Crime Weekly - S3 Ep148: Shad Rock Thyrion: Taylor Schabusiness' Insanity Plea (Part 2)

Episode Date: October 6, 2023

On February 23, 2022, in the early morning hours, Tara Pakanich was sleeping at her home in Green Bay, Wisconsin, when suddenly, she heard a slam from the storm door. Tara wasn't too worried because she thought it might be her son's friend, Taylor Schabusiness, leaving. She got out of bed and noticed that the basement light was on. Curious, she decided to go downstairs to see if her son, 24 year old Shad Thyrion, was still there or if he had left with Taylor. Upon reaching the basement, Tara searched for Shad but couldn't find him. Just as she was about to return upstairs, something unusual caught her eye - a black five-gallon bucket placed on the floor right next to the staircase, concealed by a towel. Tara lifted the towel, and what she discovered was beyond anything she could have ever expected. It was her son’s severed head. Try our coffee!! - www.CriminalCoffeeCo.com Become a Patreon member -- > https://www.patreon.com/CrimeWeekly Shop for your Crime Weekly gear here --> https://crimeweeklypodcast.com/shop Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/CrimeWeeklyPodcast Website: CrimeWeeklyPodcast.com Instagram: @CrimeWeeklyPod Twitter: @CrimeWeeklyPod Facebook: @CrimeWeeklyPod ADS: 1. Curology Now, get up to 6 skincare products FREE–up to a $52 value–with free shipping, and a no-cost consultation with a licensed dermatology provider when you go to Curology.com/CRIMEWEEKLY. 2. IQBAR Now get twenty percent off all IQBAR products, plus get FREE shipping. To get your 20%, just text WEEKLY to 64000. 3. ALO Moves Find the health and wellness routine that works for you with Alo Moves! Go to ALO MOVES.com and use code CRIMEWEEKLYVIP in all caps for thirty days free plus twenty percent off an annual membership.  4. Prose Take your FREE in-depth hair consultation and get 15% off your first order today! Go to Prose.com/crimeweekly.

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Hello, everybody. Welcome back to Crime Weekly. I'm Stephanie Harlow. And I'm Derek Levasseur. There's a fly in my recording booth, so let's just hope for the best, because it keeps flying within two centimeters of my head, and I might lose my mind. So, it's going to be a long episode. So, should we just talk about CrimeCon next week? Yeah, no, definitely. Let's just dive right into it. Plus, we have the interview tonight with Dr. Mahandi, which is going to make this long episode even longer for you guys. So, get some popcorn, get ready, because as you canness part two, and I'll give you a little quick recap. Right after Shad Therian's severed head was found in his mother's basement, the Green Bay police had a solid suspect, Taylor Shabizness, who had last been seen with Shad. Officers arrested Taylor and took her to the police station where she gave a very detailed confession describing how she had strangled Shad with a dog collar, then sexually assaulted and dismembered his body. Following this confession, Taylor was charged with first-degree

intentional homicide, mutilating a corpse, and third-degree sexual assault. And due to the graphic nature of the crimes, there were immediate concerns about Taylor's mental state and whether or not she was competent to stand trial, which I think we can definitely understand. In mid-March of 2022, Taylor was sent to a mental health facility where she underwent an inpatient evaluation by a psychologist. In April 2022, Taylor returned to court for a review of her first competency evaluation, and Judge Thomas Walsh declared her fit to stand trial. But then, her defense attorney requested a second evaluation, telling the judge, quote, she's been psychiatrically hospitalized multiple times. She's been diagnosed with bipolar and

psychotic. This may have been one of her better days, however. I'm very surprised at the result of this report, end quote. So what he's saying is she may have talked to the psychologist on one of her better days, and he thinks that there's something not right with her. And so he's super surprised that the psychologist deemed her to be fit to stand trial. Now, we were talking to Chris Mahandy, Dr. Chris Mahandy earlier, and he kind of said something along these lines where, you know, being declared competent to stand trial and being declared, you know, legally insane or not insane are two separate things. And we're going to, you know, talk about that when we hear from his interview. Yeah, I thought that was great. I never thought about because we were talking before we hit the record button. We mentioned it in the interview too, but I was using the word

competent and he's like, whoa, whoa. He's like, stop real quick. No, that's different. Competent to stand trial is one evaluation. And then he was saying sane or insane during the commission of the crime. So there's two different defenses there that you could be making. Hey, you could, he basically gave the example. And I think this was before we started recording, you could be perfectly sane during the commission of the murder, but then something happens in the meantime, whether it's being in prison or whatever, where you do have a psychotic breakdown and you're no longer competent to stand trial. So I was like, Oh, you know what? It's a great point. You can be both. So he has a million good takes, but that's, that was one of them where I'm like, you know, that's why you get paid the big bucks, buddy.

Exactly. And, I mean, I think that Taylor was, I think she was fit to stand trial, right? Because Dr. Chris said, can she sit in the courtroom and hear and understand what's happening? Then she's competent to stand trial. And basically, yes, she could, right? She talked to the police. She admitted what she had done. She was very calm and concise about it. And she seems to have an understanding of what she did.

Judge Walsh agreed to a second opinion, and the defense hired a doctor to conduct the evaluation. On May 19th, Taylor was back in court for a follow-up competency hearing where both the prosecution's and defense's experts testified. The judge began by asking Taylor if she believed she was capable of standing trial, and she replied that she was not. Next, Dr. Deborah Collins took the stand for the prosecution to testify about the evaluation she had conducted. She told Judge Walsh about her meeting with Taylor, saying, quote, I would characterize her as cooperative, responsive to my questions, so she didn't require a lot of redirection, for example. There were certainly moments where her expressed emotions were odd or out of context in the interview, but at no point did she appear distracted, end quote. Dr. Collins detailed Taylor's history of mental health struggles, which began when she was in the seventh grade,

just a year or so after her mother suddenly passed away. Taylor's teachers reported problems with attention, concentration, and disruptive behavior in school, and she was sent for evaluation and treatment. Subsequently, Taylor was diagnosed with ADD or ADHD and was prescribed medications like Vyvanse and Adderall. That same year, Taylor was hospitalized after a suicide attempt, during which she placed a knife to her throat but was interrupted in the act by her father. Taylor was also given mood stabilizers, antidepressants, and antipsychotic medications, and she continued psychiatric treatment until she turned 18 and stopped taking medication due to negative side effects, claiming she, quote, felt like a zombie, end quote. It's crazy to me

that she was on all of these medications before the age of 18, right? Antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, antidepressants, Adderall, all at the same time and all before the age of 18. That's a lot. You know, it's interesting. I guess it didn't play. You gave it away last episode where you basically said that she was found, you know, to be sane and all this stuff as far as competent for trial. So it's one of those situations where it's surprising that having this history before this incident didn't maybe weigh into it. But I guess at the end of the day, they're not looking at the history. They're looking at her mind state at the moment when the act occurred. And the ability, again, I don't want to steal too much, but Chris saying that the decision to use methamphetamine and that's all a conscious decision that you're making beforehand, which would define you as being

sane and your ability to make the decision of right and wrong. That was very interesting when he said that because I'd never really thought about it before like that, like the use of drugs. He said, choosing willingly to put a substance in your body does not count as like a legit mental illness, even if that't allow that to be a form of defense where you can say, listen, I'm a good person. I've never done. I didn't hurt anybody, but I was literally terrified for my life. But some people have adverse reactions to marijuana where they become like psychotic. It's very rare, but it can happen. So even if you make a choice to smoke a plant that everyone else has no problems with and everybody else gets chill and you turn into like a monster, that's still not a defense, which is crazy. And it seems like that one, if you do go that route, especially if you're on drugs, that's

harder to get. I almost would think that the defense being, if you can do this, a crime of passion where in that moment, something happened that enraged you, like you walking in on your spouse or something, that's an easier thing for people to understand than saying, hey, listen, I was temporarily insane because of these drugs. As Chris said, that's not a good enough excuse for most courts. So even if you're a good person, even if you've never committed a crime in your life, you can never hurt a fly, you decide to make the conscious decision to take a drug, understanding that there are possible side effects, well, then you're held responsible for actions you do

while under the influence of those drugs. Well, most of these drugs we're talking about, what do they do? They alter your brain. They alter the way your brain is working. So you should understand the implications, negative and positive. Yep, especially meth.

I mean, she's been using it long enough. I think her history of using it, she knows what it can do. Exactly, that's what I'm saying. This is somebody who uses it regularly. Yeah, she's a habitual offender. She knows what she's doing. So it wasn't the first time she had taken it and had some adverse reaction. She's like, ah, I've never done this before. Like she knew. Yeah. I can't wait you guys to hear the old one because it was even things he was talking about as far as, you know, what these

types of people, maybe they haven't been charged with a crime for, but what they might be doing in their personal time, what videos they're watching, books, I'm like, makes total sense. He would want to, he was, it was great. I'm not going to say anything else. I'm stealing too much. So in April and May of 2021, when Taylor was 23, she was hospitalized again after a second suicide attempt. During this stay, she was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and bipolar disorder. Dr. Collins testified that Taylor was dependent on many substances, including alcohol, cocaine, Xanax, and meth, which she had been injecting intravenously up to nine times a day for several

months. Literally at that point, I don't even think your brain is functioning properly anymore. But once again, this is her decision to do this. Dr. Collins stated that Taylor didn't exhibit signs of psychosis and despite her drug use, there was no evidence of hallucinations or other effects impairing her judgment. Dr. Collins believed that Taylor understood the court proceedings and the potential consequences, which Taylor knew included the possibility of life imprisonment. Dr. Collins said that in her expert opinion, Taylor was fully competent to stand trial. And remember, this is the doctor that the defense hired, I believe. Yeah. Yeah. And I also think it's important too,

because you laid it out perfectly. At no point when Taylor was being interrogated by law enforcement, that she say, oh, I thought, you know, he was a lion and he was attacking me and I had to kill the lion because it was going to kill me. No, she said, I knew who it was. This was a form of like foreplay we had done, you know, that he put the chain on voluntarily. I knew what I was doing. I could feel his heartbeat in my chain, but I was gratified by the feeling that I was getting from it. So I continued doing it. And I think that's important because yes, she was impaired by the meth, but not in the way where it could be, the argument could be made that she was in the right state of mind. She was basically in another planet inside her own head and didn't even realize what she was doing. It's quite the opposite. She told law enforcement exactly what happened, how she did it, and what

she felt in those moments, including what she did after this whole situation, which reaffirmed that she was basically turned on by it. She was turned on by the whole thing. Yes. She made the conscious decision to continue choking him when she knew he was dying, right? Yep. She basically said- Yeah right yep she basically said hallucination basically said i knew he was i was killing him and i was kind of enjoying it so i just i kept going and that's another thing right like are you mentally insane you could have moments of insanity psychosis the point is at the moment of the crime, did you know the difference between right and wrong? Did you know what you were doing was wrong? I think she did. I think you even said, like, she said to the cops, like, oh, yeah, I know, this is fucked up.

That's fucked up, she said. That's fucked up. I mean, she reaffirmed it. Fucked up usually means wrong, right? Yeah, she definitely knew what was going on. Yeah. And I correct myself, Dr. Walsh, I mean, Dr. Collins was actually the prosecution's doctor. Okay. Dr. Tracy Luchetta testified on behalf of the defense, stating in regards to Taylor's overall evaluation, quote, she responded cooperatively, yet there were many aspects of her statement

that made me concerned about her cognitive functioning, her thought process. She voiced a statement very early on that was very peculiar and seemed consistent with the delusional beliefs." Dr. Luchetta testified about how Taylor said when her mother Marla passed away, Marla took Taylor's heart and gave it to a pedophile who was using it to control her. Dr. Luchetta also noticed that Taylor did not seem to understand the consequences of her actions, and Taylor had even mentioned that she might face the death penalty if convicted, which Luchetta found concerning because Wisconsin doesn't have the death penalty. Dr. Luchetta admitted that in the end, she couldn't make a

clear decision about Taylor's mental competence. Now, listen, remember that she's speaking to Dr. Luchetta after she speaks to Dr. Collins. Dr. Collins, who's the prosecution psychiatrist, and Dr. Luchetta is for the defense. Is it possible that between two psychiatrists, two mental health professionals, her defense was like, yo, you had it way too together with Dr. Collins. We're going to need you to act a little bit more crazy when you talk to Dr. Luchetta, okay? Say some weird things. Say something that seems like you maybe are in a state of psychosis. Just make some shit up. You're good at that. So I really find it hard to believe that one doctor could be like, yeah, she seems to understand what's going on.

And then she talks to another doctor and she's like, well, she did have some delusions. She did have some, you know, issues. Yeah. I think, I don't think you're wrong. And I think there could be even more at play where you have situations where, yes, this is to some degree a science, but the assessment process by each and every doctor, whether it's a psychologist, a psychiatrist, or an actual medical doctor that you're dealing with for an injury, they could all look at something and it'd be the exact same and interpret it differently based on their process, based on how they assess. Or their biases. Well, that's the second part, right? So the first part is unbiased, just really just the way they

perceive things. You have scientists who look at different, look at our climate, right? And not to go there, but different talk to different scientists. They feel differently about the climate. And I'm not saying one way or the other, Jesus, don't, please don't come for me on that one. But to what you just alluded to, even if it's not malicious and its intent, the fact that you're hired and being compensated or paid for by the prosecution or conversely being paid for by the prosecution, or conversely being paid for by the defense, they are smart enough to know why they are there. And could that skew their judgment based on their own, their bias now knowing that there's an expectation that they're, you know, even though it's not said that there's an expectation

of who they're representing, who they're being paid by. And could that come in on both sides and influence their assessment of that particular person? Of course. We're all human. Absolutely. And these experts in most cases are getting paid a lot of money. So, yeah, if you want to keep working in that field, it behooves you to come back with results that are in line with whoever's paying you. Yes.

