Their relationship was volatile, even toxic.
[Jeffrey] The card said, "Roses are red, violets are blue,
my wife's cheating on me, your husband too."
It seems like he wants revenge, and she tells friends
that he's been stalking her.
I saw him read the message and I was like,
"Is everything OK, dude?"
And he goes, "No."
He told me that something bad had happened on the property.
[dog barking]
[reporter] Investigators are searching areas where cadaver dogs have
indicated there might be human remains here.
Everyone is uneasy about what they might find there.
There were some sort of foreign objects
buried under the dirt.
I thought we've got something going on here.
[theme music playing]
[theme music continues]
[theme music concludes]
This was one of the most mysterious cases we've covered
recently here at People.
Childhood sweethearts whose love went south.
And when things got violent,
even the cops weren't sure who was telling the truth.
[ominous tones playing]
[reporter] Tanya Winchester says she watched as Lake County
detectives made a discovery while digging
in her neighbor's backyard.
I did see that law enforcement kind of circled around the site
and took off their hats, and it looked like they had
said a prayer.
♪♪
[Tina] Michael and Laurie Shaver seem to be the epitome
of the fairy-tale couple
and have been inseparable pretty much their entire lives.
They were both born in the same small town
of Laurens in upstate New York and grew up across the street
from one another.
[Strickland] Laurie was the youngest of five,
and one of her brothers was special needs.
She stuck up for her brother and took care of him at school
to keep people from bullying him.
[Jeffrey] It was a relatively close family structure,
but the father was working full-time.
I think it was financially a struggle for the family.
Mike Shaver's parents divorced when he's young.
He and his two siblings live with their mom full-time.
[Strickland] Mike was close with his family.
He was a hard worker and was a little bit of a clown.
[Cory] Mike, he was an amazing person.
He was always smiling,
and you never really saw a frown on his face.
[Tamara] Mike and Laurie started dating in eighth grade, so they were
middle school sweethearts. -[school bell rings]
A high school friend, she said that Mike was
Laurie's little pet.
[Cory] He loved Laurie unconditionally,
would do anything for her, move heaven and earth.
[Tina] Michael has always been obsessed with aviation.
He even dropped out of high school and went
to flight school instead before working at a regional airline.
The people that we spoke with say Laurie was a sweet person
who was easy to talk to and liked to have a good time.
Laurie was working as a claims adjuster
for an insurance company.
It was convenient for her to be at home,
and they wanted to get married and start building a family.
[Tina] Laurie and Michael married in 2004 when they were
in their early 20s and soon welcomed
their daughter, Isabelle, and son, Aiden,
into their family.
[Jeffrey] Laurie as a mom was kind of like a mother hen.
She really felt the need to protect the children.
Those kids were the center of Laurie's life.
[Cory] Michael Shaver was very family oriented.
You know, every time we talked about his kids,
you would see a glow in him.
[Tina] Michael and Laurie wanted more space for their growing family,
so they moved to Florida where they could afford
a large plot of land.
By 2014, they're fixing up their five-acre dream property
in the town of Clermont, a rural suburb 25 miles
to the west of Orlando.
[Jeffrey] It was kind of like a mom-and-pop farm.
They had some pigs and chickens and some ducks.
Mike is a regional airline pilot, but that requires him
to be away from home for long periods of time.
That starts to wear down on Laurie and the kids,
and it impacts their marriage.
[Tamara] Sometimes that would lead to some frustration
between Mike and Laurie.
So he quit that job for his family and started
working at Disney.
[Strickland] He originally started out as a mechanic working
on Spaceship Earth at Epcot.
[Cory] Mike absolutely loved it.
He loved being able to bring his kids to the park
and them knowing that their dad was
a part of making magic for Walt Disney World.
[children chattering indistinctly]
[Tina] With Mike working at Disney, everyone is seemingly happy.
But all of this would soon change.
[tense music playing]
[phone ringing]
[Strickland] Laurie Shaver tells the dispatcher that they were
doing a home improvement project,
and they started getting into an argument
and it got heated.
She's in a Target parking lot at that point, very upset.
EMS checks Laurie out, and deputies do see
some bruises on her arm
and some lacerations on her hand,
which corroborate her story.
While they're doing that, the deputies respond
to the home to make contact with Mike.
