Law&Crime Sidebar - Mom Holds HIV-Positive Husband at Gunpoint When She Finds Him Raping Her 12-Year-Old Daughter: Cops

Episode Date: February 3, 2024

Donovan Sheppard, 39, is in an Oklahoma jail, accused of raping his stepdaughter in her bedroom. The girl’s mother allegedly caught him in the act and held a gun on him until police arrived. Sheppard and his wife both confirmed to police that he is HIV-positive. Law&Crime’s Jesse Weber discusses the disturbing case with Chris Hansen, renowned predator catcher and founder of TruBlu.PLEASE SUPPORT THE SHOW: If you’re ever injured in an accident, you can check out Morgan & Morgan. You can submit a claim in 8 clicks or less without having to leave your couch. To start your claim, visit: https://www.forthepeople.com/LCSidebarHOST:Jesse Weber: https://twitter.com/jessecordweberLAW&CRIME SIDEBAR PRODUCTION:YouTube Management - Bobby SzokePodcasting - Sam GoldbergVideo Editing - Michael DeiningerScript Writing & Producing - Savannah WilliamsonGuest Booking - Alyssa Fisher & Diane KayeSocial Media Management - Vanessa BeinSTAY UP-TO-DATE WITH THE LAW&CRIME NETWORK:Watch Law&Crime Network on YouTubeTV: https://bit.ly/3td2e3yWhere To Watch Law&Crime Network: https://bit.ly/3akxLK5Sign Up For Law&Crime's Daily Newsletter: https://bit.ly/LawandCrimeNewsletterRead Fascinating Articles From Law&Crime Network: https://bit.ly/3td2IqoLAW&CRIME NETWORK SOCIAL MEDIA:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lawandcrime/Twitter: https://twitter.com/LawCrimeNetworkFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/lawandcrimeTwitch: https://www.twitch.tv/lawandcrimenetworkTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@lawandcrimeSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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will keep you on the edge of your seat. Don't let your fears take hold of you as you dive into this addictive series. Love thrillers with a paranormal twist? The entire Oracle trilogy is available on Audible. Listen now on Audible. An Oklahoma youth baseball coach is under arrest after a woman says she caught him in the act of sexually assaulting her daughter in her own home. We're digging into this wild case with renowned predator catcher, Chris Hansen. Welcome to Sidebar, presented by law and crime. I'm Jesse Weber.

All right, we want to warn you that what we are about to talk about is extremely disturbing. I can't emphasize that enough, but with that warning, here we go. A man is accused of raping his own stepdaughter, and the abuse allegedly started when she was 11. But earlier this month, 39-year-old Donovan Scott Shepard, a coach for the youth baseball team, Oklahoma Aftermath, was out at a bar in Moore, Oklahoma. And that's when he allegedly got into a fight. According to police, his wife came to pick him up, took him home to Oklahoma City. And according to an affidavit, the woman went to bed, but Shepard didn't. She went looking for him, entered her daughter's bedroom, and that is when she told police she saw him.

raping her 12-year-old daughter. Again, Shepard's stepdaughter. The woman actually held Shepard up at gunpoint until the police got there, believe that. And to make this even more horrifying, when Shepard was arrested, police say both Shepard and his wife told them that Shepard was HIV-positive.

When police later interviewed this young girl, she told them that Shepard raped her and that this wasn't the first time this had happened. No, she told authorities, she was attacked six times starting when she was 11 and claims that he even assaulted her on her 12th birthday. Shepard is facing a huge list of felony charges, four counts of rape, two counts of lewd molestation, one count of pattern of criminal offenses, and one count of exposing others to AIDS. By last look, he's being held on a $500,000 bond, and now we are going to talk about it.

Let me bring in renowned journalist, predator catcher, Chris Hansen, host of Takedown on True Blue. You can check it out at watchtrueblood.com. And also, he's the host of the podcast Predators I've Caught, Chris Hanson. Chris, so good to see you. Thank you so much for coming here on Sidebar. My gosh, this one, huh? You can't make that up, Jesse.

Thank you for having me. I wish it was on a little cheerier subject, but that's not why you have me on, typically. No, I mean, I would love to have you on to talk about something else. But, yeah, this is just horrifying. this thing is uh it's it just takes predatory behavior to a whole horrifying level i mean think about this this guy is HIV positive he knows that um and he in spite of that he engages in this relationship horrifying as that is in and of itself with his underage stepdaughter it's it's mind boggling to think about what was going on in his mind that allowed him to do this.

