Did you kill her?
Hell no.
Were you there when she was killed?
No.
What?
Well, sure looks like you did.
She's in your freezer.
I didn't do anything to this girl.
I'm Scott Weinberger, investigative journalist and former deputy sheriff.
I'm Anastasia Nicolazzi, former New York City homicide prosecutor and host of Investigation.
Discovery's True Conviction.
And this is Anatomy of Murder.
Here's the thing about getting away with murder.
It's much more difficult than you think.
The act itself can be terrifyingly simple.
One squeeze of a trigger, a few drops of poison, but making it disappear, hiding the evidence and a person behind it, that is the hard part.
And you know, we say all the time what catches killers isn't the moment, it's the mess they make hiding it.
Today we're talking about a homicide that took place not too long ago in Youngstown Ohio, a Rust Belt city located about midway between Cleveland and Pittsburgh.
And, as you'll hear, it's an example of a crime in which the killer's efforts to avoid being caught were as disturbing and horrific as the murder itself.
With us to help.
Today's story is the detective that helped crack the case and unravel the twisted tale behind a young woman's sudden disappearance.
I'm Michael Lambert, and I'm a detective sergeant with the Youngstown Police Department.
And like Scott, my co-host here, can tell you, a career in law enforcement usually means starting in uniform.
And in that tradition, Michael worked the uniform division for five years before he eventually moved on to violent crimes, the vice squad and the detectives bureau.
Now, as you know, Anastasia, I've worked and covered a lot of cases.
But hearing Michael lay out the facts, I understood why this one still haunts people.
In 2017, Shannon Graves was a free-spirited 28-year-old woman who had spent her whole life in Ohio.
She was a girl that grew up in Youngstown.
Her father was actually a Youngstown policeman.
Her mother was a waitress at a pretty famous local pizza place.
Shannon was smart and independent but unfortunately in places like Youngstown where employment had been on the decline since the 1960s, there just wasn't a lot of opportunity in her own hometown.
And like many young people, Shannon wanted to pursue her dreams, but also needed a job to pay the bills.
So Shannon began working as a dancer an exotic dancer to help make ends meet while she put herself through school.
She was attending one of our local beauty schools and she graduated and was on her way to moving into probably safer lifestyle than what she was living.
And so that safer lifestyle included staying close to her parents and her sister and moving into an apartment of her own on the west side of Youngstown.
It was an older part of Youngstown, close to the downtown area.
The closer you get to the city, the older the housing is.
But it was not a bad neighborhood.
It was a place where you wouldn't be afraid to walk at night.
Shannon had been dating someone, a guy named Arturo Novoa, off and on for a few months.
By February of that year, 2017, she'd even invited him to move into her apartment.
Arturo was an inspiring musician who focused on rap music, and they figured it would be a good way to save a little money, as they both got their careers off the ground.
So, as we mentioned, Shannon's family described her as a free spirit who rarely, even ever, kept them in the loop on her long-term plans.
So it really wasn't that surprising for Shannon to go weeks without being in touch.
And in full transparency.
Those weeks sometimes stretched for months, but her family was used to that.
But they also said that Shannon was reliable and could be counted on to be there at important family events.
So when she was a no-show at her half-sister Debbie's birthday party, they were pretty concerned.
A call to her boyfriend Arturo didn't give them much comfort.
He told Shannon's sister that they had actually broken up again.
And this time Shannon had decided to pack up her stuff and move out of town with another man, which didn't sound like Shannon at all, especially when they noticed that her dog Molly, was still at her apartment.
Anybody who knew Shannon also knew she would never leave Molly behind.
Even more worrisome was the fact that for four months, Shannon had not sent a single email or text.
And when the texts to her own cell phone were answered by what seemed like a stranger, her family assumed her phone had been cut off and her number had been reassigned.
And so Shannon's sister, Debbie, finally went to police and filed a missing persons report.
But even police knew that the search for Shannon was complicated by the fact that no one had seen or spoken to her since February.
So that was one of our first questions was why the delay?
Because that was several months, you know, four months, almost five months before we were notified.
But according to family, this was typical behavior for Shannon.
She would drop in and out of regular life.
And when she came back, it was like nothing happened.
Now, there was also the fact that Shannon was 28.
She was an adult, not a teenager, not an at-risk youth.
She had every right to go where she pleased, and she often did.
But this time, something told them it was different.
It wasn't until she started missing important birthdays and stuff that they thought something might be wrong.
So they were going from concern to really raising an alarm at that point.
Typically, it takes a few steps before investigators make the leap from missing person to possible foul play.
But in this case, they had reason to think for sure that Shannon could indeed be in trouble.
