The Bad Nurse

 

 

 

 

Dead of Night
(with Gary C. King)

Sheila Johnson

Kensington Publishing Corp.
http://www.kensingtonbooks.com

All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

Table of Contents

For Buddy

CHAPTER 1

I
n the little town of Ider, in DeKalb County, Alabama, the residents usually know all there is to know about their friends and neighbors. There aren't that many secrets that remain a secret for long in most rural small towns in the South, and gossip isn't considered an invasion of privacy or even bad manners. It is simply thought of as passing along interesting information.

Billy Junior Shaw, the owner of Shaw Saddlery, was an expert saddle maker and prominent businessman. He was a valued member of the community, known and liked very much throughout the area. When Karri Willoughby, one of his stepdaughters and a nurse, found him dead in his home on April 22, 2008, people were saddened but not completely surprised to hear of his passing. His wife, Lila “Susie” Shaw, had died only twenty-two days earlier, on April 1, and many of those who knew the couple assumed that his death might have been linked to his grief over her passing.

Karri Willoughby told the emergency personnel who responded to her distraught 911 call that she had stopped by to check on her stepfather on the way home from her job at the Chattanooga Surgery Center in Tennessee. She had found him inside his home, unresponsive.

During the customary investigation that followed Shaw's passing, the coroner ruled that his unattended death had been caused by a heart attack. Family and friends believed that depression due to the loss of his wife had most likely been a contributing factor in Shaw's sudden collapse. They took comfort in their faith that the two had been reunited again and were now resting beside one another in the Fuller Cemetery.

As was standard procedure in almost all unattended deaths, samples of Shaw's blood and urine had been taken by the coroner and sent to the state forensic laboratory in Huntsville, Alabama, for testing. Results of the tests were not expected for quite some time, due to a huge backlog of cases at the laboratory. The test results would likely be routine, law enforcement assumed, confirming the coroner's preliminary finding of a heart attack being the probable cause of Shaw's death.

Over six months later, DeKalb County sheriff Jimmy Harris was shocked when he opened his mail one morning to find a most unexpected toxicology report from the Huntsville laboratory. An investigation into Shaw's death was immediately started. Despite the death having initially been ruled a heart attack, Sheriff Harris and his investigators had just received confirmation from the forensic lab that Billy Junior Shaw had been murdered.

CHAPTER 2

I
nitially no one outside law enforcement and the district attorney's office knew about the receipt of the unexpected results of the toxicology report, or why there was a sudden renewal of interest in the cause of Billy Shaw's death. But as the authorities launched the investigation, information gradually leaked about the case. Whispered rumors about the circumstances of the death soon began to circulate in the community.

As those rumors gradually increased, they provided the sheriff with some surprising new information. It seemed that there were several stories making the rounds about one of Shaw's two stepdaughters who had filed for bankruptcy more than once, and who had ongoing serious financial problems.

The authorities learned that prior to Shaw's death, the woman had been caught on multiple occasions withdrawing funds from the bank account of her stepfather's saddlery business. She also had been stealing the identity of her mother, applying for credit cards in her mother's name, and taking money from her mother's bank account by forging Mrs. Shaw's name on several large checks.

This stepdaughter, Karri Willoughby, was, coincidentally, the same person who had reported that she had arrived at Billy Shaw's home, found him unresponsive, and had placed the call to 911 for help. When making a statement during the initial investigation, the 911 operator had recalled advising Karri to begin CPR, continuing until the paramedics reached Shaw's home.

But when questioned later, after the toxicology results were received, the paramedics who responded to Shaw's residence on the day of his death remembered that they had thought it strange at the time that there was no indication that CPR had been performed on Shaw. They had assumed that since she was a nurse, CPR should have been the first thing that Karri would have done, but that was not the case.

The whispers about Billy Junior Shaw's death were beginning to build in volume. When it became public knowledge that Sheriff Harris had obtained an exhumation order to remove Shaw's body from his grave in the Fuller Cemetery, the rumors began to fly in earnest. Harris and his officers had been attempting to keep a tight lid on their reasons for the exhumation and the renewed homicide investigation, but speculation in the community ran wild. It was, after all, the first exhumation in DeKalb County for over thirty years.

CHAPTER 3

O
n May 13, 2009, more than a year after his burial, the remains of Billy Junior Shaw were removed from the Fuller Cemetery in Ider and taken to the forensic lab in Huntsville for a full autopsy. Harris remained very tight-lipped about the homicide investigation, telling the press that he did not know when to expect results from the autopsy. Additionally, he explained, at the time of Shaw's death, his department had not been aware of the possibility of any foul play being involved. There had been no indication at the scene that caused any suspicion. Harris did say, however, that the sheriff's department and the district attorney's office had been working in cooperation on the case and hoped to make an arrest soon.

Only five days later, on Monday, May 18, Harris issued another statement, which indicated that his department's activity on the case had been progressing faster than he had initially led the media to believe. An arrest could possibly be made that week, he said. Harris revealed that both a man and a woman had been interviewed at length by his department in connection with Shaw's murder. They were both considered to be persons of interest in the case, he said, and his investigators were set to meet on Wednesday with District Attorney Mike O'Dell to plan further action toward the identification and subsequent prosecution of Shaw's killer.

Matters, however, did not proceed as quickly as the authorities had hoped. Plans for an arrest in the case were put on hold for almost exactly another year, while information and evidence continued to pile up against the person whom law enforcement had focused in on and whom they now believed to be solely responsible for Shaw's murder. Instead of an immediate arrest, the case was carefully solidified and then turned over to a grand jury.

When an indictment for capital murder was issued by the grand jury in May 2010, two years after Shaw's death, Sheriff Harris issued a statement saying that it was an unfortunate, tragic situation, but he and his investigators and the district attorney (DA) would not have presented the case to the grand jury if they had not had conclusive evidence. They had, they believed, pinpointed the identity of the killer and had established both means and motive for Shaw's death.

In the indictment that the grand jury handed down, they stated that the person they believed to be responsible for murder had “caused the death” of Billy Junior Shaw “by lethal injection and did so for pecuniary or other valuable consideration.”

When Shaw's stepdaughter Karri Denise Willoughby turned herself in at the DeKalb County Detention Center on Friday, May 14, following her indictment for the capital murder of her stepfather, she was placed under arrest and held without bail in the DeKalb County Jail. News of her arrest sent the Ider community into immediate turmoil, and it only increased as Sheriff Harris provided further details of her indictment, surrender, and arrest to the media.

The motive for the murder was financial, Harris said in his statement to the press. Karri was set to profit from Shaw's death, he said, inheriting a large share of his estate. Harris said that Karri had been the person who initially reported Shaw's death, claiming that she had found him unconscious in his home in the Cartersville community, north of Ider.

Emergency personnel from both the Ider Rescue Squad and the DeKalb Ambulance Service had responded to the scene, and Shaw had been pronounced dead by the DeKalb County coroner, Tom Wilson. Wilson's initial findings were that Shaw had died of an apparent heart attack. However, Harris said, after discussions with District Attorney Mike O'Dell, Wilson “took measures at the scene, which later provided clues as to the cause of Mr. Shaw's death,” referring to the blood and urine samples that were collected and sent to the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences (ADFS) Laboratory at Huntsville.

Harris finally revealed to the media why the results of that initial analysis had resulted in the exhumation and autopsy. Those first results, he said, had shown that instead of a heart attack, Billy Junior Shaw had died of a lethal injection of propofol, the drug that caused the death of Michael Jackson, the “King of Pop,” at his California estate.