In April of 2009, 42-year-old Florida lottery winner Abraham Shakespeare seemed to just disappear off the face of the earth.
But a series of text messages from Abraham and a phone call he made to his mother would eventually lead police to make a gruesome discovery about his disappearance.
And what they found would expose months of lies and help lead to a groundbreaking new law in Florida.
But before we get into that story, if you're a fan of the Strange, Dark, and Mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right podcast because that's all we do and we upload twice a week, once on Monday and once on Thursday.
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On April 9, 2009, 42-year-old Abraham Shakespeare drove his fancy black BMW 750i car towards an upscaled gated community in Lakeland, Florida.
Abraham stopped his car, hit a remote control on his sun visor, and waited for the large gate that kept his neighborhood separated from the rest of the city to open.
Then Abraham drove through the gate and glanced in his rearview mirror.
His friend, Dee Dee Moore, was following right behind him in her black Hummer.
Abraham led Dee Dee through the neighborhood's winding roads that were dotted with large two-story homes with huge front yards and swimming pools in back.
Then he pulled into the driveway of his own house that looked a lot like the others in the neighborhood.
Abraham parked his car and stepped outside.
He was six foot four inches tall with long skinny arms and legs.
He had a beard and a black spandex cap that covered his dreadlocks.
He wore a white t-shirt and jeans. Dee Dee's huge Hummer pulled into the driveway behind the BMW.
Dee Dee got out and smiled at Abraham. She was 36 years old and she was tall with dyed blonde hair and she laughed and talked a lot.
Didi went around to the passenger side of the Hummer, opened the door and took out a video camera and a tripod to put the camera on.
She closed the door and then followed Abraham into his house. and Abraham led her through his living room that had high ceilings, large leather couches, and a state-of-the-art TV.
The furniture, and most of the decorations inside, had come with the house when Abraham bought it.
Abraham asked Didi how her day at work had been as they walked up the staircase to the second floor, and Didi told him that things were going really well.
She owned and operated a successful medical staffing agency, and she said business just kept getting better.
Then they walked down a hallway on the second floor into a room that Abraham used as an office and as a place to relax and watch TV.
And when they walked into the room, Didi set up the tripod, put the camera on it, and turned the camera on.
Then she asked Abraham if he was ready for her to film him.
Abraham looked at the camera. He grinned and said, yep, he was ready.
Since Didi's medical staffing agency had taken off, she had spent a lot of time and energy following her dream of becoming a writer.
She wanted to write books and movies. And when Didi and Abraham had met through a mutual friend about six months earlier, she was fascinated by his life story.
And she thought he would be the perfect subject for a biography or a documentary or maybe even a Hollywood blockbuster movie.
Didi pressed record on the camera and asked Abraham just to talk about himself a little bit and to tell her about his life.
Didi thought getting Abraham to tell his story in his own words would be a great resource for her for when she started writing a book or movie about him.
Abraham started talking into the camera and pacing a little back and forth.
And as he talked about his life, it seemed like he was almost reliving certain moments from when he was younger.
And that made Dee Dee smile. And as she listened, she thought even his last name, Shakespeare, was perfect for a storyteller like Abraham.
Abraham had grown up poor and he had dropped out of school when he was about 12 years old to go work in the citrus fields that thrived in that part of Florida.
And Abraham had left school without really learning how to read or write beyond the most basic level.
And as he got older, he started to understand that his employment options would always be limited.
And so he had spent the majority of his life moving from one odd job to another trying to make ends meet.
In the room upstairs in his house, Abraham stopped pacing for a second and he thought back to some of the low-paying jobs he'd had.
And he said going from job to job and struggling to survive had made it clear to him just how much the city of Lakeland was divided.
Lakeland was part of the Tampa Bay area, and in Lakeland, some of the wealthiest people in Florida lived just miles away from some of the poorest people.
