A Tangled Web

by Leslie Rule

  Ray couldn’t understand why his moms didn’t like Shanna and hoped they’d change their minds when they got to know her. He and Shanna had met at the plastic factory where they both worked in Battle Creek, Michigan. She ran the press, and he was attracted to her from the moment she first smiled at him. He’d just moved from Tennessee, where it seemed that all of the women he’d met were gold diggers, not interested in a guy without a lot of money. After being on his own for a couple of years, Raymond was flattered by Shanna’s flirting.

  But he soon realized his new girlfriend had problems. “She was a cutter, but I think she did it for the attention.” Her wrists were often covered with razor scratches, but he never saw signs she’d done serious damage.

  Shanna was unreasonably jealous of female coworkers. Once, after Ray had an innocent conversation with a woman at work, Shanna snapped, “What did that bitch want?” He realized his mothers had been right, but he’d become too attached to Shanna to walk away. The fact she was living with him at his dad’s house made it even harder to break up. They bickered frequently, but when they were getting along, they liked to go to the movies or to their favorite restaurant—Battle Creek’s Big Boy Fast Food. One afternoon, in early 1998, they were eating at Big Boy, when Shanna smirked triumphantly and announced, “I’m late.”

  It was a shock, but Raymond was determined to take care of her and his baby. “Let’s wait for the right moment to tell my parents,” he urged. She nodded but blurted out the news the minute she found herself alone with his stepmother. Ray was annoyed but tried to overlook Shanna’s quirks. The baby was due in August, and he focused on getting things ready. He bought a trailer, so they could have their very own place to raise their family. It wasn’t exactly a mansion, but it was clean and cozy and located in a trailer park with friendly neighbors. He expected Shanna to be pleased, but she had other ideas. She was eight months pregnant when she suddenly moved into twenty-one-year-old Neil Munson’s house.

  “He’s just a roommate!” Shanna insisted. Raymond wanted to believe her, but Neil glared at him when he visited. Shanna told Raymond not to worry about it and invited him to spend the night. Neil rushed outside and got into his car, loudly revving the motor outside their bedroom window. Neil was behaving like a jealous boyfriend, but Shanna insisted there was nothing romantic between them, and she had no idea why he was acting so strangely.

  Instead of settling into nesting mode, as most pregnant women do, Shanna was restless, flitting about from place to place and man to man. Sometimes she stayed with Ray, sometimes with Neil, and sometimes at a women’s shelter. Raymond couldn’t help but wonder if the baby was really his. But when Cody Nathaniel Golyar entered the world on August 25, 1998, Ray realized the six-pound infant looked exactly like his own baby photos. This was his son, and he loved him instantly. But it soon became clear that Neil was Shanna’s boyfriend. The betrayal stung, but Ray wanted to be in his son’s life. Things were so strained between Shanna and Ray that he saw Cody only a few times over the next months. “He was a colicky baby,” Ray remembers, “But I was able to soothe him.”

  Raymond and Neil had something in common. Both had mothers who’d taken an instant dislike to Shanna. “I got a bad vibe from her,” remembers Gloria Munson, adding that she could see Shanna was manipulating her son. “He’s slow. He believes what people tell him. He was always kind of naïve. If he thinks that you know what you’re talking about, you could tell him the sky is really fluorescent purple, and he’d believe it.”

  Gloria and her husband, Stan, owned an old house they rented to Neil and his brother, Larry. When Gloria discovered Shanna had moved in, she asked her to pay rent. But Shanna was always broke, despite the fact she’d gotten a job at the convenience store where Neil worked. She barely contributed to the household but lived with Neil, off and on, after Cody was born. Neil had his own baby, Gavin, a few months older than Cody, and he helped Shanna take care of her newborn. The oldest of Gloria’s six kids, Neil had helped care for his younger siblings from the time he was school-age and had also helped with the many foster children the Munsons raised. Neil and his ex, Rachel, shared custody of baby Gavin, but Neil wanted full custody. Rachel had almost agreed to it, until she saw something that alarmed her. “Rachel called me,” Gloria recalls, “and she was upset because Shanna was swaddling Gavin, and he was seven months old—much too old for that.” It was as if the baby were wearing a little straitjacket, his arms bound to his sides, unable to move. “Shanna didn’t want the kids moving. She didn’t want the kids to do anything!”

