn't beating, her
pupils were fixed and dilated. She was gone. Dick Britton

(05:14):
called her parents at the farm, but just told them
that Shannon had been in a horseback riding accident. When
they got to the hospital, a doctor and a sheriff's
deputy came out to see them, and Lucille started screaming,
is she all right? They didn't answer for a moment,
and Lucille sobbed out, is she dead? Yes, the doctor said.

Speaker 1 (05:35):
David told Shannon's parents the same thing he'd told Dick Britton,
that Shannon had fallen off her horse and hit her head.
The hospital said she died of a broken neck, consistent
with that story, David embraced the distraught Lucille from behind.
She looked down and saw scratch marks on his hands.
When she looked up and saw similar marks on one

(05:57):
side of his face, her blood ran right then. She
thought David Davis had killed her daughter, but she kept
that to herself, at least at first. When the nurse
came to ask the family what they wanted to do
with the remains, David said he and Shannon had just
had this conversation. Shannon had wanted to be cremated. At this,

(06:21):
Shannon's mom lost it and started yelling she will not
be cremated, and soon the Moors and David were yelling
at each other in the hospital waiting room oh Lauren.
David said he had no life insurance on Shannon and
couldn't afford a funeral. Bob Moore said he'd pay for
it and begged David to let them take Shannon's body

(06:43):
back to Toledo to be buried. David still said no
until Dick Britton, who'd been watching the whole drama play out,
jumped out of his chair and said, David, that's her parents.
They have rights. You've only been married ten months. Finally,
David backed down. When her temper cooled down, Lucille Moore
was more convinced than ever that David Davis had killed Shannon.

(07:05):
When they first got back from their Vegas wedding, Shannon
told her mom that David had taken out big life
insurance policies on both of them. He'd lied. The police, though,
were not eager to draw this thing out. We've seen
this a dozen times with small town departments. If there's
a way for them to quickly rule a death in accident,

(07:26):
so they've still got time to get down to Cracker
Barrel for a chicken fried steak, and they'll take it.
A couple of cops spent about five minutes looking around
the accident's site. They found a half buried rock with
blood on it, and they found Shannon's untied shoes about
eight feet away. They gave these to David Davis, and
the shoes promptly disappeared.

Speaker 3 (07:45):
Oh great, good job, guys.

Speaker 1 (07:47):
Yeah, what's wrong with handing over potential evidence to the
victim's brand new husband? Come on? Without any investigation. The
authorities accepted David's claim that he had no life insurance
on Shannon in fact, they never interviewed him at all
after that first night at the hospital Jesus. With no

(08:08):
obvious motive and no obvious evidence of foul play, the
medical examiner ruled the death an accident.

Speaker 3 (08:16):
Shannon was buried three days later in Toledo, and her
parents learned some surprising things about David the orphaned war hero.
For one thing, the orphan's parents came to the funeral,
and from talking to them and other members of his family,
it was obvious that David had never served in the
military at all. The successful life of international real estate

(08:37):
was likewise a lie. He'd lived on the farm in
Hillsdale County for years on disability payments from an old job.

Speaker 1 (08:44):
And of course there.

Speaker 3 (08:46):
Was no tragic fiancee who died on her way to
their wedding, just an ex wife who hated him, and
two daughters he wasn't allowed to see. Basically, his whole
life was a lie. And I want to take a
minute to look at the Vietnam stuff because I think
it shows what kind of drama queen bullshit artists were
dealing with here. David, remember, had never been in the

(09:06):
military at all and had never served in Vietnam. But
he told the moors he'd been a major in the
Marine Corps. He'd been seriously wounded when apparently simultaneously, he
stepped on a landmine and an artillery rocket exploded overhead.
I guess just one explosion didn't have the narrative oomph
he was after he'd been blinded for a year and

(09:30):
still had scars on his back from the explosions. Everyone
else in his platoon had been killed by the rocket.
He did, in fact have scars on his back from
surgery on a herniated disk. In nineteen seventy six, after
he'd heard himself lifting some stuff on the farm, he
told his neighbor Dick Britton that he'd been injured when
his parachute caught him in a tree and a Vietcong

