Na Cola Franklin: It was meant to be a joyous occasion, the wedding of long-term partners. It ended with the groom in the morgue and the bride in handcuffs.
Olga Hepnarova: Ever since she was a child, Olga had been at war with the world. Now, she’s checking out of this life. But she won’t be going alone.
Shaye Groves: The couple enjoyed kinky sex, sometimes involving ‘knife play.’ The problem with such things is that they can quickly get out of hand.
Chelsea Cook: The marriage was over. Travis was moving on with his life. Chelsea was having a harder time of it, seething with hatred, plotting revenge.
Tracy Lea Fortson: As a former police officer, Tracy thought she had what it took to pull off the perfect murder. A twist of fate would prove her wrong.
Huajiao Zhaung: Peter and Selina had a happy life until mother-in-law from hell, Huajiao, arrived for a visit. Then, things quickly turned toxic.
Gina Spann: A military veteran is shot to death on his front porch. But who killed him? His estranged 30-something wife... or her 17-year-old lover.
Jennifer Fletcher
“Does anyone else live here?” one of the officers asked.
“My daughter and my four-year-old grandson,” Diane replied.
“Where are they now?”
Diane replied that she didn’t know. The officers then drew their weapons and started a search of the house. The ground floor was mostly orderly, but the upstairs was in disarray, with drawers pulled out and clothes scattered all over the floor. Then one of the cops heard a noise coming from a bathroom. He identified himself as a police officer and ordered whoever was in there to come out. A terrified female voice replied that she did not believe he was a cop. The officer slid his badge under the door as proof. Moments later, the door swung open. A woman and a little boy emerged, clinging desperately to each other. Jennifer and Jacob Shanbrom were safe.
So what had happened inside this family home in suburbia? What terror had this mother and child been put through? According to Jennifer, she had been giving Jacob his bath around 7 p.m., when she heard a noise from downstairs, then raised voices, and then a gunshot. Terrified, she’d locked the bathroom door, sealing her and her son inside. They’d cowered there in terror, listening to the sounds of someone tramping through their home, terrified that they’d be discovered. They had remained there until the police arrived.
On the face of it, Jennifer’s story made sense. The city was in the grip of a crime wave at the time. There had been multiple break-ins in the immediate neighborhood over the last few months. But this one was different. This time, there was no obvious sign of forced entry, and the burglar had left empty-handed. Despite his thorough ransacking of the residence, he had somehow missed jewelry and a valuable coin collection that was on open display.
And, of course, there was violence in this case. A man was dead. The autopsy would reveal that Joel had been shot three times in the head with a .410 shotgun. The first two rounds were buckshot and had maimed but not killed. The third was a solid round that entered through Joel Shanbrom’s eye and severed his brainstem. This was the kill shot.
Something else would emerge from the autopsy, a problem with the timeline. Jennifer was adamant that the intruder entered the house while she was bathing her son at around 07:00 p.m. The medical examiner pegged the time of death later than that, sometime between 08:00 and 09:15, when Diane got home. Still, time of death is an inexact science. Perhaps Jennifer and Diane could shed some light on the subject.
Re-interviewed by detectives, Jennifer told much the same story. She’d been bathing her son; she heard raised voices, then a gunshot; she locked herself in. Diane said that she’d gone out on her own to dinner and a movie, something she often did to give her daughter and son-in-law some alone time. She returned home around 09:15 p.m. and found Joel dead on the couch. She did not see anyone in or near the house, although she did notice that the blinds in the living room were closed, which was unusual.
So this was where the police stood after 48 hours. A man shot to death in his own home during a botched burglary, no eyewitnesses, no forensics, plenty of questions. Why did the burglar leave valuables behind despite ransacking the house? How was it possible that Jennifer had heard an altercation when everything seemed to indicate that Joel was asleep when he was shot? Why the discrepancy around the time of death?
All of these questions led detectives to believe that there was more to this crime than a botched burglary. It is helpful, in such circumstances, to determine who might benefit from the victim’s death. In this case, the answer was obvious. Joel Shanbrom was heavily insured, with a $300,000 policy from his employer and additional life insurance worth $500,000. People have been killed for less. Just how solid was the Shanbroms’ marriage?
That depended on who you asked. Jennifer’s friends and family thought everything was great. Joel’s family said that the couple clashed frequently over finances, that they had lost their home to foreclosure, and that Joel was forced to work two extra jobs just to make ends meet. He wanted to go for marriage counseling. She did not. It was as though she’d already given up on the relationship. According to them, there was a good reason for that. Jennifer was cheating.