  When Gloria confronted Neil about Gavin’s swaddling, he explained, “Shanna says it’s the best thing for him.” Gloria put her foot down. She would not allow her grandson to be subjected to any more of Shanna’s peculiar mothering and told Neil “Rachel is going to keep your son until we know what’s going on.”

  Gloria has powerful maternal instincts, and in addition to her biological and foster kids, she adopted a special-needs child. A hands-on grandma, she helped Neil care for both Gavin and Cody. She worried about Cody, who seemed to be a very unhappy baby. Shanna said he was just colicky, but he should have grown out of that by the time he was three or four months old. Cody cried incessantly—until January 29, 1999. Neil and his mother went grocery shopping at about 9:15 that morning, taking Cody along while Shanna worked. Gloria was struck by how unusually quiet the infant was.

  Later, back at Neil’s place, they set Cody down on the rug and played baby games with him. He was oddly subdued but didn’t look ill. Cody hadn’t cried the entire time Gloria was with him that day, and she still hadn’t heard a peep out of him when she left after noon. When she returned around 5 P.M., she stepped straight into a nightmare. Neil was dozing in a chair, and when she checked on Cody, she realized he wasn’t breathing. She shouted at Neil to call 911. As Gloria performed infant CPR, she could hear Neil on the phone. “I remember him trying to give his address, and he couldn’t do it totally,” she says adding that her son seemed confused by whatever the dispatcher was asking. Stan arrived and took over the CPR while Gloria grabbed the phone and gave directions to the emergency operator. Police beat the ambulance to the scene and took Cody to the hospital in their squad car.

  Gloria was worried sick about Cody and asked Neil if anything unusual had happened. He said Shanna had called him at work the night before and cried, “I dropped the baby! Get home!” But Cody had seemed okay when Neil got home. He was definitely not okay when officers rushed him to the Battle Creek Health System Emergency Room. The baby had no heartbeat. Doctors administered two courses of resuscitative drugs to restart his heart, but he couldn’t breathe on his own, and his pupils were fixed and dilated. He was intubated and transferred to Bronson Methodist Hospital. Dr. Robert Page pronounced Cody Golyar dead at 12:40 A.M., January 30, 1999. The cause of death was “shaken baby syndrome (SBS).”

  Neil was devastated. The infant had gotten sick on his watch, and the young man suffered both guilt and grief. At 5 A.M., cops put an exhausted Neil in the back of their squad car and grilled him. Neil acknowledged that he often playfully tossed Cody into the air to make him giggle. The police taped the conversation but admitted later that they didn’t start recording until they’d prompted Neil to incriminate himself.

  Neil was trying to be helpful. The mentally challenged man was sleep deprived, probably in shock, and had a tendency to get confused, especially in stressful situations. This was the second time in twelve hours he’d been questioned, and he’d already stated there was nothing unusual about his play with Cody that day. But they kept repeating questions and didn’t seem pleased with his answers.

  Neil eventually told them what they wanted to hear. He finally said he’d shaken the baby. Shaken him once. But Cody’s death was not caused by a gentle jiggle or bouncing on a knee. Did Neil understand what they meant by shaking? Probably not. Dr. Page testified that Cody’s injuries were the result of twenty seconds or more of vigorous shaking. Apparently, the officer didn’t unders
tand SBS either because he fixated on the tossing game—a potentially dangerous activity but not the cause of Cody’s death. Officer Stone testified, “Mr. Munson told me that he often would play with the baby by tossing the baby in the air and catching the baby. He described it as setting the baby on a knee and kind of tossing him up in the air and catching him. He advised me this is how he often played with the baby. I asked him if anything out of the normal happened this day, if he had played with the baby any differently, and he said basically no . . .” Unsatisfied with Neil’s response, Officer Stone pressured him. “When I asked him if he could’ve thrown the baby higher or whatever, he said, yeah, he could have. I tried to get—I asked him distance-wise and if it could have been a foot. He said, yeah, maybe it was—it was even a little over that. I asked him how many times he had thrown the baby in the air and caught him, and he said he would estimate five.”

