In this episode, Payton and Garrett explore the mysterious disappearance of Michael Shaver, a man who vanished without a trace. For years, no one filed a missing person report, but eventually, the police began to investigate what really happened to Michael Shaver.
WFTV 9 - https://www.wftv.com/news/local/murder-or-innocent-jury-deliberate-case-husband-buried-backyard/U6E2QET3SJA7JMS6QX772D4NIQ/
Inside Edition - https://www.insideedition.com/laurie-shaver-murder-trial-daughter-shot-father
Spectrum News 13 - https://mynews13.com/fl/orlando/news/2024/09/13/laurie-shaver-murder-trial-nears-end--accused-of-killing-her-husband
https://mynews13.com/fl/orlando/news/2020/09/18/florida-woman-accused-of-killing-husband--covering-remains-under-concrete-slab
Law & Crime Trials - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jtfa_VSDz9Q&list=PLT2snNGWwa65TSL1ZY2yzVBqvATLaQISM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sE43ErZNZyE&list=PLT2snNGWwa65TSL1ZY2yzVBqvATLaQISM&index=2
The Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/07/amie-harwick-murder-convicted
ABC 7 - https://abc7.com/amie-harwick-gareth-pursehouse-murder-case-sentenced/14148385/
Law & Crime Network - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bg0Huiwv_WE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiPDU14FgJk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmU0kIkMtcY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70QXkVUnGDY&list=PLT2snNGWwa65TSL1ZY2yzVBqvATLaQISM&index=3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HC4LoLEEb9A&list=PLT2snNGWwa65TSL1ZY2yzVBqvATLaQISM&index=4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8EyroDE-Cs&list=PLT2snNGWwa65TSL1ZY2yzVBqvATLaQISM&index=5
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7xn-oOaUH8&list=PLT2snNGWwa65TSL1ZY2yzVBqvATLaQISM&index=6
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ov8mbYtlFN8&list=PLT2snNGWwa65TSL1ZY2yzVBqvATLaQISM&index=7
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdcnxDShO1I&list=PLT2snNGWwa65TSL1ZY2yzVBqvATLaQISM&index=8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmuPsAZY2Bg&list=PLT2snNGWwa65TSL1ZY2yzVBqvATLaQISM&index=9
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnGY7KF0CEw&list=PLT2snNGWwa65TSL1ZY2yzVBqvATLaQISM&index=10
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eg3HV05KJLE&list=PLT2snNGWwa65TSL1ZY2yzVBqvATLaQISM&index=11
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrwM05r6-tQ&list=PLT2snNGWwa65TSL1ZY2yzVBqvATLaQISM&index=12
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zm6v4kSkxtA&list=PLT2snNGWwa65TSL1ZY2yzVBqvATLaQISM&index=14
You're listening to an Oh No Media podcast.
Hey, everybody! Welcome back to the podcast. This is Murder with My Husband. I'm Payton Moreland.
And I'm Garrett Moreland. He's the husband.
I'm the husband. Now, if no one's told you today, you rock!
Hope everyone's having a great week and a great weekend. This comes out on Monday, I always forget, so I hope everyone’s weekend has been amazing. I'm still a little bit sick, so excuse my voice. Good thing Payton is the one who's going to be talking most of the time. We can listen to her pretty voice, and it won’t matter.
A reminder: we have bonus content, ad-free content, and early release content over on Patreon, Apple subscription, and Spotify. So, yeah, you should check it out. I feel weird plugging it, but I will just plug and chug! I need to calm down; I’m being weird.
Garrett, why don’t you take it over and give us your amazing, brilliant 10 seconds?
So, honestly, I’ve been sick, and the only thing that makes me not congested is taking Sudafed. Not the wimpy, crappy, sugar-pill placebo stuff you get in the aisle—the same ingredients as nothing. I mean the good stuff behind the counter that the pharmacist has, right? You go up, tell them you want Sudafed, they log your license because you can make meth from it, yada yada yada.
I started taking it, and when I take that stuff, not only am I not congested anymore, but I’m like a superhuman. I am hyper-aware, just super attentive. Then, I was looking it up on Reddit—okay, not just Reddit, but other sources were saying it too. Anyways, I was looking it up, and they were saying that people who take stimulants like Sudafed and so forth, when they become hyper-aware or super focused, most likely have ADHD. I might have ADHD. I don’t know.
Anyway, just letting everyone know Sudafed works. I’m not promoting it. I’m not a doctor; I’m just explaining my experience. This is not an ad, I swear.
