Dateline Originals - Internal Affairs - Ep. 4: "Can I Just Give You A Hug?"

Episode Date: December 19, 2023

A detective plays cat and mouse with an unusual suspect, while crime scene evidence raises questions for investigators.This episode was originally published on October 4, 2022. 

Why do we make the choices we make? Sometimes what seems right in the moment can be a colossal mistake in life's rearview mirror. It's human nature. We never think the worst is going to happen. We live in a culture in which confessing and then trying to make up for our missteps, has value in and of itself. The debate is whether that shows one's character or one's lack of saying. For many in this story, the road to perdition was as clear as the center line on an expressway. Easy to read, straight as a ruler, from the first hello to the last goodbye,

and just as dangerous to cross. So then what about Heather Garris? The young wife and mother was just weeks shy of her 38th birthday when she was gunned down in a freezing parking lot. An innocent victim if ever there was one. She'd done nothing but trust her cheating husband and try to fix her broken marriage. What thoughts raced through her mind the night of her execution? When the Grim Reaper ordered Heather to her knees and leveled a gun at her head. In this episode, you'll hear from Shana Nelson, Heather Garris' romantic rival, and the woman accused of killing her in cold blood on a cold night in Greeley, Colorado, January 23rd, 2007. Where are you today? What's going on with you today? I know your time frame, your whereabouts i've been home all day today with the baby i don't know you just want my whole day is it you'll also hear a police interrogation

one that doesn't sound like it came from any version of law and order I'm trying really hard to not cry, okay? I'm cool. Will you just hold my hand? Sure. And you'll hear more on what detectives learned about Ken Nelson's handgun. So now the big question, how does a gun that should have been on his hip at the time this murder happened turn out to be the murder weapon? I'm Josh Mankiewicz, and this is Episode 4 of Internal Affairs, a podcast from Dateline. To hear Shauna Nelson tell it, her bladder was about to burst. Oh my God, Greg, I'm going to pee. Yes, she was cuffed to a stainless steel bar that was bolted to the wall.

Yes, she was being accused of cold-blooded murder. And yes, she was facing a tough interrogation. But in that moment, as Shawna sat squirming and shifting in her chair, absolutely nothing seemed to matter more than finding a bathroom. Can we shut this door and I'll just pee in this trash can? It was the diet pills she'd been taking, Shawna said, that made her detention in a small 6x10 room so particularly unbearable. We couldn't get a female officer there quick enough. That's the voice of Detective Mike Prill.

He, along with Detective Greg Tharp, were lead investigators on this case. So Greg escorted her to the men's bathroom, and he just kind of stood in the doorway while she went into the stall. And we took that opportunity to collect her clothes. So after she went to use the restroom, she changed out of her clothes, handed them over the door to Greg. He bagged them, and we put her in an orange jail jumpsuit. Oh, thanks, Mark. When Shauna returned to the interrogation room, she seemed in much better spirits. I'm sorry it took us that long.

We'll probably have to get closer. Prill says he and Tharp decided early on that Tharp was best suited to do Shauna's interview. I'm like, dude, you know her. I don't know her at all. She clearly likes you, so let's use that to our advantage and you do the interview. He wanted nothing to do with it. He just didn't want the responsibility of being part of a big case like that. This was going to be his first biggest case that he'd be involved in.

But he understood what I was getting at. So at about 7.30 that evening, with Prill watching the video feed from another room, Greg Tharp started with the basics. You're being detained right now for this investigation. Is this customary? You have the right to remain silent. At this point, it's been a little more than an hour since Heather Garris was gunned down. But Shauna told Tharp she didn't know anything about any shooting.

Detectives Tharp and Prill, of course, believed she did. I know you, but that doesn't have any relevance over these rights. You still have to do your job. I don't know what to do. I mean, I don't know what my side is. I don't understand this. This is all kind of overwhelming, Greg. I know.

One minute I'm, like, going to the liquor store, and the next minute Ken's jumping out of the truck, and I don't know. I don't know what to do. I don't know. I'm so confused. I'm going to try really hard to not cry, okay? I'm cool.

I don't understand this, Greg. I know, and we're going to get through this, okay? Will you just hold my hand? Sure. Over the years at Dateline, I've met my fair share of homicide cops, and not too many have struck me as the hand-holding type. But Greg Tharp rolled with it. Do you have any idea what we're inquiring about? Yeah, Kel told me.