(09:51):
soldier shot him in the knee. Despite the injury, David said,
he pulled out his pistol and shot him right between
the eyes. Co course, she did, Dave, of course she did.
His friend Tom Davis was a high school teacher, and
he invited David to come talk to his class when
they were studying the Vietnam War. David told the kids

(10:12):
what it was like to hold men in your arms,
and watch them die, then broke down and wept in
front of the class. Good God, man, chew the scenery.
Why don't you it's unreal. My dude had actually spent
the war as a student first, then an encyclopedia salesman,
an apartment complex manager, and a hers driver for a

(10:32):
funeral home. That one was prophetic. Now, after Shannon's funeral,
David went out for dinner with some of her family.
He didn't seem to be mourning at all, just enjoying
being the center of attention. He made a toast to
my lovely wife, Shannon, who is looking down on me
at this moment. We're all looking down on you, David.

(10:53):
This upset Shannon's cousin Cheryl so much as she ran
out of the room. David followed pologize for upsetting her,
and then he folded her up in a hug and
told her she was now the most beautiful woman in
his life. Then he firmly grabbed her butt and squeezed.

(11:14):
Oh my god, how did she manage to stand there?
I would have gone like red missed berserker, like just
full on screaming out for blood berserker. That man would
have been in the ground by the end of the
day that woman had remarkable self restraint. A few days later,
David dropped off some of Shannon's things at her parents'

(11:36):
house in Toledo and told them he was going to
a desert to think. Please do David, and please stay
there until the vultures peck your bones dry. But suri surprize.
This was another lie. In reality, he was flying down
to Florida with his girlfriend, because of course there was
a girlfriend. Just be patient, we'll get back to her.

(11:57):
After the funeral, Bob and Lucille Moore went back to
Hillsdale County to see the sheriff, specifically to tell them
they thought David had lied about not having life insurance
on Shannon. The sheriff found out that David had in
fact taken out three life insurance policies on Shannon, all
with double indemnity clauses that paid out double if she
died in an accident. He stood to make a little

(12:19):
over three hundred thousand dollars, which today would be just
north of a million.

Speaker 1 (12:25):
This made the cops suspicious enough to reopen the case.
A month after her death, Shannon's body was exhumed for
an autopsy, but this still revealed no evidence of foul play.
The cause of death was changed from a broken neck
to a traumatic brain injury, which was still consistent with
a fall from a horse, and once again Hillsdale County

(12:45):
determined that the death was accidental. Bob and Lucille Moore
were furious and sent letters to the state Attorney General.
So did Dick Britton, who had become convinced his neighbor
had gotten away with murder.

Speaker 3 (12:58):
Yeah, Dick is awesome, by the way, he's on this
episode of American Justice about it. I know, I just
said Dick is awesome. Let's move on from it phrasing.
But yeah, I love this old dude. He smelled a
rat from minute one, and he was not gonna let
it go. He seems like an old cowboy, like the
kind who's probably eaten a lot of baked beans right

(13:19):
out of the can, you know, like under the stars,
around the campfire with the other cowboys. He's great.

Speaker 1 (13:27):
As a matter of fact, Dick took an additional step
and went to see Detroit Free Press reporter Billy Bowles.
Bowles thought there was a story here and he started investigating,
and he soon uncovered that David Davis was no stranger
to insurance payouts. Not long ago, he'd bought a new
property in Hillsdale County and had it insured, And wouldn't

(13:50):
you know it, the barn and house on the property
both burned down soon after separately.

Speaker 3 (13:57):
Wow, what bad luck poor David.

Speaker 1 (14:00):
In October, Bulls's story was on the front page of
The Free Press, which at the time was one of
the biggest newspapers in the country. It laid out the
sketchy details of Shannon's death, the lies of David Davis,
and the half hearted investigation of local law enforcement. There's
nothing like bad publicity to get the wheels of government turning.