And Abraham said when he was younger, he would pass by the gated communities where the rich people lived, and he would tell himself that someday he would figure out a way to move behind those gates.
But it was a dream that most people in his poor neighborhood laughed at.
And for most of Abraham's life, that dream he had seemed like it was impossible to achieve.
But even though Abraham had spent decades living in his mom's house and working low-paying jobs, he had refused to let that bring him down.
And everybody who knew Abraham said he was one of the kindest, most positive people they had ever met.
Then, three years earlier, on November 15th of 2006, Abraham had been working as a delivery man for a food distribution company.
Abraham's coworker, Michael Ford, had been driving the delivery truck that day, and he pulled into a convenience store to get cigarettes and a drink.
But before Michael got out of the truck, Abraham had reached into his pocket and taken out two dollars.
Abraham was pretty broke at the time and he knew he shouldn't just throw money away.
But he stared at the dollar bills in his hand and then gave them to Michael and asked him to buy two quick pick lottery tickets.
And Michael laughed, grabbed the money and went inside.
A few minutes later, Michael had gotten back in the truck and given Abraham the two lottery tickets.
Then the following evening, Abraham had been sitting on the couch at his mother's house watching the winning lottery numbers get announced on the local news.
And he had just stared at the TV, stunned, because each winning lottery number that just got announced matched a number on a lottery ticket he was holding. at first as the numbers kept matching over and over again abraham had kind of laughed it off and thought you know this is not going to happen but when they were about to announce the final number he could feel his heart beating faster because all he needed was one more match he leaned in close to the tv and watched as the newscaster called out the final winning lottery number And when Abraham had heard that number, he checked his ticket, then he checked it again and again.
And then Abraham jumped off the couch and started shouting to his mother that he had just won the lottery.
Abraham's mom came into the room and she thought he was playing a prank.
But when he showed her the numbers on the TV and the matching numbers on his ticket, she started screaming and crying because Abraham had hit the $30 million jackpot.
Fast forward back to the present and Abraham smiled into the camera and Didi smiled too.
Just hearing Abraham tell that story about winning the lottery was like listening to somebody describe a miracle, like something that never really actually happens in real life.
But then Abraham stared down at the floor and a look of total exhaustion came across his face.
So Didi asked him if he was okay, and Abraham told Didi about what had happened almost immediately after he was shown on the TV collecting his big lottery winnings.
Even after a huge amount of taxes and a reduced payout for taking his lottery money immediately instead of over several years, Abraham walked away with about $12 million, more money than he'd ever imagined having in his whole life.
And with that money, Abraham had bought his dream house in one of Lakeland's beautiful gated communities for the rich, and he had gotten himself a very fancy car, that BMW.
But soon after that, a lot of people had seemed to take advantage of Abraham's kindness.
And he was lending money to friends, family, and people he had never met before.
And he was paying for their mortgages, healthcare bills, college tuition fees, startup expenses for businesses, and just about anything else people could think of.
And Abraham said that he loved helping people.
He really did. But over time, it had just gotten more out of control.
And now, two and a half years after he had won the lottery, he said there were days where he would get hundreds of text messages from people asking for money.
And he just felt like he couldn't say no to any of them.
In fact, Abraham had a cousin named Cedric Edom who owed him thousands of dollars in mortgage payments on a house that Abraham had bought and let Cedric live in.
And now Abraham could barely even get Cedric to talk to him, let alone get Cedric to pay back any of the money he owed.
And Abraham hated that he felt like his lottery money was coming between him and his friends and family.
From behind the camera, Didi asked Abraham if he was tired.
And he turned away from the lens, then glanced back and said he'd been tired for a whole year.
And he said sometimes he dreamed of running away to a beach in some other country and just disappearing forever.
Not long after that, Dee Dee stopped recording.
She could tell Abraham was getting upset and she felt for him.
She hadn't won millions of dollars, but she said when her business had taken off, she had her share of people coming out of the woodwork asking her for money.