After all, it had already been four months with absolutely zero contact.
So they asked her family, was there anybody in her life who might potentially want to do her harm.
And what they explained was that, while Shannon did not have any clear-cut enemies, she did have some past relationships with boyfriends that had given her own family some pause.
One in particular had been away in prison.
He was involved in narcotics.
And when he came back, he was trying to reunite with her.
But he had found that she found somebody while he was away.
And so this ex-boyfriend, John, became one of their first stops.
Had he seen her?
Had he heard from her?
And most importantly, was he still jealous or angry about Shannon's now new relationship?
But as it turned out, that ex-con boyfriend, he had been looking for her too, with no luck.
At least, that's what he told detectives.
He was really interested in finding her and sorting out where she was too.
And we kind of had to guard on that, because if anything bad was happening he was definitely going to be a suspect.
Shannon's ex even offered police to help, knocking on doors and questioning Shannon's friends and acquaintances, which also, in a way, actually raised suspicions.
It was one of those cases where you wonder if this guy's like a little too willing to help you out, you know.
But the reality was people were scared.
Her family just wanted to know if Shannon was safe.
And investigators wanted to know if they were dealing with a missing woman or a murdered one.
You got the sense that everybody thought something bad had happened to her.
That was kind of mixed in with the fact that one of these people was the boyfriend, the ex-boyfriend, who had been to prison.
I was familiar with the guy.
And you're just kind of like all over the place.
What do we really got going on here?
Michael's partner on the case, went to Shannon's apartment to talk directly to her most recent boyfriend Arturo, and get his account of exactly when he last saw Shannon.
But Arturo did not make things easy.
He was never where he was supposed to be.
He went to the apartment several times.
So our attempts to talk to him were unsuccessful.
So, while a home visit is always a good piece of intelligence for any detective, you can pick up some really good clues from what may be your potential crime scene.
Just making contact and getting that first statement is really the key, no matter how you manage to do it.
I went to a family member's, his mother, and I got to talk to her.
And she thought I was a parole officer and was kind of stonewalling me until I told her who I was.
When I told her who I was, she got him on the phone for me.
So I actually got to talk to him on the phone.
Arturo talked and answered questions, but he also dismissed the family's concerns and told Michael that everyone was just overreacting.
He dismissed it as they fought.
They obviously had a tumultuous relationship.
They on again, off again.
He tried to make things work.
And then finally, he said that she met somebody at this club she worked at and left, just totally left them.
But the general idea was this guy took her to Cleveland and she's living there now.
And he's living in her apartment, had been driving her car and was taking care of her dog.
But she told him she'd come back for the dog, but he didn't know when.
On the surface, it sounded plausible.
But here's the thing.
Shannon's family had actually been keeping an eye on Arturo and the apartment and they knew he wasn't telling police the whole story.
Her main champion from the family was her sister, Debbie.
Debbie had organized a group of people that were friends with Shannon that would run down their own leads and conduct surveillances on the apartment to see if they could see her coming and going.
And Just generally watch what was going on.
And they had noticed that there was a whole other woman living in the apartment with him.
It turned out that not only had Arturo moved in a new girlfriend to Shanna's apartment, she had brought her two kids along.
But once again, this was still just a missing persons case.
And the priority was to find Shannon.
Maybe she still was in Cleveland with a new boyfriend.
Now, this being 2017, there was one really good way of finding out digital forensics.
And Detective Michael Lambert was just the man for the job.
My specialty in the homicide unit was phone records.
I had a lot of training in it and a lot of success in finding people and recreating where they'd been.
So I knew I could reconstruct where this girl was pretty easily.
And while Shannon didn't have a credit card or even a debit card, she did have what's called an Ohio Direction card, which was the state's system for distributing public assistance funds.
They keep really good records of card usage and you know where they're used, what time, what store, what was purchased and all that.
So between those two things we were able to fill in all those dates and stuff before June between the phone and the direction card.
Not only did her call history and her card usage leave behind a digital map of her movements, they also helped create what investigators would call a pattern of life.
The direction card showed us where she normally shopped, what was normal for her to do.
She worked in Akron, Ohio, which is about 45 minutes from here.
So we saw a card usage where she would stop after work and get a drink on the way home and where she shopped locally, and all that.
And that pattern was the same for months leading up to February of 2017.
But then there was an abrupt break in that pattern.
And then we saw a complete change to where the card is all of a sudden being used in places where it's never been used before buying things that she didn't normally buy.
So that was interesting.
So also suspicious was that these new purchases were not happening in Cleveland.
They were happening right there in Youngstown.
So either Shannon had completely changed her habits or somebody else was using that card.
And that wasn't the only thing belonging to Shannon that somebody else was using.