And, I mean, we have to keep in mind Dr. Collins for the prosecution was like, no, she's fine to stand for trial, right? The defense's doctor, Dr. Luchetta was like, I can't make a decision. So that kind of also tells me something like she could literally not even say, yes, this person is not fit to stand trial. She was like, well, I kind of saw some stuff that was like concerning, but this is a mental health professional. And she's like, probably she can see through when it's an act. And she doesn't want to say for sure because she doesn't know. But at the end of the day, she still cannot make the decision and state with her chest,

this person's not competent to stand trial. Yeah, I'm with you. She's trying to give him enough. Like, hey, I'm doing my best here. But she's not trying to like... Yep, not trying to ruin her career. So obviously the defense and the prosecution are going to argue about these two sort of contradicting assessments. And the defense argued to the judge

that Taylor wasn't receiving psychiatric treatment at the time. And they suggested her mental state had worsened in two weeks, the two weeks between evaluations. So they're like, that's why she seemed perfectly fine at one. And then the next, she seemed completely worse, like her mental state worsened. And the prosecution brought up the fact that a person can show signs of a mental illness and still be capable of contributing to their defense and

participating in the trial, which is exactly what Dr. Chris Mohandy said. And ultimately, Judge Walsh sided with the prosecution and ruled that Taylor was competent to stand trial. So we're going to take a quick break. We'll be right back. On July 5th, Taylor appeared in court for her formal arraignment. She remained silent during the proceedings, so a not guilty plea was entered for all three charges against her, and a trial was scheduled to begin in October of that year. A few months later, on September 1st, Taylor entered a different plea, not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect. Consequently, Judge Walsh postponed the trial and ordered a psychiatric

evaluation to assess the validity of Taylor's new plea. Fox 11 News explained that in Wisconsin, when someone pleads not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect, they undergo a regular trial, and if they are found guilty, then the trial enters the penalty phase, where the same jury then decides if the person did indeed have a mental disease or defect at the time of the crime. If they did, the defendant will go have a mental disease or defect at the time of the crime. If they did, the defendant will go to a mental health facility. If not, they will face prison time. And just as a side note here, using drugs voluntarily does not qualify as a basis for this plea, which we've already discussed. Because I think that's super interesting, by the way. I never had heard that

before. And I've watched a million trials and I've read a million news stories. I never heard that before. So Taylor could not legally argue that being under the influence of methamphetamine had led her to kill, sexually assault and dismember Shad. evaluation claiming Taylor's mental health was deteriorating and needed reassessment. He told the judge that Taylor's brother had died in a motorcycle accident in July and that she'd been on suicide watch since August. He further said she had been engaging in concerning behavior such as self-harm with a metal bed frame and throwing her feces at other inmates. Judge Walsh agreed to another evaluation. However, he emphasized that the trial needed to occur at some point and couldn't be continually delayed for more evaluations, which I think the judge picked up on the fact that this is what the defense was doing, right? Like just literally trying to push this trial off for as long as possible. Yep. Stall, stall, stall. And I mean, honestly, I can understand being in a poor mental state

if your brother died in a motorcycle accident. However, especially based on our conversation with Dr. Chris Mulhondy, it doesn't really feel like Taylor has a ton of empathy or a ton of like normal emotions and feelings for the people around her. What gave you that impression? I think it was the dismemberment, but it also may have been the post-death sexual assault. Sexual assault, leaving the head of a woman's son on the stairs for her to find.

I think that, yeah, I think I'm with you there. Yeah, so it does seem, and Dr. Chris said, there may be some psychopathic tendencies here. Oh, yeah. Because I asked him, like, how could somebody do this who had no experience dismembering bodies, no experience with dead bodies? Like, how could someone do this? And he's like, oh, she may have had some psychopathic tendencies. You know, there's a lack of empathy there. Right.

Yep. By November 22nd, Taylor's third evaluation was finished and Judge Walsh again ruled that Taylor was competent to stand trial, which he scheduled for March 6th, 2023. The defense requested yet another competency evaluation because three wasn't enough, but Judge Walsh denied it, citing that the past three had already established her competence pretty thoroughly, I think. He said the defense could conduct an additional evaluation as part of their strategy, but he would not postpone the trial for it.

Go, Judge Walsh. Now, around the same time, Taylor's husband, don't forget about Taylor's husband, Warren, who's still in federal prison, he had someone share a letter that he'd written on Facebook. And this letter read in part, quote, the world doesn't know our struggles. We struggle with mental illness, postpartum, bipolar, addiction play a big role in our choices we've made. People probably want to know what happened February 23rd, 2022. Drugs were given to Taylor Shabizness from Shade. He said Shade, but the victim's name was Shad, while at his house. Yet he is dead now, which I'm sorry for him and his family.

The truth is, though, drugs should have never been given to my wife because it's the drugs that caused her to do what she did. But yet Shade, a.k.a. Shad, isn't at any fault here, and he's the one who provided her the illegal drugs. I just hope one day my wife will make it home because she doesn't deserve to be locked up forever, end quote. This is crazy to me, okay? These are some Bonnie and Clyde ride or die people here, man. Taylor and Warren together forever, All right. This is insane. She murdered somebody while in the process of, you know, having sexual intercourse with them. And then she had sexual behaviors with her victim after she murdered him.

And her husband's like, I don't care about that. That's my woman. Okay. She can do whatever she wants. And it wasn't her fault. It was the drugs. And he gave her the drugs as if this woman hasn't been injecting meth nine times a day for however long.

Yeah, no, it's, it's crazy. And I almost feel like he's misspelt his name wrong on purpose. I absolutely agree. And he's like, I'm sorry that he died. But like, why isn't anybody blaming him? Yeah. He's dead now. Can't bring him back.

But no, I mean, two peas in a pod and obviously their mindset on it, as you said, regardless. Yeah, could the drugs have played a factor in their decision-making process? Yes, but we've already established that can't be used as a form of defense because you're making that conscious decision while sober to take those drugs. And it could be a deeper conversation. Oh, well, you're making that conscious decision while sober to take those drugs. And it can be a deeper conversation. Oh, well, you're addicted. Again, somehow you became addicted to those drugs by consciously deciding over and over again to continue taking them. Not saying that addiction is not a real thing and that it's not a disease.

It certainly is, yes. But it's something that is – at some point, it started because you decided to make it start, right? It didn't just – I mean, there are those rare cases. I hate that I have to qualify like babies that are born addicted to a drug, but that's a rarity. We're talking about most people here. It started somewhere.

And you can't go through life making those decisions, have something like this happen while under the influence and then use that as an excuse and have the victim not get the justice they deserve. It just doesn't work that way. Yes, I completely agree. And also we're talking about meth here, right? So this is, this is, come on. We've, we've seen the billboards. We've all seen the billboards. We've all heard the stories. We know meth is not a drug to be fucked with. Okay. We know, you know, when you start this,

you're taking your life in your own hands. And somebody who's used it habitually, like Taylor, and who's done some stupid shit on it, right? We've been getting in car chases, almost running over pedestrians, trying to fight cops. You now understand that this drug makes you do things that are bad, that get you into trouble, that make your life worse, that make your life harder. You continue to do them. So at some point when you've done something unforgivable that you cannot take back and somebody's son is dead, you can't now say, well, I didn't know that it would make me act like a damn fool. I didn't know that it would change my personality. I didn't know that it would make me more violent. And Dr. Chris, once again, I don't know if it would change my personality. I didn't know that it would make me more violent. And Dr. Chris, once again, I don't know if he said this in our interview, but he said,

meth, above all other drugs, has this very huge tendency to reduce inhibitions and increase the likelihood of you being violent, right? So these are two things hand in hand are not good. Reduced inhibitions, increased violence. Right. Couple that with some some some behaviors that have happened beforehand and where now it's just exacerbated by the drugs themselves. But again, she knows about her own personal mental health and where she stands. And if if it's true, what what they're saying that they know they have a history of mental health issues. PTSD, bipolar. They're the last people that should be on those types of drugs. And it doesn't appear that she made any actions to get off, to get help, to go to rehab, to see a doctor, methadone clinic, like anything like that. So overall, we're talking a lot about it here, but clearly this was a decision she made. And ultimately her actions, as much as she can try now in hindsight to kind of get out of it, it doesn't appear to be working. And Judge Walsh has had enough of it. And honestly, I will say, like I said, this is somebody who uses this drug

nine times a day, injected. okay, so often. It almost also feels like at some point you would develop a tolerance, like an alcoholic, right? Somebody who takes two shots and who doesn't ever drink alcohol, they're going to be stumbling around. If you've consumed alcohol every day for like three years, people can't even tell you're drunk half the time, right? Your body is so used to it. In a constant state. And you can almost function better on it. She was driving around.

She was having conversations. She was calculatingly and calmly dicing up a body. This is not somebody who seemed to be out of control of her actions is what I'm saying. No, you're right. And I feel like we might be doing it a little bit right now. I know I'm doing it where we're interchanging the competency and the insanity of the crime itself. So I know in this these first few paragraphs are really focusing on the competency hearing. And as far as whether she's able to even stand trial for the crime she's being accused of. Are we talking about, did she go for a defense of I was insane at the time this happened? Yes, she did. We said that. All right. So that was earlier as well. I know we're going back and forth. And we're also talking about her husband, Warren, who's like, this isn't my wife. It was the drugs.

Warren, you know that's not true. Taylor knows that's not true. Right. So the first, so what we're talking about now is is more the insane versus uh sane was she was she sane or insane during the time when the actions occurred and we still have to talk about the competency part of this where they're like okay she she was sane when it happened now is she capable of standing trial that are we talking about two different things here so they've they've already deemed that she's fit to stand trial fit to stand trial got it he then comes in and she's fit to stand trial. Fit to stand trial. Got it. She then comes in and she's like, I want to plead not guilty by reason of mental defect.

Yeah. And her husband is now writing this letter that he's having somebody post on Facebook advocating for her. Like this is not her. This was the drugs that her victim gave her. So he's to blame. Right. So they were going two prong here where they were like, hey, listen, their strategy, defensive strategy, we can see it now. it now it's hey let's try to get her declared unfit for trial that doesn't work we're going with the insanity plea if that doesn't work we're going to go back to the drawing board and i don't blame them for attempting to do that it's all they got what do you got she admitted to everything on video yeah and and she she literally said like yeah i knew what i was doing yep the only angle you have is hey when she made that she wasn't a right right of a sound mind.

What else can you say? There wasn't appear to be she was under duress. There wasn't any leading. She was all about it. There was no argument. Like you were talking, I don't know if you were even on camera, like a crime of passion. Like she walked in on something and snapped. No promises being made by police.

So, yeah, they probably watched that video and said, okay, well, insanity or nothing. That's all we got. It's the only option we have here. Yeah. And I mean, looking at her actions, you might actually be able to convince a jury that no sane person could do that because they're looking at it from their perspective, right? Like I was saying last episode. We do talk about that. Yep. We do talk about that with Chris. I can't even imagine how a sane person could do this. I would never do this. And we get into that too. Yeah. So later on in the letter, Taylor's husband, Warren, wrote, quote, there's always two sides to every story. And I promise you, if you knew my wife like I know my

wife, you wouldn't think or believe she could ever do what has been done, end quote. And yet she did do what has been done. He finished the letter by telling Taylor to stay strong and get better soon. He loved her and everything was going to be okay. Man, if we all had somebody as supportive and loyal as Warren. From prison. Let's take a quick break. On January 6, 2023, the first half of a two-part competency hearing took place. During this hearing, the prosecution and defense both took turns questioning Dr. Matthew Seppel, a mental health expert for the prosecution who had evaluated Taylor in November. his opinion, Taylor was capable of participating in her case and had the mental capacity to understand what was happening. The defense asked whether some of Taylor's recent actions, such as self-harm with a metal bed frame, could indicate psychosis. Dr. Seppel explained that these actions might be signs of psychosis, but he didn't definitively say whether they applied

to Taylor's case. The prosecution then asked Dr. Seppel if someone could have a mental illness and still be competent to stand trial. He responded yes, indicating the mental illness didn't necessarily mean incompetence to stand trial. Judge Walsh then scheduled the second half of the competency hearing for mid-February. And remember, the hearing, the trial itself is scheduled for March. So Judge Walsh trying to get this shit done. On February 14th, Taylor went to court for a status update and her lawyer, Quinn Jolly, asked for a delay in the second part of the hearing because their expert wasn't ready.

Judge Walsh agreed to postpone the hearing and then right after this, Taylor suddenly tried to elbow her own lawyer, Quinn Jolly, in the head. Now we're going to play a video for you. Once again, I will say in my opinion, this was something that was premeditated between Taylor and her or her defense team, or just Taylor herself was like, it's going to seem super crazy if I try to like attack my own lawyer. Like they're definitely going to think I'm crazy now. I'm really hoping it's the latter. I'm really hoping it was just her and her defense attorney wasn't like, just attack me in the middle.

Like in cahoots with us. I mean, I wouldn't put it past any lawyer. I mean, I guess they could do that. I think most ethical lawyers are not going there. It doesn't seem, watch the video. We'll weigh in on it quick. Yeah. A judge has approved a lawyer's request

to be withdrawn from the case after his client attacked him in court. Taylor Shabiznes was in court for a hearing when she attacked her defense attorney as he was sitting next to her. A court officer pulled her to the ground, but the defendant made it difficult for him to restrain her. We're in the courtroom. The attorney said their attorney-client relationship was irretrievably broken, And Chibisnes has since been assigned a new public defender. Dude, that's crazy, man. Okay, so I don't think the lawyer's in on it because the lawyer was like, I'm out. He looks scared. He looks scared. That's what I was going to say.