(14:21):
Just a couple of days after the story hit the newstands,
the Attorney General assigned a state police detective, Don Brooks
to look into Shannon's death, and right away Brooks thought
he was looking at a murder case. The Moors, meanwhile,
filed a lawsuit to stop David from collecting Shannon's life
insurance money. David, probably afraid he'd be scooped up by

(14:42):
the cops, didn't show up in court, and the money
went to the Morris instead. They also demanded that more
tests be done on Shannon's remains and samples were said
to the Medical College of Ohio and Toledo, and it's
a good thing they were. The tests revealed a foreign
sub in Shannon's tissue. The lab couldn't identify what it was,

(15:03):
but it was a flaming red flag for investigators. Detective
Brooks's investigation revealed that David Davis had briefly been a
postgraduate pharmacology student. He also knew that farmers often have
access to powerful drugs to help them treat livestock. When
he talked to veterinarians about what drugs might be used
in a homicide, one of them made a suggestion that'll

(15:26):
be familiar to many true crime nerds. Suxonal coaling.

Speaker 3 (15:31):
Hello again, suckonal coaling. This shit pops up in true
crime more than the phrase it was the kind of
town where nobody locked their doors. It's an incredibly powerful,
fast acting muscle relaxing that can be used to medically
induce paralysis, like for intubation and other kinds of surgery.
It's not really recommended for veterinary use now, but in

(15:52):
nineteen eighty it was used a lot in large animals
like horses and cattle to briefly relax them for difficult
stuff like positioning fractured limbs. It has a lot of
legitimate uses in human medicine, but as I'm sure y'all
will remember, it's also been used in some nightmarish murders.
Nightmarish because suconal coline is not an anesthetic. You'll be

(16:15):
completely immobilized, but you'll still be awake and aware of
everything that's happening to you. It's like being buried alive.
Just absolute horror. Detective Brooks's suspicions were essentially confirmed by
Shannon's cousin, Tory, who testified that in the summer of
nineteen eighty she'd been visiting the farm and seen syringes

(16:37):
in the refrigerator and in the freezer several medicine bottles
labeled Anectine, the brand name for suxonal coline. The thing
is one of the reasons why this has been a
popular drug for murder is that it breaks down really
quickly in the body, and at the time was considered
impossible to detect. The Toledo Lab worked with the renowned

(17:00):
Karlinska Institute in Sweden. If you want to know how
renowned this is the place that hands out Nobel Prizes
in medicine. Okay. Together they developed new techniques that allowed
them to determine whether the unidentified substance in Shannon's tissue
was suxonal coline, and it was. Her body was yet

(17:21):
again exhumed and another autopsy performed with a specific purpose
of looking for injection sites, which were found on the
shoulder and wrist, and the pathologists determined that while Shannon
certainly had suffered a head injury, it hadn't damaged her
brain enough to kill her, and probably hadn't even knocked
her out. Detectives now thought they could piece together what

(17:44):
Shannon's murder had probably looked like. She and David had
gone out riding, and once they were in the woods,
they'd tied up their horses and gotten down on the
forest floor for a little you know, afternoon delight. At
least that's what Shannon thought this was about, hence her
unbuton blouse and kicked off shoes. It was a pleasant
experience and she was completely relaxed, and then David stabbed

(18:09):
her in the shoulder with a syringe. They struggled, and
Shannon clawed at David's hands and face, but soon the
drug took hold and she went limp. David went down
to her wrist, found a vein, and injected her again.
Now that Shannon was completely paralyzed but still alive, he
bashed her head against a rock half buried in the

(18:30):
ground so she'd have the bleeding and bruising that you'd
expect from an injury received before death. And then he
stood back and watched as his wife, immobile but still
awake and aware, slowly suffocated as the overdose of suxonal
coaline shut down her respiratory system. It probably took about

(18:51):
ten minutes five or six for her to go completely unconscious.
Just deal with that fact for a second. How long
that would feel like if you were drowning on dry
land and fully feeling every moment of It's just it's
horror movie stuff. In October of nineteen eighty one, an
arrest warrant was issued for David Davis on charges of

(19:12):
first degree murder, but authorities tried to keep this on
the hush hush. They didn't know exactly where David was,
and they thought that if he knew he was wanted
for murder, he'd just rabbit and disappear completely, and they
were very much right about that. David's attorney found out
about the arrest warrant and got in touch with him.
While David was sailing in the Caribbean with yet another girlfriend.