Well, interestingly enough, her phone, it never got turned off.
And...
It was being used.
The phone number that the family had for her when they called it, another woman was answering it.
Remember her family had assumed Shannon had just stopped paying her bill and her phone number had been reassigned.
But that actually wasn't the case.
Turns out it wasn't.
It was still her phone and it was being used by Arturo's other girlfriend, the one that was now living with him.
Police had good reason to believe that Arturo's new girlfriend, a woman named Katrina Layton, was using Shannon's phone, spending her money and even living in her apartment.
And according to some of Shannon's friends she had also been seen at Arturo's side at a recent bonfire party.
But apparently they weren't just there for the good times.
According to a witness, Arturo and Katrina had brought a bag of Shannon's belongings to throw into the fire.
Here's how one of the people who were at the bonfire explained it.
Basically, what he wanted me to do is, you know, he wanted me to help him get rid of the last of her crap that she left there.
Okay?
Old documents, clothes.
I figured he was being spiteful.
Into the fire went some clothing and an engraved bracelet with her name on it.
It's something that has her name engraved on it.
That seems like something that would be rather important to her.
And I'm like, that just doesn't look good.
I've seen this movie.
Arturo's explanation?
It was a gesture of revenge for Shannon leaving Arturo for another man.
But to Shannon's family, it also sounded like destroying potential evidence.
They were concerned because there was a large dumpster next to the apartment and there was carpet that had been removed from the building not necessarily her apartment and they were afraid that she was dead and somebody was disposing of her body.
Investigators knew it was time to search the apartment where Arturo and Katrina were now living.
So while we're doing the search warrant at the apartment, I finally get a chance to talk to Arturo face-to-face.
And I actually got to talk to the girlfriend, Katrina Layton.
You know, they're both dismissive of the whole thing.
Investigators were looking for any obvious evidence of a crime, like blood or signs of a struggle.
But a look into someone's home is also a way to get a pretty good sense of who people are.
And detectives, they got an eyeful.
Looked through the whole house, and there were some weird things about the house.
They had a lot of books about witchcraft.
I don't know.
That was just their kind of thing.
They're big fans of Insane Clown Posse, so there was Juggalo stuff all over the place.
So I didn't see this coming, but here's where I get an opportunity to explain the Juggalo subculture.
A Juggalo is a fan of a hip hop group, Insane Clown Posse, which is famously known for its aggressive lyrics, a fascination with horror films and death imagery.
And yes, their iconic clown makeup.
Not everyone's cup of tea for sure, but also not against the law, obviously.
Still posters of insane clowns wielding machetes is not exactly a good look when police come knocking on the door looking for your missing girlfriend.
We did find a few spots that we thought were blood in the house, but not to the extent that you would think somebody had been killed there.
We took swabs of it, sent it off to the lab.
It wasn't really all that helpful.
It just became one more of those things that we were doing, because that's what you do trying to break this thing loose.
Like, where is she?
Is there something obvious in there that's going to tell us something happened?
There really wasn't.
We did it, but it wasn't all that consequential, you know?
So we left there thinking, well, that didn't really help.
But the search of the apartment was not a total bust.
Interesting thing was I did find a rent receipt for a new apartment that they had leased and had not moved into yet, over on the south side of Youngstown.
And I took note of that, but I left the receipt there.
I didn't want them to know I knew about it.
On his way home, Michael went by the address of the new apartment, a duplex on Youngstown's south side.
He looked in the window, but the apartment was empty.
So why rent an apartment but not move in?
And we were contemplating writing a search warrant for that place, but we really didn't have the probable cause yet.
And I think we can all appreciate that Michael and his team were playing by the book, right?
They felt something was off and wanted to know what was inside, but also knew that there were legal lines that hadn't yet been met.
But what he did have was reason to believe that his recent visit to Arturo had left a pretty strong impression.
Because soon after, detectives got a very interesting call from a couple in nearby Campbell, Ohio.
They knew Arturo from recording songs at their house.
They had a studio in their home, a makeshift rap studio in their living room.
And he would come over there and make rap songs because he was going to be the next big thing.
And it seems that soon after the detectives visit, Arturo had reached out to them with a very strange request.
So after the search warrant, in the middle of the night Arturo calls the Eschenbaus and says hey, my power got shut off, which happened a lot with them.
He goes, I got a freezer full of food and I'm going to lose it all.
It's like three o'clock in the morning.
He says, can I bring this to your house just until my power gets back on so I don't lose my food?
So I don't know about you, but if I get a phone call like that in the middle of the night, I'd be a little more than just suspicious.
But for whatever reason, the couple agrees and Arturo appears at their home a few minutes later with a large freezer.