And she knew that even for someone who was as good of a person as Abraham, that pressure could take its toll.
And so Abraham and Didi had talked for a little while longer, but not for the camera.
And then at some point, Abraham looked around the room and then stared out the window at his sprawling yard.
Abraham lived in a place he'd once dreamed about.
And now all he wanted to do was get as far away from that house as possible.
And after this day, April 9th, 2009, when Abraham and Didi chatted and Abraham spoke for the camera, Abraham just kind of disappeared.
And in the days and weeks following this day, Didi, Abraham's mom, and some of his other close friends and family did get occasional text messages from Abraham, but nobody saw him or talked to him on the phone.
And in the text messages he sent, Abraham always said that he was doing fine and he just wanted to be left alone, but he never said where he actually was.
And so Abraham's apparent decision to just leave without telling anyone really upset his mom.
They had always been really close and she had talked to Abraham almost every day for his entire life.
So now only getting a few text messages from him every now and again with kind of sparse information about what he was doing and where he was, was very difficult for her to deal with.
But like Didi, Abraham's mom had seen up close how people constantly came to Abraham for money and how that really weighed on him.
And she knew Abraham had started to imagine himself walking on a beach where nobody knew who he was and where nobody would bother him.
And so Abraham's mom and his other family and friends didn't try to find him.
They just kind of respected that he really just wanted space.
But then, fast forward to November 9th, 2009, seven months after Abraham was last seen by anybody close to him.
And on that day, Detective Dave Clark of the Polk County Sheriff's Department was sitting at his desk looking at a report that didn't make sense to him.
The Sheriff's Department had gotten a call from Cedric Edom, Abraham's cousin who owed him thousands of dollars.
And Cedric had said that his cousin had been missing since April and he wanted to file an official missing persons report.
Detective Clark, who had short blonde hair and a goatee, looked really young, but in reality, he had been in law enforcement for years and he had experience with almost every kind of case.
And Clark had a reputation for being one of the best listeners and one of the most objective officers in the entire department.
In fact, during interrogations, Clark was known to give suspects every chance to tell their side of a story because he genuinely believed in the assumption that people were innocent until proven guilty.
But as much as Clark had seen over the years, and as much as he tried to give people the benefit of the doubt, something about this missing persons report felt really strange to him.
If this man was missing, why had his friends and family waited seven months to tell the police?
Clark leaned back in his chair and read over the report again.
And this time when he read the missing person's name, his eyes went wide.
He grabbed a piece of paper and pen and started writing down some notes. because Clark remembered something that he hadn't thought of in years.
Clark knew who Abraham Shakespeare was because after Abraham had hit the lottery jackpot back in 2006, news stations in the area covered what they called Abraham's rags to riches story over and over for weeks.
So Clark now knew he was dealing with a potentially missing person who was worth millions and millions of dollars.
And when that much money was involved, there was always the possibility of foul play.
And so Clark wanted to get to work on this case right away.
And he wanted to start his investigation with the man who had filed the missing persons report.
Because Clark was interested in finding out why, after all this time, Cedric had now decided to come forward and track down his cousin.
A few hours later, Detective Clark led Abraham's cousin, Cedric, into an interrogation room at the Sheriff's Department.
And Cedric was combative almost from the moment he walked in.
He told Clark he didn't understand why he was being questioned, and he said he was the only one who seemed concerned at all about Abraham.
But Clark just smiled and asked Cedric to sit down with him at a small table in the cramped bright room.
And then Clark said that they had contacted Cedric and asked him to come in because he was the one who had contacted them.
And the police really just wanted to know what was going on with Abraham that had concerned Cedric enough to get in touch with authorities. cedric took a breath and tried to calm down but it didn't work and in a very angry voice he launched into an attack against a bunch of abraham's friends including dd moore and he said they were all really greedy people who took advantage of abraham and then cedric said he was almost positive that one of them had killed abraham and taken off with his money Clark listened and let Cedric talk for as long as he wanted.
