Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast - She Tried To Kill The President // The Shannon Guess Richardson

Episode Date: July 9, 2026

Shannon Guess Richardson, an actress with minor roles in television shows like The Walking Dead, was sentenced to 18 years in federal prison in 2014 for mailing letters laced with poison to Barack Obama and Michael Bloomberg.

So why would this actress from The Walking Dead try to assassinate Barack Obama? Now the woman's name is Shannon and Shannon is 35 years old when the story starts, living in New Boston, Texas. And like I said, she's an actress, mostly background work. She had a minor role in the Vampire Diaries and in Blindside. She also played a zombie in The Walking Dead. Here's a picture of her with all the makeup on. But as much as she loves this job, Shannon has a problem. her marriage isn't going so well.

It's kind of fallen apart. Now, she's married to this guy, Nathan. And Shannon and Nathan, they've only been married for two years, but he's done putting up with her nonsense. He's already planning on leaving her. Now, according to Nathan, she has become obsessed with becoming famous, and it's interfering with their marriage. And she also has five kids from previous relationships,

and I guess he just wants to leave all of them. But then one day in 2013, the worst thing happens to them. Shannon discovers that she's pregnant. And that's not good, considering he's actively trying to leave her. But despite the pregnancy, Nathan still wants to follow through with his plan. So he goes and he hires a divorce attorney. But I guess Texas has some law where people aren't allowed to get a divorce if the woman is pregnant,

like a judge can't legally grant it until the baby is born. So now Nathan has to wait until this baby's born before the divorce can be finalized. But Shannon finds out that he wants to divorce her and she gets super pissed off. I mean, her husband wants to leave her in the middle of her pregnancy? Oh, hell no, she is not about to let this slide. Now, around this same time, all the way over in Mississippi, a man named Dutchie starts mailing letters laced with the poison, ricin, to a few different people. But one of those people is the U.S. president at the time, Barack Obama.

And we actually talked about that case last year in a completely different video. Anyway, this dutchky guy gets arrested and charged, and his assassination attempt is big headlines. It's all over the news. And this apparently gives Shannon an idea. She could also mail rice-en-laced letters to the president, but make it look like Nathan was the one doing it. That way, he gets busted,

and he goes to prison and she wins, I guess. I'm not sure what she gets out of sending her baby daddy to prison, but here we go. So she gets to work on this idea, and she goes and she creates a PayPal account in her husband's name. Then she goes to the post office and she opens up a PO box in his name. After that, she goes on the internet and she Googles how to make ricin, because apparently there are step-by-step instructions online, so she starts ordering materials to make it, you know, like castor bean seeds, sodium hydroxide, some syringes, and other stuff, and she pays for them using the PayPal account that she just set up in Nathan's name.

Once she receives her materials and her husband is away at work for the day, she makes her poison. After that, she gets on her laptop and she writes a letter to Obama basically being like, you'll never take my guns away. Anyone who tries will get shot in the face. Because she's trying to make Nathan look like a crazy far-right gun lunatic who wants to kill the president. Then she prints the letter out and she rubs the ricin all over it so that when if Obama reads it, he'll get poisoned. Now, she really wants her husband to get in trouble. So she doesn't stop with Obama. She also types up two more letters, one to Mark Glaze, who is the director of a gun control organization, and the other one is addressed to Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York during this time,

who's also a big gun control advocate. And in these two other letters, she makes similar threats, and she rubs ricin on them as well. Then she uses an online shipping service to generate the postage, which you can just print at home. But she sets that account up using her husband's name,

because she's really trying to make sure all of this traces right back to him. Then she leaves the castor beans in the fridge in plain sight, and she plants some of them in his car. And when everything is already, She drives to a local post office to drop off the letters, and then she waits. Now, if you mail a letter to the White House, it doesn't go directly to the president.

It actually goes to a mail screening facility located a few miles away. So a few days later, the first letter addressed to Obama arrives at the mail screening facility. While the letter addressed to the mayor of New York also arrives at a mailing facility there, and it immediately gets flagged as suspicious. so no one opens it. Now, the letter addressed to Mark Glaze, the gun advocate guy, it arrives in his mail in Washington, D.C., and Mark Glaze himself actually opens the letter, and he reads it.

Now, luckily, Shannon didn't know what she was doing when she rubbed ricin on the letters, so she sort of did it wrong, and even though Mark Glaze came in contact with the poison, he suffered no injuries and showed no symptoms of exposure. Regardless, someone is sending poison to the president, so now the FBI gets involved and they start investigating. And this story is all over the news. Someone tried to poison Obama. And so 10 days later, Shannon goes down to her local police department, crying, saying, I think my husband's the one who tried to poison Obama. And when they ask her why she believes that, she tells them that she found castor beans in the fridge, as well as sticky notes on her husband's desk, with the written addresses of Obama and the mayor of New York, which Shannon totally planted those there.

Shannon also calls the FBI and tells them the same thing. So then the feds come out and they search her house and Nathan's car. And sure enough, they find all this incriminating evidence against the guy. So they show up to Nathan's job and they detain him and they question the hell out of him. And Nathan, he knows what's up right away. He's like, it wasn't me. My wife is setting me up. So the feds start investigating her, too.

And immediately, they notice something is very off about Shannon's story. I guess she and Nathan have this laptop at home that she was doing all those Google searches on, like, how to make ricin and like Googling the addresses of the New York mayor and stuff. And during the time those searches were made, Nathan was actually at work. And the feds are able to confirm this. So there's no way he could. could have made those searches himself. Also, the envelopes, which contained the ricin letters, got time stamped once she printed

the postage that she had bought online. And during that time, Nathan was also at work. So the feds asked both Nathan and Shannon to take a polygraph test, which, as I always tell you guys, lie detector tests are total nonsense, pseudoscience, they're designed to trick people into confessing. Well, Shannon agrees to take one. And we don't know if she passed or failed, but the feds tell her that she failed. And believing that she failed, she, of course, starts confessing.

But she doesn't confess to the whole crime. She actually says that she mailed the letters, but that Nathan forced her to do it. It was all him, and she was just a victim. But the feds, they aren't buying that either. I mean, she drove to a post office to mail the letters while her husband was confirmed to be at work. So there's no way he forced her to do it. And so, bam, they arrest Shannon. Here's her mugshot. She pleaded guilty in December to possessing and producing a biological toxin.

And ultimately, she takes a plea deal and she gets sentenced to 18 years in prison.