(19:34):
His attorney told David he needed to come back north
and turn himself in. David said, I'll be there in
two weeks. He sailed to Haiti, ditched both his boat
and his girlfriend, and poof vanished. It would be years
before authorities had any clue where he'd gone.

Speaker 1 (20:18):
So other than a murderer and a liar, who exactly
was this guy? While he was missing, investigators were able
to piece together a solid picture of his life, especially
around the time he knew Shannon Moore. David Davis was
born in Flint, Michigan, in nineteen forty four. He was
a smart kid who had, or at least claimed to have,

(20:40):
a photographic memory. He was on the high school debate team,
as well as being a member of the Literary Society
and the French Club. He went on to the University
of Michigan, where he'd get a psychology degree, and in
his junior year he married his high school girlfriend, Phyllis,
the first of their two daughters was born a year later.

Speaker 3 (21:02):
Always interesting to me to see how many people who
end up murdering somebody studied psychology. I think it's because
people with sociopathic tendencies they want to understand themselves, like
they want to understand why they're different. It's really common
for people to like that to study psychology. Also about
the photographic memory. Okay, I used to serve on the

(21:23):
appeals board at the university where I teach, and one
time we had this plagiarism case where the girl claimed
that she had a photographic memory and that's how she
just happened to type, you know, the exact same answers
as the ones that come upon Google for the test questions.
So I was like, all right, show us read this
passage and say it back to me word for word.

(21:45):
I'm a scamp. I'm sure you can imagine how that went.
H girl looked at me like I was Charles Manson.
She was so mad. But what do you expect when
you make a claim like that, Like it's really easy
to prove. So we're gonna ask you to prove it, babe,
don't you on your exams?

Speaker 1 (22:02):
Yeah, that's silly. David did about a semester and a
half of pharmacology graduate school before dropping out to work
at a Chrysler plant. Six years later. David and his
family were living on the farm in Hillsdale County, and
he was the head of security, with his duties including
processing disability claims. This apparently gave him some ideas. On

(22:23):
January first, nineteen seventy four, David was in a mysterious
accident at the Chrysler plant and was found unconscious. This
was a holiday and he wasn't scheduled to work that day,
but he'd shown up anyway. He went to investigate a
supposed burglary that nobody else knew of anything about, and

(22:44):
a security guard found him unconscious on the floor. David
said he woke up with his sphere headaches and was
nearly blind. He couldn't read or tell the time, and
his sense of smell and taste were impaired. Funnily enough,
though doctors could find the faintest trace of an injury
to his head, brain or eyes. Still, he was placed

(23:06):
on medical leave and started collecting disability checks from both
Chrysler and the Social Security Administration in today's money. Over
the next five years, he made over six hundred thousand
dollars from disability.

Speaker 3 (23:19):
Payments, rime and nut like good God.

Speaker 1 (23:22):
Obviously it was a total scam. When his neighbors saw
him tooling around in his car, they joke, well, there
goes the blind man. David never went back to work
at Chrysler, just picked up his checks and made a
half hearted attempt to farm corn and soybeans. He never
made any money at it. Right after he accepted a

(23:43):
lump sum payment from Chrysler, his debilitating conditions seemed to
magically clear up, and he started taking graduate courses in education,
able to see and read.

Speaker 3 (23:54):
Just fine, what a little print, you know, with all
the people who legitimately need disability desperately and can't get it,
it just ough. This makes me sick.

Speaker 1 (24:03):
Yeah, I was thinking about that too. It's honestly so infuriating, disgusting.
In nineteen seventy six, Phyllis divorced him and filed for
a protection order, alleging that David was violent both with
her and their daughters. The order was granted and she
won custody of their kids. David was never the kind

(24:25):
of person to stay single for long, though, and almost
immediately started dating a woman named Kay Kendall.

Speaker 3 (24:31):
We don't know much about their relationship, except that David
once excitedly told Kay he'd read about this drug called
suxonal coline that could, if injected, kill someone by suffocation
and leave no trace.