When he puts it in there he actually has to go back and get an extension cord because where he put it was too far from the outlets down there.
So he He had to leave and get an extension cord.
And he comes back and he puts a padlock on the freezer.
The freezer didn't have a lock on it, so he put a hasp and a padlock on it.
But he's not real mechanical, so when he puts it on he puts it on with all the screw heads exposed, so anybody with a butter knife can take it off.
The locked freezer sat in the couple's basement until finally, their curiosity got the better of them.
It's not for a couple days before the wife decides she needs to get into the freezer because she needs to borrow some hamburger meat to make spaghetti.
That is her story.
I guess she just doesn't want to say that she's nosy.
The wife grabbed a screwdriver and pried open the freezer.
And what she discovered inside would turn this case and the community upside down.
In Youngstown Ohio, 28-year-old Shannon Graves had been missing for over four months without a trace.
But after her boyfriend stashed a mysterious locked freezer at a friend's house, her missing persons case was about to take a dramatic turn.
That padlocked freezer had sat in the couple's house for several days before the wife finally decided it was time to see what was inside.
And when she opens it up, she doesn't see meat and stuff.
She sees a big black trash bag and a Home Depot bucket.
And she's like, oh boy, this isn't good.
So she puts it all back together and calls her husband and says, you got to come home right now.
Something's not right with this.
I want you to see this.
These were friends of Arturo's, so they were not unaware that his girlfriend had been missing.
But also, since they were his friends, what they did know was Arturo.
So he comes home and he does the same thing.
He opens it up, only he pulls open the bag and he sees a foot.
We do want to warn you that the following contains graphic content and descriptions of graphic violence.
Inside the garbage bag, there appeared to be other body parts as well.
Horrified, the couple immediately called 911.
911, what is your emergency?
Police from the town of Campbell arrived at the scene.
In the basement, they found trash bags that had been removed from the nearby freezer.
Inside the bags contained what appeared to be the dismembered parts of a human body.
Everything except the torso and head.
Camel goes there and, strangely enough, as soon as Camel starts talking to them and seeing what they have and it was kind of well known we were looking for this girl they immediately call us and turn the whole thing over to us.
So, Anastasia, this makes perfect sense.
You know, the officers who made the discovery handed it back to the team that had been working the missing persons case.
And, you know, they already knew her world, had timelines, warrants, and the DA already looped in.
And once the death is confirmed, that groundwork becomes the engine, as you know, for a homicide case.
And look, not to get too legalese on all of you, but we do know that I'm the lawyer.
So let me just explain jurisdiction for a minute, right?
Which is that...
The office or the jurisdiction that can take this case is going to be several.
It can be where the crime occurred, where it was reported right which you have to show some nexus connection to that place, or also where the body is found.
And more often than not, as you were just saying, Scott, obviously it goes back to where it started.
What they did have was detectives that to your point Scott, like they were already working this case.
So that's why when Youngstown detectives were called, they headed over.
So, you know, you pick one lead agency for continuity and clean lines.
I mean, let's everyone else support that task force type model.
You know, you move without stepping over bounds or stepping on evidence, of course, or witnesses.
It's not politics that I see.
It's just good casework.
And so here it was Youngstown.
So detectives from Youngstown arrived, fearing that their search for Shannon was likely over.
It was the ending her family had feared the most.
Immediately, we're able to tell just by what we have there that it's Shannon because of a tattoo.
The severed foot in the freezer bore Shannon's distinctive scorpion tattoo.
The remains included severed arms, hands, and a partial skull.
They were sent to the coroner in Cleveland where her ID was confirmed.
But it was far from the end of the mystery surrounding what happened to Shannon Graves.
Now we've got a body, so it isn't a missing.
But what we don't have is a murder because we don't know how she died.
The fact that her remains ended up in a freezer owned by her boyfriend was a good indication that she had met with a sudden and likely violent death.
But it's not necessarily proof that she was murdered.
There was a chance her death was accidental and perhaps someone had tried to cover up her death or his or her possible involvement.
She's reportedly used drugs at times.
So are we talking about an overdose and somebody just didn't do the right thing?
So honestly, I know it.
Just saying the fact that it could be accidental may seem strange to somebody who's listening.
But you know, in a sense you have to look at all of these potential options to move forward in this homicide investigation.
And you have run into this in your in your history.
And unfortunately, more than once.
Again, we talk accidental, but let me just play it out for you for a second.
One, we just learned that there was some narcotics used in Shannon's life.
So if narcotics are being used, well, think about that someone had to supply them.
Maybe they worried they might get arrested for that.