I had seen it and I was like, I don't look like he was in on it. So I never watched that whole news clip. That clip of her trying to elbow her lawyer in the head was all over for a while. And that's really all I saw. But I didn't see where the lawyer was like, he's like, I'm out. Our our relationship is irreverent, like completely broken. And she's assigned a new public defender at this point. I think I wasn't expecting that. Now, does that mean that Taylor's actually just insane and and just had

broken one of the elbow no she was trying to look crazy she's trying to look crazy probably because she screwed up man she screwed up with her her interview with the police she screwed up with her first mental health evaluation she was just being herself just being good old no empathy taylor straightforward man shed's head is in a bucket. That's fucked up. Yeah, I killed him and I knew I was. She's like, man, I messed up and now I have to do damage control and I have to appear to be just bananas. Yep.

And honestly, I don't know. She knew it was only play at that point. Yeah. A deputy had to step in and wrestle Taylor to the ground, but she kept struggling. So two more deputies helped to calm her down. After the attack, one of the deputies can be heard on the video saying, quote, You went off on your attorney, Taylor. You went crazy on your attorney.

End quote. Taylor was like, exactly. I did go crazy on my attorney. Crazy, you say? Crazy is what I am. She didn't say that, but in her head, I guarantee you she was. She was like, my plan worked. So Taylor was then taken out of the courtroom. Within minutes of the attack being over, Jolly asked to be taken off the case,

claiming the lawyer-client relationship was beyond repair. And honestly, Quinn Jolly was probably like, I'm so glad I don't have to represent this person because honestly,, I was throwing stuff at the wall to see what would stick and there's no hope for her. This is a losing battle. Yeah. He was a public defender too, right? Yeah. Yeah. So he has no choice but to take the case. So you're right. When that happened, he's like, hallelujah, I'm out. I have a valid reason now to not be in the same room as this person. Judge Walsh later agreed to this request and a new public defender was assigned to Taylor's case. When Taylor's husband, Warren, heard what happened, he had someone write on his Facebook saying, quote, I know what she's being accused of is not who she is. Not only has her addiction played a big role, but so does her mental background, as well as postpartum depression.

I just want my wife to get help, professional help, because it's what she deserves. Like I said, my prayers go out to my wife. I love her more than anything in this world, and this will never change no matter what. End quote. His prayers? His prayers? You know, it's funny. People go to prison, and they do horrendous things, and they're horrendous people.

They go to prison, like the Mansous things and they're horrendous people. They go to prison like the Manson girls and suddenly they find God and they're just praying and God's listening. I'm really surprised that he's standing behind her knowing. I don't know how much of the details he knows. He knows all of it. That's what I'm saying, man. Loyal. Loyal AF. Knowing what she was engaging in before and after. Well, I mean, how can he blame her? he's in prison for so many years and she knows she probably knows somebody was visiting him you know what's good for the goose is good for the gander well i was corrected last episode about conjugal visits and stuff like that when we were talking about me what we were talking about how did that come up where i was like oh maybe she was that a different were we talking about no that was the news yeah no that was uh this case because i think

we said something like um she had written on her facebook like yes yes yes you're right and uh someone corrected said by the way there's no conjugal visits in the wisconsin prison i'm like i didn't think there were but okay is there only one wisconsin prison i don't know i'm sure there's most multiple state prisons probably different levels you have maximum minimum i know here in rhode island you have a maximum minimum minimum and medium security prisons for obviously the different levels of offenders. So, I mean, even if he's not having conjugal visits with any other woman, she could have seen that maybe an ex-girlfriend visited him or somebody that, you know, either way. Especially with the prison that she's probably in. I'm assuming she was in a max facility. You mean he?

Well, I'm talking about, I'm talking, yes, about when I made that comment, but yes, you're correct. I don't know what I'm thinking. Him being in a max facility, he's not going to get access to that type of interaction. He's not getting access to that type of interaction. So, I mean, and multiple things could have happened, right? Let's say it's to piss her off and make her mad at him.

Let's say he's in prison and all of a sudden she's getting hit up on Facebook by a girl or two. And they're like, oh, actually, by the way, like I've been sleeping with your husband, you know, things like that. And so she gets pissed off. There could have been multiple things happening. Yep. For sure. He's standing by her because he has nothing else to freaking do. You know what I mean? Boredom.

Nothing else to do. He's in prison. He's got nothing to do. She's standing by him the whole time. And he's like, man, I got to repay the favor. Listen, there might be some truth to it, too. We should ask Chris this on the phone, the Zoom. But I will say this.

I feel like sometimes with people who are going through certain things, they look for excuses to their behavior. And maybe that's what they've relied on in the past where it's like, oh, you know, we have these underlying issues. It's not really our fault. And so there might be a part of him, just a part where he believes what he's saying, where it's like, I empathize with her because where we are today, me being in prison, her being where she is right now, this is due to the trauma we experienced as children and what we led into our addictions in adulthood. And we are both in the positions we're in now because of circumstances that were outside of our control.

And I'm not saying I don't feel bad for people like that, but even in the worst situations, and we've talked about this before, we all have a choice. We all have a choice. We all have a choice. So you can't lay the blame on the feet of other people in every single situation. I feel like maybe in this particular scenario, he's looking at it like she's, you know, in a lot of ways they're similar. And he feels just like she's being mistreated. He's mistreated. And that's why he's in prison for something he probably shouldn't be there for either.

Totally agree. That's called a trauma bond. Yeah, good point, yeah. I'm literally describing trauma bond. That's a trauma bond. It's like, Derek, that's a trauma bond. That happens in very toxic, codependent relationships. And what you see is these two people making excuses

for each other's abhorrent behavior. Yeah, and that might be what he's doing here. Not making the other person better, not making the other person own up to what they've done and take accountability, which is what a true good partner would do. Hey, you're acting incongruent to who I know you to be. And yes, you've got things that you've done

and things you've gone through that may be contributing to this, but now you're an adult and this is your choice and I want the best for you and I want you to be healthy and happy and whole. And so let's work on getting you there. I'm not going to make excuses for you left and right so that you can continue down this path, which has led us both nowhere. Nope. Trauma bond. So on March 24th, the second part of the competency hearing finally took place. Dr. Seppel testified again, so Taylor's new attorney, Christopher Freilich, could question him.

Dr. Seppel said he still thought Taylor was competent for trial, and he hadn't received any new information to change his mind. At the end of the hearing, Freilich requested another evaluation, claiming Dr. Seppel's previous evaluation from November was too old. And Taylor's attack on Quinn Jolly needed assessment. Damn, they are really pushing. They're just trying to push this off for as long as possible. What are they waiting for? Like they're going to have to do it eventually. Yeah, I think it's what you said earlier, though, just not knowing, knowing that if they get past this point and they lose, it's all downhill from here because they know what's coming. They know what the police have. And the only chance to really get her in a situation where even if she's in prison for the rest of her life, she's in a different facility, is to derail this trial before it starts.

And I mean, honestly, this is a public defender. He just met her. I don't think he's even that invested in her personally. However, he wants to do everything he possibly can so that later she can't appeal and say, well, my defense was inadequate. Right. Yeah, that's true too. He don't give a shit whether she goes to a mental health facility or a prison or whatever.

He's like, I got to do my job to the best of my ability. That way she cannot get out on some loophole or some appeal later on. Yeah. I will tell you in many cases, public defenders are newer lawyers. They're just coming up out of law school and they're just getting their feet wet and they will do everything they can. And they're actually great to have represent you because they really want to establish themselves as good lawyers. So they're not only doing it for you, they're doing it for self-serving reasons. And it might be something here too where- It's like on-the-job training, you know?

On-the-job training. It might be something where he's just coming into this case. He's trying to delay it a little bit further so he can get more caught up on the specifics of the case. And this could be a tactic where he's stalling so he can, you know, find out if there are anything, any elements of this case that he can attack. Obviously the most glaring one is she was insane when it happened or she's not competent to stand trial. Therefore we got to kind of avoid this whole thing. So they go for the home run. If

that doesn't work, then they can try smaller battles, but that could be what he's doing here, where, you know, even though he's a newer lawyer, um, and'm assuming that, maybe he's not, but if he is, he's someone who, like you said, is not really that invested at this point, but wants to catch up maybe and is trying to go at an angle that maybe the previous lawyer didn't. And that's what he's doing. But I will say public defenders sometimes have people have this negative connotation about them. I've seen cases where situations that I thought were slam dunks, you get some young, really motivated lawyer. Fresh, like trying to make a name for themselves. Wants to become a good defense attorney that they can charge a lot of money for privately. They build their reputation on these cases. Oh, you see who they got off? This person had the drugs and guns on them. They walked away

with six months probation. I'm hiring them. 100%. And honestly, I think that some of the best arguments in court I've seen have been made by public defenders because they're like, not jaded yet. They're not hardened. They're not like, you know, over it. Yeah. I completely agree. People are like, oh, you know, I see a public defender. I'm like, oh no, here we go. Here we go. They're going to put me through my paces, man. We're going to have a battle because they're going to try every, even the newest things in the coming out of law school.

They're trying, which I love it. It's a challenge. I don't take it personal, but it was never a day off when you had a public defender who really was, this is what they were dreaming about for years. So they're ready to go. So this, this public defender, the new one, Christopher Freilich, he's like, we need to push this off. We need to evaluate how she attacked her previous lawyer. And Judge Walsh was like, no, no, Taylor's fit for trial. And then he set a trial date for July. So it did end up getting

moved from March to July. In the months leading up to the trial, Freilich made several motions, including one to reduce Taylor's bail from $2 million cash to $500,000. Freilich argued that the original amount was too high and stated that Taylor could stay with her father. He's trying to get her out? This is crazy. He mentioned her willingness to attend mental health treatment and wear a monitor, and noted Taylor's personal challenges, such as the loss of her mother in 2009. However, the prosecution fought back, telling the judge that Taylor had removed a GPS monitor in the past, which we know she did, and this cast doubt on her trustworthiness. That's not the only thing that cast doubt on

her trustworthiness, if you ask me. In another motion, the defense asked Judge Walsh to exclude the prosecution from the jury selection, a completely unusual request. I would say more than unusual, bizarre. Why would that ever happen? Yeah, never going to happen. Could you imagine? No. Maybe that's some of the new stuff that this public defender learned in law school. No, I mean, I don't know. I've never heard of such a thing. Throwing what they can at the wall to see what sticks. And even the point before where it's like trying to get her out. Bail's not set as a form of punishment because you're still innocent, but it's to avoid the potential of you fleeing the area.

Or committing another crime. Committing another crime. But are you a danger to society, but also are you a flight risk? Yes and yes. Danger to society, but also are you a flight risk? And with someone like her, like you said, who's removed the bracelet before and also gotten in a car chase with police, she's obviously not someone who abides by laws and the authority. So they're not going to let someone like that out because they know based on the circumstances of this case, if she has the opportunity to flee, she's going to do so. So that's the main reason they're not going to lower

the bail and make it even easier for her. There's no amount of money that they can lower the bail to where it would incentivize her to say, oh my God, that's too much money. I can't take off. No, because she's not paying for it. She's going regardless. Yeah, exactly. She don't give a fuck. That's what bail is intended for. I was actually, I don't know where this came from, but I was thinking like when she attacked her lawyer, Quinn Jolly, there's a good chance that she did that because like, could you imagine doing that much meth for that long? And then all of a sudden you're in prison and you ain't got no more meth.

She's probably like withdrawing hard. It's funny you say that because I was thinking as I was watching some of the other videos about her sitting in court, I'm like, is she insane? Is she competent or is she sick? Like you said, all the withdrawals, the years and years of habitual use of methamphetamine and other drugs, I'm assuming, to be cold turkey immediately, that would make you look pretty ill as well. And maybe have some weird questions and answers during a psychological assessment. Yeah. Irritable. Trying to hit your lawyer. Yeah, that's what I was going for, yeah.

And you do see her in some of these videos in court. She seems all twitchy and weird. So is she trying to act crazy or is she withdrawing hard from a drug that she was so dependent on and her body was so used to that she just does not know what to do now. I mean, I remember when I quit Nicotine Man for two weeks, I felt like there was no more hope in the world. I swear to God, I felt depressed. I never felt depressed in my life. And for those two weeks, I was like, what is the point in living? Because my brain wasn't getting that dopamine hit anymore. And the dopamine went all the way down to zero. And you literally are like why everything's gray

why am i here so i can't even imagine having a meth like that and then not having it overnight made a combination of things where obviously not the most alcohol too and stuff yeah alcohol meth someone who does have some prior issues mentally right combine? Combine all that, you're on trial for murder or you're going to potentially be on trial for murder. That could piss you off. Yeah. You're not going to be comfortable. Yeah. You're not going to be in a great mood. On May 4th, Freilich requested a new competency evaluation because he still believed the previous one from November was no longer accurate. A week after that, he filed a motion asking the judge

not to allow Taylor's statements to the police to be used as evidence in the trial. Freilich argued that Taylor couldn't think clearly that night due to drug use, so she couldn't legally waive her Miranda rights, and this, according to Freilich, meant that her rights had been violated. He further claimed Taylor's mental health history affected her ability to understand questions and understand her rights. Next, Freilich asked the judge to exclude the evidence found in Taylor's mental health history affected her ability to understand questions and understand her rights. Next, Freilich asked the judge to exclude the evidence found in Taylor's apartment from the trial, arguing that because Taylor's name wasn't listed on the search warrant, only her roommate's was, her bedroom shouldn't have been searched. Freilich also requested the dismissal of the sexual assault charge, arguing that because Shad was already dead at the time of the assault, legally, he wasn't considered a person. I take back everything nice I said about you, Freilich.

You are the worst. You deserve each other. You and Taylor deserve each other. That is disgusting. That's a disgusting argument. Yeah. No, and I will say, I'm not justifying it at all, but this goes back to what we were just talking about. I know, I know, but disgusting. Touch a nerve. Yeah. And the question becomes, how far are you willing to go for the victory, the potential victory? And I've said before, and this goes for both prosecution and defense. I'm not choosing one side here, where they sometimes look at these cases like their own little chess match, honestly. And we're all just chess pieces. And that's really what it comes down to for them. And they really want to win.