And Clark thought it was a little weird how quickly Cedric had jumped to the conclusion that Abraham had been murdered.
But Clark didn't mention that. And when Cedric finally stopped talking, Clark smiled and talked to Cedric almost like they'd been friends for years.
Clark said he'd done some research right after getting the missing persons report.
And so he knew that Cedric owed Abraham thousands of dollars in mortgage payments on a house that Abraham had bought for him.
Cedric shook his head and the anger in his voice came right back and he said he loved his cousin and he reiterated that he was the only one doing anything to find him.
By the end of the interview, Clark was even more surprised than he had been by the missing persons report.
He didn't have enough evidence to hold Cedric, but he thought if something really had happened to Abraham, Cedric had to be at the top of the suspect list.
Here was a guy who hadn't said anything for seven months, who owed Abraham thousands of dollars, talked about a potential murder, and then immediately tried to put the blame on other people.
So Clark couldn't shake the feeling that Cedric might have contacted police in an attempt to cover his own tracks in some way.
But Clark was going to remain objective like he always did.
And even if he was potentially connected to Abraham's disappearance, there was also a chance that he was telling the truth.
And so maybe there really were friends of Abraham who were out to get his money in any way possible.
So, later that day, the sheriff's department subpoenaed the cell phone company in order to get a detailed account of Abraham's cell phone records.
But Clark knew that could take a while, so he dug further into some of Abraham's financial records and the list of people who owed him money was astonishing.
In the three years since Abraham won the lottery, he had loaned millions of dollars to people.
And this was just in the form of property expenses, medical bills, educational costs, and other loans that had a clear paper trail.
But Clark figured Abraham must have also been handing out money to people in his everyday life that he had not kept records of.
So, tracking down all the people who owed Abraham money would take time and resources.
Clark was willing to do whatever it took, but he still had no evidence, other than Cedric's word, that Abraham was actually missing.
Clark needed to get a better idea of what was happening, so he decided to talk directly to one of the people that Cedric had been eager to blame for Abraham's disappearance, Dee Dee Moore.
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On November 10th, the day after the missing persons report had been filed, Detective Clark found himself back in the interrogation room.
This time, he was seated across the table from Dee Dee Moore, Abraham's friend who wanted to write a book and make a movie about his life.
Dee Dee had on jeans, a t-shirt, and leather sandals, and Clark thought she was almost the exact opposite of Cedric when it came to interviewing her.
She smiled a bunch and seemed very easygoing, and she said she would tell him anything she could, but that she didn't really understand why she was there.
So Clark asked her, you know, when was the last time you spoke to Abraham?
And she said she had gotten a text from him somewhat recently, and that he messaged her from time to time just to see how things were going in her life and to tell her that he was okay and enjoying his time away.
Then Clark took a breath and got a serious look on his face.
He looked right at Dee Dee and told her that Abraham's cousin, Cedric, had said he was worried Abraham might be dead.
Dee Dee immediately looked confused and said she didn't understand because as far as she knew, she was texting somewhat regularly with Abraham.
And as far as she knew, Abraham had done exactly what he said he was going to do.
Take off to maybe a beach somewhere and never look back.
So Clark asked her why Cedric would have filed the missing persons report in the first place and why he might have pointed the finger at her as someone who might have wanted to hurt Abraham.
Dee Dee just shook her head and then she looked at Clark and said she had an idea why Cedric might come after her.
Clark smiled, and in his friendly voice, he asked Dee Dee to fill him in.
And Dee Dee said that she and Abraham's mom were two of the only people in his life who had pushed Abraham to follow up with everyone who owed him money and make them pay him back.
They said it was one thing to be a kind person, but it was another to get taken advantage of.
And they told Abraham that just because someone was family, it didn't mean they were entitled to get anything they wanted from him.