People do sometimes get arrested, charged with crimes for supplying various narcotics for people who ultimately overdose right
So maybe they decide to dismember her, trying to avoid it being discovered how she died.
Brutal, horrific, yes.
And again, not likely that this is the scenario, but it's a possibility that can't be ignored.
You always need to consider every explanation, especially the non-criminal or lesser ones.
But let's transition over to Shannon's family.
So for Shannon's family, Shannon's death came as sad but not totally unexpected news.
But the report about the condition of her remains was shocking to them and the community.
They, from the get-go, thought that she was dead.
But I don't think that even they thought it was going to be like this, you know?
Investigators turned to the coroner in Cleveland to confirm their suspicion that Shannon had indeed been killed.
But his job would not be easy.
So we're waiting on the coroner's report to see, you know, what they have to say.
And the coroner's report comes back.
We don't have a whole body.
We have arms and legs.
And we have full dental, but not a whole head in this bucket.
All the things that you would think people would want to get rid of.
You know, fingerprints and dental records.
We have all that, but we don't have the body.
So we have what we need for identification, but we don't have what we need for cause of death.
We don't have a body with bullet holes in it or an ax or whatever.
But whether or not they could prove Shannon was murdered or the specific means of her death, they were confident they could at least prove who was responsible for putting her body parts in that freezer Arturo Navoa.
We've got enough to arrest him for basically abuse of a corpse.
But that's not exactly what I want out of this.
On the other hand, you don't want this guy running loose.
And so detectives arrested Navoa at the apartment he had once shared with Shannon.
And they bring him in for questioning.
It is still unclear how long it had been since Shannon had died or how long Novoa had lived with her remains in the apartment.
But there was little doubt that he was the person responsible for placing her in the freezer and concealing her death from her family and the police.
Inside the apartment, police recovered a meat cleaver by the front door and an owner's manual for the freezer that contained Shannon's remains.
We prep him up and take him over to the jail and we go through his pockets.
One of the things we get is the key to the padlock that he's still walking around with on the police station the next day.
Like, that was pretty good evidence that he was involved in that.
However, his motive remained a mystery.
If he killed her, was it planned?
Was it done in the heat of the moment?
Police didn't know, but they had an idea who might.
And so, when Nouveau was arrested, they also arrested Nouveau's new girlfriend, Katrina Layton, believing that they had evidence that she not only had knowledge of Shannon's death but, more importantly, something to do with the cover-up.
And in that, quite possibly her murder.
You know, I told you about 10 times that the missing girl is dead in your freezer.
I'm looking for some kind of reaction.
You don't look shocked at all.
Yeah.
No, it's not that.
I'm just trying to process everything.
Katrina, the girlfriend, she comes in too.
We end up charging her as well.
We were able to track down the fact that this freezer was purchased using her money and that, While he was moving it, when he had to run back and get an extension cord, he went back to the apartment where she was.
So she had full knowledge of all this as well.
Layton was questioned, but she denied having anything to do with Shannon's death.
Did you kill her?
Hell no.
Were you there when she was killed?
No.
What?
Well, sure looks like you did.
I didn't do anything to this girl.
You understand this looks like you did it and he helped you.
I know.
That's what it looks like.
I don't know anymore.
Good training.
Did you kill her?
No.
Okay.
Did you take her apart?
No.
Investigators also talked to Novoa, but he denied killing Channon or knowing anything about the bonfire, the freezer or the fate of his ex-girlfriend.
And two people said you dropped the freezer off at their house with a body in it.
Did you hear what I said?
But remember, given the condition of the remains, the coroner was still unable to determine a cause of death.
So before they could charge either of them with Shannon Graves' murder, they would have to find evidence somewhere else, be it solid physical evidence or maybe somebody else who was willing to talk.
This is going to be at this point unless we find some things a cooperation case, because now you're going to need the cooperation of somebody who knows what happened to help you out.
And casting that net for potential cooperators.
It was about to get a big assist from the local media.
Because the discovery of Shannon's remains and the subsequent arrest of her suspected killers.
It was all over the news.
And you never know who's watching.
Well, the arrest that we made was public.
The 911 tape of the Eschenbaus finding the body in the freezers on every news channel.
Everybody's watching it.
And I get a call from Wal-Mart.
Now, I've talked about this before, but Walmart famously has an incredibly sophisticated security apparatus and it's known for being very helpful in police investigations.
As Michael told us, if you've committed a crime and you go to Walmart, you're probably going to get caught.
When this contact of ours sees Arturo and his girlfriend on the news, she bursts into tears.
She has a breakdown at work.
Nobody knows what's going on.
She goes into the office, closes the door and calls us and says hey, I knew something was up with these two.