You are wandering into dangerous territory.
You think I’m a druggie? No, but just telling people that Sudafed gives them the same effects as Adderall—oh no. I was just saying what I saw online. People were saying that a lot of people who take stimulants, like Sudafed, become super focused.
Anyway, it kind of scared me a little bit because I was like, “Why am I so focused on this stuff?” Garrett came home from pickleball and said, "That Sudafed made it so I could see where the ball was at all times. Everything was like in slow motion. It was crystal clear. I felt like I had a new life.” It kind of scared me. I'm not going to take Sudafed anymore unless I’m congested. Maybe I'll take some tonight before I go to bed.
Anyways, that's my 10 seconds; that's my experience. Any doctors, nurses, medical students, or pharmacists want to comment, go ahead. Know-it-alls, no. I mean, I’ve done the research. I know my stuff.
Yeah, that’s what I got going on. I start medical school next week, so I’m pretty excited about that.
And on that note, let’s hop into today's case.
Our sources for this episode are WFTV 9, Spectrum News 13, Inside Edition, Law & Crime Trials, The Guardian, ABC 7, Law & Crime Network, and WESH 2.
Over the years, we have covered a lot of murders on this show, and we've also talked about many of the reasons that people commit violent crimes. People kill out of greed, the desire to control, or even to punish a victim. Some people are simply cruel and enjoy making others suffer. But every now and then, you come across a story that's a bit trickier to understand—one where the killer's motives are more in a gray area.
And that's what we'll be covering today.
To explain why that is, I actually have to go all the way back to the beginning. So here we are, meeting Lori and Michael Shaver. They were high school sweethearts. They grew up in a small rural town in New York State and went to a school with just 500 students. The two of them met for the first time in the mid-90s when they had a class together in seventh grade. They began dating in their sophomore year of high school, but Michael dropped out before his graduation.
After Lori earned her diploma, her parents actually confronted Michael, her high school sweetheart, and warned him that he'd have a hard time supporting a family with their daughter without a degree. With their encouragement, he got his GED. Lori stood by Michael through all of this, and the two of them were married five years later, in 2006. Eventually, they had a daughter together, whom they named Isabelle.
Once they were married, Michael got to pursue a lifelong dream—he had always wanted to fly planes, and he was actually able to get his license and become a pilot. From there, the marriage had a lot of ups and downs. Michael, Lori, and their daughter Isabelle ended up moving to Florida, but then decided they didn’t like it, so they moved back to New York. Then they changed their minds again and went back to Florida. I can’t judge, because Garrett and I have done this every year of our marriage!
Michael also ended up changing his mind at one point about his professional aspirations. He decided he didn’t want to fly planes anymore, so he went into a special engineering training program. He then got a job working at Disney World and later at Epcot. So, there was a lot of shuffling around for this family—they were moving states, changing careers, and making huge life changes.
What’s Epcot again?
It’s a theme park that’s part of Disney World.
I've never been to Disney World, so for those freaking out, Garrett doesn’t know what it is! I've never been to Florida, and I’ve never been to Disney World. If I’m remembering right, Epcot is the one with the big golf ball. It might not be a golf ball—I was really young when I went. It has this really big giant ball.
So, eventually, they did settle down in a small town on the outskirts of Orlando, Florida.
At this point, even though they weren’t moving so much, Lori and Michael's relationship was complicated in other ways. Reportedly, by this point in their marriage, Michael had become physically abusive.
According to Lori, one night she got home from a workout at the gym, took a shower, and as soon as she stepped out of the bathroom, Michael attacked her completely unprovoked. Lori hadn’t said a word to him, but still, he reportedly came up to her and punched her in the face.
Wait, that's insane.
She claimed that another time, Michael physically knocked her down onto a couch just because she wanted an Oreo. It was bad enough that at one point, Lori actually took out a restraining order against him. However, pretty soon after she filed for the protective order, she asked for it to be canceled. We can never say for sure what goes on in other people’s lives—it’s hard to know what led her to file for the restraining order and then cancel it right away. I don't want to speculate on it.
They’re still married?
I think it is safe to say, though, that their marriage—their relationship—is on the rocks. I am going to focus on what we do know, which is that by mid-November of 2015, Michael was out of the picture. According to Lori, around that time he told her that he was done with the marriage, he was done with their daughter, and he was leaving her. He walked out the door without taking any of his possessions with him. Once it was clear that he wasn’t coming back, Lori decided to take all of his stuff and sell it for cash.
