Every Town - Texas' Most TRAGIC Case: The Cruel Murder of DEBORA SUE SCHATZ

Episode Date: May 9, 2025

A young and pretty postal worker went out to do her rounds one summer day and never made it back to the post office or anywhere else for that matter. 23 year old Deborah Schatz disappeared from an affluent neighborhood in Texas and the details around what exactly happened to her are about as senseless and tragic as any crime can get. 👀 Watch This Episode On Youtube: https://youtu.be/yOnFUHzBL3g 👁 Check out our movie AN ANGRY BOY for FREE! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvtlOlODQ8g&t=5238s https://tubitv.com/movies/100029672/an-angry-boy International & Other Ways To Watch: https://www.anangryboy.com/ 💀 MERCH: https://scary-mysteries.teemill.com/ 💀 Free 7 Day Trail on Exclusive Episodes, Podcasts & Perks! https://www.patreon.com/scarymysteries   🎧 Our Other Podcast Scary Mysteries: https://open.spotify.com/show/3ZooEZMoZ421WdsOVJhVkT 👁 X: https://x.com/ScaryMysteries1 👁 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andrew.fitzg 👁 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@andrewfitzgerald 👁 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/scarymysteriesofficial 👁 X: https://x.com/ScaryMysteries1   🗣 Business Inquiries, questions and comments hit us up at [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Every town has a dark side. A young and pretty postal worker went out to do her rounds one summer day, never made it back to the post office or anywhere else for that matter. 23-year-old Deborah Shats disappeared from an affluent neighborhood in Texas, and the details around what exactly happened to her are about as senseless and tragic as any crime can get. She would be found murdered soon after, dumped in stuff deep down. in the mud of a creek bed. The shocking nature as to what happened to her

will go on to be one-uped by the media frenzy in legal war that followed. And it pitted a wealthy family against a lower-class one, so you can guess as to how it turned out. And for all these reasons, and more, this is why Deborah's case has gone down as one of the strangest in all of Texas's history.

Hey, guys, it's Andrew, and thanks for tuning in to this week's episode of Everytown War today. were diving into the details surrounding this young lady, a person who had everything in front of her, taken in the blink of an eye by someone who, well, doesn't even know why they actually did it. This case was suggested by one of you, so thanks for that,

and I hope you all enjoy it. Now let's head on down to the lone star state to cover a senseless crime that devastated a family, disappointed our legal system, and left wounds that have never fully healed. This is the tragic story of Deborah Shats. Born on September 16th back in 1960 in Houston, Texas, Deborah grew up with eight brothers and sisters in a house bursting with life.

The friends and family all called her May for some reason, though nobody knows exactly why. It was something she picked up in childhood somewhere along the way and it just stuck. The Shats' home itself wasn't much to look. look at from the outside. It was typical middle class and inside there were a lot of mouths to feed. Their faded greenhouse on Kempwood Street with three bedrooms squeezed in all nine kids while Dad Albert kept the family afloat working at General Welding after serving as an army cook. Her mother, Barbara, focused on raising those nine children, so they didn't have much,

but at least they had each other. And they herself was something special, or smile infection. She wore her honey blonde hair long, and when she tossed it back while laughing, her whole face would light up with joy. And this is how her siblings remember her, just a good person with a kind heart. As she got older, she wasn't looking to change the world or climb any corporate ladders. May just wanted the simple things, a family of her own someday, and kids running around like she grew up with. As she dropped out of school in seventh grade, already clear about what mattered to her. While other girls had posters of rock stars, May was old school and head over heels for Elvis. And not just a little crush, we're talking true devotion here.

She'd signed school papers as May Presley. When Elvis died, she locked herself in her bedroom for a week, heartbroken. Her prize possessions were a little bag of grass clippings, her cousin snuck from Graceland, and an Elvis figurine her mom gave her for her 21st birthday. They loved kicker dancing on weekend nights and fishing trips with her cousins. Those camping weekends with extended family were sacred. Nine families gathered around campfires, swam in the lakes, and told ghost stories under the stars. Her nieces and nephews adored her, and she was the fun aunt, the one who got down on the floor to play with them,

who never seemed too busy or too tired. By 1984, she moved into her own apartment with her best friend. But family still always came first. She called her mother every single day. Most nights, she'd swing by the family home for dinner, catching up with whoever was around. That connection was unbreakable. She'd worked at a daycare center,

loving every minute with the children, and then as a dental assistant specializing and treating kids. But ultimately, she landed a postal carrier job, and that was her big break. and good benefits with decent pay, enough to buy herself that gold Mustang she drove so proudly. She'd been delivering mail for just over a year and a half, saving up for her dream car, a red corvette. Yes, things were that much different back then than they are today. A hard work paid off, and you could actually make a living.