I mean, it shocks the conscience on every level. I wanted to ask you, Chris, in your experience, in the cases that you've covered, that stepfather, stepdaughter dynamic, do you see that a lot in your experience and what does that tell you? Here's what we see. oftentimes these fantasies played out on porn sites, you then see in real life. We just finished a sting, Jesse, this past week in Alabama. And we use this scenario in other states as well.

It's not, you know, exclusive to Alabama, where a mother is selling her daughter for sex. and it is consistently something that predators will want to engage in. And we had a case just last Thursday night. A man showed up after negotiating with someone posing as a child's mother to meet and have sex with a teenager. We've also seen it on the other side where a guy traveled from Indiana to Ohio to meet with sheriff's department decoys posing as a father. and daughter, they have sex with a 13-year-old girl. So there is this fantasy in the porn culture out there. And I think when these guys were predisposed to this activity anyway, get all caught up in the porn part of it, suddenly watching it doesn't fulfill their fantasy. And they cross

this line, Jesse, between fantasy and reality. And that's when they show up at our door, or in this case, they commit this horrific crime. That's a really good point. I didn't even think about that. I always assumed, and maybe it was the wrong way to assume, but, and look, we still don't know the more details about this. He's innocent until proven guilty. But the thing is, I have always been curious that whether or not you have people who get

into relationships with somebody in order to target the minor that's in that household. Well, I think that happens too. I think historically, you know, when I break down these predators into categories, one of the categories is the guy who's a hardcore predator no matter what. And these guys will be the bad little league coach, the bad scoutmaster, the guy who shows up at the food court at the mall, looking for opportunity. The guy who may, in some extreme cases, be the guy who marries a woman who's got a stepdaughter to get at the stepdaughter. This happens. Now, you know, how rare it is or how many times it happens, I can't tell you. But I do know that it happens. And we have

seen this scenario play out before. We caught a guy in a predator investigation once who had been busted for abusing children who he met in one of those programs to be a, you know, a foster father, you know, on a Saturday, take the kids to the ball game. And he went through an entire family and sexually assaulted three of the kids in the family, boys and girl. And here he is at a predator stick. So it is a pattern. It does happen. Hopefully it's as rare as it would appear to be by, you know, the cases that you and I see. But it does happen that way. Yeah.

So this story is incredibly unsettling. Just a reminder of how the world is unpredictable and not the safest, which leads me into talking about our great partner and sponsor here on sidebar, Morgan and Morgan. Because if you get really hurt in this world, you should know how to protect your rights and whether you should be compensated for what you lost, which, by the way, could be worth millions of dollars. And Morgan and Morgan, the largest injury law firm in the country, they don't settle for lowball offers from insurance companies. I mean, in the past couple of months, Morgan and Morgan saw verdicts of $12 million in Florida, $26 million in Philadelphia, and $6.8 million in New York. Mind you, this is considerably higher than the highest insurance offers for these accidents. They've completely modernized the process for their clients, too, because you submit your claim, you sign documents, you talk to your whole legal team all from your smartphone. And not only that, the fee is absolutely free unless you went.

You can submit a claim at for thepeople.com slash LC sidebar or by dialing pound law that's pound 529 on your phone. I mean, here you have these alleged crimes that took place from 2022 to 2024. The time the girl was 11 years old. Yeah, what does that tell you? Well, it tells you that he's a stone cold pedophile predator. You know, there are guys who try to take advantage. of kids in their late teens, wrong, often illegal. But this guy specifically was targeting

somebody who was very young, prepubescent probably, and very vulnerable. And these are the worst of the worst predators we see. And I will tell you, I think one of the most interesting witnesses, because in the information, the charging document, they have one of the witnesses is the doctor from the children's hospital that I feel could be one of the most important witnesses if you're trying to understand exactly what happened here, right? Exactly. And we see this in many cases. We had a situation in Michigan where a guy met a 12-year-old girl on Instagram and groomed her for a period of weeks, flew up from Florida, convinced her to climb out of her family's bedroom window, meet him in a church parking lot, took her to a hotel,