Then, on November 18th, he emailed his boss to say, "Hey, I’m quitting my job." This was a job that he had worked very hard to get, by the way, and interestingly, this resignation came after a full week of missed shifts. So, he leaves his wife, she sells his stuff, he misses work for a week, and then he emails his boss and says, "Yeah, I'm not coming back."
Now, before all of this, Michael had always been a very reliable employee. In his entire career, he had actually never missed a shift without at least calling his manager to say he was sick or that there was a family emergency. But beginning on November 10th, he began skipping work again and again, and it was completely out of character. And then, that email he sent when he left his job didn’t exactly sound like him either.
Either way, Lori was now a single mother raising a 7-year-old alone. She didn’t file for child support, in part because Lori had always made more money than Michael, and she knew he was out of work now. Even if he could afford to pay child support at all, the money would be small enough that she decided it wasn't worth her time to go through the court process.
Interestingly, she actually never officially files for divorce either. Apparently, she says the two of them had a verbal agreement about the terms of the split—who’d send who money, who had parental rights over Isabelle, and other details. Lori and Michael, she says, worked it out between themselves without getting lawyers involved, which, I do feel like, happens quite a bit, so not a big, I know, raise of awareness to me, I guess.
So technically, on paper, Michael and Lori are married for years after he leaves.
Yeah.
Now, this was a little weird because Michael had never given any indication that he planned to abandon his family and his career, and he didn’t tell anyone what he was going to do next.
And besides that, Michael apparently became a bit of a recluse after he walked out on Lori and Isabelle. He hadn’t met up with any of his old friends in person, he didn’t find a new job, nobody ever spotted him at the grocery store around town. When Michael’s mother got sick enough that she had to be hospitalized, his brother desperately tried to reach Michael to share the news, but he was impossible to get on the phone or to find in person.
Then Michael stopped making car payments, and his vehicle got repossessed in 2016. His credit card company also tried to sue him for not paying his balance, but the lawsuit couldn’t go forward because no one could find Michael to serve him with papers. His driver’s license, pilot license, and passport all expired, and Michael never showed up to file the paperwork to renew any of them.
Wait, that's insane actually.
So it’s definitely strange, but nobody raised the alarm until early February of 2018. Remember, he leaves his family in 2015. That was in part because Michael was posting on Facebook this entire time. He had been, you know, emailing people, so even though nobody had actually seen him or talked to him on the phone, he was still “living his life”—he was sharing updates about it on social media. It actually took until that February, years later, for a friend to sit down, think about all of this, and realize, “I think something’s going on.”
So that friend decides to investigate. They call other people, like, “Hey, I know that, like, you’ve corresponded with Michael and we’ve seen that he’s been posting, but have you actually laid eyes on him?” No one has. No one that this friend can talk to has actually seen Michael since November 15, 2015—the week he goes missing and misses work.
So three years, basically.
Wait, even the ex-wife hasn’t seen him?
Well, it had been a little over two full years of him being completely out of sight and impossible to reach on the phone.
Got it.
So it was concerning, and it was actually enough at this point that the friend called the police and said, “Hey, here’s what’s going on. He’s posting, but no one’s actually spoken to him or seen him in person since 2015.” So they report Michael missing and ask the police to do a wellness check on him.
Interestingly, when the police start looking into it, there was no record of Michael renting any apartment or buying another house. To all appearances, it seemed like he still lived in the same home that he had once shared with his wife, Lori. Obviously, this is the house that Lori and their daughter Isabelle are still living in. So, the police go to Lori’s house and say, “Hey, we’ve been asked to do a wellness check on Michael. This is the address we found. Can we search your house?”
Inside, they don’t find anything unusual, and Lori tells them, “Hey, Michael left a long time ago. I haven’t seen him since 2015. We decided to split, and that was that.” There was no sign that he’d been in the home or that anything alarming had happened.
For sure.
They look at her and go, “Is it weird that he hasn’t asked about your child?”
Yeah, this is where the red flags start coming in.
So they go into the backyard and see a fire pit that had been installed in May of 2016. This was about six months after Michael left his wife and daughter and essentially went missing. The fire pit had a concrete base, and Lori had actually written her name in it before the concrete set—like a little fun thing to do at the house. Clearly, this was something Lori had helped install herself because she was there when the concrete was wet. She hadn’t called in professionals; she had done it herself.