They really want to win. They really want to win. And how far are they willing to go? And what are they willing to throw out there in order to try to get the results they're looking for? And ethics become a big part of it. What are you willing to do for your client? But also, how far are you willing to go against maybe your own morals and ethics? I mean, he touched a nerve with me. I can see that.

That's horrible. This person has parents and like, horrible. Like, he keeps going, okay? And I understand this is like, he's trying to find a loophole. He's trying to find like a gray area. I freaking get it. But come on, man.

Could we be a little human at this point? Like, could we? Could we? This is gross. I mean, technically, then, anything that happens to a person after they're dead shouldn't even matter. And so desecration or destruction of a corpse shouldn't even be a charge because that's not a person anymore. Like, come on, man. Come on. Anyways, Freilich claimed that once a person has passed away, they don't meet the definition of a person in the jury instructions and the statute.

Freilich further questioned how Shad could have been sexually assaulted if his genitals had been removed. I think he needs like a biology lesson. And the lab tests on the dildo were inconclusive, which meant that aside from Taylor's admissions, there was no other evidence of sexual assaults. The prosecution fought back against these claims, arguing that Wisconsin's sexual assault statute states that sexual assault charges, quote, apply whether a victim is dead or alive at the time of sexual contact or sexual intercourse, end quote. Point blank period, man. I feel like that's all you got to say. That's all you got to say. That's what the law says. On June 13th, a hearing was held so that Judge Walsh could rule on all of the motions that had been submitted. Walsh said he viewed all seven hours of Taylor's interviews with the police, and his final observation was that, quote, she is able to recall after asked a question. We know she is able to recall accurately because the information coming from those who are processing the site is consistent with what she is telling the

individuals conducting the interview. She was tracking their conversation, not confused or demonstrating what this was about or doing there. In all, her demeanor seemed consistent with someone who knew what was going on. End quote. Walsh found that Taylor voluntarily waived her Miranda rights, which meant her statements to police could be admitted at trial. He then denied the rest of Freilich's requests, including the motion to drop the sexual assault charge, the motion to keep evidence from the apartment out of trial and the motion to delay the trial for a new competency evaluation. Not today, Freilich. Taylor's trial would go ahead starting the week of July 21st. Yep. This was Walsh's way of saying, I'm done.

Yeah. We're good. Let's get it on. Let's do this. I see what you're doing. I appreciate your effort. You know, good, good job. I wish you'd been my student in law school.

However, you're wasting my time and I have a vacation to go on. We're going to find out like Freilich was like 30 years out of law school. But honestly, that'll probably be the case. But whatever. I don't care at this point. Yeah. Either way. But yeah, this is this is it.

They put Walsh put his foot down. Walsh said enough. Yeah, no more. So let's actually take a quick break and then we'll be right back. In early July, a few weeks before Taylor's trial was set to begin, Freilich submitted a document stating that after a new evaluation, a forensic psychologist believed Taylor was not fit for trial. This is the case that never ends. He asked for another delay in the trial so the judge could decide if there should be a hearing on this evaluation and if Taylor should undergo yet another evaluation. Judge Walsh agreed to a new one but refused to postpone the trial, warning that the trial must continue as planned.

Taylor's final competency hearing was held on July 13th, and this time, Dr. Diane Litton, an expert for the defense, testified about the multitude of evaluations she had conducted. Dr. Litton explained that she first met with Taylor back in February. During that meeting, Taylor refused to speak to her about the case. Instead, she threw a chair at Dr. Litton, which is something the doctor had never dealt with during her 32 years in the field. She tried multiple times to meet with Taylor again, but she refused every time. And then finally, in late June, Taylor spoke to her. Dr. Litton said the evaluation was bizarre. She reported that Taylor talked about command hallucinations, which told her to hurt herself or other people. Wow, she suddenly has all this verbiage to talk to the mental health professionals about. It's almost like she's been in the prison library reading up on it. Yeah, nothing but time. Taylor also mentioned that during the attack on her previous attorney, Quinn Jolly, she felt like there was madness and chaos in her head, like a carnival atmosphere. I don't dispute that. I'm sure there absolutely is a carnival atmosphere in her head.

Dr. Litton further said Taylor often went off topic during their meeting. Quote, she said that she had a thing with Jeffrey Dahmer a year ago and just numerous comments about Johnny Cash being on a train. She went on and on about the train, how loud its whistle was and how Johnny Cash apparently overdosed on the train. End quote. Dr. Litton told Judge Walsh that she didn't think Taylor was ready for trial and she didn't think Taylor was faking her mental illnesses. She testified, quote, despite her knowing the basics about competency judgments and guilty pleas, she still exhibits this lack of insight and judgment about her case, how to act in court, how to help her defense attorney to understand the proceedings, end quote. At the end of the hearing, Judge Walsh didn't make a decision, instead choosing to wait for

the results of one more evaluation, which would happen the following week just before jury selection. On July 21st, right before jury selection was about to start, Judge Walsh decided that Taylor was officially competent for trial. Hasn't Judge Walsh said this like 55 times by now, though? I mean, we're an hour into this episode and we still don't know i can't if taylor's competent for trial or not judge walsh is like now she's competent for trial and then he's like all right one more value no competent for trial no one more one more evaluation competent for trial like this is insane yeah no but you know what we're laughing a little bit here but the reality is this is super important because this is the whole case hinges on this as far as is she going to be out as a free woman again?

Either way, probably not. But is she going to be in a maximum security facility or is she going to be in a mental health facility, which obviously is different conditions and probably more preferable by her. And could there be a world where she goes to this facility and she quote unquote, you know, is rehabilitated and is better and mentally prepared for whatever she's going to face in the outside world? Could she get out again one day, especially if she's hit with a lower, is she hit with voluntary manslaughter or involuntary manslaughter? Yeah, it's possible. So it's so important to get this right, not only for the victim, but also for the quote unquote offender in this situation.

Because what if we're dealing with someone who is not mentally capable or competent? We want to make sure that they're getting a fair trial as well. So I actually appreciate the fact that Judge Walsh has given this much rope with this and has taken this much time because he doesn't know. He's not a psychologist and he wants to make sure that if he's going to sentence this woman to life in prison, she understands the significance of this case. So I respect it. I think this is, again, I know we're joking a little bit about it, but I'm glad to see that he gave them multiple opportunities to show him a different side of this and to see if it was something that would be believable for him. So I absolutely would always agree with you, except for this case and this woman.

Because of what she did to Shad and things like that you're saying, right? I watched her interviews. She said, I knew he was dying and i liked it you know she basically said like yeah i knew i i felt his heart beating and i knew he was dying and i just kept going like come on man so that part that part i agree with like as far as sane or insane during the actual incident but when talking about competency, like after the fact, is she, is she capable of, of withstand, you know, going through this trial? I feel like that's what this, these we're in, we're in the middle of a competent hearing, right? That's what we're trying to decide. So I feel like seeing, she was saying at the time when it occurred, uh, occurred is already established. Now it's like, okay, but is she competent enough to understand trial and contribute

to her defense in a effective manner with her current mental state? And I feel like if you have someone who really is in a situation where they can't mentally process what's happening, they could actually hurt their case and they're not getting a right to due process, a fair trial. So I think it's important for the judge to allow experts to come in and say, hey, tell me what's going on here. Does this person have the ability to sit through this trial and be a productive part of their defense? And if not, we have to make sure that that's taken care of. Maybe they go to a facility, they're rehabilitated to the point where they can stand trial. Like Lori Vallow. They had to do Lori Vallow.

Yeah. And we bring them back in. You know, we're in no rush here. So I was just saying from that sense, I appreciated it. But yeah, as far as the insanity, insanity versus sane with the actual crime itself, I'm with you. It's pretty cut and dry to me that in that moment, yes, under the influence of drugs, but still very aware of what was going on. And even after the fact, continuing to do things that are just unimaginable for hours at a time. And she would have been coming down at that point and then doing what she did with the body itself. I have no sympathy for her and her actions and she's definitely where

she deserves to be. But in the grand scheme of our judicial system, I'm glad to see that this judge didn't just go based on what she had done and was really allowing the experts to weigh in on her mental capacity as far as the trial itself. So here's my thing. I've never seen this many competency evaluations in a single case, right? So at some point, you're going to have to ask, all right, the first three people were like, yeah, she's fine. Then a bunch more people said she's fine. But the defense, now they're out there fishing for people who are going to come in and say she's not. And you're just muddying the waters at this point.

How many mental health professionals do you have to pull before you get an idea and at any point, anything after that is just adding confusion and you know chaos to the matter because the first several mental health professionals was like yeah she's completely fine she understood what's happening blah blah and but now the defense is bringing in people like all these random people we don't know what they're doing they could be looking for people who are willing to say anything on the stand for a paycheck? We don't know. But is it adding more context or is it adding more confusion? I think you're right. I think the more experts they have come in, the less of an impact their evaluations have on Judge Walsh because of the reasons you just said. You start to wonder, are they cherry picking? Are they just going to keep doing this till they find someone to say what they need them to say? And even if, even if they're telling the truth, it doesn't

resonate with the judge as well as it would if it was the first expert and the second expert. Now we're talking, like you said, third, fourth expert. And now suddenly they're seeing something that hadn't been seen by the three previous experts. I do feel like any human, you know, would look at that and go, yeah, this is the first out of four that's saying this. So I'm not going to give it the same weight that I would give it if it were multiple experts at the beginning of this of this whole hearing. Right. So Judge Walsh explained that he had considered all the case details and his own observations in court. And in the end, he concluded that Taylor was competent. He noted that he often saw Taylor interacting and discussing

things with her attorney, and it was clear that she understood courtroom procedures. Walsh noted that while there had been occasions of inappropriate behavior, Dr. Seppel testified that he was unable to rule out that the behavior was volatile in nature. And I honestly think that this is the perfect segue, the perfect opportunity to now play our earlier interview with Dr. Chris Mohandy, who, as Derek will tell you in this clip, has credentials out there. Like, as long as my arm. Yeah, I just gave you a paraphrase. Go look him up. See that some of the cases, the biggest cases you can think of, he's worked on.

He's humble about it, but he's the real deal. He's incredibly, incredibly smart. He's the real deal. He's incredibly, incredibly smart. He's the real deal. Yeah. He's incredibly smart. He knows what he's talking about. And I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with him and what he's done. But if not, you will be now and you should definitely check him out.

And we're going to tell you at the end of our interview where you can find him if you want to follow him, etc. So listen to the interview. It's very good. And we're going to play it now. All right. So guys, we polled you guys last week. We said, would you like to have Dr. Chris Mohandy on? The comments were overwhelming. We're glad to have you, Chris. You and I have been talking about this for a long time. But before we get into the questions about this particular case, I got to give you your flowers a little bit. I know it's weird because we're friends, but for anybody who doesn't know Dr. Mahandi, he's a clinical police and forensic psychologist with over 30 years with experience in assessment and management of violent behavior.

And he has a very long resume. You can go look it up for yourself. But I know some of the conversations that Chris, I'm going to call him Chris because he's a friend of mine, have had over the years. One, he was at the OJ scene where OJ was barricaded in the house. He was part of the negotiation team when there was the robbery, the shootout in LA. He was part of that. He's worked on hundreds of cases. He's testified as an expert witness all over the country as a forensic psychologist. I had the privilege of working with him on Breaking Homicide, where some of the stories

that he had for me and some of the experiences he shared and the knowledge that he provided made me a better investigator over the years. I learned so much from him. He also has a great book called Evil Thoughts, Wicked Deeds. You got to go check it out. Chris, multiple interviews in there where you've talked to some and interviewed some of the most dangerous minds on the planet. You give us some insight into that.

I know you're a busy guy, so thank you for coming on and spending a little time with us tonight. Thank you for having me. I'm super grateful to get to spend this time with you and Stephanie. I've missed being together with you, working on cases, talking about cases. I always enjoy it when the three of us get together and have a conversation. I know this is just going to be, you know, informative and stimulating all in one. So thank you for having me. Our pleasure, man. We don't always get someone on with your experience and it's tough for us to have guests because our shows are long as it is. But with a topic like this, where neither one of

us really have any experience dealing with a case that was this horrific. We've covered a lot of cases. And in the comments last week, overwhelmingly people were like, oh my God, this case is so graphic. I almost didn't make it all the way through. So to have someone like you, who unfortunately has dealt with cases like this before is invaluable because you're going to be able to shed light on things that Stephanie and I just, I know for me personally, I can't even comprehend. I want to comprehend though. Right. And that's why he's here. Yeah. So why don't you hit it off, Stephanie? You wrote the script on this. Like

we talked about it off record. We talked to Chris a little bit on record, so we'll just dive right into it. Well, we discussed the case a little bit with Chris before we jumped on and hit record. And I mean, I wish we'd been recording because he gave some great insight, but I'm sure you can do it again. Hopefully. I know you can. So basically, what was the first question you asked, Derek? Because I thought that was a great lead. Yeah. With Taylor's business, we were wondering, you know, with this horrific crime, obviously she had some criminal history before this, but nothing of this type of nature, nothing that violent.