The third party in this supposed love triangle was a man named Matthew Fletcher. Fletcher worked as an insurance salesman for Primerica, where both Joel and Jennifer had part-time jobs. The three of them started hanging out together, but Joel soon began to suspect that there was something going on between Jennifer and Matthew. He confided in his sister, Barbara, that he was thinking of speaking to a divorce lawyer. He was dead before he got the chance.
Jacob Shanbrom was laid to rest on March 23, 1998. Both Jennifer and Matthew attended the funeral, but there was absolutely no emotion from the widow. Neither did she stay for the wake put on by Joel’s family. Instead, she and Matthew convened to a hotel, where they threw their own party, ordering several bottles of champagne from room service.
These details, however, would only emerge later. For now, the police were trying to determine if there was a case to answer. Jennifer and Matthew were brought in for questioning, where they both denied that they were anything more than friends. When a detective asked Matthew to account for his whereabouts on the night of the murder, he said that he’d had an appointment with a client in the San Fernando Valley at 07:00 p.m. This was, of course, the time that Jennifer claimed her husband was shot, a time the medical examiner disputed. It gave Matthew an alibi for the time of the shooting. However, no one could vouch for his whereabouts during the crucial window between 08:30 and 09:15.
Nonetheless, there was nothing directly implicating either Matthew or Jennifer in the murder, and they were free to go. Jennifer received her $300,000 payout from the LAPD but ran into a problem when she tried to cash in the additional $500,000. Joel had canceled the policy in the months before his death. It was subsequently reinstated in February 1998, but the insurance company was disputing the authenticity of the document. It believed that Joel’s signature had been forged and was refusing to pay. Jennifer did not press the issue, suggesting that the insurers were probably right.
Still, she and her lover had a $300,000 windfall to enjoy. Jennifer received her check in October 1998 and immediately transferred half of it into Matthew’s bank account. In February 1999, the pair traveled to Hawaii and tied the knot in a beach wedding. Matthew filed the paperwork to adopt young Jacob, and the couple subsequently had a child of their own. They were living the life, blissfully unaware that justice was coming for them.
By 2002, Joel Shanbrom had been six years in the grave. These were good years for his former wife and her new husband. They were financially secure, very much in love, building their young family with two children and a third on the way. They also had a weak link in their conspiracy of silence. The police had never quite believed the story that Diane Bates told them on the night that Joel was shot. They decided to circle back to her, to apply some pressure, to see if she would crack.
Brought in for questioning, Diane was initially steadfast in her resolve, repeating the story she had told six years earlier. But it is difficult to withstand a skilled interrogator, especially when you are selling a false narrative. Cracks began to appear, inconsistencies, outright lies. Eventually, Diane was backed into a corner where she was offered a stark choice – either come clean or spend the rest of your days behind bars. Offered full immunity in exchange for her testimony, Diane agreed to cooperate. With that in place, the police moved in and arrested Jennifer and Matthew Fletcher.
Diane Bates did not exactly stick to the terms of her plea deal when the matter came to trial. She was evasive on the stand, refusing to directly implicate Jennifer. Nonetheless, skillful interrogation by the prosecutor managed to coax several admissions out of her. Taken in conjunction with the circumstantial evidence, it was enough to convince a jury of Jennifer’s guilt. She was convicted and sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole. Jennifer Fletcher was pregnant on the day that she entered the prison system. Her third child was born behind bars. All three of her children were later adopted by her sister.
Matthew Fletcher appeared before the courts in March 2004. He chose to represent himself and was about as slick as you’d expect an insurance salesman to be. Fletcher’s argument relied heavily on his alibi, which, according to him, ruled him out as the shooter. Unfortunately for him, this was easily debunked. The argument presented by the prosecution was that he had finished his appointment in the Valley, then driven to Northridge, arriving around 8:30 p.m.
Joel was fast asleep on the couch when Jennifer let her lover into the house. It was she who fired the first two rounds, but she was jittery and pulled her shots. Despite the close quarters, much of the buckshot went astray. Joel was seriously injured, rendered unconscious, but not killed. Fletcher then took over, reloading the gun and shooting Joel through the eye, killing him. This was what the prosecutor theorized and what the jury believed. Matthew Fletcher got the same sentence as his wife.
Jennifer and Matthew Fletcher remain behind bars. Having exhausted all of their appeals, they have no hope of ever being free again. One has to wonder how they feel about that, late at night, when they are lying all alone in their cells. Was it worth it? Were six gilded years worth a lifetime in a cage? More importantly, was it worth the life of an innocent man?
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