Given the timing, the police thought, “Okay, it’s a little weird. Let’s take a closer look.” But when they approached Lori and said, “We’re going to come back another time with cadaver dogs to go around the backyard,” she refused. Not only that, but she told them, “You need to leave now. I’m canceling the current search, and you need to get off my property.” She insisted they leave immediately.
Of course, the police didn’t need her permission to continue their investigation; they just needed to wait for a warrant. Technically, they were going to a judge to say, “Hey, this guy supposedly still lives here on paper, but no one’s seen him for three years. We need to search the house.” Any judge would consider that probable cause and say, “Go ahead.”
They got the warrant on March 9th. Remember, this was all happening back in February; it’s now March. They were so suspicious after Lori immediately kicked them out and refused a search that they decided to excavate the fire pit. They were going to dig it up.
Holy crap.
It’s interesting because if they don’t find anything, it could look really bad for them. But they feel like they’re going to find something. I mean, it’s going to look bad for Lori, but everyone else is thinking, “Well, they needed to search.” Imagine: we just dug up your whole fire pit, your yard, basically, because we thought there was a body in there. This does happen quite a bit when searching for missing people, like digging up someone’s yard. And if you’re thinking of Chad and Lori Daybell—well, they buried bodies there, too.
So, they excavate this fire pit, and about three feet down, under the concrete, they find a skeleton.
Michael’s body.
No freaking way. Insane. He was buried underneath the fire pit.
No way. Did she kill him? I did not see this coming. I didn’t see that she was going to kill him and bury him there. I think everyone was stunned. This is not how these things typically go, especially with the body just being in the backyard. This is nuts. Even though it was under concrete, she technically had a month to move the body. She probably knew she was screwed. But, I mean, how do you get under the concrete without people noticing?
So, the body was under a blue tarp and had been tied up with a green strap. Here’s where things get interesting: Michael had been reported missing in early February of 2018. This was about a month before this search.
Sorry to interrupt, but do you really think the dogs would have been able to smell it underneath the concrete?
Uh-huh. Yeah. Decomposition, yeah.
Even if a body was there at one point and has been moved, the dogs can still smell it.
Oh yeah, I guess they’d still get a hit.
Yeah, yeah. So, police are like, “Okay, he’s been reported missing for a month.” Technically, no one had seen him for over two years, but he was only reported missing a month ago. Given the rate of decomposition when they found the body, they realized he had been dead a lot longer than that. It was impossible for investigators to pinpoint an exact date, but they could tell Michael had been dead for about two years, give or take. It had been so long that his body had almost completely decomposed, so, like Garrett said, it was mostly a skeleton. The police even had to check his DNA against his father’s to confirm his identity.
They weren’t 100% sure it was Michael, but it was clear why he hadn’t gotten a new job, found a new place to live, or updated his address. This also meant that all those Facebook posts—fake, fake, fake—that had been appearing on his timeline for years obviously weren’t from Michael himself. His killer must have been posting them to hide the fact that he was dead and keep up appearances.
And the police didn’t have to wonder long about who the killer was. By this point, most people thought it had to be the person who poured the concrete over the body. Obviously, it had to be the person who reacted so strongly and negatively when police wanted to search the area around the fire pit—the woman who lied and said Michael had left her, when he was actually dead and buried in her own backyard. That was his wife, Lori Shaver.
Lori looked even more suspicious when Michael's autopsy results came back. They showed he had died from a gunshot to the back of the head—holy crap—specifically from a .38 caliber gun. And as it turned out, Lori owned quite the collection of firearms in Florida, including a .38 caliber handgun. Next, the police pulled her digital records, which only implicated her further.
First, they saw that Lori hadn’t sent a single text message or even tried to call Michael once since November 15, 2015. Wow. Your husband, the father of your child, leaves, and you never once try to get in contact with him? You never even send a text message or make a phone call to this person you supposedly agreed to co-parent with? This was definitely shaping up to be a pretty open-and-shut case.
Now, I assume the defense is going to argue domestic violence, fear for her life, and so on. But even if Michael had left her and even if she was okay with letting the marriage end, she probably would have tried to contact him at some point. Most likely, they would’ve wanted to file for divorce.
This was also why she hadn’t formally filed for divorce; she claimed they’d worked out all the details between themselves. Except, apparently, none of those conversations ever involved a phone call or even a quick text about when to meet up—they were supposedly meeting up in person and having all these conversations randomly.
