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