Clark nodded and asked if that had caused problems in Abraham's life, having people like Cedric around.
And Dee Dee's voice got a little louder and rougher, and she said Cedric prayed on good-hearted people.
And she knew that as much as Abraham wanted to see the best in others, Cedric would never pay him back a dime.
Detective Clark and Dee Dee spoke for a little while longer, and then Clark thanked her for her time, and after she left, he went back to his desk to look at his notes from both of the interviews he'd conducted over the past couple of days.
And as he did that, all he could think about was how badly he wanted to see Abraham's cell phone records.
Because Clark still didn't know if Abraham was dead in a ditch somewhere, like Cedric wanted him to believe, or if Abraham was just sipping piña coladas on a beach without a care in the world.
In the days following his interview with Didi, Clark kept digging into Abraham's financial records, and he and other members of the investigative team met with Abraham's friends, family, and as many people who owed him money as possible.
But Clark also discovered something new that caught his interest.
Michael Ford, Abraham's co-worker who had used Abraham's money to buy the winning lottery tickets, had filed a lawsuit about a year after Abraham had won the lottery.
In that lawsuit, Michael had argued that because he was the one who actually bought the tickets for Abraham, he was entitled to at least a cut of the winnings.
But Michael had lost his case in court, and Clark wanted to know if maybe Michael held a grudge against Abraham.
So Clark pursued this new potential lead.
But he discovered that Michael and Abraham had pretty much lost touch once the trial started.
And Abraham had even stated publicly that he didn't blame Michael for doing what he did.
And he said he would have been willing to give Michael hundreds of thousands of dollars if Michael had just asked him instead of going directly to the courts.
Now, none of this ruled out Michael as a suspect in Clark's mind, but there was no evidence putting Michael anywhere near Abraham in the days and weeks before Abraham had apparently disappeared.
So Clark knew he needed to keep looking elsewhere.
And Clark still felt like he was in the middle of one of the most bizarre cases he'd ever dealt with, because no evidence had surfaced that suggested anything violent or against the law had even happened to Abraham.
There was no body, there was no signs of distress at his house, and friends and family kept getting text messages from him.
So Clark kept reminding himself that Abraham was a guy with the financial means to truly just disappear if he wanted to.
But then at the end of the month, something happened that would turn Detective Clark's attention back to one suspect in particular.
On a day in late November, Abraham's mom contacted Detective Clark and said she had something to show him.
So Clark drove out to her house and Abraham's mom met him at the door and invited him inside.
The house was warm and comfortable and being there, Clark felt even more of an urge to discover where Abraham was just so he could put Abraham's mom's mind at ease.
Clark thanked Abraham's mom for calling him and for welcoming him into her house.
Then she led him into the living room and picked up an envelope from the coffee table.
She opened it and showed Clark a greeting card with a Christian cross on the front.
And she said when she'd gotten this card, there had been a $100 bill inside of it.
She handed the card to Clark and he opened it and he saw a scribbled note that said, "'I'll be home soon' and Abraham's signature underneath."
And Abraham's mom said that even though her son had trouble writing, he had always made sure he could sign his name.
And she recognized that was definitely his signature on the card.
Abraham's mom told Clark that she had gotten the letter about two months earlier, but she had forgotten about it.
She said she was sorry she had not shown it to him sooner.
Clark said that was totally fine and that he was grateful that she was showing it to him now.
And he picked up the envelope that the card had come in and he squinted his eyes, almost like he was trying to look for something that wasn't there.
Because there was no stamp or address on the envelope and it didn't look like it had been mailed from anywhere.
So Clark asked Abraham's mom how she'd actually gotten the letter.
And she told him her nephew, Abraham's cousin, Cedric, had hand-delivered it.
Just hearing that made Clark feel like his investigation had gone right back to where it started.
Then, without Clark saying anything, Abraham's mom said that even though Cedric was her nephew, she didn't always trust him.