The investigators were confident that Lori had been posting as Michael on his Facebook account because they traced the IP address for the device making those posts. It was all from Lori's computer. When confronted with this mounting evidence, Lori told police, “Well, I’m not the only person who has access to that computer.” She also claimed she wasn’t the only person who made decisions about projects around the house, like installing the fire pit in the backyard.
After Michael’s death, Lori had dated other men and even remarried fairly quickly, despite her and Michael not being technically divorced. She also had other boyfriends while Michael was still alive. According to her, they had gone through a trial separation. One day, while Lori was at her daughter’s school, she bumped into a man named Jeremy Townson. As soon as he laid eyes on her, Lori noticed he was looking at something specific: her bruises. These bruises, according to Lori, were from Michael.
She said that after meeting Jeremy at her daughter’s school, he slipped her a note with his phone number, saying, “I know what you’re going through. I can help you. Call me.” Lori did call him, and they started dating. She thought Jeremy was someone safe, someone who could help her escape her violent husband and build a new life. But, to hear Lori tell it, Jeremy wasn’t who he seemed. According to Lori, Jeremy was a liar. He told her he was married but separated, yet sometime after they started dating, he got back together with his wife without telling Lori. She claimed she didn’t realize this at first.
On the positive side, Lori said she was gaining confidence and realizing she didn’t need Michael in her life. According to her, around November 10, 2015—about five days before anyone last heard from Michael—she’d kicked him out of the house for good. So, when she told her friends he had left her, she meant it. Lori also claimed she didn’t know what happened to Michael after that, where he was living, or why he quit his job. She only had a vague sense that he’d moved somewhere in Georgia.
But it’s just so hard to get around the fact that Michael’s body was buried in her backyard. How do you explain that?
I feel like she’d have to admit it and then claim self-defense.
Well, she’s about to tell you, because there’s no other way around it. Lori claims Michael didn’t die; he actually left, went to Georgia, and just didn’t talk to anyone. Then, in May of 2016, while she was at home, Michael suddenly appeared out of nowhere. He showed up at the house, after having been out of touch, and began attacking her once again.
This incident was worse than anything she had ever gone through before with him. He threatened to kill her. He pushed her to the ground, kicked her, and then stomped on her head with his foot. Given their past, this could very well have happened—unless, of course, her past was a lie too.
Yes, if you're trusting, you have to trust everything she says. But has she ever told any friends about this?
We'll get there, we'll get there.
This is what Lori is telling the police when they confront her with the evidence. She says he’s kicking me, and my life was in danger, so I fought back. She explains that the quarrel got out of hand, one thing led to another, and suddenly Jeremy—her boyfriend, who was married—was in her house. He grabbed her gun and fatally shot Michael in the back of the head. Lori insists it wasn’t me. Jeremy was the one who killed him. But then she adds it also wasn’t a cut-and-dry murder; there’s a gray area here.
According to Lori, while this was happening, her 7-year-old daughter, Isabelle, was in the house. She says she didn’t want Isabelle to see her father's corpse, knowing her daughter was too young and innocent to deal with the fallout of such a brutal act of violence. She claims she panicked, put Isabelle in the car, and left. Jeremy stayed at the house with Michael's body to clean up the scene.
So she's just blaming everything on Jeremy? I wonder what Jeremy thinks about this.
After she dropped Isabelle off at school, Lori says she came home. By then, Michael’s body was gone, and Jeremy had gotten rid of it. Lori claims she had no way of knowing where the body was, but once it was discovered years later, she pieced everything together. She’s saying I had no idea that was under my fire pit.
Then why did you say no to searching the house?
Shortly before Michael allegedly left her in November 2015, he and Lori had been digging a pit in the backyard to turn it into a duck pond. Obviously, that project never happened. Between Michael's leaving and his disappearance, the duck pond simply wasn’t a priority anymore.
At some point after Michael disappeared, Lori began dating someone else—not Jeremy, but a different man named Travis Filmer. By May 2016, very soon after the supposed shooting, they planned to have a commitment ceremony. Now, Lori is with Jeremy, but she also marries Jeremy—except now, she’s with Travis.
They couldn’t have a wedding because Lori was still technically married to Michael, who hadn’t even been declared dead yet. The ceremony was going to be informal, in Lori's backyard. She and Travis decided they needed to fill the pit with something before the guests came, so they rented a cement mixer and filled the hole with freshly poured concrete, turning it into a fire pit.
According to Lori, neither she nor Travis had any idea that Jeremy had buried Michael’s body in that pit. Then, by complete coincidence, she and Travis filled it just days later—mere days after the shooting.