He gives his side of the story, which is similar
but kind of opposite.
He said, "Laurie threw a vase against the wall.
"If she says I grabbed her arms, I probably did
to calm her down."
Mike says it didn't work and things escalated fast.
Laurie went into their bedroom and got her pistol, pointed it
at her head, and said that she was gonna kill herself.
[Tamara] According to Mike, he wrestled that gun
away from her, unloaded it,
and then she got another gun and hit him in the head.
With two very different stories, the police don't know
who to believe, so they tell Mike and Laurie
that they'll have to arrest them both.
But with both of them in jail, there would be no one
to watch the kids.
The deputies would have had to have called the Florida
Department of Children and Families.
Mike didn't want the kids to be without their mother.
So he raised his hand and said, "It was me, I did it."
So Mike Shaver ends up getting arrested for domestic battery.
[Cory] Mike, he wasn't proud of it.
He considered that as, like, a dark mark on his life.
[Tina] Mike is released on bail, but just how and why did these
childhood sweethearts get to a place where Laurie is
calling 911 for domestic violence
and Mike is being arrested?
According to Michael's friends, it started a year earlier,
when Mike discovered that Laurie was
having an affair with her boss.
[Tamara] Mike told Laurie, "I forgive you for what happened.
I just want my family back."
[Tina] But later that year, it happens again
with another man who catches Laurie's eye.
[Tamara] Laurie meets a guy named James Ballew.
Pretty quickly, James starts coming over to the house
while Mike is working at Disney, which develops into an affair.
Mike works the overnight shift at Disney World.
This allows Laurie plenty of time
to indulge in her affair with James.
But that changes when James' wife discovers
what her husband has been up to.
[Strickland] Mike Shaver got a message from James Ballew's wife one day
exposing the affair between Laurie and Mr. Ballew.
James's wife even showed Mike Shaver pictures
of Mr. Ballew and Laurie together.
That was an eye-opening experience for Mike.
The relationship is really starting
to head towards a disaster.
And shortly after that, Laurie had mentioned to a friend
that she thinks Mike would kill her.
[reporter] Investigators are searching areas where cadaver dogs had
indicated there might be human remains here
on this acreage where the Shavers shared.
[Tina] In March of 2018, a team of deputies
and crime scene investigators
from the Lake County Sheriff's Office
swarm a five-acre property in the rural outskirts
of Clermont, Florida.
[dog barking]
The dogs hit on a pile of dirt at the rear of the property.
We brought the ground penetrating radar in
and learned that there were foreign objects
buried under the dirt.
I thought, we've got something going on here.
[Cory] I had heard that Laurie was seeing somebody.
So I asked Mike, "Is everything OK at home?"
And he was like, "No, not really.
I found out some news."
[Strickland] Mike had found out that Laurie has had two affairs
in the past year and a half, so there's animosity between them.
The affair sets Mike off, and he confronts
Laurie about James,
leading to the altercation on September 4th
and his arrest for the battery.
After Mike's arrested, he gets out on bail,
but he's not allowed to go back home because of a court order.
[Strickland] So in Florida, when somebody's arrested for domestic violence,
whoever is charged with something has to leave.
[Jillian] He's got limited options for places to stay,
but Mike is a member of an air racing club
called Precious Metal.
So he ends up staying in an airplane hangar
associated with his racing club.
Laurie still lives at home with the kids.
At this time, Laurie said she was very uncomfortable
when Michael was around.
[Tina] During the months that Michael is not allowed to live
with his family, he attempts to mend
his relationship with Laurie.
But at the same time, he meets a woman
named Kendall, who also works at Walt Disney World.
[Tamara] In November 2014, Mike ends up asking out Kendall.
He tells Kendall that he is married, but separated,
so she is aware of that, and they begin dating.
Eventually, Laurie finds out about the relationship,
and even though she's having her own affair,
she's livid that Mike would cheat on her
and demands that they break up.
When Laurie found out, she told Mike
that he wasn't gonna be able to see the kids anymore
if he continued to date other women.
[Strickland] Laurie found Kendall on Facebook and started messaging her,
calling her a homewrecker.
And in spring of 2015, Laurie called HR at Disney
and filed a complaint against Kendall.
And at this point, Kendall kind of backed away from Mike
and said, "I can't deal with this."