offered her money and other things that a 12-year-old girl would like, and sexually assaulted her to the point where she needed to be treated in an emergency room and it was the treating physician there who alerted authorities which worked this investigation into motion and it turns out the guy they arrested in Florida had admitted to doing this two other times in other states so this wasn't just a one-off but it's you know again it goes back to i mean these are two different cases in that one was a stranger and one was somebody known of the child but you know you need to be vigilant you need to have this discussion with children but this one the case we're talking about today it takes it to a whole different level i mean not only the act of it being so horrific offensive

and just to ruin a child and imagine the therapy that child's got to go through to get over this and then you put the HIV on top of it it's it's unimaginable really yeah it's unthinkable um you know But again, you know, I think for prove this case, the fact that you have the doctor who's able to document the forensics of this is going to be huge. You know, the aspect of this that the wife was holding him at gunpoint until the police came. Have you ever seen anything like that? No, that's a first. And, you know, obviously that would indicate this wasn't one of those situations where the mother was somehow complicit or looked the other way or, you know, didn't want to face the reality of it when she did find out. And oftentimes these extreme cases, as rare as they are, nobody wants to believe it.

Nobody would suspect another human being of committing such an atrocity. So, you know, they're not looking for it so they don't see it. But when she did see it to hold him at gunpoint would indicate to me, you know, in terms of doing the criminal math here, that this is the first time she found out about it. And the fact that he's a youth baseball coach. I mean, what does that tell you? Well, it tells me that one of the reasons he's a youth baseball coach is to be exposed to children and to have access to children. And if he's doing this to his own stepdaughter, what has he done with other kids in his care who've been in his company? And to me, this would single the need for a much larger expansive investigation.

And I'd be shocked if we didn't find some other act here, some criminal act. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, there could be, it makes me wonder if other people would come forward if they have information about it. Well, I think typically once somebody has, you know, the courage to come forward, you see others do the same thing. And so it would not surprise me one bit if you saw other people come forward. I want to leave on this statistic and get your final thoughts on it. So according to the National Center for Victims of Crime, approximately one in five girls are the victims of child sex. abuse. That is in relation or in contrast to one in 20 boys who are the victims of child sexual abuse. And it mentions that during a one-year period in the United States, 16% of those

between the ages of 14 and 17 have been sexually abused. And throughout an entire lifetime, 28% of U.S. youth between 14 and 17 have been sexually abused. And again, we're talking about somebody who is younger than this. We're talking about somebody who, by all accounts, if this wasn't detected by the wife, this probably would have continued, allegedly continued. But just when you think about that stats and you think about how often we are talking about these kinds of things, just want to give you the final thoughts on it. This is why we do those stories. This is why we continue to expose these deeds and to try to catch these people before they actually harm a child. Now, have they harmed a child

before they show up in our investigations, maybe, potentially, and in some cases, I think it's probable. But the more we have parents talking about this, especially in this internet age, where kids are exposed to all kinds of things for the first time, you know, at a very young age, it's the dialogue. It's starting to talk to your child at the very moment they become active on the internet to say, look, there are adults who want to trick you. And no, matter what happens or how foolish you feel, you can come to me and you're not going to get into trouble. This goes back 20 years, Jesse, to the first time we interviewed a bunch of middle schoolers about the predator investigations. We showed them video. They thought it was

actors. They didn't think it was real. And I asked him, I said, how many of you have been approached by an adult online? And it made you uncomfortable. All of them raised your hand, about eight of them. I said, how many of you told your parents to? I said, why not? We did. didn't want them to take away the internet. That still applies today. You have to make this, whether it's extortion or whether it's this kind of a crime, whether it's in the home, whether it's on the internet,

you have to create an environment where a child can come forward and say, hey, mom, hey dad, I don't feel so good about this. And you can't yell at the messenger here. You can't blame this. You gotta listen to them and you gotta help them. That's our job. So well said, Chris.

I think that's really, really important. Listen, I really, really appreciate you coming on to talk about this. Maybe we will talk about a cooking class. We'll have you on for a lighter content next time. That'll be the goal if I can find something. But if you want to check out more Chris Hansen, host of Takedown, a True Blue. Check out the podcast, Predators I've fought with Chris Hanson. Thank you so much, sir.

Really appreciate it. Thanks, Jesse. Appreciate it. See you soon. All right, everybody. That's all we have for you right now here on Sidebar. Thank you so much for joining us. and please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Jesse Weber. I'll speak to you next time.