I don't know. What did Kel tell you? All he said was there was a shooting and they obviously want to talk to me. He just said they. Well, there was a shooting just before they contacted you and people are naming you as the suspect in the shooting. How? Why? I don't know. What?

Shawna told the detective that since she'd quit her job as a Greeley police dispatcher, she'd been a stay-at-home mom with a routine as predictable as lather, rinse, repeat. Murder wasn't on the list. I took the kids to school. I went home, cleaned house, I do laundry every day. Five people in the house do the laundry all the time. Watched my soap, you know, just vacuumed. At about 3.30, Shauna said she'd picked up the kids from school and taken them to Subway to get sandwiches for dinner. They were home by 4.40.

After that, she said she asked Dylan, the 8-year-old, to watch the younger kids while she took a bath. She wasn't feeling well, Shawna said. Had a headache. A couple days ago, I hit my head right here. I was opening the pantry door and I was leaning down to get the skillet, and it, bam, came back and hit me in the head right here. And I just haven't felt very good. So I told the kid that I was going to take a bath tonight.

They took Christian downstairs, the baby. They took Christian downstairs to play. And before I got in the tub, I thought, I'm going to run to the liquor store really quick. They won't even know I'm gone. And that's it. According to Shauna, her clothes were too soiled to put back on. So she says she just reached in the dirty clothes hamper

and grabbed something else, anything, for her trip to the liquor store. She dashed out of the house so fast, she said, that she forgot her shoes and her purse. She was trying house so fast, she said, that she forgot her shoes and her purse. She was trying to be quick, she said, because she didn't want her husband Ken to know she'd briefly left the kids home alone. I had gone to the liquor store, and I got out in front, and I realized I didn't bring my purse. So I started back home home and he was calling. But I didn't want to answer the phone because I thought he'd be pissed if I told him I was going to a

liquor store. And he left a message saying to call him. Shawna said she was almost home, just turning off of 65th Street, when she saw the Jeep in front of her suddenly stop and her husband jump out to block the road. He was yelling. He was so pissed. It was about 30 minutes into the interview that Detective Tharp, a tall, dark-haired man of about 40, shifted gears. Shauna seemed to sense a change was coming. She reached out and rested her hand on his arm. I know this is a horrible spot and it's a bad spot for you, but what I absolutely need from you, Shalini,

what you've always given me is honest. I've always been honest. You've always been a good friend, and you've always been honest to me. I don't know, Greg. I don't know. He's using good interview skills, or technique, I suppose. He's acting the friend. He's being straightforward. I need you to talk to me.

I can't fence up and try to go around. Got to get through this. I don't know what else you want me to tell you. That was my whole day. You know where our scene is in the shooting? No. Credit your room. Well, Kel did tell you that.

We all know the history. We know what's going on. Well, I know. I know. It doesn't look that... Do you know who the victim is in this? Well, it happened so fast when Kel was... I can't remember if Kel told me now or not. I don't know. It's Heather. It's Heather. Shawna's only response to that,

to the news that her romantic rival had just been murdered, was simply a sigh. This was the moment of truth. No more fencing. No more hand-holding. The detective knew. Witnesses to the shooting had said the Grim Reaper spoke with a woman's voice,

ran with a woman's gait. Two had even gone so far as to say the shooter in the Grim Reaper costume was Shawna Nelson. So the detective pressed for a confession. I'm not going to try to come around you and trick you with any lies or any detective stuff. You know, you've been around this job long, long, as long as I have, I think even longer than I have. So you know, you know what the game is.

So I've got to be straight with you. I'm trying to be happy with that shooting scene. We have you identified. I've got to talk to you now. We've got to get beyond what wasn't there. I've got to have an explanation as to what happened. Greg, I don't know, Greg. He didn't hide the ball at all, whereas Shauna was lying as often and as frequently as she could during her interview.

But then again, as I told Greg, just get her statement, whatever it is. If it's a lie, then get the lie. And then we will examine that statement after the fact. I know who you are and what you're about. And whatever happened tonight is not Shauna Nelson that I know. What I have for me is some dialogue here. I have some explanation as to what happened. I don't know. I guess you better get me an attorney.