And she didn't necessarily believe he was just trying to do right by Abraham by filing the missing persons report.
And then she looked Clark in the eyes and told him all she really wanted was to hear from her son.
If she could just hear his voice, she would know he was okay and everything would be fine.
Clark said he understood and he thanked Abraham's mom for all her help and told her he would keep her informed if he learned anything new.
Then Clark went back to the station and he told other members of the investigative team that he wanted to keep looking into Abraham's cousin, Cedric, because giving Abraham's mom a card with a hundred bucks and Abraham's signature in it seemed like one more way Cedric could be trying to cover something up.
And then Clark got some information that he was confident would break the case wide open.
The phone company had come back and they provided police with a detailed history of text messages sent from Abraham's number.
And something in those text messages stood out to Clark right away.
And by December, Clark believed he was closer than ever to finding Abraham.
On December 26th, 2009, so a month and a half after the missing persons report was filed, Abraham's mother was relaxing on the couch at her house.
Christmas had been a mixed blessing that year.
She loved seeing friends and family for the holidays, but not having Abraham around just hadn't felt right.
They had always spent Christmas together, and so the house kind of felt empty without him.
But then her phone rang. She leaned over, grabbed it off the coffee table, and almost started crying tears of joy because Abraham was calling.
The connection wasn't great, but she could hear her son on the other line, and that was all that mattered.
Abraham wished her a Merry Christmas and said he was sorry he hadn't called the day before.
And Abraham's mom said that was okay and that she just wanted to know how he was doing.
And he said other than dealing with a little winter cold, he'd been great.
And he knew him leaving had been very hard on people, especially her, but he felt like he'd made the right choice.
And he promised he'd be home soon, and when he did, he'd be much happier than when he left.
Abraham's mom hung up the phone and she felt better than she had in months.
And she wanted to call everyone she knew to let them know the good news.
She had finally heard from Abraham. She had heard his voice.
But first she thought she needed to tell the police.
So she took a deep breath, collected herself and called the sheriff's department.
On December 26th, right after Abraham's mom had gotten this call from her son, Detective Clark was sitting at his desk.
His phone rang and he picked it up and he could hear Abraham's mom almost shouting at him on the other line.
She told him about the phone call she'd just received from Abraham and how happy she was.
And so Clark thanked her for letting him know.
He wished her a Merry Christmas and then hung up.
But then he immediately made a call to the cell phone company so he could get a location on where Abraham's phone had been when he placed this call to his mother.
And when Clark heard what they had to say, he shouted across the room to a fellow detective and told him they needed to leave immediately.
Clark and this other detective ran out of the station.
They climbed into an unmarked car. Clark sat in the passenger seat and the other detective drove.
And before long, they were peeling out of the parking lot and heading onto the street.
It was a mild winter day in Florida, about 60 degrees Fahrenheit, but the sun was bright and Clark could feel himself sweating a little from the adrenaline rush.
Minutes later, they pulled off the road and into a parking lot of a huge shopping mall.
And when they arrived, Clark and the other detective saw the man they were looking for sitting in a parked car nearby.
But before the detectives could get out of their car, the man they were looking for drove off.
And so Clark looked over at the other detective and just said, chase him.
So the detective peeled out of the mall parking lot and raced down the street after this man in the car.
But the detectives realized they didn't have police sirens in their unmarked vehicle, so they couldn't signal to the driver that they were cops and they wanted to pull him over.
So the detective just tried to stay as close to the man they were chasing as possible.
Then finally, they came to a red light and the man they were after stopped.
And so without even thinking, Detective Clark threw open his door, he ran in front of this car, he held up his badge, and he yelled at the driver to get out and come with them.
The man in this car just stared up at Clark and then he slumped his shoulders and put his head down.
And later that day, after they had all talked back at the sheriff's station, Detective Clark knew where Abraham Shakespeare had been all this time.