  Neil had affectionately played the game with Cody to get him to smile, and while the National Center on Shaken Baby Syndrome (NCSBS) warns that activities such as tossing a baby in the air and bouncing a baby on the knee, “can be dangerous and are not recommended, they will likely not cause SBS injuries.”

  Someone had shaken Cody violently, but there was no proof Neil had done it. And no one could prove when Cody was shaken. SBS “symptoms can start quickly, especially in a badly injured child. Other times, it may take a few days for swelling to cause symptoms,” reports Cigna, a global health service company.

  Several people had interacted with Cody in the days leading up to his death. Cody’s own mother had claimed she’d dropped him. Had she done more than that? Was Shanna fed up after five months of Cody’s nonstop wailing? Had she shaken him and then concocted the dropping story to make possible injuries appear accidental?

  No one knows the answer to that, but observers noticed that Shanna didn’t behave like a typical grieving mother. Within a day or so of Cody’s death, Gloria ran into her at Walmart and was shocked by her cheerful mood. Shanna was with an older couple, and the woman smiled at Gloria and said, “We’re treating Shanna to a new wardrobe today!”

  Gloria was taken aback when she saw how excited Shanna was about the shopping spree. “Shanna looked so happy, she didn’t act like a mother who’d just lost her baby.”

  Raymond, too, was baffled by Shanna’s behavior. Numb with grief, he was more confused than ever as she bounced between him and Neil. But Neil was soon out of the picture. Police decided Neil had hurt Cody, and they arrested him. After he went to jail, Shanna slept with Raymond. It was the night before the funeral. One of Raymond’s darkest moments came as he watched Shanna by Cody’s tiny coffin, with a small group gathered around her. She whipped out photos of Neil’s baby. “They were passing the photos around,” remembers Ray. It hurt him to see Shanna, smiling proudly at the photos of this other baby, when her own infant lay motionless, within her reach, but already forgotten. “It was so inappropriate,” he remembers. “That was not the place to be doing that.”

  Today, Ray is a happily married father and an Army Sergeant First Class, and he regularly trains new recruits. In a poignant moment in 2018, as he checked his clipboard and glanced at the birth-date of a young man standing before him, he felt a lump rise in his throat. August 25, 1998. Cody’s birthday! Ray realized if his son had lived, he’d be the age of this man, twenty and healthy with a long life ahead of him. Once again, he was rocked by the loss of all that could have been.

  He’s always suspected Shanna was involved in his child’s death, and remembers that police, too, suspected her at one time. She may have been a suspect, but Neil took the fall. When he was arrested and charged with second-degree murder, the Munsons hired defense attorney Morris Astene. But the best attorney in the world can’t help a client who isn’t upfront with them. Neil was clearly under the spell of Shanna Golyar and trusted her word above all others—trusted it more than the advice of the attorney his parents had paid to save him.

  As the December 1999 trial got underway at the Calhoun County District Courthouse, The Battle Creek Enquirer quoted Astene’s opening statement: “Neil Munson didn’t do it. The mother did. The night before, she called and said, ‘I dropped Cody. Get home.’ My client is covering for a dysfunctional, abusive mother.” In a photo with the article, a bespectacled, baby-faced Neil appears dazed by the courtroom commotion.

  He was as easy for Shanna to manipulate as a handful of Play-Doh. Today, a long list of intelligent and embarrassed men have been forced to step forward and publicly admit she duped them. If Shanna could trick experienced detectives and men with genius IQs, how could an intellectually challenged twenty-two-year-old who thought he was in love understand her games? Gloria Munson’s first impression of Shanna had been spot-on. She’d sensed Neil’s girlfriend’s sneaky influence would hurt him, and she was right.

  On the second day of Neil’s trial, Gloria waited in the hall outside the courtroom, anxious to take the stand and share what she knew. But she never got the chance. That opportunity was snatched away by a questionable witness who brought the trial to an abrupt end and sealed Neil’s fate. Gloria didn’t recognize that witness when she first appeared. “If she hadn’t turned and looked at me, I wouldn’t have known it was Shanna.”