Towards the end of the spring in 2015, the charges
against Mike for domestic battery were dropped.
It's not uncommon.
There's pretrial intervention,
counseling that can be mandated.
When the charges are dropped, Mike can move back
into the house, which he does.
Mike and Laurie thought it was probably better for the kids
to have both parents back in the house.
[Tamara] But Mike and Laurie's relationship hasn't really
changed or improved.
Some days they seem to get along great,
and other days, they're back to arguing.
Mike tried not to talk about Laurie as much as possible,
and there were days where I could see that he had gotten
into a fight with her, because his demeanor
would change.
It almost looked like he was breaking down.
I think Mike had thought about getting divorced several times,
but he was more afraid that he was going
to lose his kids in the divorce.
I did hope, you know, nothing happens
between the two of them.
[ominous tones playing]
We spent several hours digging in that location
that the dogs hit on.
[dog barking]
We're sifting, using sifters in the dirt and shovels
and trowels, and trying not to disturb anything.
[Strickland] Our dig area got bigger.
The bigger it got, we quickly realized
that we needed to call in some heavy machinery
to help us dig.
[Tamara] With each foot that we dig down, the team is expecting
to find a bone, article of clothing,
some type of human remains.
While we're digging in this area
in the back of the property...
...we come across .38 caliber bullets.
After Mike moves back home, although things aren't
easy between Mike and Laurie, for the next six months,
the Shavers try to get along for the sake
of seven-year-old Isabelle and five-year-old Aiden.
And on November 7th, they take the kids to a local
tractor show with Mike's coworker, Frank Merritt,
and his family.
[Strickland] According to Frank Merritt and his wife, there was
definitely some tension between Mike and Laurie that day.
At the show, the Merritts got separated from the Shavers,
and then Mike texted him and said, "Hey, the kids aren't
feeling well. I'll have to leave early."
[Cory] When we came back to work from our weekend
and Frank and I were talking about the show,
we noticed Mike was not there.
Our boss, John, had walked up to Frank and goes,
"Hey, have you happened to hear from Mike?"
And Frank goes, "No, not since the other day, why?"
He goes, "Well, Mike didn't call in."
And I looked at Frank and looked at John,
and we're like, "That's not normal."
So John was like, "You know, I'm gonna call him."
[phone ringing]
Mike's boss at Disney tried to get a hold of him,
didn't get any answer.
[Tina] Mike isn't at work the next day either,
and now his co workers are really getting worried.
And once again, they text and call him.
It was Frank that got a text message from Mike.
And I was like, "Is everything OK, dude?"
And he goes, "No."
Investigators have been looking for evidence
and now they believe they did find something just moments ago.
[shovel thuds]
[Cory] On Wednesday, Frank got a text message from Mike
saying, "I'm going through some stuff right now.
"I quit. Keep my tools.
Just leave me alone."
And I was like, "That's not like Mike at all."
[Strickland] It's odd, but Frank said that he was just gonna back off
and give him his space so that he could work things out
and he would come back whenever he was ready to.
[phone buzzing]
[Tamara] And then on Thursday, which is the 12th, his boss got a text
that said, "Hey, I'm in Georgia.
"Just fire me or I'll quit.
I'm not coming back anytime soon."
[Jillian] Frank feels like this doesn't sound like the Mike
that he knows.
He decides to go over to the Shaver house
and see what's going on for himself.
Frank drives to the Shaver house and goes to the door.
[knocking]
Laurie answers.
Frank asks, "Where's Mike?"
Laurie told Frank that they had gotten into a fight
and Mike left with a friend and she thought that
he went to Georgia where his mom is.
Frank and I were very, very worried that something was
not right.
That was not like Mike.
[birds calling]
Over the next few weeks, friends, coworkers, family are
texting and calling and messaging Mike.
[Strickland] Nobody's ever able to get him on the phone,
but occasionally he will respond to text messages,
which are usually short, abruptly end, saying things
like, "Leave me alone. I don't have a family anymore."
I tried messaging Mike a few times on Facebook.
"We're always here, dude, whenever you need us."
I never got a response, but I know it was read
because if anybody knows social media,
you can see when somebody's picture
drops down below and you know it's read.
[Strickland] According to text messages, it seemed like Mike was done,
had just given up on his marriage,
given up on his family, and who knew where.