Even if Lori didn’t know exactly where Michael was buried, she did know he’d been shot to death. And everything she did after this was an attempt to cover up what happened. I mean, Jeremy wasn't the one posting the Facebook posts, and he wasn’t the one lying to her friends. She even told her family that Michael had been arrested and sent to jail. When her family asked, "Hey, where's Michael?" she would say, "Oh, he's in jail." She was just changing her story depending on who she was talking to.
I want to know—where’s Jeremy in all of this? What does he think?
Lori told the police why she kept up the lie for so long. She said it wasn't necessarily because she was worried about being charged with murder. She was like, "I didn’t murder him; it wasn’t my fault." Instead, she said she was more scared of losing custody of her daughter, Isabelle. Lori explained that if anyone found out about the violence and abuse in the household, and that this death had happened while Isabelle was home, she feared that child services might take Isabelle away.
I don’t know who’s right here. I’m not picking anyone’s side.
The police didn’t fully believe Lori’s story. They thought there were lies mixed in, especially because her story didn’t quite fit the facts. There were issues with the timeline. Lori said Michael left her in November, but he obviously didn’t die until May. She said he left and then randomly showed back up. She couldn't explain where he had been for those six months. During that time, he had stopped paying off his car and credit card, quit his job, and was impossible for friends and family to reach. Lori also couldn't explain why he would leave all of his possessions behind for her to sell and profit from.
It seemed more likely that Michael had actually died back in November, and Lori’s story about him coming back and attacking her was a lie.
Then, when investigators asked Jeremy to corroborate Lori’s account, he was shocked. He didn’t just deny his role in the shooting; he also denied a bunch of details about their relationship. The investigators told him what Lori had said—that he shot Michael—and he was like, "Whoa, I didn’t shoot anybody! This is insane!" He explained, "Yes, I did date Lori, but it wasn’t while I was separated from my wife. We were never separated."
Jeremy clarified that he and Lori were having an affair, and when his wife found out, he ended things with Lori. He was like, "I never told her I was separated. I don’t know where that random detail came from."
Can you imagine? Someone comes to your house and says, "Hey, this woman claims you killed someone, lied about being separated from your wife, and buried a body." And he’s like, "Wait, I just had an affair with her!"
Jeremy went further, saying, "Not only is she lying about all this, but all of this happened before Michael even went missing. She was out of my life before Michael went missing in November."
Did she not think they’d go ask Jeremy? Did she just assume they’d take her word for it and be like, "Oh, Jeremy did it"?
It gets even better. Jeremy said, "I need to let you know I have proof that all of this happened before Michael went missing." He explained that Michael was actually instrumental in exposing him as a cheater to his wife.
He said he discovered what Lori was up to, contacted Jeremy's wife, and said, "Hey, this is what's been going on." Once she learned the truth, it turned into this huge mess. It blew up, and Jeremy was like, "Hey, I will end things with Lori." She's married to Michael, and he and his spouse eventually worked through their issues. She agreed to stay with him; they patched things up, and he said, "I haven't been with Lori. I haven't seen Lori since then." He added, "At the time of Michael's death—whether you believe that death was in November or May—I hadn't seen Lori. I was completely no-contact with her."
So, someone is obviously lying. It's either Lori or Jeremy, and either way, the police knew that Lori had been actively covering up Michael's homicide. They thought, "Well, we know she lied about this because she was actively pretending to be him on social media." They believed that Lori was the one lying and Jeremy was telling the truth. They thought she was the guiltier party.
On September 17, 2020, they arrested Lori for the murder of her husband. Where we are right now in the case, I think Lori is—I mean, I think she's the guilty one. I feel like it's pretty obvious. Crazy that Jeremy was just thrown under the bus like that. He's like, "What is happening to me right now? I'm just living my life."
Well, I also think it says something that it would have made him look better to say he was separated from his wife when he was dating Lori. But he was like, "No, no, straight up, I was cheating on my wife. I'm fine being a cheater, but I'm not okay being a killer. I'm going to just tell you what happened."
I also think that this story, if true, makes her look even more guilty. The only outlook we had on their marriage so far was that he was physically abusive. She had a month to think about this, and she chooses, "I'm going to blame it on Jeremy." They thought they were just going to go arrest Jeremy and be like, "All right, Jeremy did it; you're free to go."