Speaker 1 (24:43):
It'd be the perfect.

Speaker 3 (24:44):
Crime, he told her, Yeah, it would if you didn't
tell any about it beforehand, you big goob. Shortly after that,
in nineteen seventy eight, David put together a false identity
David Bell, and got a Florida driver's license under that name.
So a year before he'd even met Shannon Moore, David
had already set up the new life he'd run away

(25:06):
to after her death. Think about that for a second.
The premeditation, So I'm like, before he'd even met her,
that is just so creepy to me. Shannon obviously wasn't
his first choice. He kept asking Kay Kendall to marry him,
but she wouldn't. As far as we know, she didn't
have any suspicions along the lines of He's going to

(25:28):
murder me for the insurance money and run off to Florida,
at least that she was aware of. But I wouldn't
be surprised if some part of her had unconsciously put
two and two together and was flashing up those danger signs.
They broke up in April of nineteen seventy nine. Right away,
David had a new girlfriend, Jeanie Hoeman, to whom he
spun a similar yarn to the one he'd used later

(25:50):
on Shannon. He was an orphaned war hero and college
football star, but with Jeanie he added a twist that
we've heard all too many times before. Ready for it.
He also worked for the CIA. Now I know we've
been here before, many many times before, but I'm gonna

(26:10):
just say it one more time, ladies, the guy who
just picked you up and wants to get married after
six weeks does not work for the CIA. Okay, nobody
works for the CIA. Say it with me. I promise
you shut it down. David did try to get Genie
to marry him after just six weeks of intense love bombing.

(26:32):
Wanted to fly her off to Vegas as soon as
he could. Jeanie didn't quite say no, but she wasn't
sure and kept putting off the decision, and that would
not do for mister David. In August, he went to
the wedding of his friend Tom Davis, and although he
was still dating Genie, he made a point to ask
Tom if there'd be any single women at the ceremony.

(26:53):
Then there was, of course, Shannon Moore. She and David
started dating immediately after the wedding. They got married seven
weeks later, and for the first six weeks of that
David was still seeing Genie too. One week before he
and Shannon got married, David told Janie the truth, I mean,

(27:13):
not the truth truth. Of course, that would be ridiculous.
David told her he was about to start a dangerous
super secret CIA mission and wouldn't be able to see
her for about a year. As part of the mission,
he had to pretend to be married, and Genie should
ignore anything she might happen to read or hear about
that marriage. Okay, his wife, wink Wink was the person

(27:37):
the CIA was having him protect. But whatever his intentions
at the time, David discovered that he didn't want to
go a year without Jennie. He started seeing her again
just a few weeks after marrying Shannon. He told her
that once the mission was over, the government would pay
him around a quarter of a million dollars. Right in
the ballpark of the amount he'd insured Shannon's life. In

(28:01):
June of nineteen eighty, three or four weeks before Shannon
was murdered, Genie asked David how much longer his secret
undercover mission was going to last? Three or four weeks
David told her, h bless her heart, But to be fair,
like in nineteen eighty that was probably a lot easier

(28:22):
to believe, you know what I mean, because people just
were not as true crime aware back then, and there
weren't a million stories out there like this. So I
can actually kind of forgive her for falling for it,
you know, I think back then it had probably a
lot easier to believe that kind of stuff. On July
twenty ninth, Jeanie flew down to Florida with David after
his long mission was finally over. She didn't know that

(28:45):
Shannon Moore was dead and it buried just days ago.
David certainly didn't act as if he was mourning anybody. Apparently,
Jeannie and David's relationship really needed one of them to
be mostly unavailable due to secret spycraft. After a year
of passionate clandestine hookups, they broke up after just one

(29:06):
week of actually living together. In Florida. The bloom fell
off of that rose quick, Jeannie flew back to Michigan,
and David got on with his new life as David Bell.
As we saw earlier, David enjoyed the yacht rock lifestyle
for a while, sailing around the Caribbean with a new girlfriend,
until he learned there was a warrant out for his arrest.