They had been to Walmart and they had called and ordered a pickup at the store order for like 16 bottles of sulfuric acid drain opener.
And they had it drop shipped to the store, I guess, because it was cheaper to pick it up there.
16 bottles of sulfuric acid, a chemical strong enough to clear an industrial drain or dissolve human bone and tissue.
You know, unless you're a licensed plumber, there's probably no good reason to be ordering that quantity of chemicals without raising some suspicion, which may be why the order was placed under a pseudonym.
But they decide they're going to be sneaky about it and they have it shipped to Chicken Man, who's going to be the guy that picks it up?
When our girl sees this.
These two people are buying all this acid and they don't want us to know who they are.
She absolutely refuses to give it to them without them showing them ID.
At first, Nevoa refused, understanding that he wanted no connection between his name and that suspicious purchase.
He's like, no, I paid for it.
I want it.
And it's against their own policy.
She ended up getting in trouble with Walmart over it, but she refused.
She refused to do it without them showing ID.
So Arturo's girlfriend actually shows her ID and makes a photocopy of it because she knows something's up.
And when she sees them arrested on TV and his body in his freezer, we were her first call.
A grim picture of Novoa and Layton's plan to dispose of Shannon's body using powerful acid was becoming clear.
But detectives were still lacking evidence of how and even if Shannon was actually killed.
And so, as is often the case when you have two suspects, investigators figured their best chance of getting the truth was to try to convince one of them to cooperate.
But which one of them would be the first to flip?
Four months after Shannon Graves' disappearance, investigators had arrested two people in connection with her death and dismemberment her boyfriend, Arturo Novoa, and his girlfriend Katrina Layton.
What ends up happening is the county prosecutor's office makes a deal with Arturo's new girlfriend.
And what the prosecutors ended up offering Layton was one heck of a deal.
All she had to do was tell the truth about what happened to Shannon, and she was promised full immunity from any potential murder charges.
And while it was obviously important for investigators to know who it was that had killed Shannon, so that person would hopefully be held accountable and face justice, it was also important to them and to the family just to know the truth.
Was Shannon killed?
How was she killed?
And why?
She was getting a complete walk not knowing what actually happened, if it was a murder or not and, if it was, who did it.
She gets a complete, you're walking out of here, you're not going to jail at all.
You just got to give him up.
That's it.
And Leighton.
She takes the deal agreeing to cooperate with police and presumably lay the blame on her boyfriend, Arturo Novoa.
But incredibly, after more than 40 hours in the interview room, Leighton ended up revealing virtually nothing of value.
And so she agreed to the deal, right?
She would get immunity if she cooperated.
And in this case, she admitted to helping Novoa dispose of Shannon's body.
But she continued to deny knowing anything about Shannon's death.
So in some ways, at least seems like she thought she could have her cake and eat it too.
I think this needs a real explainer here, Anasika.
You know it's easy to yank a plea before it's finalized, especially if a judge has already granted broad court-ordered immunity.
You can't undo that on the underlying offense, but you could still pursue perjury and obstruction charges.
How does that work in your mind?
Well, first of all, these deals are usually put into place by the prosecutors, right?
And it has to be, for not only you agree to cooperate, but you have to provide truthful testimony or all bets are off.
Obviously, as you say, Scott, there comes a point that it's too far down the lane.
And here look.
It's hard to say without more information, but it usually starts with something we call a queen or a king for a day.
All sides sit down together.
The person, the subject gives their story.
All sides assess it.
Now, in that case, the prosecutors can't use what they say, unless they ultimately come to a deal, right?
But that becomes the basis for this deal.
So what could have happened here is that they agreed to let her testify in a grand jury with immunity, or that they said look, we will grant you this deal as long as you tell us what you know.
It's a calculated decision here.
And one of the things that we were looking at and, without knowing the exact path, that's at least giving you the general breakdown.
And there is another issue as well here.
After listening to Nouveau's recorded jailhouse phone calls, it was determined that Leighton had broken her plea agreement by being in contact with him.
So in the end, they decided to make a potentially consequential decision with Leighton's cooperation agreement.
They pulled it.
It's a really big deal to nix a deal in a homicide case.
If you make a deal with somebody and then you back out of that deal as the prosecution, it's not a good message you're sending to potential cooperators in other cases.
Whether it's warranted or not, it's not a good precedent to set.
And it never happens.
But in this case...
We went down that road and we actually got the deal tossed out.
So Katrina lost her deal based on the fact that she not only didn't cooperate, but told outright lies to thwart the investigation.
But a cooperation agreement with the suspect isn't really the only tool that prosecutors have.
Look, you can't force a defendant to testify in front of a grand jury.
Right.
But sometimes we talk to them.