I don't know what else to do. With that, Detective Tharp stood up to handcuff Shawna and told her she was being charged with first-degree murder. Then Shawna Nelson, intimately familiar with the long arm of the law, hitched up her prison pants and made a final request. Can I just give you a hug? Sure. Can I just give you a hug, she'd whispered. And then, while holding the detective in a full embrace, Shauna murmured,

I'm so scared. Heather Garris' body was gone by the time Russell Keller pulled into the credit union parking lot. It was 7.10 p.m., about the time that Shawna was across town at the Greeley police station, squirming, waiting for someone to take her to a bathroom. When Keller got out of the department's CSI van, he went straight to the uniformed cops he saw standing beyond the yellow tape. They were the ones who told him what had happened. Ig's wife, Heather, had been shot twice, they said. The shooter wore a Grim Reaper mask. A witness had seen a suspect drive off in a dark-colored Ford pickup. Glancing around, Keller could clearly see the bloody spot where Heather Garris took her last

breath. Her black shoulder bag, with her keys stacked on top, were right where she'd set them down. A few feet from the spot where Heather Garris died, Keller saw the kind of evidence he was looking for. There was a spent bullet and two spent shell casings. They are PMC.40 caliber. To get a sense of Russell Keller, it might help to imagine the late actor Wilford Brimley, but with a shaved head. Keller is a thick-set fellow, about six foot tall with a bushy mustache and round rimless glasses. Only in his mid-forties, then, he looked older. Maybe twenty-plus years of investigating bloody crime scenes had aged him. It happens. After bagging the bullet and the two.40 caliber shell casings, Keller walked over

to the alley where Nick Walker, the off-duty bartender from the dugout, had seen the suspect run past him. He showed me a general area and I just went from there. There was about three different sets of tire tracks back there. All the tracks were different, but only one of those slushy tracks seemed consistent with the tread pattern on Ken Nelson's truck. The truck Shauna Nelson had been driving at the time of her arrest. So that is the one that I then put markers by, photographed, and it was measured and placed in the sketch. Then there was a dental stone cast in the middle of that track. Back at the station house, Detectives Tharp and Prill were taking a second look at the clothes Shauna Nelson had handed over while she was in the men's room, changing into her lock-up orange. The sweatpants she was wearing and the underwear were not hers. They were men's

and very big. You know, so at the time, they're just oversized clothes. I'm not, nor is Greg, kind of realizing she's wearing her husband's dirty clothes. Wearing her husband's dirty clothes, driving her husband's truck. Coincidence? Or something else? Over at the Greeley Police Garage, Ken Nelson's truck, covered with road salt and grit,

was getting a thorough going over. There was a camo jacket in the back, Shauna's red Razor cell phone, and a yellow rubber dish glove on the seat. A Kenny Chesney CD was living on the floor. Oh, and ammo. Lots of ammunition in different calibers, boxes of it in the back and in the glove box. The seats and dashboard tested positive for gunshot residue. No surprise, it was Ken Nelson's truck, and he was both a gun collector and an elk hunter. It was an item on the passenger side floor that really caught the attention of investigators.

A cheap nylon pullover Halloween mask, a black hood with red lining, and a black mesh face covering. That seemed damning, because witnesses had described the shooter wearing a mask just like that. Okay, but they'd also described the killer wearing a black robe, black gloves, and black shoes with a white stripe around the sole. And none of that getup was in the truck. And neither was the most important item of all. The murder weapon. So, where was all of that? Factoring in the drive time from the credit union to where she was stopped,

detectives figured Shawna would have had only a few minutes to hide critical evidence. That is, if she really was the murderer they thought she was. It wasn't until the next morning that a possible explanation surfaced. While out retracing all the various routes Shauna could have taken from the credit union, a Greeley patrolman spotted a black shoe. It was by an open field, sitting atop a snowbank. The shoe had a white stripe around the sole, just as witnesses described. This was near a bus stop shelter, about 700 feet from where Shawna had been stopped. Further up the road was the matching shoe. That one also perfectly perched on top of the snowbank on one side of the road.

I mean, there's a certain amount of luck that goes into this. I mean, one, we did find the shoes, so that would demonstrate to us that she's flinging stuff out of the vehicle as she's driving. You know, did she throw the shoes out of the truck because she saw Ken in, you know, just the short distance ahead of her? Detectives had a theory. What they did not have was proof. Where was the rest of the Grim Reaper getup? The gloves, the black flowing gown. How hard is it to throw a pair of gloves and a graduation gown, for lack of a better term, out a window and it just blows away in the wind over the course of the next 12 hours? Maybe. It's certainly possible.