(29:28):
Then he disappeared.

Speaker 1 (29:31):
The search for David Davis was intense at first, with
him making an appearance on the FBI's most Wanted list,
but the authorities couldn't find him, and other crimes happened
other things needed investigator's time and attention. The hunt for
David Davis went cold and stayed that way for years.

(29:53):
In nineteen eighty seven, Unsolved Mysteries ran a segment on
Shannon Moore's death and the vanished David Davis. That show
helped investigators catch a lot of assholes, but not this time.
Two years later, though a rerun of the episode aired,
a Beverly Hills dentist thought David Davis looked a lot

(30:14):
like a guy she dated a few years ago. The
show included pictures of David's hammer thumb, which is the
kind of thing you notice on someone you know well.
And her boyfriend had a thumb just like that, And
there was this when they were getting to know each other,
the dentist X had told her his wife, Shannon, had
recently drowned shit. A stuntman in Hollywood thought the guy

(30:38):
on Unsolved Mysteries looked like a buddy of his, Rip Bell,
who'd given him a few free flying lessons. But it
was an anonymous caller, a woman in Hawaii who called
the show's toll free number to say she thought she
knew the man they were after. Unsolved Mysteries put her
in touch with Michigan.

Speaker 3 (30:58):
State Police Robert Stack. The legend a legend.

Speaker 1 (31:05):
David Davis had kind of a distinctive face, and although
half of it was now covered by a big, bushy beard,
he didn't look all that different. The man this woman
knew was called David Bell, although he preferred the nickname rip.
The state's police file on Davis include the fact that
when he was young, his nickname was Ripper. That's a

(31:26):
pretty ominous name to true crime people, but given how
high school nicknames work, it probably just meant he farted
really loud one time and was never allowed to forget it.

Speaker 2 (31:36):
Oh yeah, David Bell had apparently lived in Alaska and
Hawaii and was now a pilot in American Samoa, which
I think might literally be as far as you can.

Speaker 1 (31:48):
Get from Michigan and still be in US territory. Probably
just minutes after this call, Detective Brooks had the Alaska
Department of Motor Vehicles facts over a copy of David
Bell's driver's license. Big bushy beard or not, there was
no question about it. That was David Davis. Three days

(32:10):
after that rerun of Unsolved Mysteries, FBI agents and SOMEOE
and police waited for David to show up at Pongo
Pongo Airport just before seven am. They saw him walking
towards the terminal. An agent called out David Davis, and
he turned around dufus, but when they got closer, he

(32:33):
claimed not to know anybody by that name. When they
asked if he was David Bell, he said yes, and
they arrested him. The bushy beard had been trimmed and
was now half gray, and he was about forty pounds heavier,
but there was no doubt that this was David Davis,
and he finally admitted as much on the long flight
back to Michigan. Back in nineteen eighty one, after ditching

(32:57):
his girlfriend in Haiti, he'd grown a beer and moved
to Santa Monica, where he'd had flying lessons and got
a pilot's license. He spent time in Alaska, then Hawaii,
pretending to be a doctor, a nurse, and even a
professional harpsichord player.

Speaker 3 (33:13):
I mean, who hasn't pretended to be a professional harpsichord player? Right? Then,
in nineteen eighty five, he got a job he was
actually qualified for flying, for the small airline Samoa Air,
and moved down there. A year later, David, now forty one,
married a twenty year old Samoan girl called Maria. I

(33:35):
take his word for it, Maria said after David's arrest.
Which is not exactly a ringing declaration of eternal faith,
is it. We don't know quite how their marriage dissolved,
but as far as we know, Maria never went to
Michigan and just pretty much picked up her life in
Samoa under lock and key. In Michigan, David, of course,

(33:55):
protested his innocence and seemed to be astonished that anyone
could think he'd murdered Chance. David the former pharmacology grad student,
seemed baffled by the idea that he'd used suxonal coaling
on Shannon, claimed to have never even heard of the drug,
could barely pronounce it. He said his exes Kay Kendall
and Genie Holman just had it in for him because

