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