And her colleagues at the post office all loved her, always ready with a joke and always willing to cover someone else's route if they needed help. That's who May Shats was. Not just a name and a news story or a statistic, but a daughter, a sister, a friend who left fingerprints on every heart she touched, the kind of person who made everyday life better just by being in it. But then came June 7th. And that morning started like any normal Thursday from May. She punched in at the Westheimer post office,

joking with coworkers while sorting her mail into bins. She headed out and did her deliveries, and after finishing her regular route, she did what she always did, and stepped up to help what needed. McCauley needed the afternoon off, so May volunteered to cover his deliveries in the upscale West Memorial neighborhood. Just a few more hours of work before heading home, so no big deal. Her postal vehicle turned onto Limwood Hollow around mid-afternoon, quiet dead-end street where massive homes stood behind perfectly trimmed. hedges. At the very end of the cul-de-sac was the port residence. Inside that house, 17-year-old David Port was alone, and waiting. What happened next would only come out later. But through David's own chilling words, he explained that his May walked up to deliver the mail.

He opened the door, pointing a 22 pistol at her. No warning. No reason, really other than just to do it. He forced her inside a gunpoint and made her go upstairs. May didn't put up a fight, and she followed his orders, but when she saw her chance to possibly get away, she made a run for it, and Dave pulled the trigger. And the bullets hit her in the head, and she crumpled to the floor inside the stranger's home. With the blood pulling around her, David checked her pulse. When he realized she was dead, he didn't panic in the slightest. Instead, he methodically tied her hands together. and stuffed her body into a black garbage bag.

And then it was time to start cleaning up, washing the blood off his tennis shoes, wiping down the walls where bullets left holes and getting rid of the evidence. And he did this, all with the cold detachment of someone just doing some spring cleaning and taking out the trash. He loaded May's body into the trunk of his car

and just drove around for hours deciding what the best course of action would be. He drove around so long, in fact, that he had to stop to grab a bite to eat. Normal folks going to and from the parking lot, with burgers and fries in hand, walking right past his car with the body of May inside, and they were none the wiser. As night fell over Houston, David finally decided what his next move would be. He drove out to a secluded spot on the outskirts of town near Cypress Creek.

He opened up that trunk and pulled May's body out, dragging her to the muddy, bank of the water. There, he pushed her deeper and deeper into the muck until she completely disappeared from view. He tossed her mail pouch in after that in some of the cleanup rags, all the final pieces of evidence that the two of them had ever even crossed paths. It was time to ride off into the sunset, but there was one problem, and it was a karmic one when his car got stuck in the mud. At the time, it felt like a stroke of bad luck for him, but it would later become the crucial brink. It would later become the crucial break investigators needed. Because a tow truck

had to come pull them out of there. And that driver would remember the strange teenager out in the middle of nowhere. Back in Spring Branch, May's family was starting to worry. When she didn't check in after her shift, her supervisor called her mother late that evening.

Barbershats felt it instantly. That gut-punch feeling parents get when something's not right with one of their kids. You have to remember, May was super tight with her family, and she had never disappeared like this. Never. She always called and checked in. Barbara shook her husband, Albert, awake, and explained that something had happened to May. She then started calling her other children, fingers trembling as she dialed, hoping there was

a logical answer in store, but deep down knowing she wasn't going to find one. May's sister Betty rushed over and found her mother in a state of panic, repeating over and over, they're killing her. get her out of that house. It was like Barbara somehow new. Mother's intuition, cutting through the darkness to find her child. All through that long night, Albert and his sons joined postal inspectors combing through the wooded West Houston neighborhood where May was last seen. The flashlight beams cut through the trees as they called out her name.

They searched for any sign of May or a postal vehicle, but there was nothing, not a trace. By mid-morning on Friday, June 8th, Barbara couldn't shake the feeling that something was horribly wrong. As she later said, she saw a vision. May's face appearing on her bedroom curtain, her hair hanging over her face covered in red welts. She even heard May's voice crying out, Mama, come get me, bring me home.