It was mostly criminal activity regarding drug use. So in your experience, when someone uses a narcotic like methamphetamine and does something like this, is this due to the fact that they have this predisposition to this violent behavior and this drug unlocked that? Or can this happen to anyone? Can you have someone who doesn't have this predisposition to violence, and yet because of the drug itself, they can go into this, I don't know what you would even call it, this state of mind where they're capable of something that they didn't even know was possible? I think it's both. That's always the correct answer is all the above. I've had cases, even relatively recently, where a person with no history of violence whatsoever, law-abiding, living an extraordinarily normal life, they get some drugs on board and they end up committing horrific acts of violence and murder against another person and

then trying to take their own life with no history. Now, that's extraordinary. With many of the people that I've seen that have committed these kinds of acts of extreme violence, where you have people being cut into pieces or cannibalized in other cases that I've seen, it's the drugs unlocking Pandora's box in an individual that already has issues. Those issues can be, you know, they were already kind of violent. I had a guy in California, for example, that did a lot of psilocybin and ended up killing his friend. And then, you know, before he killed him, he cut body parts off, was cooking them and, you know, eating them and that kind of stuff. You know, that's it in a nutshell. But no

history of that kind of violence, but history of other kinds of violence. So the drugs and particularly methamphetamine can very much unlock that. Methamphetamine is extraordinary in its ability to disinhibit and to ramp up exponentially a person's violence potential. And it can also cause such distorted perceptions, magnifying feelings of paranoia or extreme pleasure center stimulation that might be associated with aggression. In this case, you have a woman who's got a history of problems acting out behavior. She's using methamphetamine. And there was some inkling that there may have been pleasure derived by hurting this victim or at least pretending to hurt the victim, which suggests a pre-existing history of sadistic sexual arousal

pattern, which is very unusual in women, certainly to this degree. It's most often seen in men. But if she had the history that would speak to the dog collar, to the enjoyment of choking, then you have a probable history of violent fantasies where hurting another human being are there. So you throw methamphetamine, it's like throwing gasoline onto an existing fire and it will magnify that in certain circumstances. And I think that's what appears to be the best explanation. And it's interesting that you say that too. And Stephanie, we didn't even think about this, but we keep saying, oh, she didn't have a history of violent behavior. How many people out there,

Chris, have not been arrested for a crime like this, but behind closed doors or in their basement, they're acting out these sadistic fantasies that they just haven't been, they haven't risen to the occasion to the, to the situation where law enforcement has become familiar with this. That's a great point. Like just because we don't have a documented history of it, doesn't mean she wasn't thinking about this in her head. We don't know this. That's exactly, we don't know what her fantasy life was historically going all the way back into her teen years, what she may have been doing with consensual partners to act this stuff out. Uh, and what she may have been watching from a, um, you know, in terms of, uh, sexually stimulating films or,

uh, materials that was evidence of that fantasy life. I would strongly suspect that there's a long history of sexually sadistic fantasies that she was stimulating with probably pornography that had those themes, stuff that she was looking at online, maybe even certain kinds of films, horror films where people are being dismembered, those kinds of things. This did not just happen out of nothing. There was something there before. We don't know what it is, but it would be really unheard of. And the thread to pull on is what she did to that victim before she escalated that particular day. And what she did was the collar, the leash, the choking. And that is sexually sadistic, fantasy based. I mean, she did say when she was strangling him, she could feel his heartbeat and she knew that she was killing him. And she said she didn't care. But it may not have

been that she didn't care. It may have been that she was enjoying it. She was enjoying it too much. She enjoyed it. And then the fact that she became sexual afterwards strongly supports the arousal, the sexual arousal that is paired with sexual violence. And I would label this a sexual homicide. Absolutely. Yeah. It's a great point. I mean, she, she, as, as Stephanie laid out in the first episode, she had sex with him oral and vaginally and, and used a, I don't want to get a dildo on him. So, and that's after he's already deceased. So yeah, I mean, like you said, she goes through this and instead of being mortified after it's done she's telling us right out she's sexually

aroused by the whole that's right scene that's right it's crazy crazy yeah and i guess um is something that i kept saying in the first episode because i just couldn't wrap my head around it was i i don't understand how somebody who doesn't have any experience with dead bodies most people go their whole lives and they don't see a dead body or Or if they do, it's like an open casket and somebody's been embalmed. Most people don't come across corpses all the time. So how does somebody who probably never has before, as far as we know, now come face to face with this body whose life she took and she can now go ahead with abusing this body, dismembering it, taking his head off. And she's doing all of this. It's incredibly bloody. There's blood all over. She's not throwing up. She's not passing out. It takes a lot for them to sort of steel themselves to have to face these dead bodies every day. And this is like even on a whole a whole different level what she did. I just I don't understand how anybody could do that.

Do you have some insight into that? I can offer some thoughts. I mean, what you're talking about is a woman that apparently had some criminal history. The full extent of it, we don't know. We just know where it landed. This kind of callous detachment, lack of empathy is often seen in people who have psychopathic tendencies. A psychopathic individual, full-blown, would be very detached and not really have any trouble with hurting another human being because they're so estranged and detached. They just don't

feel the way you and I might feel in terms of empathy and disgust or revulsion to those things. You throw on top of that, okay, we know that this is the one incident where she has, in fact, engaged in sexual violence. So we don't know how many times she's played this out in her imagination, in her mind's eye, and for how long, we also don't know what she may have been watching or reading that she may have identified with and learned from in terms of, you know, violence and sexualized violence and how you deal with bodies afterwards and whether she's watching crime shows and thinking, hey, that's a good idea. You know, that's how people often will get their ideas

about what they should do from the popular media. And dismemberment for many offenders is simply a practical choice because it makes it easier in their minds to dispose of the body. That's a practical problem that an offender has. What do I do with this body? And so it becomes easier to transport, they think. It becomes easier to get rid of. And we need to suspend our judgment. Jeez, I couldn't do that. But that's not her. We're not her. She's detached. She's not particularly empathic. And it's all about her own selfish needs. And that, you know, overrides, you know, the normal conditioning that you and I have against those kinds of things. So she's a different kind of person, to say the least.

I'm not going to suspend my judgment on her. I think it sounds very much like she deserves my judgment. But I actually have two questions because I was writing down a lot of things and I'm very interested. I actually read two studies today about media violence and the effect on people because, you know, there's this huge debate, right? Does violent video games or violent television shows cause violence in people? And there's people that say absolutely not. And then there's people that say yes.

I kind of tend to lean towards the yes because of the desensitization aspect. Could she have been watching? You can get anything on the internet now. And you know that there's that certain type of film. I'm not going to say it because we'll be immediately demonetized, but they're real films, sexually based, that end in incredible violence, aka usually death. You know what kind of films I'm talking about. Could she have been watching those and that would have a real effect on almost making it feel like this person next to me or underneath me is not a real person. This is something I've seen before, especially with the drugs.

It's possible that she has a history of watching films and material that depict these kind of violent acts. You know, it could also just be fictional stuff that she's watching or, you know, enactments of that kind of stuff that's out there. There's so much that's available to feed people's perversions. And so whether it was real or some sort of simulation, I would be very surprised if she wasn't immersing herself in this kind of material. But here's the point. That is not what's causing this. She already has those kinds of dark impulses and urges and she's seeking this material out in order to fuel that so you know the answer of you know does the media cause it or you know or not it's actually the media is there and it's used almost like an intoxicant for people like this to feed their urges. And what it does is it gives them other ideas sometimes, but it also, you know, can be

part of what they are, you know, sexually stimulating themselves when they're not able to act on it with a, you know, living victim. And we find a lot of offenders, serial sexual offenders, serial murderers that use this kind of material for stimulation. But at some point, they feel like they need to have the real thing for the ones that end up doing it. Okay. Very interesting. Exactly. I was going to say, could this be an escalation when you are watching something, watching something, and then eventually you're like, okay, this is no longer doing it for me. The dopamine's not hitting anymore. I need to up the ante. Okay. And you said something about psychopathic tendencies. And I mean, totally, I absolutely agree. We've seen this in serial killers before. They'll take people, they'll have sex with them, and then they'll kill them or they'll kill them, and then they'll have sex with them, and then they'll do whatever they need to do to get rid of the body. That's right. And this is very, very, you know, resemblant of that.

Would psychopathic tendencies not show up on a psych eval? Well, it depends. Psychopathic tendencies are picked up by a checklist called the Hare Psychopathy Checklist Revised. It's a 20-item checklist that a psychologist or psychiatrist would rate based upon their interview experience and based upon the available discovery, which might include police reports. It might include interviews with family and friends. And there's a lot of different, you know, uh, variables that are on that, you know, callous, parasitic lifestyle, um, criminal versatility, failure, unconditional release, um, superficially charming, um, you know, those kinds of things. There's 20 items that are scored zero to two for each of those. And if you're 30

or above on that, you're considered to be classically psychopathic, but you can have people that are scored in their high teens and twenties that while they may not be considered full-blown psychopaths in terms of the label, they still have prominent characteristics that can become part of an equation like this. So I would expect that, you know, at least I would expect somebody probably would have thought about that and, you know, been assessing for it, but not always, you know. In that classic psychological evaluation that's being done for the purpose of determining whether she should be held criminally responsible. The question is, did she understand what she was doing and that it was wrong?

That's generally the question of a sanity evaluation. And was it because of a legitimate mental illness? A legitimate mental illness under Wisconsin law does not include, like most states, it does not include if you are voluntarily putting substances in your body. If you're high because you chose to smoke meth or shoot it up or use cannabis and you have a cannabis-induced psychotic episode, guess what? You are not going to qualify for that sanity statute. Typically, there's going to be the guilt phase of a trial, which is first, and that's how it is in Wisconsin. They're going to find the person, whether they're criminally guilty or not, and that's going to be at beyond a reasonable doubt. The second phase of the trial is going to be the sanity phase. It's going to be defense's burden to prove that the person was insane. And that's at a

preponderance of the evidence standard. So it's an affirmative defense if they try it, but the defense has to prove it. And what they have to prove is that the person had a legitimate mental illness. It cannot be simply that they were high or that their personality disorder, that is a psychopath or narcissist or something like that, they have to have a legitimate mental illness. And that mental illness has to prevent them from knowing what they were doing, that it was wrong. And that obviously was the problem for this case. She chose to get high. She chose to be under the influence of meth, and that's going to be a non-starter for any legitimate insanity defense. And that's why three court-appointed doctors came in and found her sane.

And so when you come in, like you said, you're one of those doctors that – you've been one of those court-appointed doctors, correct? Well, I've been hired. I get hired, you know – By defense and prosecution, right? Exactly. Exactly. So you've worked both sides of the aisle. You don't have any buy. You'll go wherever, whatever you obviously believe in. Right. You're not. That's right. It does what's for hire. But that's right. When you come in there and I know it's probably a lengthy process, but, you know, we have this case right here. We'll take this for an example. You start to get some of the facts and circumstances regarding this case. Defense is going to try to prove that she was insane when this occurred. You come in there. What is your process like for determining that, for assessing that? My process for conducting an insanity evaluation or a mental state at the time of the alleged offenses evaluation is to take a look at

everything I can get my hands on. I want to see that interview that they did with the police. I want to watch it. I want to see the transcript. I want to see, you know, any and all calls that may have been made by the offender or the, you know, people that found the body, all that kind of stuff, all the discovery. I want to see the police reports. I want to see the autopsy. I want to see the toxicology, you know, on the offender. I want to go out to the scene where it actually happened, if possible, to see what kind of decisions the person was making in that, you know, in that environment. I want to see their mental health records, if they have any. I want to see their records that they may have from the jail right

after their arrest in particular, because what I'm trying to understand is at the time of the alleged offenses, what was that mental state? Not three weeks later, three months later, two years ago, but what's at the crux of the issue is at the time of the alleged offenses. I'm also going to want to do an interview of that person, and that interview is going to be alleged offenses. I'm also going to want to do an interview of that person. And that interview is going to be very thorough. I'm going to ask them direct questions about what they were thinking. I'm going to compare what they're telling me to what, you know, is documented in the materials to see if they're being truthful, if they've gotten sicker, you know, if they're trying to embellish. I'm going to give some tests that pick up a tendency to exaggerate

or on the other hand, to downplay whether they have anything wrong with them. I'm going to give tests of malingering. I'm going to give tests that pick up a genuine mental illness. And I'm going to bring all that information together in the form of a report, you know, to render my opinions. And I'm probably going to videotape that interview. And why would I videotape that interview? Because a lot of times you miss the nuances of what people are saying. You also want to see, you know, you want the court to be able to see what questions you were asking and honestly be completely transparent to all sides about whether you did your job or not. And a lot of these psychologists and

psychiatrists that I see aren't doing that. Some really good ones do. But where's the ability then to review, hey, he or she might've said something that they didn't make a big deal out of, but really is a big deal. So I'm going to do a thorough review of everything. I'm going to talk to them if I can. I'm going to test them. And then I'm going to weigh in in terms of what I think is genuinely wrong with them and whether they could understand what they did, whether they have a real mental illness and whether they knew it was wrong. And I'm going to tell it like it is. You always do. Any final questions from you, Stephanie? We could do this for two hours. Yeah, I got a ton of questions, but Chris, I'm going to have to call you later and we're going to have to have a long conversation.

I have a lot of questions. So being a psychopath is a personality disorder, so they don't consider it to be like a mental health disorder that would preclude you from knowing what you were doing was wrong. Correct. A psychopath is considered really a variant of a personality disorder. The one that's in the DSM-5, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, fifth version of the text revision, which came out last year, antisocial personality disorder is the expression of psychopathic tendencies. Now, they're distinct because a person can be antisocial personality disorder. That is kind of a criminal personality, but not psychopathic.

But psychopathy is kind of a standalone, agreed upon, you know, set of character traits, if you will, that would be in the vein of personality disorders. So yeah, personality disorders like antisocial personality and it's more extreme variant of the psychopath would be a non-starter for a genuine mental defense. One final thing that we said before we started this interview was before we hit record, unfortunately, but it was important because Chris corrected me as he often does. No, I don't. No, when I go outside my field of expertise, you're like, no, Derek, stay in your lane. But you said something that I think is important specifically in this case because of some of the behavior we've seen at trial. And you made the distinction.

