incarcerated for brutal crimes. While several male relatives have violent histories, it is interesting to note that Shanna has a first cousin, a few years younger than she, who is currently serving time for a vicious attack. Henrietta was arrested in Michigan in 2016, a few months before Shanna. At one time a beautiful woman, fresh faced with even features and long, dark hair, a series of mugshots show a quick progression of aging, probably a result of hard living. In the summer of 2016, Henrietta attacked her boyfriend, Bob, with a board, splitting his head open and breaking his ribs.
“He pulled a knife on her first, and they were drunk,” Henrietta’s mother, Jean, explains. “Bob didn’t want to press charges, but it wasn’t up to him.” Henrietta was given a maximum sentence of ten years. Bob has forgiven her, and he is patiently waiting for her release. He is about thirty years older than Henrietta, but only five feet tall, and at 5′8″, Henny not only towers over him, she outweighs him by seventy pounds. “I don’t know what happened to her,” Jean says sadly. “She used to be normal. She was in the Peace Corps.”
While Jean recalls that her daughter was once a gentle soul, another relative remembers that this was not the first time she reacted violently, and they claim that when she was a young girl, Henrietta once hit another child with a shovel.
While Shanna’s biological family seems to have more than their share of dysfunction, there are a number of relatives who were very good people, including Camila’s only daughter, Sherry, and granddaughter, Arianna. Camila lost both in separate accidents, just one month apart in 2014.
Arianna would literally give someone the shirt off her back. The teen was waiting for the school bus one icy morning when she noticed a girl, shivering, without a coat. Arianna peeled off her sweatshirt and gave it to her. When Arianna was only twelve, she heard about a campaign to encourage people to become organ donors. She immediately wanted to sign up, and she took it upon herself to get the paperwork and fill it out. At her young age, parental consent was required, so after her mother signed, Arianna mailed the form.
When Arianna lost her life at age fifteen in the car accident, several people’s lives were saved because she was an organ donor. Camila is rightfully proud of her granddaughter. She taught good values to her kids and granddaughter, and she believes that if she had been allowed to raise Shanna, things might have turned out differently. If indeed Shanna’s problems are a result of both nurture and nature, it’s possible that the right nurturing could have made a difference. Would Shanna have lived a more gentle existence if her Aunt Camila had raised her? No one will ever know.
CHAPTER TWENTY
WHEN THE WIND IS RIGHT, Battle Creek, Michigan, residents can step outside and inhale the sweet scent of toasting cornflakes. The brothers Kellogg invented the cereal by accident in a Battle Creek sanitarium in 1894 while trying to create healthy meals for patients. Will left some boiled wheat out too long, and when it got stale, he and brother John tried to turn it into dough but ended up with flakes. They toasted it, the patients loved it, and breakfast of the future was born.
Also known as Cereal City, Battle Creek is still the headquarters for Kellogg’s, the breakfast giant currently employing over 35,000 worldwide. Over the years, thousands of locals have toiled in the Battle Creek plant, including Shanna’s foster father, Jack Parsnoll. He and Nannette raised a houseful of kids, most foster or adopted, and Shanna would one day complain she felt stifled by her foster mother’s religious views. It couldn’t have been too uncomfortable, however, because Shanna continued to depend on the family into adulthood, even living with them for a while after Kellogg’s transferred Jack to Omaha in the mid-1990s.
The Parsnoll family had suffered losses over the years, and Nannette credits her faith for giving her the strength to get through it. She was a teen in 1975 when she lost her older sister in a snowmobile accident, and the family was rocked again when Shanna’s foster grandmother, Elsie Parsnoll, was murdered at age forty-six in January 1981. Elsie’s ex-boyfriend, Drake Leeds, was ten years her junior, and in what sounds very much like stalker behavior, followed her into a Battle Creek lounge, pulled out a gun, and shot her in the side.