Based on interviews and cell phone data collected throughout the missing persons investigation, here is a reconstruction of what police believe happened on April 9th, 2009 when Abraham first disappeared.
On that night, Abraham drove his car down a road in an upscale neighborhood in a town about 20 minutes away from his house in Lakeland.
Abraham had spent much of the day talking to Dee Dee on camera, and he was still thinking about getting away from Florida and kind of dropping off the map for a while.
But before he did anything drastic, he wanted to make sure he had enough cash on hand to just disappear.
And he hoped to avoid leaving a paper trail as much as possible so it would be harder for people to track him down.
So Abraham was on his way to the house of someone who owed him money and who had told Abraham that they had thousands of dollars in cash that they could give him.
While Abraham wound his way through the neighborhood, the person he was going to see sat inside their house and waited for Abraham to arrive.
And a few minutes later, they saw the headlights from Abraham's BMW outside.
So they went to the front door, stood in the doorway, and waved to Abraham as he stepped out of his car.
When Abraham got to the door, the person he was meeting with could tell that Abraham seemed down.
But they said hopefully getting some cash would cheer him up.
Abraham smiled and walked inside and followed this person through their living room and into a small home office.
Abraham stood in the middle of the office and the person he was meeting with walked across the room to a floor safe standing in the corner.
Then that person crouched down, they entered the combination for the lock and opened the safe.
And then they just waited there for a second.
Abraham asked if everything was okay. And this person said, yep, everything's fine.
I just need to make sure I grab the right amount of money.
Then this person reached into the safe, slowly stood up, turned around and aimed a gun right at Abraham.
A look of fear came across Abraham's face, but before he could turn to run, the person shot him right in the chest and blood began to stain his white t-shirt.
Then the person fired again and this bullet grazed Abraham's heart and perforated his lung.
The shooter casually walked across the room and stood over Abraham and they watched and listened as Abraham slowly died.
Then the killer put the gun back in the safe, then they went back to Abraham's body, crouched down, took his phone out of his pocket, and slipped it into their own pocket.
Then they grabbed Abraham's legs and dragged him out of the room.
Abraham was skinny, but he was very tall, so dragging him through the house was not easy.
But eventually they managed to pull Abraham to the back door, and then they dragged him out into the backyard.
A fence surrounded the yard, and it was totally dark out there except for some moonlight.
So the killer did not feel like anyone could see them, so they didn't rush.
They bent over, caught their breath, and then picked up a shovel that was laying in the grass.
Then they started digging a hole in the middle of the yard.
Finally, when the hole was deep enough, they walked over to Abraham's body, grabbed him by the legs, dragged him across the yard, and dumped him into the hole.
Then they took the shovel and filled the hole back in.
Later that night, they cleaned the bloodstains from inside their house and out in the yard, and then they found a phone number of a construction company that they planned to call the next day to place a concrete slab over the hole where they had just buried Abraham.
Then the killer went into the living room, hooked up their video camera to the television, and watched the recording they had made with Abraham earlier that day.
Dee Dee Moore, Abraham's friend who was an aspiring writer, had murdered Abraham.
It turned out that months before the murder, she had convinced Abraham to give her control of his finances.
And she had promised to play the bad guy and collect money from all of Abraham's friends and family who owed him.
And she even agreed to hold on to a large amount of Abraham's cash for him in her safe so he wouldn't be tempted to just hand it out to people who asked him for money.
And because Didi was a successful business owner, Abraham had believed she would be better at managing money and collecting debts than he could ever be.
So he thanked Didi for her help and put her in charge of millions of dollars in cash and assets.
And Didi had collected money from people who owed Abraham, but instead of giving the money to Abraham, she kept it for herself.
And she spent that money and some of the cash Abraham had given her on a brand new huge Hummer vehicle and other expensive items she wanted.
And for months, Didi had gotten away with it without anyone suspecting anything.
But then in the spring of 2009, not long before the murder, one of Abraham's friends started to catch on to what Didi was doing.