Except, surely someone would have found them and turned them in once they knew police were looking for them. And guns? Well, they don't just blow away when flung out the window of a moving truck. We brought our city streets snow plows out and plowed up the entire highway and then took all of the snow that was collected to a large parking lot on the north end of town and secured that mound of snow until it melted, just in case we collected the handgun. As for those shoes, they were size 10 men's shoes.

Shawna wore a woman's size 8. When investigators searched the Nelson home the day after the murder, they found it neat as a pin, downright orderly. The door to the master bedroom was locked, but once opened, detectives found a full bathtub. And that at least supported Shawna's story that she'd been running a bath when she decided to rush out for a bottle of wine. Elsewhere in the house, detectives found several guns and several more boxes of ammo. They also found something else, a topless photo of Shawna's friend, Michelle Moore. Detectives didn't know what to make of it.

Were Shawna and Michelle lovers? Michelle Moore said that she was not having a relationship with Shauna other than they were friends. Shauna's sister, Deb Smith. She had sent Shauna nude pictures of herself. I find it very hard to believe. You've seen these? I have seen them. And so has the rest of the world.

I find it hard to believe that, you know, I'm sure you have male friends. Do you send nude pictures of yourself? Just the really close ones. Those are the kind of things that you think, that make you think, why? It doesn't make sense. Based purely on the physical evidence, the case against Shauna Nelson seemed about as airtight as a screen door. There was no DNA to connect Shauna to the crime. The truck? Well, there are a lot of black Ford pickup trucks in Greeley. No, what detectives Prill and Tharp. Not only were they hip-deep in a murder investigation,

but their entire department was in the process of moving to a brand new building. There were files to pack and unpack. Decisions to be made about decades of office flotsam. What to pitch, what to save. For Prill and Tharp, at least one decision was easy. Every scrap of paper, every photograph, every record they had pertaining to the Shawna Nelson investigation was going into a spanking new conference room they had commandeered as a kind of war room. We had our computers pulled in. We had two desks brought in. We got rid of all the conference tables except for one so four or five of us could sit around and talk or strategize. We push pinned a bunch of stuff, timelines, cell phone records, photographs and the like. They always hate it when the place is brand new and you're putting up stuff on the walls. Yeah.

And to this day, I can still see a couple of, you know, we're just talking a little thumbtacks. These were the grinded out months. Shoe leather detective work. The detectives building a murder case against their prime suspect, Shauna Nelson. One tiny detail at a time. There were witnesses to interview and then re-interview. Family and friends of key players questioned again and again. By March 2007, two months after the murder,

one of the clean white walls in the new war room was becoming covered with photos of Heather, Ig, Shauna, Michelle Moore, and others. In another spot, a timeline based on known interactions was taking shape. Dates, times, locations, and logs of phone calls made or received, as well as their duration. By early summer, most of the items on their to-do list had been checked off. I think it's right around the time I'm contemplating what types of things should we send to the lab. You know, Shauna's shoes, the clothes, the shell casings from the scene, the spent bullet from the scene. Oh, look, we have this gun in evidence as well that Ken handed over. And Greg is like, why would we want to turn that in? It was on his hip when this murder happened. I'm like, I don't know, man.

Let's just be thorough. So we submitted it. Ah, the gun. Ken Nelson's gun. It had been in the property lockup since he'd turned it over on the night of the shooting. For the life of them, Prill and Tharp couldn't figure out why Ken Nelson would turn over his service weapon. His colleagues at the Drug Task Force had never asked him. And by the time detectives found out about it, Ken Nelson had lawyered up. And why was that?

Well, because by then, Ken Nelson was also being investigated for evidence tampering. And so it all stems back to the fact that I saw the driver's side door open. It had been one of those enduring riddles. How could the driver's side door of Ken's truck have been open? Imagine, an unmarked police car blocking the right-hand lane and a pickup truck driven by Shawna locking the other. By all accounts, Shawna had scooted out the passenger side to talk with her husband. No one who was there admits to ever opening the truck's driver's side door. Kel just has no recollection of Ken going to the driver's side. Fortunately for me, at least, two high school kids leaving school that night encountered these two vehicles facing westbound on 18th Street.