There's two differences here. There's determining whether the offender was sane or insane during the commission of the crime. And then there's a different evaluation for competency to stand trial. And although we've seen some behaviors at trial with Taylor that may suggest something different, that doesn't impact your assessment of her mental state at the time of the crime itself, which I think someone like myself, you can either combine them or get them mixed up. That's right. It's easy to mix up these two issues that come up in trials. One is, is the person competent to stand trial? That means, are they well enough to sit through the trial proceedings and cooperate with their lawyer, know what's going on and participate meaningfully in their defense. And that's just, can they sit

through the trial? Are they well enough to go to trial? Sanity has to do with the actual offense. Are they criminally responsible or because of a genuine mental disorder, were they unable to understand what they were doing or that it was wrong? And those are two distinct issues. Criminal responsibility versus competency. Yes. That's great. Chris, anything final words from you, Stephanie, before we?

Yeah, I have one more question. I'm so sorry. Hit me with it. Would somebody having like a personality disorder like borderline or, you know, being a psychopath or an antisocial personality disorder, would that make a difference? And I think it would coming into the sentencing phase. ones, can often be considered in sentencing decisions by judges. And even in capital cases, I've testified in a number of death penalty cases, and there's issues of mitigation and the fact that somebody, you know, may have a serious mental illness that, you know, kind of aggravated their tendency to do what they did, you know, maybe something that causes a jury or a judge to be merciful in terms of sentencing. You know, on the other hand, if you've got just a straight up personality disorder or you're a psychopath, probably not

going to be too helpful to you in the sentencing phase since one is considered a sickness and the other is more just a flawed character. Oh, and so with something like being a psychopath, right, or antisocial personality disorder, lacking empathy, you can't fix that. You can't teach somebody who doesn't feel empathy to feel empathy. This is not, they weren't programmed correctly. This is not fix that. You can't teach somebody who doesn't feel empathy to feel empathy. This is not, that's right. They weren't programmed correctly. This is not fixable. Right. So those kinds of, of, of issues, you know, when a court is looking at, you know, either a jury, you know, or a judge that might be adjudicating a sentencing decision,

and they're looking at, you know, why would I be merciful? Well, one person was sick, they weren't in their right mind. Okay, they still knew what they were doing, but they weren't in the right mind. You know, the other thing that they might be looking at is, what is the prospect of rehabilitation with this individual? And do we need to, you know, protect society from somebody that really can't be rehabilitated, or is not interested in being rehabilitated, and is just invest, you know, a person that, you know, will continue to blame others or exploit others or, you know, hurt other people. I mean, those kinds of things often do get, you know, placed into the, you know, into the decision making process when it comes to sentencing. And those would be considered then

exacerbating factors. So there's aggravating and mitigating factors. Aggravating, yeah. Yeah, exacerbating factors in it. And being a psychopath or antisocial personality, you know, could in a number of cases actually be considered an aggravating factor. Perfect. Thank you so much. Chris, you're the man. Guys, everybody, like I said before, if you haven't checked it out, go check out Dr. Chris Mohandy's book, Evil Thoughts, Wicked Deeds.

It's an excellent book. I don't know if you guys have picked out out, go check out Dr. Chris Mohandy's book, Evil Thoughts, Wicked Deeds. It's an excellent book. I don't know if you guys have picked out it by now, but Chris is a wealth of knowledge. Anywhere, Chris, I know you're on TV all the time, but anywhere people can find you or just kind of stay tuned to the True Crime channels and they're probably going to see you pop up. You're on, I see you all the time, even when I don't want to see you. Follow me on X, formerly Twitter and Instagram. What's your IG?

At Dr. Chris Mohandy. Super super hard and what is it on x uh at dr chris mohandi you're like you're one of the lucky ones and the reason i'm on x is because of you derek you got me on to x back in the day can we not call it x i know listen i don't like it either it's not great it's not great well listen hey we appreciate your time. Thank you for sharing your insight. We're going to have to have you back on when we have another one of these crazy cases. He should be our resident psychiatrist. He'll start invoicing us. He's very expensive. I'd love doing it. Count me in. We'll talk soon, Chris. Take care, brother. Be safe. Thanks, guys. Take care, Stephanie. Bye, Derek. Thank you. Bye.

Yeah. So like I said, that was a great interview. Go check Dr. Chris Mohandy out. And we're going to take our last break. And then we will come back and continue discussing the trial of Taylor Shabiznas. So jury selection began as planned that day with nine women and seven men chosen, including four alternates. During opening statements on July 24th, the prosecution stated that Taylor made a series of choices in the early morning hours of February 23rd, 2022. She chose to consume meth. She chose to strangle Shad with a dog collar.

She chose to commit sexual assault on his body. And she chose to dismember him. The prosecution told the jury that the case wasn't a whodunit. They were sure Taylor committed all of these crimes because she had admitted to them in an interview with police. The prosecution said, quote, in the interview, she's describing what's happening to Shad. It's evidence you'll hear, and you'll hear it from the defendant's mouth that this is an intentional act. It's evidence you'll hear, and you'll hear it from the defendant's mouth, that this is an intentional act. It's not one pull of a gun trigger. It's an intense act, end quote.

The defense didn't have much of an argument except to remind the jury to remember that there are two sides to every story. I guess they got their opening arguments from Warren's Facebook. Oh, my God. Sorry. They asked the jury to keep an open mind and to find Taylor not guilty. The trial lasted only three days, so there weren't many witnesses. The first witness was a supervisor from the Brown County 911 Center who testified about the 911 call made after Shad's head was found downstairs. Tara, Shad's mom, also took the stand to describe the discovery.

It was a possibility. I didn't know why the bucket was there. Tara, Shad's mom, also took the towel off? I did. And how long did you look in the bucket? I don't know. Seconds, probably. Did you put the towel back then? I put the towel back, yes. Tara's boyfriend, Steve Hendricks, testified about what had happened before they called 911. That's how she put it. I found my son's head in a bucket. So I'm dumbfounded. Didn't believe her.

Thought she was having a mental issue or something. Go downstairs and see what the hell she's talking about. And I can't see anything. So we go back upstairs and contemplate what the heck to do. So I guess what do you do specifically when you go downstairs? I went to the basement and observed a bucket that she said, but I don't know, my mind blocked it out. All I seen was like hair like an animal or something. I didn't know what the heck.

The prosecution played body cam footage from Officer Alex Wanisch, the responding officer who first located Chad's head in the basement. ABC2 printed that Taylor seemed interested in Wanisch's body cam video while it was being shown. Interested because she's enjoying the sight of her crime that she committed. She's like, ah, I've never seen it from this perspective. I wish I'd taken more time to really take all of this in. But I was so busy cutting up a body and trying to get the body parts out of there. I really couldn't just appreciate my work. That's funny. I think she's right up there with some of the most prolific serial killers that we know about, honestly. As far as their mental, just their mind state? Yeah, like she seems very, you know, like we had talked about with Dr. Chris, not at all empathetic, not empathetic to Shad, not caring about what she had done.

She seems real casual about it. The only time she seems to perk up during the trial is when they're showing camera footage of the crime scene. Like Dr. Mahandi said, she was able to become sexually aroused after the horrific thing that she did. After taking someone's life, she was able to be sexually aroused after that. And he said this is very uncommon in women. Very uncommon. I'm going to throw something out to you here. All right.

And it's a shot in the dark. It doesn't have nothing, no basis for it. Take your shot. Shoot it. We talked about it in Dr. Mohandy's interview, how someone who's never shown a history of this before could do something like this. You mentioned the phrase serial killer. We've also seen historically, in many cases, there's an evolution or an escalation with serial killers where their first murder, it might be more, I hate to use this word, but traditional. And then as they

get comfortable, they start to really dive into their fantasies. In what world, you know, is it possible that maybe this wasn't Taylor's first victim? Just throwing it out there. She's around people who are drug users and maybe not missed by many. Are there any unsolved murders out there that maybe Taylor had done something like this before? And maybe this wasn't her first time disposing of a body like this. Maybe this was the first time she's gotten to this point, but in the past, she's committed crimes

where it wasn't as graphic, but over time with this escalation and this sexual gratification that comes from it, could she have done this before? Who are we to say she hadn't? Just because she hadn't been caught doesn't mean she didn't do it. Just throwing it out there. I mean, I really didn't.

I said that to Dr. Chris before we started recording because he was talking about, you know, well, her criminal history and we don't know what kind of things she's done with sexual partners before. And I was thinking and I said it like we don't even know if she's committed violent crimes before and just not gotten caught. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, hey, listen, not completely out of the realm of possibilities where maybe Shad wasn't her first victim and the behavior displayed afterwards was the end of a history of doing things like this. Who knows? You would think that she would have been apprehended, but depending on who she was hanging out with and where they were hanging out,

it could be a homeless person, someone like that. I was thinking the same thing, dude. Yeah. So it's just something to think about. Yes. And especially when you make a comment like that, where you think she's up there with some of the top serial killers as far as her mind state and what she's able to do and how she's able to separate emotion from action and how she's able to desensitize herself to these types of situations where she's not throwing up how she's able to separate emotion from action and how she's able to desensitize herself to these types of situations where she's not throwing up and she's not passing out like a normal person would. It makes you wonder, was that because she's just a complete psychopath or was it because this isn't her first rodeo? She's done this before. Or both. Or both. This actually

reminds me of a case I read about a few months back. And I can't remember where it was or what her name was, but it was a young woman. And she basically lured, I believe, two or three homeless men into the woods and murdered them during sex. And then when she got caught, they were like, why did you do that? And she was like, because I wanted, I wanted to, I wanted to do, I want to know what it felt like. And I liked it. So I did it again.

Dangerous people out there. Yeah. This might not have been her first crime like this. This might not have been her first murder at all. Maybe she's meeting people on like dating apps or something. Like you don't know. I wonder if police, we wouldn't know it,

but our police looking at that. I would hope that they are. For unsolved murders in the area that may fit a similar MO. I'm going to look for it now. Or was she around someone who was doing things like this that she was emulating? Who knows? Maybe Warren was her partner in crime before he went to prison, man. Honestly, it could be any of them.

And that's why he's standing by her like this. Yeah. In that circle of people. Because it does seem really crazy that she would go from, you know. Zero to a hundred. Zero to a hundred. Like this is the epitome of zero to a hundred. Yeah.

Or was there a middle? Was there a couple along the way? Who knows? We're throwing it out there. Again, I started by saying no basis for it, but wouldn't be the craziest thing. It would not. It would wouldn't be the craziest thing. It would not. It would absolutely not be the craziest thing. And I'm thinking of these couples in the past that have committed these crimes together, right?

Rosemary and Fred West, Myra Hindley, and Ian Bradley. I think that was his name. I keep forgetting. It's also 2.30 in the morning. So Carla Homolka and Paul Bernardo. It's okay. It's 2.30 the morning. So Carla Homolka and Paul Bernardo. It's okay. It's 2.30 in the morning. Carla Homolka and Paul Bernardo. These are people who committed horrible murders together, often sexually based, right? So is it crazy to think that Taylor's a business and Warren over here? You forgot your girl, Lori Avalo.

Chad Daybell. Yeah, but they didn't really do this together and there was no sexually based motive. Well, according to Lori, she was never there for any of them, you know? Yeah, I guarantee you she wasn't because that bitch don't like to get her hands dirty. Even the ex-wife? No, definitely not for the ex-wife. You know what I'm talking about? Okay, we're going off, like you said, 2.30 tomorrow, but... Yeah, but I'm saying these are couples that I've named off who have committed murders together, sexually motivated, horrific murders. And it's not crazy to think that there would be another couple like that. It's just not crazy to think that.

Nope, I agree. Especially with meth involved. Hmm. Well, I know we're talking about one, but could have had the same situation where you only find one for Rex Hurman. Doesn't mean that was the only one he committed. For real. You know, so you just never know. So the jury also watched a video of Taylor's arrest and a little over an hour's worth of clips from her police interviews during which she confessed to Shad's murder. The clips focused a lot on Taylor's statements about the dismemberment process. Right at the elbows? Was this part of the arm left on? You've got to go in that little bit. Okay, look. But you know that you cut off at the elbows?

Yeah. Okay, you cut both arms off at the elbows? I hope so. Because I was saying that dismemberment process I did was really messed up because I was nodding off. And then I was sawing it off. Did you use dismemberment? Just the nodding off. Did you use legs at all? What would you have done with legs?

I think there's one leg that's actually intact. Okay. And then maybe, maybe. I have no idea. Was his body okay when you did this dismembering? Was it in one spot? It was all in the same spot. And where's that again?

Blue tub. So the bodies in the blue tub as you were cutting it up? That's the weird thing, like, because when it started happening, like, I started, like, nodding out. Okay. And then I was going crazy on the limbs, like, even while I was sleeping. And then it looked messed up, and I didn't like it. Okay. But you believe, so when you believe the blue tub, that big tub, like, probably,

I'm thinking it's the way you're describing it, it's one of these, like, Tupperware cups about, like, this size. And that's your cubic one, foot one. And that's where most of the blood is. Along, like, a bunch of his organs. His organs are everywhere, too? His organs are everywhere too. His organs are everywhere? Yeah.

Did you like hide organs in the house? Oh, they're in plastic bags. They're in plastic bags. In the tunnel? In the backpacks. In the backpacks? Okay. Did you move all organs?

Like intestines and everything? Yeah. Where are the intestines? Do you remember? They're going to be in a plastic bag. They're all in plastic bags too. So that blue top is just all blood, isn't it? It should be like only this much.