As the holidays pass, Laurie accepts that Mike is gone
and keeps living her life.
And at the end of 2015, she meets fellow parent
Jay Townsend in the pick-up line at her children's school,
and they begin to date.
There's just one problem, that Jay is still married.
Jay did tell Laurie that he and his wife were separated,
but that wasn't true.
So the relationship between Jay and Laurie abruptly ends
when Jay's wife discovers the affair.
[Tamara] Within a year, there's still no sign of Mike Shaver,
but Laurie meets another man named Travis Filmer.
Travis was a youth coordinator at his church he attends.
Him and Laurie hit it off pretty quickly,
and within a few months, Travis had moved in to Laurie's house.
Laurie and Travis decide to get married, but she's still
legally married to Mike.
Although the family has texted with him over the last year,
no one has actually seen or spoken with him.
So Laurie and Travis decide to hold
a commitment ceremony in their backyard.
The Shaver children think that their dad, Mike, has left
and isn't contacting them.
Travis has become the father figure in their home.
Laurie and Travis worked to make their house their home.
They constructed a fire pit and put their initials
in the fire pit, along with a heart.
Then, out of nowhere, Jay Townsend's wife reaches out
to Laurie about a delivery she received.
[Tamara] In April 2016, Jay's wife receives
a flower delivery at work.
But they're not from Jay.
The card has a little cryptic message on it.
The card said, "Roses are red, violets are blue,
my wife's cheating on me, your husband too."
And the end of the note reads, "Check your Facebook,
we need to talk, Mike."
[Tina] The affair with Jay has been over for months,
so Jay's wife finds it a little odd.
Mike tells her that he has installed a spy app on Laurie,
his wife's phone, due to his suspicions of the affair,
and that he has captured several text messages
and photographs between Laurie and Jay.
[Jillian] It seems like Mike wants revenge for Laurie's affairs,
and she tells friends that he's been stalking her.
[Strickland] Laurie says that Mike keeps popping up.
She'll see him driving beside her.
Laurie felt the need to protect the children
and protect them from Michael.
But after all this time, no one has seen Mike in person
except for Laurie.
[Strickland] Two and a half years after Mike was last seen,
one of Mike's close childhood friends
ends up calling the sheriff's office
to find out what's going on.
[phone ringing]
[Tamara] The sheriff's office responds
at the Shaver residence to investigate.
Laurie answers, says, "No, Mike's not here."
The deputy asks if he can walk around.
She's very cordial and friendly, and she says,
"Yes, you can do that."
The deputies look around the property
and all seems normal, but when they get
to the fire pit, one of them notices something strange.
The deputy then notices a darkened area, kind of like
a depression in the concrete.
The deputy asks her, "Have you ever buried
any of your livestock here?" She says, "No."
And he asks her, "Well, is your husband buried here?"
She says, "That's ridiculous."
At that point, her demeanor changes.
She kicks him off her property.
She doesn't wanna talk about the fire pit at all.
Knowing that no one's seen Mike in about
two and a half years, except for Laurie,
the Lake County Sheriff's Office
launches a missing persons investigation into Mike Shaver.
[Strickland] So, with the knowledge that he had been texting his family,
I thought, "Surely this guy is alive somewhere."
Maybe Laurie was just offended by the line of questioning,
and that's why she told the deputies to leave,
and we just need to find him.
In order to find Mike, detectives start looking
into his digital footprint.
You typically can't just fall off the face of the earth,
so my first step was to start seeing, where is
he spending money? Is he getting paid?
Once we started getting his bank records back,
we realized that most of the activity had stopped
early November of 2015.
That was odd.
The tractor show was the beginning of November 2015.
That was the last time, that we know of
anybody seeing Mike.
We saw no record that he had worked anywhere, filed taxes,
had a cell phone, used a credit card.
His driver's license had expired.
He didn't renew it anywhere in the country.
His FAA medical had expired,
which means he wasn't a pilot anymore.
What that told us was either Mike was completely living
off the grid somewhere...
or that he was dead.
To find out where Mike is, alive or dead,
I wanted to talk to Laurie, but Laurie's already told us
that she won't talk to us.
So I went and talked to Travis, Laurie's now husband,
and Travis told me that Laurie had told him
something bad had happened on the property.
[Tamara] Travis said, "It's not that Mike is missing,
"it's that he's no longer walking the earth
and there's a body on the property."