They could see two men with a woman at the passenger side of the truck. Those kids had been leaving a high school basketball game to grab a snack when they'd encountered the tie-up. Traffic stopped in both directions. They couldn't go anywhere, but according to the kids, while they waited, they did see this. And they witnessed a male who seemed to be arguing with the female walk around the front of the truck to the driver's side and reach in and remove something from the truck. They were never sure what it was he removed from the vehicle. Kids speculated that he reached in and turned off the vehicle, but that's not true.

It was running when we got on scene. What exactly was removed? Well, given the circumstances, the detectives had a hunch it was likely the murder weapon. If it was, and if Ken Nelson had disposed of it in an effort to cover for his wife, then that made Ken a party to the crime. Now, here's the thing. Detectives Prill and Tharp had an even bigger riddle on their hands, because the firearms analysis report from the lab was in. The results? A mixed bag. The lone bullet recovered at the scene could not be matched to a specific gun, but the results on

the.40 caliber shell casings were conclusive. Those casings, found near Heather Garris' body, had been fired by Ken Nelson's service weapon, the same gun he'd handed over to fellow officer Jonathan Trahan just after the shooting. So now the big question, how does a gun that should have been on his hip

at the time this murder happened turn out to be the murder weapon? Remember, Kel Halsey said the first thing Ken did when he climbed into the passenger seat of his Jeep that night was hand him his gun so he wouldn't be tempted to use it if he caught up with Shawna. Halsey had put the gun under the seat of Ken Nelson's Jeep. And that's where it was when Ken left Halsey with Shawna and drove off to check on his kids. Our theory is that he removed the murder weapon from the truck, put it into his empty holster,

because the gun that was in that holster is under the passenger seat of the Jeep. Then he drives and picks up his kids. Stick with me here, because this is a little confusing. Detectives theorized that with the possible murder weapon in his holster and the gun he'd handed Kel Halsey bouncing around under the front seat, Ken Nelson had gotten confused

as to which gun was which. He confused himself and believed he had his duty weapon in his holster and the gun bouncing around on the floorboard was the murder weapon. That's what he confused in his own brain. the gun bouncing around on the floorboard was the the murder weapon that's what he confused in his own brain um and so he gets rid of his kids you know turns them over to his family and then finds some location and god knows in this town and in this county that's not hard

and threw away the wrong gun and then at the task force um for whatever reason, he offers up his gun. Confusing? Oh, yes. But the fact was, spent casings at the scene matched a gun that Ken Nelson had thought was on his hip at the time of the murder. Had he somehow taken a different gun to work that day by mistake? Detectives didn't know. But after rummaging around the Nelson home, that certainly seemed plausible. But he had more than one.40 caliber handgun at the house.

He was into his guns. And I don't know if he carried different types at different times at work, but her plan, we believe, was to plant this gun back at the house and make it look like Ken somehow had murdered Heather, or at least it was going to misdirect the investigation. It was only a theory, a convoluted theory at that,

but it could not easily be dismissed. After all, Shawna had been driving her husband's truck and wearing her husband's clothes with his DNA on them when she was arrested. So if the ultimate goal had been to eliminate anyone who stood in the way of Shauna's happiness, well then ensuring that bullet casings at the murder scene, traced back to a gun owned by an inconvenient spouse, might be considered a convenient twofer. But the way Shauna now saw it, she hadn't been the only one in that triangle with an

inconvenient spouse. Ig, she thought, also had a motive for murder. He definitely knows more than he's saying, and that's the part that irritates me while I'm sitting in here. He got rid of both of you. That's pretty sick. Next time on Internal Affairs. You ended up giving me a polygraph. What? Yeah.

That accused me of, when we stopped you, going to the driver's side, getting the gun, taking it out and hiding it. What? Yeah. And then told me I blatantly failed. I'm really thinking about calling Dateline. He's totally lying, though. Who is?

It's a call. Yeah, big surprise. Yeah, saying that he was only in a relationship with me because he felt like I was blackmailing him into staying in it because I would tell Heather. And he, that's never how it was. That's never ever how it was. Thank you. Susan Nall is Senior Producer. Adam Gorfain is Co-Executive Producer. Liz Cole is Executive Producer. And David Corvo is Senior Executive Producer.

From NBC News Audio, Bryson Barnes is Technical Director. Sound mixing by Bob Mallory. Nina Bisbono is Associate Producer. producer.