I think maybe she was hoping that because Jeremy was her affair partner, Michael would have been so mad at him, and Jeremy would have been mad at Michael, creating this love triangle. So maybe she thought there was motive there for Jeremy to kill Michael. It’s just crazy. The police are going to do their investigation, but I think the fact that Jeremy's wife can kind of back his story and be like, "Yeah, no, it was a mess, and all this happened, but this is how it ended," kind of smashes Lori's hope that this would look like a love triangle.
It seems like everything was settled by the time Michael went missing. Lori was charged with second-degree murder, domestic violence, and accessory after the fact, all of which she pled not guilty to. Her trial actually began in September of 2024, so just this year. This is recent.
The prosecutors laid out all of their evidence that Lori was a liar—this was their strategy. They said she killed Michael herself, Jeremy was not involved, and it wasn’t in self-defense. They believe it was a cold-blooded crime. They also presented evidence supporting their timeline that Michael was killed in November, not May, as she claimed. When they interviewed her neighbors, they noted a terrible stench coming from Lori's backyard since that fall.
This is well before the day that Lori claims Jeremy shot Michael. Interestingly, Lori had adopted a new pet potbellied pig shortly after her neighbors began complaining about the odor. Anytime someone would mention the smell, she would say, "Oh, it's just my new pig."
I thought it was because pigs eat anything.
Well, they do, and I thought there was something else going on.
No, she just uses it as an excuse, saying, "Oh, that's just my stinky pig." And the neighbors were like, "It's not the stinky pig." They said, "The smell was here before you got the pig." This was just one more lie to add on. At this point, Lori has so many lies tacked onto her story that it's a little alarming.
However, when it came to the defense case, Lori and her attorneys actually took a pretty shocking strategy—not one you would expect. Earlier, I mentioned that, according to Lori's testimony to the police, Jeremy had shown up and killed Michael after Michael attacked her. I left out one part of her account, and that's because the public didn’t know these details until the trial. So I left it out, but now I'm going to tell you in the same way that the public found out.
Lori and Isabelle, her daughter, both told the police more details than originally shared. These were details, as I said, that weren’t released to the public until right before the murder trial because they were sensitive. They both got into everything when they were called as witnesses.
At this point, Isabelle is 15 at trial, just one week away from her sweet 16th birthday when she takes the stand. She was only seven when Michael died. Isabelle explained that violence had been common in her house when she was young. She said Lori and Michael, her parents, fought almost every day, and it wasn't unusual for those fights to become physical.
She said that when Michael finally walked out on her mother in the fall of 2015, she felt like she could breathe a sigh of relief. They had never been close. Michael, her dad, had always been strict, and each time he got home from work, she would hide in her bedroom because she wanted to avoid him. She said life became easier when he wasn’t around.
Except, Isabelle testified at trial that one night in May, she came home to find Michael on the patio behind the house, fighting with her mom.
Okay, she’s seven at this point?
Yes, and in her mind, she knew he wasn’t supposed to be there because they were separated. He was supposed to be out of both of their lives, and yet here he was, grabbing Lori and throwing her on the ground. Lori was begging him for mercy, and Michael was screaming that he’d kill her. He pushed her down onto the concrete floor, began hitting her and kicking her, and then he put a foot against her face and pressed her head down.
At that moment, Lori stopped screaming, and seven-year-old Isabelle became terrified. According to Isabelle, she told the jury that she ran all the way to her mother's bedroom, where she knew her mom kept a gun close to the bed. Isabelle grabbed the gun, ran out to the patio, aimed it at her father’s head, and pulled the trigger.
What’s happening? There’s no way.
I want to keep in mind that, according to everyone at this point, seven-year-old Isabelle had never been taught how to use a gun. She had never held a gun because she was too young to be handling one.
Isabelle testified at the trial that she did what she had to do; if she hadn't shot Michael, according to her, her mother would have died that day. Now, even though Isabelle said she managed to hit Michael in the head, she claimed she didn't kill him—she just hurt him badly. Lori decided in that moment not to call an ambulance to help Michael; instead, she called Jeremy to come over and get rid of Michael.
So, the daughter's story is, "Oh no, Jeremy didn't shoot him—I did. But Jeremy was involved; he came and helped get rid of the body." I just don’t know if Jeremy did that. I think I’m on Jeremy's side right now.
So it all was a mother’s desperate attempt to shield her daughter from the consequences of one tragic, life-or-death decision. Lori said this is why she also lied about Michael leaving her and being out of touch. Even though she knew Isabelle had shot Michael to save her, she feared it would create trouble for their family. Child services might take Isabelle away once they learned she was the one who had the gun, that there had even been a gun accessible, and that she'd used it to shoot her father.