On March 9th of 2018, we executed a search warrant
on the Shaver property.
[dog barking]
Using ground-penetrating radar and the cadaver dogs...
...the team discovered the bullet casings,
but they still haven't found signs of a body.
We started thinking about this fire pit.
We haven't even touched it.
As the sun's starting to go down, we start digging
a little bit to get the heavy concrete out of the way.
And probably about two, two-and-a-half feet
under the concrete pit,
I hit something hard with the shovel.
Immediately, I knew that we had found
the remains of Mike Shaver.
[reporter] We do have breaking details here.
We can tell you that they have found a arm bone in a fire pit
behind the home here that the Shavers shared.
[Tamara] We returned the next day to the Shaver house.
We were able to find almost a complete skeleton...
wrapped in a tarp secured with ratchet straps.
The remains were dressed in socks, shorts,
underwear, and a T-shirt.
We saw what appeared to be a bullet hole in the skull.
We don't have a confirmation yet
that this is Michael Shaver, but what are the odds
of another set of human remains being
on Laurie Shaver's property while Mike Shaver's missing?
Obviously, we will be working with
the medical examiner's office to get the identity confirmed.
The Shaver family sees their son's house on TV,
gets in their car, and drives down there.
[Strickland] I spoke with the Shaver family.
Mr. Shaver was quiet, reserved.
Trying to process everything was of course, difficult for him.
[Tamara] We still had to positively identify the body.
So we obtained DNA from Mike Shaver's dad
and positively and quickly identified him through DNA.
We were really hoping that we could find him
and, you know, say, "Hey, you gotta be in touch
with your family better." But it was Michael Shaver.
[Cory] News came on, and it said, "Breaking news, body found
in backyard."
And all of a sudden, I see Mike's picture
up on the screen. And I'm like...
no.
At that point, I just -- I started to cry.
And...
I looked at my wife and I said, "That bitch murdered him."
Mike's remains were autopsied and it was discovered
his cause of death was a single gunshot wound
to the back of the head.
And his manner of death was homicide.
The projectile used to kill Mike was still in his skull
when we found the body.
And it was determined to be a .38-caliber class projectile.
I called Laurie and told her that we discovered
human remains in her backyard.
[phone ringing]
So after I told Laurie that we found
human skeletal remains in her backyard,
she said, "Thank you,"
much like you would at a drive-thru
or a grocery store when you check out.
[chuckles softly]
I think that a normal person, their response is gonna be
a little bit more...
dramatic than the one that I received.
I immediately thought to myself,
"This woman killed him."
[Jillian] At this point, authorities believe all signs
are pointing to Laurie Shaver, but they're looking
for more circumstantial evidence to build their case against her.
[Tamara] Although having your husband's body buried on your property
does make Laurie look guilty, that doesn't 100% guarantee
that she's the person who killed him
or who put him there.
According to the autopsy, we knew that Mike had been
deceased for quite a while, but this didn't match up
with Mike's social media and texts at that time.
So one of the things we did was look back at times
when his family thought they were texting him
or he was posting on Facebook and try to find out
who was actually behind that social media presence.
We noticed that after November of 2015, when Mike would update
his Facebook page or make a post, the IP address would
come back to the same IP address that Laurie,
sometimes within a few minutes, would use to update
her Facebook, which told us that these posts,
they were being made at the same location.
Knowing she's under suspicion for Mike's murder, Laurie Shaver
reaches out to her attorney, Jeffrey Wiggs.
Early on, Laurie Shaver relayed to me
that she had not shot Michael Shaver.
We met with the prosecutor, and I said, "Well, there's
some other actors in this."
Laurie's attorney gave us two names.
One was Jay Townsend,
and the other one was James Ballew,
the men that Laurie had affairs with in the past.
And when we interviewed Jay and his wife, his wife told us
this story about the flowers and the months' worth
of text messages between her and Mike,
who we now know was most likely deceased when that took place.
I found that flowers had been purchased using Laurie Shaver's
bank account, so that was a clue that Laurie is the person
that sent the flowers and not Mike.
That was a pretty big slip-up from Laurie.
In September of 2020, the prosecutor believes
that they have enough circumstantial evidence
for an arrest.
Breaking at noon, the wife of a man whose remains were
found buried in a backyard has been arrested
two years after the discovery.