What Barbara didn't know at the time was that those red welts matched the ant bites later found on May's body. That same morning, Bernardport, David's father, approached police as they searched the area to tell them that his own son was missing too. His wife and a friend had come home the night before to find David gone, and a bullet hole in the wall by the staircase.

Bernard was worried as David was diabetic and had a learning disability on top of that. He was somewhere on the spectrum, but back then it wasn't a whole whole thing. lot the doctors could do because they didn't understand mental health issues like that. When police followed Bernard back to his house, he showed them his son's stash of weapons. Two pistols, two rifles, and a shotgun. This is Texas, so it wasn't the craziest thing.

But one of the pistols, a 22 caliber, they could tell, had recently been fired. And then David's stepmother, Odette, handed over one of his tennis shoes. It had been washed, but bloodstains were still visible. And so it was at that point that David officially became a suspect. Bernard immediately called a lawyer and told police they'd need a search warrant to go any further. From that moment on, Bernard and Odette refused to answer any questions. A silence they maintained throughout the entire investigation and trial. By Friday afternoon, the search was still going strong when suddenly someone yelled out,

There he is. David Port had come back to the neighborhood in his marooned Chevy. When he spotted the police, he floored it. The kid took off like a bullet, but he didn't get too far. He crashed right into a parked car at a nearby apartment complex. The five cops swarmed him, with guns drawn. Slapped on the cuffs and read him his rights.

And then the strangest thing happened. This teenager just started talking, confessing fully, like he was telling them what he had for breakfast. He laid it all out, how he'd met the mail carrier at his front door with a loaded gun, how he forced her upstairs, how she tried to run, and he shot her in the head twice. The way he described cleaning up the blood and getting rid of her body, and it was chilling to see. No emotion or amorous coming from him.

Just matter-of-fact about the whole thing, like he was explaining how to change. a tire. When they asked him why he did it, David shrugged. I didn't even know her, he said. That was it. He literally didn't know why he had taken that poor girl's life. He told the cops he had dumped May's body in Buffalo Bayou, but something didn't add up. At first, they just took him at his word since he had been admitting to the entire thing. But they searched and searched and found nothing over there. Either the kid was lying or he was confused. It turns out it was a little bit of both. Then came the lucky break that cracked the case wide open as to where young May had been disposed of. That tow trucker from before was watching the news that night nearly fell out of his chair.

He recognized the kid they were talking about and called the police right away saying, that port kid? I pulled his car out of the mud yesterday, way out by Cypress Creek. in Highway 290. That's 20 miles from where David claimed he had dumped the body. Authorities rushed to the spot, and there she was. May's body wrapped in a garbage bag, just like he described, with two bullet holes in her head. And the mud and red ants had already started doing their work.

It was heartbreaking. You'd think arresting the killer would be the end of the story, right? But not even close. This case was about to get weird in ways nobody. he saw coming. Bernard, David's father, hired Randy Schaefer, who'd learned from the best, a legendary racehorse Haynes, one of the most famous defense attorneys in all of Texas. Added to the team was Jack Zimmerman, another heavy hitter. These weren't your average court appointed lawyers. These guys had reputations and hefty price tags. To set things in motion,

they knew they needed to get the public on their side. When called to test, they were to test, testify before the grand jury, the poor parents flat out refused. Their lawyers claim the Jewish law prohibited parents from testifying against their children, and that, if they were forced to, it was anti-Semitic. So with that, this murder case spread onto the front page of every newspaper across America, and that was all part of their plan. See, the Harris County prosecutors had a problem, and they weren't sure they had enough evidence to make the murder.

or charged stick. Yes, they had a confession, but that alone wasn't enough, especially with David's condition. And postal workers were out for blood, of course, demanding the death penalty for the kid who killed one of their own. But without his parents' testimony, they couldn't even prove the kid was home that day. And people took sides, and ugly stuff started happening. Anti-Semitic letters showed up at newspapers. Someone vandalized the judge's house.

and the DA's office got a bomb threat. Even the Jewish community in Houston was split down the middle. Some rabbis backed the ports. Others, like Rabbi Jack Siegel from one of Houston's biggest synagogues, called the whole argument fate. Since Roman times, he said, Jewish law has been subordinate to the law of the land. Judge William Hatton himself wasn't buying the religious freedom argument

and had to make a stand here. He gave the ports a simple choice, talk or go to jail, and they unexpectedly chose jail. This drew out the trial even further. Bernard spent two months behind bars. Odette, who wasn't even David's real mom, but his stepmom, stuck it out for four and a half months. That part was especially weird. It was a woman willing to go to jail for a kid who wasn't even her biological son. In the case against David Port finally went to trial, though, in March of 1985, in New Braunfelds, a German ancestral town.