They obviously it's their right if they want to testify.
But also with prosecutors, we can say, look, you say you're telling the truth.
Great.
We'll put you in the grand jury, potentially as our witness, even though you're now charged with the idea of a deal.
However, you have to waive your immunity, which means that if we find out you're lying, we can still use what we're saying saying against you.
One of the first things we did was run everybody involved in this case through the grand jury.
The grand jury is a great investigative tool.
It's one thing to sit in an interview room with somebody and talk to them and you know they don't want to tell you things and then, but it's a whole nother thing to drag them down and put them in front of a jury and tell their story.
So we did that with andrew and his girlfriend and these people at the fire and all this, and people were just like falling apart.
They also upped the pressure on their two suspects and everyone else they suspected of aiding their attempts to destroy evidence of a potential murder.
And they did this by reminding them that they didn't have to prove Shannon was murdered to put them all away for a very long time.
The general idea that we came was we need to give them something bigger to worry about than this murder case.
And we decided that we would indict the group of them in an overall overreaching conspiracy case to basically hide the fact that Shannon was dead and how she died.
In other words, if Navoa and Layton thought they could just take a little bit of jail time on this lesser charge of abusing a corpse, they were sorely mistaken.
The easy way out on this was abuse of a corpse on Arturo, call it a day.
To the credit of the prosecutor, this was the exact opposite of that.
We turned this into a much bigger thing.
And amazingly...
That's all it really took.
Once we did that, people started folding up immediately and all those things we needed to know we found out.
It turned out that more people had known about Shannon's death than they had ever led on to police.
And more than one had actually helped Navoa come up with a plan to cover it all up.
And with Layton's deal off the table, there was now an opening to make their own cooperation deals in exchange for leniency and the truth.
When word got to Navoa that all the people he had involved in this crime were ready to flip, he knew his fate was sealed.
And it eventually got to the point where we had enough cooperators, to where it left Arturo in a point now, with Katrina losing her deal and she's not going to go to bed for him anymore that he had to plea.
Once he came to our side, it was like night and day.
He gave us everything we could possibly need.
The story Navoa laid out was simply horrifying.
Its brutality only matched by its senselessness.
And, as Shannon's family had suspected all along, it all came down to petty jealousy between people in a doomed relationship.
Arturo is living with Shannon in her apartment, but he is secretly still seeing Katrina.
But his own infidelity didn't stop him from being angry when Shannon considered getting back together with her other ex.
So everybody knows about everybody.
There's no big secret that somebody's got to get killed over.
In the meantime, Navoa continued to see Leighton, his other girlfriend, even inviting her into Shannon's apartment when she was at work.
On one particular evening, Katrina comes over to the apartment because Shannon's at work.
Arturo's up at the street, up the street at a bar and it's in view of the apartment and he sees Shannon come home and he knows there's going to be a problem.
So he goes over there and when he gets there, this would be according to the version that Arturo actually told us.
Shannon's already dead and Katrina's there, and she had killed her and hit her in the head with a hammer.
So, according to Novoa, it was Katrina Layton that had killed Shannon with multiple blows to the head with a hammer.
Shannon likely suffered a fatal traumatic brain injury, a cause of death.
That was a mystery to the coroner because investigators had only recovered a portion of Shannon's skull.
I mean on its face.
I'd say that it looks like that the killer harbored an incredible amount of rage or jealousy, since bludgeoning is such an up-close-and-personal kind of assault.
And even though Novoa explained his relationship with Shannon that was rocky and at least claimed that his affair with Layton was not even a secret or a big deal between them, there can still obviously be major jealousies, control issues and anger that just boils over, like it clearly did here, no matter which way the truth actually played out.
At no point did anybody need to get killed.
Everybody knew about everybody.
If Shannon came home and found another girl in her apartment with Arturo well, it's really not a surprise, you knew about her.
According to Nivoa, after he arrived home to find Shannon dead, he immediately enlisted Layton's help to cover up her murder.
First, by wrapping her body in garbage bags and putting them in the trunk of Shannon's car.
They load her into the car, and at this point, this is February, Katrina wasn't living there.
She had a house in Boardman, Ohio, about five miles away.
And they drive her body to Boardman, Ohio, and they put her in the garage.
And they're kind of deciding what to do, and they don't know what to do.
Nvoa decided to call a friend, a man named Herman, who had a certain reputation for knowing what to do in a situation just like this.
Herman comes over and he says, what's up?
So he takes him out to the garage and shows him, I need help.
I need to get rid of this body.
What do I do?
According to Novoa, Herman then left and returned a short time later, not with the police, but with a machete.
He dismembers the body in the garage, makes it smaller.
He goes, there, I made it smaller.