Now, as moving as that was, Isabelle's story still doesn’t explain the timeline discrepancies. There is still so much evidence that Michael was actually killed back in November. But Isabelle cooperated with her mother's story on the stand, saying the shooting happened in May.
On top of that, Michael’s autopsy showed he’d only been shot once in the back of the head. For Isabelle's story to be true, he should have had two bullet wounds, because according to her, he wasn’t dead yet when they called Jeremy, who supposedly delivered the fatal shot and buried the body.
Plus, the testimony Isabelle gave on the stand was different from what she initially told police. I'm not sure exactly what the discrepancies were, as her original statement to the detectives wasn’t released to the public. But she was only seven, so it's hard to compare. Still, it was enough for prosecutors to suggest during the trial that Isabelle wasn’t being truthful. They argued, "This is not what she originally said." We don’t know exactly how different the testimonies were, but at trial, prosecutors claimed it was a completely different story than what she initially told police.
They believe Isabelle was coached because she didn’t want her mother to go to jail. It's sad—so sad—that she may have been encouraged by the defense to take credit for the shooting so Lori could be spared. I think that, as an attorney or as the defense, that should be illegal.
And here’s the thing—how is that not illegal? Many of Lori and Michael’s friends and family members came forward and said, "We never heard that Michael was abusive." They would say, "We hung out with this couple, we were around them, we knew them." There had been no signs of violence in the relationship.
Of course, we know that abuse can be hidden, especially in domestic violence situations, but in this case, it’s important to note that many of their friends who spent time with them came forward to say that, if anything, it seemed like Lori was actually the one who was abusive toward Michael.
In public, like in front of people, she had threatened Michael. She had physically attacked him, and on one occasion, other people saw that Lori had pulled a gun on Michael.
Interestingly, this incident where Lori had threatened to shoot Michael was right before his disappearance, so it kind of did come across like Lori was controlling and dangerous, and she was victim-blaming her husband by acting like he was the aggressive one.
Their friends and family came forward, and they were like, "We don't think he was actually abusive," but mom and daughter are saying he was abusive. Now, I will say we are getting into a gray area. The signs of abuse are not always obvious from the outside, especially if you don't know what to look for. So, it is possible that Lori could be telling the truth. Michael could have been abusive, and his loved ones may never have noticed or realized it. Some people are good at hiding these things.
We do know that Michael was charged with battery in September of 2014, the year before his disappearance, and he did plead guilty to those charges. He didn't attempt to fight them. One of Lori's former friends testified that she knew Lori had been hurting herself and blaming Michael for it.
According to that friend, Lori had openly admitted to this friend that she had given herself bruises and cuts to tell everyone it was from Michael. She added that she'd been in therapy to deal with these compulsive lies, that she had trouble with lying. But since this was a private conversation between Lori and a friend, I mean, how do you know who's telling the truth? This is just what a friend testified to at trial.
It's also possible that Lori told the friend that the abuse wasn't real when it really was. I mean, again, we're in a very tricky situation. She could have been trying to protect Michael. It's also possible that Lori and Michael were both abusive toward one another. We know that that also happens.
However, when it comes to homicide, things tend to be a bit clearer. Either Lori was guilty, or she wasn't. That became the core question during her trial: Was Lori a victim who'd covered up her husband's justifiable shooting in a moment of desperation, or a cold-blooded killer who'd been faking abuse for years so she could get away with murder?
The jury actually only deliberated for five hours, and they came back with their verdict. They found Lori guilty—guilty of second-degree murder. To all appearances, the jury did not buy her story about how Isabelle had really pulled the trigger, then how Jeremy had come over to finish.
As of this recording, Lori hasn't been sentenced yet; those hearings are scheduled for the end of this November 2024. In the meanwhile, after the ruling came down, Lori's attorney said that they plan to appeal the verdict. So even though the trial is over, it's very clear that there will be more to this story in the future.
Now, this is clearly a very recent trial, even though the murder is older, and there's a lot that we still don't know. I mean, in the eyes of the law, Lori is guilty, but her story feels a lot less cut and dry than those of some convicted killers. It's been almost ten years since Michael died, so for his sake, I hope that we can sort through the misinformation and somewhere find some truth because everyone, no matter what they may or may not have done, does deserve justice.
And that is the actually pretty current story about Lori Shaver and Michael's death.
I love it.
And I hate it.
Goodbye.
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