scrawled on the wall in red crayon: “Go away whore.” Liz’s destroyed garments included two shirts and a pair of sweatpants, but Dave’s clothing had not been touched. This latest vandalism would eat up many hours of Omaha law enforcement’s time. Detective Prencer soon became involved, and investigators processed the scene. Officers canvassed the area but couldn’t find a single person who’d noticed anything suspicious on December 12. Not only were there no witnesses, the intruder had left no fingerprints. The police didn’t guess that Liz had staged the scene, that she’d cut her own clothing, removed the screen from the window, and written the message on the wall. She had everyone fooled and told her dark secrets to no one.
Most of the people in Liz’s life were aware she had problems but had little understanding of how deeply those troubles ran. They didn’t really know who she was, and as of this writing, neither does she. Liz is unaware that the middle name she has embraced as her own for most of her life is not the one her mother gave her. She was not born Shanna Elizabeth. She was Shanna Kay. Her mother called her that, all in one breath. Never just Shanna, but always Shanna Kay.
Liz was very young when she was separated from her biological family. She knows of her mother’s fate, but not her mother’s birth name. She is unaware of her father’s identity and might be surprised to realize he was alive until 2007, residing in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in the same apartment he’d moved into with her mother three decades earlier.
Liz is still unaware her aunts have been searching for her since the state of Michigan cut their ties with her in 1978, days before her third birthday. After long hours of research, I found one of those aunts. I wrote to her, hoping my letter wouldn’t come as a shock. I wasn’t sure if I had the right family, but if I did, I figured they surely must be aware of Shanna’s conviction. Even so, I chose my words cautiously. I mentioned prison but not murder. I gave the aunt my phone number, and sent the note off to the ten different email addresses I had found online, hoping that one of them was correct.
Fifteen minutes later, my phone rang. Shanna Kay’s Aunt Camila had no idea what had become of her, and it was up to me to tell her. She knew that Shanna was in prison but was aware of that fact only because she’d just learned it from my email. I stalled, reluctant to speak words I knew would hurt her. “It’s pretty bad,” I warned. “A tragedy.”
“My whole life’s been a tragedy,” Camila replied with a sigh. “I can take it.”
“Shanna was convicted of murder,” I said.
Camila gasped, and I was relieved when she didn’t ask for details. She was remembering the sweet little girl she’d spent decades searching for. How could I tell her that that child had grown up to be a monster? Over the next days, we spent hours on the phone. Little by little, Camila began to ask questions, and I gave her the answers as gently as I could, never volunteering details she had not asked for. I knew she needed to digest the information slowly, but it didn’t take long for Camila and her sisters to find the episodes about the murder produced by NBC’s Dateline and the Oxygen Channel’s Snapped.
In my long conversations with Shanna’s aunts, we talked about what causes an innocent child to grow up to be a killer. Is it nurture or nature? They, too, hope to find answers and opened their hearts to share some very personal and painful things. While I knew they’d be shocked by the things I had to tell them, I wasn’t expecting to be shocked by the things they had to tell me.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
MOST OF WHAT I’VE LEARNED about Shanna’s roots came from her birth family. While they did their best to recall the past, their memories of long-ago events sometimes differed from each other’s. Scandalous accusations were made against relatives, both living and dead. Pseudonyms are used for most of Liz’s birth relatives, and some horrendous details about things impossible to prove have been omitted. The dead can’t stand up and defend themselves, and it would be unfair to repeat some of the worst and possibly untrue things told to me.
By exploring Shanna’s past, I hoped to find events that might explain