  Shanna was in disguise! She wore a wig, a dingy shade of dishwater blond that flowed past her shoulders, and a skirt with a hem that brushed the floor as she sailed passed. As it so happened, the grieving mother was a fugitive from justice! She would later insist that the felony warrant was nothing more than a misunderstanding. She hadn’t really meant to steal a car. Even so, if the wrong person at the courthouse recognized her, she could go to jail. She was the state of Michigan’s star witness in a murder trial, and she arrived incognito to avoid arrest in the other matter.

  Shanna took the stand in her strange getup, and would spend the next seventy minutes destroying the young man who believed that she loved him. Assistant prosecutor Karen Ounst knew she had to air Shanna’s dirty laundry before her opponent got a chance to. Morris Astene would surely use Shanna’s crimes to discredit her, so Ounst diffused the impact by bringing them up first. With Ounst’s prompting, Shanna acknowledged two standing felony warrants for “Unlawful use of my roommate’s car” and “Driving while my license is suspended.” She also admitted she’d been arrested for shoplifting in 1996.

  The prosecutor next wanted to establish that Cody was healthy the morning Shanna left him with Neil—something Gloria was prepared to refute. Shanna testified, “He was fine, normal. Laughing. And I just got him out of bed to get him dressed, so I could go to work.”

  Ounst asked about the call to Neil on the night before Cody was stricken. This was the infamous “I dropped the baby” call, and records from the phone company could confirm a call was made at about half past eight, but only Shanna and Neil knew what was said. Ounst asked, “Why did you place a call to Neil Munson?”

  “Just to see when he was getting out of work, and if he was going to need a ride home or what.” Shanna next testified that Neil was careless, and it was up to her to pick up the knives and bullet casings he left lying around within the infants’ reach.

  Gloria, still waiting in the hall, would have been horrified to hear Ounst’s next line of questioning. Apparently, sometime before her testimony, Shanna had reported that Gloria had confessed to shaking Cody. Gloria, who had raised a number of children and never had an issue, was now being accused of the worst thing imaginable by the odd little woman in the wig. Shanna claimed Gloria had phoned her the day after Cody’s death with a startling admission. “I was just called and told that she could have shaken Cody.”

  “Okay. And when you called the police, why did you do that?”

  “To inform them.”

  “Okay. Now, was that the first time Gloria Munson told you that she may have shaken the child?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right. Did she indicate under what circumstances she may have shook the child?”

  “No.”


  “What was your reaction when she told you that?”

  “I was just upset and confused.”

  The first time Gloria learned of the accusation was in March 2019 when I read her parts of the trial transcripts over the phone. She wasn’t really surprised to hear Shanna had plotted against her, but was floored by something else I revealed. For the first time, Gloria learned why she didn’t get a chance to testify and why Neil’s trial had come to a screeching halt. Shanna sat on that stand in her bizarre outfit and read seven letters she claimed Neil had written to her from jail. Those letters convinced the jury that Neil was responsible for Cody’s death and allowed Shanna to dance out of that courtroom and flee the state of Michigan. She hurried back to Omaha, far away from the felony warrants and people who whispered that she had shaken her child.

  There was just one little problem. It’s unlikely Neil authored the letters that sent him to prison. When I read them to Gloria, she laughed out loud. “Neil would not have been able to articulate so well,” Gloria told me. “He has a learning disability.”

  While we now know that Shanna is a pathological liar, and that forging confessions to frame others for her crimes is her M.O., no one at that 1999 trial had the ability to peer into the future and know that she would one day impersonate innocent people in over 20,000 emails. Certainly, Karen Ounst believed Shanna was truthful when she questioned her about Neil’s handwriting. “Did you recognize his handwriting in every one of the letters?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Shanna testified. The writing on the envelopes bore information indicating they were mailed from the jail, but that, too, could have been forged. The one-time suspect in Cody’s death was permitted to identify Neil’s handwriting, and no one challenged her. Not even Neil. As his client sat silently beside him, Morris Astene had no reason to suspect the letters were fakes. They were supposedly written in May 1999 and contained dramatic passages such as “I wish I could have you in my loving arms one more time. Please understand I’ve lost something very special to me. I’ve lost a son that I loved very much. Also, I lost his mother as well.”