Now it's easier to get rid of.
And he's like, thanks, but that doesn't really help me.
What do I do with it?
He goes, well, have you ever watched Breaking Bad?
And he's like, no.
He goes, well, watch it and you'll see what you do.
Referencing the popular TV show, Herman instructed Nevoa to purchase sulfuric acid and some large plastic tubs.
The plan?
To dissolve Shannon's dismembered remains until there was nothing left.
They get the whole idea from Breaking Bad, and the bad guy in Breaking Bad is Chicken Man, so that's where that comes from.
But, to no one's surprise, this disturbing scheme doesn't go as planned, nothing being as easy as what you see on TV.
And we'll spare you those details.
But despite their gruesome efforts, Navoa and Layton were able to destroy only a portion of Shannon's remains.
It doesn't happen instantaneously.
It takes like weeks.
And so they're storing her in freezers, intending to get rid of her, but they don't.
Eventually a freezer goes bad.
They got to get another freezer.
Then they, the cops are knocking on the door.
So they got to move this freezer and it becomes this gigantic disaster.
And remember that empty apartment that Michael had stopped by after first interviewing Nevoa?
He would later learn that the freezer containing Shannon's remains had actually been inside the day he peered in the window before it was then transported to another friend's basement.
So in the end, Novoa had placed the blame for killing Shannon on Katrina Layton and claimed he only helped get rid of the body.
But was that true?
Layton was still refusing to tell police anything, but investigators were able to do a thorough search of her recovered computer.
And, along with a trove of Novoa's amateur rap recordings, they were able to uncover some messages that she had sent to a friend in Connecticut.
We get a girlfriend of Katrina's from Connecticut who we didn't know anything about.
And that was her confidant.
She on one night broke down and told her a whole story.
So we go to Connecticut and talk to her.
And according to Layton's friend, Novoa's story was a lie.
She claimed that Layton had told her that when she arrived at the apartment, Shannon was already dead.
Arturo was despondent because he had accidentally killed her at a fit of rage.
And, quite honestly, that version based on everything we know about the relationship dynamics between these three, this version seems the most plausible and realistic, at least to me.
And based on the he said she said of it all, the truth about Shannon's murder was as muddled as it was senseless.
At the end of this whole trail, though, you're not 100% what happened.
You're as close to the truth, I think, as you're ever going to get, because nobody's going to say oh, this is absolutely what happened.
After accepting a plea to a long slew of charges that included murder, Novoa was sentenced to life in prison.
His girlfriend Katrina Layton and his friend Andrew Herman each received 12 years for their roles in covering up her murder.
In 2022, Nouveau was resentenced due to technical errors in how charges had been merged.
And while his conviction was upheld, his sentence was reduced to 48 years to life.
A young woman loved reduced to evidence in a refrigerator.
You hear that and ask what kind of human being could do this?
And the truth is we may never know in a way that satisfies.
Motives and labels don't reach the void it takes to do something like this.
We can map the timelines, prove the acts, and deliver a verdict.
But in cases like this, you can prove what happened or who did it, yet the motive that would make it emotionally understandable is often missing or unknowable.
So we leave the why with the killer, and we keep Shannon's name with us.
I was trying to decide what my final thought would be about in this case.
Is it about the senselessness of the crime, the brutality and barbaricness of what was done to Shannon after she died?
All worthy topics.
But what I decided to highlight today was the work done by Michael and law enforcement to find the truth and get justice for Shannon.
Shannon Graves' case is likely not one you'd see in any headlines beyond the barbaric way she was found and likely not covered endlessly on social media.
Because for various reasons, cases like this just don't often capture the same attention.
Be it the turbulence of her life, the muddy relationship, the apparent use of narcotics, or even her work as an exotic dancer as she tried to make ends meet.
Many shun attention to cases just like this.
But we here at AOM, we don't.
And importantly for this final thought, Michael and his team did not.
They worked her case as hard as what you see on the ones that do make the front pages.
And that's important to me, to Scott, to all of us here at AOM, to call that out when we see it.
We remember Shannon Graves today as a young woman trying to move her life forward.
Things clearly weren't easy for her, but she was working to get through school and make a life for herself that she wanted to lead.
So, to Shannon, this AOM community wants you to know, wherever your spirit is today, that we remember you and say justice is important for all.
Tune in next week for another new episode of Anatomy of Murder.
Anatomy of Murder is an AudioChuck original.
Produced and created by Weinberger Media and Fresetti Media.
Ashley Flowers is executive producer.
This episode was written and produced by Walker Lamond.
Researched by Kate Cooper.
Edited by Ali Sirwa and Philjean Grande.
I think Chuck would approve.