Dr. Vincent Tranchita of the medical examiner's office testified that Shad died from strangulation, likely from the dog collar, and that Shad had several different drugs including cocaine, meth, and marijuana in his system at the time of his death, but none were the cause of his death. Dr. Tranchita said that after Shad was strangled, his body had been eviscerated and the organs were removed. Petra Schwab, also from the medical examiner's office, took the stand and told the jury that she'd seen mutilation before, but nothing to this extent. Next, the prosecution asked a detective to share information about what they had found when searching Taylor's phone, specifically the internet searches she made leading up to Shad's murder. The detective testified that on February 12th and 13th, investigators noticed that Taylor looked up things like Jeffrey Dahmer,

cadaver definition, Jeff Boyardee, blow-up doll, and customized face. In the days just before the murder, Taylor's internet searches included terms like flaming pentagram, Jeffrey Dahmer, and KKK. Yeah, so it kind of looks like this may have been a little premeditated. Premeditated and she's looking up people that she's emulating, aspiring to be like. Yeah. Cadaver definition? What is that about?

How do you know the definition of a cadaver, dude? How many times has she looked him up in the about? How do you know the definition of a cadaver, dude? How many times has she looked him up in the past before this, you know? She can dismember a body, but she doesn't know the definition of a cadaver. This is a problem.

It's like putting the cart before the horse, I think. Mm-hmm. Flaming pentagram. Blow-up doll. Customized face. Oh, blow-up doll with a customized face. Yep. So she's

into some kinky things, man. Yeah. All right. Well, this is what Chris was referring to. Yeah, this is exactly what he was talking about. He didn't even know all this. It wasn't a surprise to detectives that Taylor had been looking up Jeffrey Dahmer content as she previously told them she, quote,

had a thing for him. This detective further testified that dating back to December 2021, there were many other searches related to Dahmer, totaling 24 in all. Some of these searches included phrases like Jeffrey Dahmer's butt and Jeffrey Dahmer walking into court all sexy. Additionally, Taylor had saved 12 or more photos of Dahmer. And on February 12th, she even took a selfie with a picture of Dahmer. Wow. Wow. After Dahmer was mentioned by the detective, defense attorney Freilich motioned for a mistrial, stating, quote, I would argue on behalf of my client that if this information were to come in, she's going to be painted in the worst light possible.

You think? Yeah. You think, Frolic? I don't think you can. You can't declare a mistrial based on a fact. Hey, man, this isn't going to make

my client look good. Hey, what are we doing here, guys? Mistrial. I object. You're making my client look guilty. I object. Throw this out. You're making her look like she liked a serial killer or something.

Yeah. My God. How dare you? Freilich. Freilich. Freaking Freilich. All right. She's going to be painted in the worst light possible with maybe the worst killer in human history.

End quote. By the way, this only adds fuel to the fire about what we were just like theorizing about as far as, you know, the people she was looking up to, her role models, talking one of the most prolific serial killers of all time. So is it crazy to think that she wanted to be like him? Emulated him, yeah. I mean, what are we talking about here? I would be shocked if law enforcement didn't, after this murder, didn't start to look at

the specifics of how she did this to see if there were any other unsolved cases out there that had a similar modus operandi. I wouldn't be surprised at all. Dude, do you know what Jeffrey Dahmer did with his victims? They was eating them and shit, yeah. I think there was a sexual aspect to it as well. I don't doubt i don't know i didn't i never watched dahmer or anything like that i know for some reason jeffrey dahmer is the one serial killer that i was just like i can't do it with you i can't you know like i looked into it a little bit but i i just i can't yes um. Dahmer began carrying out particularly disturbing acts with corpses, continuing to use their bodies for intercourse, taking photographs of the, get this, dismemberment process, preserving with scientific precision his victim's skulls and genitals for display.

Hey, didn't she cut off Shad's penis? Yeah, unfortunately, that sounds about right. So did Taylor set aside Shad's head and his penis in a bucket so that she could do what Dahmer had done to his victims? Was she literally following his routine step by step? Because so far, kind of seems like it. Remember- Seems like she's following a playbook, doesn't she? She was going to come back for that bucket, man. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. I just, it's crazy. I didn't think it was going to go here. I thought maybe this could be a situation where the drugs just finally

screwed up her brain and she just lost control. But like you said, five minutes ago, it seems like there's a lot more premeditation here where she might've been thinking about this for a long time before actually doing it. And that's if she had never done it before to someone else. I think she knew she wanted to do it to somebody and she was going to do it to somebody. Well, even what you were talking about with the search engines, you know, customizable faces on blow up dolls. Now those blow up dolls in most cases are used for sexual acts, but they could also be used for other things. And if you go back to Dr. Mohandy's interview, he was saying just this, where you have this assessment that's going to take place. And although this individual may not have been convicted of a crime, this

egregious in the past, they could be doing things behind closed doors, certain movies, certain books, or physically doing things with objects and animals and all these different things prior to this type of incident taking place. So he would want to go back and look at all this. And when he did, if he was part of this case, this is what he would have found. So there you go. You have a situation where someone has been thinking about this and fantasizing about this very situation for an extended period of time. Yeah. We got to tell Dr. Chris to watch this because he's going to be like, I predicted that. I predict that. fantasizing about this very situation for an extended period of time.

Yeah. We got to tell Dr. Chris to watch this because he's going to be like, I predicted that. I predict that. It's like, he's super smart. He's all, he's done a few,

what he's 30 years. He's like wicked smart man. Yeah. Almost as old as, almost as old as us doing this. I mean, and I've told you this before, you've met Chris before and I don't want to go on this,

you know, whole thing here. This is a long episode, but this is what I was telling you about before. You've met Chris before, and I don't want to go on this whole thing here. This is a long episode, but this is what I was telling you about before, where sitting in a car with him all day long for 12 hours a day on breaking homicide and talking about these cases and other cases. I said it in the interview, like the information that I learned from, even though I was an investigator for 13 years at the time when I met him, there was so many ways, things I thought I didn't think about before in the perspective of a doctor and how they look at in the mind and how it can tell you so

much about a person and not only what they've done in the past, as far as building a case, but also what they're capable of in the future. And just the way his mind works, not only based on his intelligence and his education, but also the experiences he's had interviewing some of the most dangerous and violent people on the planet. It's given him an insight that you and I can't understand unless you're sitting in the room with these types of people all the time. And that's why I wasn't just saying to plug his book because he's a friend. He talks about these very interviews in his book, and it gives you such an insight into it. Yeah. I mean, just from the, you know, we were on, I wanted to keep asking questions, you know, we were on,

I wanted to keep asking questions, but I know you were like, we need to keep get going. Cause we've seen the episode going from three hours to four hours. Yeah. But I wanted, I couldn't like, I had more questions. I had more questions.

I'm going to call him myself and just be like, yeah, he, she's like, I want his number. I'm like, I got you. Well, he said, give her my number. Well, you said, Derek, I need his number. And she, and Chris said, give me your number. But maybe he's like, he actually texted me on the side and you well he said give her my number well you said derek i need his number and chris said give me your number but maybe he's like and then he actually texted me on the side and said don't give her my number and then i said you're mine now you don't even know what you just did because i said be careful what you wish for chris psychology man i could talk about it for hours yep he's good um okay so so uh taylor's lawyer is like we cannot have

taylor be affiliated with Jeffrey Dahmer. That's going to make her look bad. Mistrial, right? The prosecution fought back, arguing rightly so. Quote, her interest in Jeffrey Dahmer is relevant to this case. She, I assume, is going to argue she didn't intend to do this or is certainly going to argue in the second phase of the trial that she had some sort of mental illness that caused her to do this. The state's position is that she did this because she wanted to do this, end quote. Also, that is Stephanie Harlow's position, for sure. Yeah. Derek Labaster's as well. And Dr. Chris Mahandy, too. So I think we're in good company. Yep. Now, the judge denied the

motion for a mistrial, obviously, and things moved on. A DNA analyst testified that the dildo found at the crime scene, which Taylor admitted to using on Shad, could not definitively be linked to Shad's DNA. This was one of the few pieces of evidence that somewhat benefited the defense. After the prosecution was done putting witnesses on the stand, the defense said they weren't calling any witnesses, and Taylor wasn't going to testify. Probably a good idea. While the jury could not judge her based on that fact, they certainly could judge her on the fact that she often displayed inappropriate behavior, including laughter, smirking, and glaring in the courtroom. For instance, when the prosecution discussed displaying a photo of Shad's severed head during an autopsy, Taylor could be seen laughing as the judge said he would allow

this picture to be shown. On another occasion, she was caught on camera making a finger gun gesture towards Judge Walsh. Furthermore, during the testimony of Taylor's friend A.J., who had been with Taylor and Shad shortly before the murder, A.J. mentioned they had been, quote, chilling, chopping it up, end quote, meaning they were simply hanging out. Taylor found this unintentional wordplay amusing and burst into laughter. I can't even believe, like, I can't, I can't even believe her. Next up were the closing arguments. The prosecution told the jury, quote, this isn't an accident. If it's an accident, you're not going forward. You're not seeing this result. You're calling for help. You're certainly

not after the fact after you finally finish then cutting up his body, right? You have all the evidence in this case and it points to intent, end quote. The defense said his client was innocent, saying, quote, the facts here are very complicated, confusing, unclear, two different locations, no eyewitnesses. It's foggy. It's cloudy. It's hard to imagine. Almost impossible to try and figure out what did and didn't happen.

End quote. It's pretty clear what happened. And literally, the prosecution has said what Taylor confessed to, to the police, is exactly what law enforcement on the scene found the crime scene to show. We know what happened here because she confessed to it. It's not foggy, confusing. And even like the idea of like, oh, she blacked out during this or whatever. She's able to be at the interview room and describe what she did. And it lines up perfectly with the forensic evidence at the interview room and describe what she did and it lines up perfectly with the forensic

evidence at the scene that just shows like she was clearly conscious and aware of what she was doing when she was doing it and was taking note of what she was doing for her to be able to go back and and describe it all to investigators or interrogators at the at the at the police station and then obviously have that line up with all the forensics at the, at the crime scene. During her police interview, she literally was like, yeah,

I was so like turned on. I was sucking and cutting at the same time. Yeah. Or sucking and slicing at the same time. Like, come on, man. Yeah.

And some of those phrasing, not that it passes anything, maybe it's still because she's coming down from whatever she's on, but, but still be able to remember everything in such detail and to describe those emotions. In such glorious detail, right? Yep. Some might say like you're reliving it and enjoying that.

Yep. Absolutely. And that's the thing, right? Like a normal person wouldn't go into that much detail because they'd be like, I'm not trying to incriminate myself. But Taylor almost like wants to. She wants to share with people what she's done because she's super like impressed with herself. Like she enjoyed it so much. It brought her so much dopamine and so much pleasure. She's like, I want to talk about it again because it's going

to let me relive it. It's going to bring me more pleasure and give me another hit of that dopamine by talking about it to somebody. Somebody else did that. Do you remember who else did stuff like that? Who was that? When they talked about their victims? A lot of people, man. Who are you talking about? Anyone in particular?

Derek Levasseur. I've never done something like this. I was going to say Jeffrey Dahmer, but. Jeffrey Dahmer certainly loved to talk about it. You get what I'm saying? Yeah. So again, going back to that, her role model, someone she looked up to. So just again, we're just making connections here.

She probably called him Daddy Dahmer. Oh, God. I can't believe you said Derek Levasseur. I know it's late. I know it is late. I couldn't have come up with anything else. On July 26, after deliberating for only 45 minutes, 30 minutes of those, probably the jury was like, we just got to stay in here a little bit longer and make it seem like we're thinking more. They're playing like games of tic-tac-toe.

They're playing games of hangman. They're just trying to pass the time at this point. After only 45 minutes, the jury found Taylor Shibis guilty of first degree intentional homicide, mutilating a corpse and third degree sexual assaults. There you go. And that's just what we said earlier in the episode where I said it was so important was to determine, you know, was she sane, was she insane? And then also, was she competent to stand trial? Because that was the whole case hinged on that. And I think the defense knew that from day one,

where if they lost that battle, they lost the war. And as soon as they lost that, they knew this would be the outcome based on the specifics, based on her ability to basically go back and tell the investigators exactly what happened. They knew that this would be the outcome. So, yeah, it lines up with what they, now we know why the defense tried so hard.

But listen, it's not necessarily over, right? Because there's the second phase of Taylor's trial. The sentencing. The jury has to decide now between the sentence of a psychiatric hospital or prison. And that happened the following day. So after the jury was like, guilty, next is the second phase. And we got to figure out her sentence. So the defense, who had the burden of proof, argued that Taylor's past mental health struggles and drug use influenced her actions on February 23, 2022. Taylor's lawyer claimed that her serious

mental condition made it difficult for her to distinguish right from wrong and to control her behavior during the offense. The prosecution acknowledged the disturbing nature of Taylor's actions, but argued it did not indicate a mental defect, stating, quote, what Ms. Shabiznas did to Shad is disturbing. It's conduct we don't see often. It's conduct that you may hear about and think, my gosh, that person must not have been in their right mind when that happened, which is exactly what I said, right? I'm not going to sit here and try to convince you otherwise, but you've already carefully listened to the evidence and followed the law that the judge gave you,

and you'll do so going forward as well because you will be told what a mental disease or defect is and what it is not. A mental disease is not antisocial conduct. It's not conduct brought about by the use of a controlled substance, a temporary mental state caused by a controlled substance. A person is not mentally ill just because they commit something that's unnatural, that's so enormous, that is just beyond comprehension, right? You'll be instructed that those are not mental diseases or defects. So as disturbing as the conduct you already heard about is and may be, that's not where the analysis ends, end quote. Great, great little sentence there or whatever, little statement there. I like it. Yeah, it's a little opening statement. I have to tell you,

before listening to that, which he totally flipped me, but I was thinking in my head, I'm like, oh, I'm about to say something and Stephanie's going to be all over me. But I was going to say, obviously, as horrific as it is what she did, you've said numerous times, like, how could anybody do that and actually not pass out from it? And you would think that the explanation would be that they're not of sound mind. Yeah. And so before you read that statement, again, because definitions are important here, right? That you have to go by the definitions of the law, not how you personally feel.