Because even though he was making regular payments to Didi to clear his debts with Abraham, she kept asking him for more money.
And when he got angry and said he had already paid what he owed, Didi worried he would tell Abraham and Abraham would find out that she had been stealing his money.
So Didi decided she would just get rid of Abraham, but keep collecting the money people owed him for herself.
But in order to do that, she had to make it seem like Abraham was alive and just wanted his distance.
And so when she filmed him on her camera, claiming it was for her book and movie, even though in reality she had no aspirations to write Abraham's story, she intentionally steered the conversation to how tired and frustrated he must be.
And when Abraham talked about wanting to escape to a foreign beach, Dee Dee knew it was time to put her plan into motion. so she told abraham to come to her house to get thousands of dollars in cash that she'd been holding for him in her safe and when he arrived she killed him and then used his phone to text his friends and family and then she showed some of his friends and family the video recording of abraham where he was talking about how he wanted to leave florida and go to a beach somewhere and just kind of disappear and be left alone And so naturally, his friends and family believed that that was what happened to Abraham.
He had chosen to kind of go away. And Didi almost got away with it.
But once Abraham was dead, Didi became relentless in her pursuit of his cousin Cedric.
And she called Cedric and came to his house all the time, demanding he pay back all of the money he owed Abraham.
And Cedric just wasn't going to do that.
And so finally, Cedric got fed up with Didi and he filed a missing persons report.
Now, Cedric did not actually believe that Abraham was dead, but by alleging that he had been murdered and pointing at Dee Dee as potentially the murderer, he knew that would launch a police investigation into Dee Dee and that would get her off of his back for at least a while.
And when Detective Clark got a record of Abraham's text messages, he was shocked at how well written and how formal they were.
After all, he knew that Abraham still struggled with reading and writing.
Then when Abraham supposedly called his mother on the day after Christmas, Detective Clark got confirmation that what he believed had been going on was going on.
Somebody in town had been using Abraham's phone and had been pretending to be him.
And when Clark traced Abraham's phone to the mall parking lot, he and the other detective saw Didi leaning into a car, handing over cash to a man and taking a phone back from him.
And when they chased that man down, he admitted that he was a friend of Abraham's who Didi had paid to call Abraham's mom and pretend to be Abraham.
And the man had told Abraham's mom on this call that he was fighting a winter cold to make up for the fact that he didn't really sound like Abraham.
Not long after that, Abraham's cousin Cedric came back to the sheriff's station and he admitted that someone had paid him to deliver the greeting card that Abraham supposedly wrote to his mother.
And it would turn out that the money Cedric was paid to make that delivery could be traced back to Didi.
And so, Cedric had been right about Dee Dee all along without actually knowing it.
With all of this new information and with Abraham's phone records, police determined that every text message that had been sent from Abraham's phone since he disappeared had actually been sent by Dee Dee.
And eventually, they learned that Dee Dee had hired a construction company to lay a concrete slab down in her backyard.
So, on January 27, 2010, over nine months after Abraham's murder, police went to Dee Dee's house and they broke up the concrete slab out back, dug up the ground underneath, and found the skeletal remains of Abraham Shakespeare.
And pieces of the t-shirt and jeans that Abraham had been wearing in the video that Dee Dee recorded on the day she killed him were still clinging to his bones.
Dee Dee was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole.
Abraham was given a proper burial and his family was finally able to grieve.
And his murder helped lead to a new Florida law that keeps the identities of large jackpot lottery winners private for 90 days.
And in a telephone interview from prison, Dee Dee surprised reporters and said she strongly supported this new law.
So that's going to do it. If you got something out of today's episode, be sure to check out our YouTube channel, just called Mr. Ballin, where we have hundreds more stories just like this one, many of which are not on the podcast.
They're only on YouTube. Again, that channel is called Mr. Ballin.
So that's going to do it. Until next time, see ya.
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