Not exactly the best spot for a Jewish kid accused of killing a young woman with a German last name like Shats. But still, the prosecution had their work cut out for them. They didn't have the parents' testimony, and there were big questions about whether they could even use David's confession. And most of their evidence was certain. circumstantial. Yeah, they had the murder weapon and some blood evidence, but nothing that directly tied David to pulling the trigger. Well, finally, came the game changer. The judge decided to allow David's confession after all. Once the jury heard those cold, detailed words straight from David's mouth, it was pretty much over. And here was this kid with no prior record,

who everyone described as quiet and passive, suddenly confessing to this brutal murder. And the jury didn't buy the Gentle Kid Act, and they convicted him and slapped him with 75 years in prison. But still, this roller coaster wasn't over. In August of 87, the Texas Third Court of Appeals reversed the whole conviction. And turns out those oral confessions shouldn't have been allowed in the first place under Texas law. And the court basically said, look, we know this is frustrating, but rules are rules. We can't use these kinds of statements as evidence. You can imagine what this did did the Shats family,

and they were already shattered beyond repair. Albert, May's dad, had died just two months after his daughter was murdered. The doctors called it a heart attack, but everyone knew it was a broken heart. Then a few months later, they lost Barbara's son-in-law Roger Allen, too, who died suddenly. And it was like this dark cloud just wouldn't live from the family. And so to make it all worse, while they were drowning in grief, they had to watch the ports become these sympathetic figures in the media.

Newspapers painted Bernard and Odette Port as these cultured, wealthy, principled people, making a brave stand. And many editorial writers actually sided with them. Meanwhile, the Shats family, this big, tight-knit working-class family who just lost their daughter and father, where they were barely mentioned, like they were just a footnote in someone else's drama. That's partly why the Shatsas filed a $5 million wrongful death lawsuit against the

ports back in August of 84. And May's sister Millied said, That money ain't nothing. We filed that suit to keep them from getting rich off my sister's murder. See, the ports were already talking to book agents and movie producers. All while the Shats were planning funerals, the ports were figuring out. how to capitalize.

Eventually, the insurance companies hammered out a settlement. The Shats is would get $1.66 million paid out over time until 2006. But as anyone who's lost someone knows no amount of cash fills that hole. The family talked about feeling this permanent emptiness, like someone had carved out a part of them that could never grow back. And the legal ping pong went on for years, and the appeals courts had dated. David should go free, but then the Texas court of criminal appeals stepped in and said,

Nope. And they tossed out the lower court's ruling and David went back to prison. And there was this weird law from 1977 meant to ease prison overcrowding that meant David would be eligible for supervised release after 26 years. So even with a 75-year sentence, he wouldn't serve anywhere near that time. And through it all, the Shatt's family never left. go of May. And they still talked about her in the present tent, convinced she was sending them messages from beyond. They saw signs everywhere, their family dog sniffing at her old backyard swing,

and the swing itself moving on a scorching, windless afternoon. In the wildest part, while they swore they could see her spirit in a family photo taken the Christmas after her murder, a faint ghostly shape hovering among them. As for David, after 30 years behind bars, he walked free on June 5th of 2014. Almost exactly three decades after he murdered Deborah Shats, he was out. He'd been denied parole multiple times since 2007, but thanks to that 1977 law, his release became mandatory.

And today, if you drive down to the corner of Roger Dale and Westheimer in Houston, you'll see a post office with Deborah's name on it, and they dedicated it back in January of 2001. A building, a plaque, a name that most people walk past without a second thought. But for her eight brothers and sisters, for her army of nieces and nephews, it's so much more. They'll never know her laugh, her hugs, her spirit, just stories and faded photographs. Meanwhile, David Porte, he's free. The technicality and a prison overcrowding law put them back on the streets just days before the anniversary of May's murder. The system protected David Port, and it buried Deborah Sue Shats twice.

And so that's going to do it for this week's episode of Everytown. I hope you all enjoyed it. If you like this type of work, we do, and you want more, check out some of the links down in the description. We have a huge library of videos and podcasts for you to go through exclusive content. content, feature film to watch. We got new merch and more. I appreciate you very much for tuning in. And remember to come back next week for another episode of Everytown filled with scary, strange, and mysterious stories. Because you never know. Maybe your town will be next.