Right. If you had told me, or you do tell me that she went to a mental hospital, I feel bad for the family, but I would see where that could come from because of what she did and how horrific it was and how, even when you watch the video of her being apprehended out as she comes out of the apartment, there's just like no emotion at all. It's just like, hey, she like puts her hands behind her back and she's calm, cool, collected. So I could see a world where that happened, where it's like this person isn't. No, because like Dr. Chris Mohandy said, that's like psychopathic tendencies.

That's a lack of empathy. That's a personality disorder, not a mental disease or defect. Putting her in a psychiatric hospital will not help her or fix her. You can't make somebody have empathy when they do not. You can't fix somebody who's broken. Right. Because before it, as I'm thinking that you're reading this and I'm thinking, yeah, that's that's kind of true. And by definition, what she's displaying would not qualify as a mental defect. And if that's true and it doesn't qualify, well, then she wouldn't you wouldn't put her in a mental. OK, now I'm convinced. Good opening statement. Let's move on. Yeah. Let's see what happens, man. Yeah. After opening statements, the first defense witness called to testify was Taylor's father, Arturo Coronado, who had recently been sentenced to 12 years in prison for raping a 13 year old child related to his then wife. So, yeah, this this group of people, family tree, man. Yeah. I need to cut that whole bitch down.

It would explain why she gravitated towards her man there in prison as well. Court cameras captured Taylor and her father exchanging smiles when he entered the courtroom in an orange jumpsuit and handcuffs. Taylor grinned almost nonstop as Arturo expressed his concern that Taylor was often not in her right mind. He recalled a time when Taylor had agreed to go to a mental institution, but did not like the pills they gave her, which he claimed messed her up. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. This is just so ludicrous. The pills messed her up?

The pills messed her up? Or was she messed up? And why are we letting a child rapist sit on the stand and give any it's a character witness that's ridiculous this is insane he could speak to her that's the best this is the best character witness they could they could scrounge for for taylor they're like well well, we got her husband, Warren, who's in prison. Bring in her child rapist dad. Or her child rapist father who's in prison.

I'm sure the jury loved that. Which one do we put on the stand? This is bananas. Yeah, the pills messed her up, Arturo. The pills. Arturo also mentioned that Taylor had been on a positive path until she got with her husband and started doing hard drugs, which is funny because that's not what we heard about her, right? We heard that since the death of her mother, especially, she had been on a really bad path. That she'd been on antipsychotics, antidepressant medication, Adderall, all of these until she was 18 and then she stopped because the pills made her feel like a zombie. And then she started injecting meth nine times a day and drinking alcohol and smoking weed and doing cocaine and ecstasy. What is this good path you refer to, Arturo? Where was the path? What are you talking about? I mean, I guess for Arturo, who raped a 13-year-old girl,

maybe that would seem like a good path path i can't do it and it makes me wonder did her father sexually assault taylor oh i i wouldn't doubt that one bit why wouldn't she use that i wonder because maybe she still has a good relationship with a stockholm syndrome kind of thing yeah i think phil maybe i mean again we're going on a. Maybe he didn't. But it feels like based on what you described as he walked into the courtroom, she still looks at him in a very positive light. Something happened to this woman. Yeah. Right? Yeah. It was the pills. Yeah, the pills messed her up. That's right. Okay. The next defense witness was Dr. Diane Litton, who testified that Taylor faced difficulties in school from a young age,

starting in kindergarten. Now, remember, Dr. Litton was like the only mental health professional who was like, oh, yeah, she's not not good. She's not in her right mind. I've never seen anything like this. She was the only one who was that like concrete in her belief that Taylor was not fit to stand trial. Out of all of the people, she was the only one. And so, of course, the defense would call her as their witness. So Dr. Litton explained that between the ages of 7 and 14, Taylor received counseling for attention deficit, hyperactivity disorder, and depression, as do hundreds and thousands of people around the world every single day. When Taylor turned 14, she was put on antidepressant medication and spent three days in a mental health facility

due to suicidal thoughts, delusions, hallucinations, and depression. Upon her discharge, she was diagnosed with a mood disorder without psychosis. Though she did have some paranoia, Dr. Lin said her initial interactions with Taylor were challenging. During their first meeting, Taylor did not speak at all, even through a chair at the doctor, and in subsequent attempts to interview her, Taylor remained nonverbal. We've heard all of this before from Dr. Linton earlier. However, on another occasion in late June, Taylor finally started talking. Dr. Linton noted that during this meeting, Taylor had difficulty paying attention and seemed to experience hallucinations. She said she was hearing screams and a train whistle. Dr. Lynn told the jury that it's common for individuals

experiencing manic states to have memory gaps, which she believed Taylor had. Dr. Lynn emphasized Taylor's facial expressions, noting that Taylor often appeared to be grinning when discussing her actions. She's been described as smirky. Yeah, smirky. She has inappropriate, her, you know, grinators, with me, at times briefly it's very strange. Other times looking, you know, I can mimic it, very scowly. A lot of people interpret it superficially to be grinning. Yeah, grinning it all, but getting a kick out of everything. Nah, uh-uh, no, uh-uh, not me, uh-uh. Based on my experience and training, that's a psychotic person right there. That's, then that's what's causing this really weird, bizarre, and I'm telling you, to me, it's off the scale. 32 years, I've seen a lot of psychotic people, bipolar, psychotic, manic, and I just haven't seen very many like this. Very exceptional. Very exceptional.

In conclusion, Dr. Lin's overall opinion was that Taylor met the criteria for the not guilty by reason of insanity plea. Of course it was. Of course it was. Dr. Matthew Seppel testified for the prosecution expressing doubts about Taylor's bipolar diagnosis. He suggested that her symptoms might have been caused by excessive drug use and noted that after getting arrested, Taylor spent 21 days in a psychiatric hospital where her condition improved, possibly because she had abstained from drugs during that time. Dr. Seppel also raised concerns that Taylor might have pretended to experience hallucinations, noting that her statements to different mental health

professionals were inconsistent, with only Dr. Litton hearing about internal stimuli. He informed the jury that a completely different doctor who evaluated Taylor believed her symptoms were greatly exaggerated and would be unusual even for someone with genuine schizophrenia. Notably, Taylor did not testify during this phase of the trial, and after less than an hour of deliberation, the jury concluded that Taylor did not suffer from a mental illness when she killed Shad Therion. On September 26th, 2023, Taylor Shabiznas was sentenced to life in prison without parole. No cushy mental institution for her. No mental health professionals wasting their damn time trying to fix something and someone who cannot be fixed. And it's really, honestly, honestly, like I'll tell you, we've covered a lot of cases. I've covered a lot of cases on YouTube. I've seen people do terrible things. I truly believe that this woman either is a serial killer or would have become one. Oh, I mean, if not one would have definitely

become one. I can tell you for a fact, looking at the comments, I don't know if you checked them out yet on YouTube, but I mean, everyone in the comments was saying how graphic and horrific this case was and how even for some of them, they had to turn it off. They couldn't finish it. And I will tell you, when I was reviewing the episode, I was listening on audio and I was driving and I, and I, I was, I was, I said, this is going to be a tough one for some people because the detail that we went into in part one is difficult because again, that wasn't even like very detailed compared to what was out there. Right. So it's a, it's a, it's a horrific case and I feel like they obviously got it right.

And it's one of those situations where she could have been putting on a little bit of a show at trial to even get it close to where it could have been a competency thing. But obviously, thank God the competency didn't become a huge issue where someone, a judge would have said, hey, listen, you know what? She isn't suitable to handle a trial. Let's send her off to a mental health facility and she could be there for the next 10 years before she's able. I don't think they would do that. Lori Vallow was there for a couple months. She would have been there for a couple months. You can't fake it for that long. Not with real mental health professionals who aren't paid by your defense team to say you're crazy.

That's true. But no, this is a crazy case. I'm going to go. I've said this before and I was wrong, but I feel pretty confident in saying, no, maybe not actually. It's actually not. Why say it? I was going to say this is our longest episode ever,

but I don't think it is. I don't know. I feel it's the latest we've ever recorded. Someone, yeah, it is. It is three o'clock in the morning right now. We had a lot of business to go over and we were going over before this. We didn't start till 1 a.m. to go over and we were going over before this.

We didn't start till 1 a.m. though. So actually I think we made great time. However, we did have, you know, about 45 minutes on earlier with Chris, which is crazy because we did it at 7.45 and it's now 3 a.m. I've been in this recording booth for like my life. Yep.

It's been a long time, but no, it's close. Somebody in the comments, if you're watching on YouTube, let us know. Do you know what our longest episode is? I'm sure it's pretty easy to find. But this has got to be close because we're at two hours on the ticker here. And we have 30 minutes with Dr. Chris. Dr. Chris and a bunch of videos that are going to be put in here that we referred to in here.

So I'm thinking two and a half, two hours and 45 minutes probably. What do you think? Three hours. Three hours. I don't know if we've, two hours and 45 minutes probably. What do you think? Three hours. Three hours. I don't know if we've ever done a three-hour episode. I think we have, honestly. You might be right. You might be right.

We've done some long ones. There was a time where we were like, honestly, on a roll, where we were just doing like three hours and 15 minutes. No way. And people were like, more. I know. We were like, oh, this is going to be so long. People are going to be mad. And we were like oh this can be so long people are gonna be mad and they were like we love it no they love it yeah this is this is one where

it it was a little bit longer because we had an interview it's only the second guest we've ever had on crime weekly the first one do you remember who it was yes it was uh the detective tom nope dave sexton dave sext, but he was Dave, Tom. Sorry to anybody named Dave or Tom, but your names are interchangeable. Dave Sexton was the only other person we've ever had on the show. It's always good, but it does logistically for us bring some issues with

the internet and three people on the screen and timing it and having it fit in with the script. I like it, though. I like it. It's great. It's especially when you don't do it all the time. It's a nice change up. Any final words from you?

I mean, damn, I think we should go live and discuss this further because I got to think about this. I won't be surprised if there's more to this story down the road where we find out maybe it's even from Taylor herself, where we find out that this this may not be her first victim dude guarantee you she goes to prison give her a couple weeks to realize she's in there for life she's gonna be writing a freaking book wow wow she's crazy like i just can't imagine that somebody like this existed and was walking around out there and how many taylor's businesses are walking around oh yeah that's a taylor's businesses are walking around oh

yeah that's a whole that's scary that is a scary thing about i mean allegedly rex humerman has been out there for what 20 years doing things like this and you just walk in the streets i mean it's i don't like started in his 40s he's 59 now whatever if he did do it um but no it's a crazy case. You sound like OJs. Yeah. If I did it. It's a crazy case. Why do we cover it? Because you got to be prepared for what's out there. Understand the people that are around you. Taylor was walking around with everybody else up until this moment. And nobody, including Shad, knew what she was capable of.

So it's something where. Oh, I think some people knew what she was capable of. Well, yeah. And especially if she had done it before. But clearly Shad didn't know what she was capable of so it's something where i think some people knew what she was capable of well yeah you ain't you and especially she had done it before but but clearly shad didn't know what she was capable of or i don't think you would have put a collar on if that's what did happen uh and allow her to hold on to it i think uh good old clyde barrow i mean warren over there yeah warren was well aware of the depths of depravity that his wife held. And yeah, I think the moral of the story is a lot of the time people do horrible things.

And there is sometimes a reason for it. Like they went through trauma. They had a horrible life. They have a legitimate mental illness. Sometimes people just do bad things because they're bad people. The leadership business is one of them. What did we say before? Sometimes good people make bad decisions.

Sometimes bad people are bad people. Yeah, you just got to get these people off the street and throw away the key. Not allow them to do this to anybody again. That's really it. It's a long one. Thank you to Dr. Chris Mohandy. We hope that you guys enjoyed that interview. We appreciate him taking some time to be with us. I think she should be executed. I'm sorry. I just, I'm thinking. You're still on it. You're still on it. I can't,

I don't feel comfortable living in a world that she exists in. We're going to go back to the hanging, drawing, and quartering, man. Any final words, Stephanie Harlow? I mean, if she likes to cut people up so much, let's see how she likes to have it done to her. Oh, gee, oh my God. I'm sorry. Like, this is messed up. She's messed up. Oh, messed up.

If that was your son, man, mm-mm. No, yeah, I agree. I agree. It's terrible. All right. Everybody, don't date people who are heavy meth users and injecting meth into themselves nine times a day. Get them some help. Get them into rehab. When they clean up and they're back to their fighting shape, then you can love them and let them in your life. But honestly, nah. Pass. I'm going to pass. It's a no from me, dog. And I know obviously meth is bad. I would even say that in this particular case with this particular person, I think you could make an argument that the meth enhanced what she did, but it wasn't a deciding factor.

She would have done this sober. So that's something you got to consider. Like Chris Mohandy said, takes away your inhibitions, raises your ability for violence. I think she already had this in her. Yeah. I definitely know. I know she did.

I know she had it in her already. Yeah. We appreciate you guys being here. This was a long one. If you made it to the end of the video, way down in the comments below, let us know what you think of the case. Let us know,

what should we put there for a little emoji or something? Let's do something. Because this is, people only know if they did it. Let's do a glass of wine. Glass of wine. I could go for a glass of wine right now. I could go for a fucking glass of wine right now. I could go for a glass of wine.

Let's just do a simple glass of wine. I've never even seen you drink wine. That's the point. That's the point. You would just take anything right now. Right around now to go pass out. So that's really it. What about a glass of wine?

Glass of wine. If you're listening on audio, leave a rating. of wine. Glass of wine. If you're listening on audio, leave a rating, let us know what you think. If you're watching on YouTube, like, comment, subscribe. We are out of here. We will be back next week with a new case. We'll talk to you soon. Can I end this episode? Anything else? Let's end it. I got to think about this. All right. Have a good night, everyone. Be safe out there. Bye.