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.”
The flowery, romantic wording was as foreign to Neil as the complex sentence structure, Gloria insists. “Neil” wrote that he missed Shanna’s “beautiful face” and that he wished he could “hug and kiss your beautiful body from head to toe and make sweet love to you all over again.” He proposed marriage, and even signed one of the letters, “Love your husband, Neil John Munson.”
The fourth letter, dated May 10, 1999, contained the first damaging passage:
. . . As my wife to be, I need you to come back up here and tell my attorney that on Thursday, the 29th of February the reason you called me from work at eight-thirty p.m. was because you had dropped Cody from about four feet, which then caused Cody to stop breathing. So then, you shook Cody, not to do any harm, but to get him to start breathing again. Please Shanna, this is what will set me free because they are trying to pin it on me. Please, I love you with all my heart and soul . . .
Cody had actually died on January 29th, but the letter writer had forgotten that. The fifth letter, dated May 11, made things