(34:15):
he dumped them. Both. Those bitches. You couldn't trust anything,
they said. He apparently thought he could just schmooth his
way out of all this. He told Detective Don Brooks
that after he'd gotten everything straightened out, they should go
get a beer together. The nerve of this prick lord
of mercy. In November nineteen eighty nine, David Davis's trial

(34:37):
for first degree murders started in the Hillsdale County Courthouse.
This was a tough road to hoe for his defense team.
The prosecution had testimony from David's exes and Shannon's family
that firmly established David both knew about how sexual coaling
could be used to kill somebody, and that he kept
some in the freezer at his farm. The jury learned

(34:58):
that David established a false id day nity in Florida
the year before Shannon's death, and then in quick succession
over the course of just a few months, tried to
pressure three different women into quick Vegas weddings. He'd taken
out heavy double indemnity life insurance policies on Shannon, then
lied about them after her death to try and avoid suspicion,

(35:18):
and of course, when the heat was on, he'd run,
living as a fugitive for years. He looked guilty as hell.
And that was before the physical evidence that showed the
presence of suctional coline in Shannon's body and the last
most thorough autopsy that revealed needle marks on her body
and a brain injury that was insufficient to kill her.

(35:39):
This was a strong case even without the detection of
suctional coaline, but that was the part the defense decided
to attack the hardest. It's not an uncommon tactic when
you're faced with highly specialized and complicated scientific evidence that
you know the jury isn't going to be able to
fully grasp, just call it junk science and hope your
own expert is more convincing at the very least little

(36:00):
kind of can't. They'll cancel each other out, you know,
the defense expert and the prosecution expert, and just kind
of nullifies it. The defense tried to make a big
deal out of the fact that investigators had never been
able to show where David might have gotten hold of
suxonal colin. But that's the reason why the trial standard
is beyond a reasonable doubt, not beyond any doubt. What

(36:20):
does it matter where he got it when you've got
a witness saying she saw it in his fridge.

Speaker 1 (36:26):
The defense focused on the complicated science because they knew
they were getting killed. In the rest of the trial,
prosecutor Mark Bloomer described the scientific evidence as just frosting
on the otherwise well baked cake. The circumstances surrounding the
whole courtship, marriage, and death of Shannon Moore overwhelmingly suggested

(36:50):
premeditated murder, even if we never figured out what drug
he used.

Speaker 3 (36:54):
Well said. Two hours after jury deliberation started, it turned
out that they liked the cake. David Davis was found
guilty of murder in the first degree That came with
a mandatory sentence of life in prison without the possibility
of parole. Because he'd successfully avoided capture for so long,
he was considered an escape risk and held in the

(37:16):
maximum security section in the Marquette Prison surrounded by eight
gun towers. He appealed, of course, with more hope than most.
The techniques used to detect sexonal coaling were controversial in
the scientific community, but the appeals court decided David's defense
had adequately questioned the findings with expert testimony during the

(37:36):
first trial, and that the new doubts about the techniques
used wouldn't have changed the outcome. David Davis spent twenty
five years behind bars before he died in twenty fourteen
at the age of seventy. Now, why do we keep
coming across these people, y'all? These narcissus clowns who were
so far up their own asses that they assume everybody's

(37:58):
going to believe every ridiculus us lie they tell, and
who think so little of the other people in their
orbit that they're perfectly willing to sacrifice any one of
them to make their own life a little easier. Even
though we see them all the time, cover their cases
all the time, I still don't understand them. I think
that's why we keep coming back to these stories to

(38:19):
try our hardest to understand. But like the deadly poison
David used to murder his wife, the real answer to
that question may stay undetected. So that was a wild one, right, 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

(38:40):
Crime Campfire. If you haven't booked your spot yet on
the Crime Wave True Crime Cruise from November three through
November seventh, get on it, y'all. Join Katie and Me
plus last podcast on the Left, Scared to Death and
Sinisterhood for a rock and good time at sea. You
can pay all at once or set up a payment plan,
but you got to have a fan code to book
a ticket. So to Crimewave at c dot com, slash

(39:01):
Campfire and take it from there. And as always, we
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(39:23):
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