[reporter] The Lake County Sheriff's Office just arrested
Laurie Shaver on a warrant of second-degree homicide.
[Tina] Laurie, however, maintains her innocence,
and while out on bail, she even posts a video
to YouTube asking people to donate for her legal fees.
I'm coming before you guys today just to let you know
that we have our suspicions, but I don't know why I've been
targeted, why I've been set up
or charged with this heinous crime.
I am not guilty.
Laurie told me Michael was really very controlling.
He battered and abused her for years, and it was
an atmosphere of a lot of violence.
100%, it broke my heart to have Mike painted in that light
because, honestly, I don't think he had
a bad bone in his body.
Laurie's out on bail for about four years, and it finally goes
to trial in September 2024.
[Tina] As the trial begins, no one could have anticipated
the surprise theory the defense puts forward of how Mike died.
Laurie and Mike's 16-year-old daughter, Isabelle,
who would have been seven years old at the time
of Mike's death, is called to the stand.
The story was that the seven-year-old heard
Mike and Laurie getting into an argument in the house.
[voice trembling]
[sobbing]
[Tina] Isabelle is referring to Jay Townsend,
whose full name is Jereme Townsend.
According to Isabelle, Laurie had met Jay
a month before Mike disappeared.
[Tamara] Seemingly out of nowhere, Jay appears to deal
with the situation.
Mike's still alive, so he grabs the gun from her
and shoots him again.
Tells Laurie to, "Take the kids to school.
I'll take care of the body."
But when they cross-examined her, you can see that
that doesn't make sense.
There's just one problem.
There was only one bullet hole in the back of the skull.
[Cory] It pissed a lot of us off that she would try
to blame this on her daughter.
What mother would let their daughter take the fall
for their crime?
[Jillian] This is totally different than what Isabelle told investigators
back in 2020.
When Mike's remains were first found, she said that she has
no idea what happened to her dad and that he just disappeared.
[Tamara] I've never met Laurie, but just from investigating
this case, she seems to manipulate even those
she loves the most to get what she wants.
Laurie wanted it to be essentially
a self-defense claim, but she couldn't take responsibility
and say, "I shot Mike."
Someone else had to shoot Mike.
A seven-year-old can't dispose of a body.
She couldn't take responsibility for that even.
Her boyfriend had to swoop out of nowhere
and dispose of the body.
Later in the trial, Laurie Shaver takes the stand
in her own defense.
I had recommended that Laurie not testify, but I think
she wanted to get her word in.
Laurie's testimony lines up pretty closely with Isabelle's.
The trial lasts about a week, and the jury comes back
with a decision in less than a day.
[dramatic music playing]
Michael's family, you could tell
there was just a sense of relief.
It had been nine years for them from the time they last saw him.
Elation.
We were very happy.
This was a long time coming.
Finally, they got to see the end result,
and justice served.
While this will not bring our beloved Michael back,
our family can finally, after all these years,
start to get closure.
When I learned she was guilty of killing Mike,
I dropped down to the ground on my knees and I cried.
My friend finally got justice.
But then I was like, "Crap, what about the kids?"
[Strickland] When you see the Shaver kids hearing that their mom is
guilty of second-degree murder and then going to prison
for the rest of her life, I mean, there's no winners.
After the trial, Michael Shaver's parents filed
a petition to gain custody of those kids.
But Laurie's given Travis, her husband, power of attorney
to take care of the children.
[Tamara] I do feel this was an abusive relationship,
with Laurie being the abuser.
I think that what prevented him from coming forward was
he wanted to keep his family together
and he wanted to be a father to his kids.
Ultimately, that abuse led to the extreme,
and Laurie murdered Mike.
[Cory] Having Mike in your life was a blessing, because the level
of dedication that he showed to not only his kids
and his friends is unparalleled.
You will never find that in most people.
He was always that man you could depend on every single time.
Mike is definitely truly missed.
There's honestly not a day that goes by that I actually
don't think about him. I think about him quite a lot.
[somber music]
[music continues]
[Dispatcher] Boston 9-1-1.
There were so many bizarre elements to this case.
[Newscaster] 25-year-old Mariah Wilson shot multiple times.
Whoever did this, it was a very personal act.
[screaming]
I want to hear from you. I think you know what happened.