Sins & Survivors: A Las Vegas True Crime Podcast - The Murder of Shauna Maynard

Starting point is 00:00:00 To listen ad-free, visit Zinspod.co slash subscribe. Starting at $2.99 a month, you'll also get access to our exclusive bonus content episodes when you join through Patreon or Apple subscriptions. Thanks for supporting the show! In early 1998, Shauna Maynard left her home in California and headed to Las Vegas. She was searching for freedom and in a hurry to grow up after high school, just like so many teenagers are, even today. Her family was worried about her leaving home and moving somewhere where she didn't know many people and trying to start a life.

Starting point is 00:00:33 Just a few months later, her mom got the call that every mother dreads from the Clark County coroner. Hi, and welcome to Sins and Survivors, a Las Vegas true crime podcast where we focus on cases that deal with domestic violence, as well as missing persons and unsolved cases. I'm your host, Sean. And I'm your co-host, John. Today's case is a little bit different. It's the case of Shauna Maynard, a young woman who moved to Las Vegas in 1998 over the objections of her family. She obviously got in over her head fast and didn't make it out. What we know about Shauna comes from interviews with her family and from the detective assigned to the cold case, Terry Miller of the LVMPD.

Starting point is 00:01:19 Do you want to start us out? Sure. Shauna Ann Maynard was born on September 22, 1980, in Torrance, California. Her family lived in Norco back then. She was the second eldest of four siblings, with an older sister named Andrea, and a younger sister and brother whose names aren't in the swing shift, we'll talk a little bit more about the well-documented dynamics of having four siblings and the typical relationships that the oldest can have with the second oldest. Not that every family is the same, but Sean happens to have some experience in that area, so we'll talk about it. In an interview from March of 2024, her mom Inez described Sean as fiercely independent and challenging as a teenager. That makes sense for anyone who has a teenager or even remembers being one. I think a lot of us went through a phase like that. She also described her as a fun-loving, free spirit, but still immature,

Starting point is 00:02:17 which again makes sense when you're talking about a 17-year-old. She attended Buena Vista High School, which we were able to find through her high school yearbooks. And her family told interviewers that she graduated in an accelerated program, which sounds like it might have been a GED. She was interested in going to college to become a fashion designer, and she loved music. As we said, Shauna was a very independent teenager. By December 1997, she left her family home and was living with her older sister, Andrea, in Norco, California. When she told her sister she wanted to go to a New Year's Eve party, her older sister told her she thought it was not appropriate for a 17-year-old.

Starting point is 00:02:58 As you can probably guess, that caused a problem, such a problem, fact that Shauna decided to really leave this time. It happened fast, and on December 31st, her mother had reported her as a runaway to the Colton Police Department. It was clear she was worried sick and had no idea where she might have gone. Shauna traveled to Las Vegas with a male friend whose name wasn't specified in the record. She lived with that friend for a couple of months, but eventually there was some sort of problem with her friend's girlfriend, and again, she had to pull up stakes and move. This time, she moved in with two older women into an apartment near Las Vegas Boulevard and Owens. Police investigators said that the apartment was

Starting point is 00:03:40 very crowded and said that the two women she was living with had at least seven children between them. It was crowded, but it came with benefits for Shauna. She took a job at a restaurant and was also making money babysitting for her roommates. Still, the rooms were small and there was very limited space. Terry Miller from the LVMPD commented that Shauna was likely putting up with living conditions that were pretty bad and uncomfortable to avoid being homeless. Based on everything investigators were able to uncover, it seemed like a really bad situation. We also learned that Shawna had cut her family out of her life entirely during that time. She wasn't in contact with her mom or any of her siblings, and they had no idea where she was. They hadn't spoken to her at all since New Year's Eve. She'd just taken off. Her mom said that she was

Starting point is 00:04:30 desperately looking for Shauna, but remember, this was 1998, and it wasn't as if she could look at Shauna's Facebook or Instagram feed or track her phone. She didn't have any of those. In fact, Inez said that the time she was looking for Shauna was a living hell. She tried to talk to people in Shauna's circle, like friends from school, but no one would give her any clues about where she was. She had the impression they knew, but they weren't telling her, probably because Shauna told them not to tell her mom, which had to be incredibly frustrating. Investigators have some theories, which are unconfirmed, but they did

Starting point is 00:05:05 share them, that there were some pretty potentially sketchy things happening at that apartment with her roommates. They had a theory that Shauna might have been attracting some unwanted attention from both the women and the men in their circle. Again, a very bad position to be in when she had no other place to go. On April 21st, 1998, just four and a half months after moving to Las Vegas, Shauna called a friend around 2 a.m., not the same friend she came to Las Vegas with, and told her that there was a problem at the apartment and that she was afraid for her safety, and she said that she thought someone was going to hurt her. The friend she called was living at home with her parents at the time with a brand new baby, so she couldn't leave to go get Shauna

Starting point is 00:05:51 at the apartment, but she told Shauna she needed to get out of there. She told her essentially to just run, and she would send a cab for her at a nearby casino, the Silver Nugget on North Las Vegas Boulevard near Lake Mead. Unfortunately, Shauna never made it to the Silver Nugget on North Las Vegas Boulevard near Lake Mead. Unfortunately, Shawna never made it to the Silver Nugget to get that taxi. This was before the widespread use of cell phone videos or surveillance systems in general. Now, of course, in Las Vegas, we have the Metro Police Fusion Camera Network. That's a network of surveillance cameras that are monitored 24-7 by Metro Command Center and can do things like gunshot detection and facial recognition and uses a crime pattern analysis software package that helps the command center dispatch police around the valley. Between 3 and 3.30 a.m. that same night, a Metro police officer out on patrol in the South Valley said he heard gunshots and he thought they were coming from the area of Rainbow and Decatur. He went to investigate, but he couldn't find any

Starting point is 00:06:49 evidence of a crime there. Remember, this was 1998, and of course, as we'll often remind you, the Las Vegas Valley was much less populated then. Back then, Blue Diamond was just a dusty, desolate two-lane road which had sparse houses and few businesses, mostly used by commuters coming in from Pahrump. If you were to visit that corner today, you would find very few rattlesnakes and scorpions, but you would find a lot of places like Wingstop, EOS Fitness, Walgreens, the Silverton Casino, and more subdivisions than you can even imagine. It's fully built up now and not even near the edge of Las Vegas. Pahrump is a much smaller city, about one and a half hours to the west of Las Vegas, and much more rural even today. There are about 45,000 residents there today, but in 1998, there were only about 20,000, and many of them got to Las Vegas using Blue Diamond, aka State Route

Starting point is 00:07:43 160. Two of these commuters were making the early morning drive to Las Vegas along Blue Diamond, aka State Route 160. Two of these commuters were making the early morning drive to Las Vegas along Blue Diamond, and near Decatur Boulevard, one of them said he thought he saw something that might have been a body about 10 feet off the road. They turned around and pulled off the road to check it out, and unfortunately it turned out to be a young woman's body that had been shot several times. To them, it seemed like she was deceased, and they called Metro in immediately. EMS arrived quickly and confirmed that she was gone. In Metro's initial investigation, they came to the conclusion that she seemed like she had been shot while running away from her assailant. Strangely though, she didn't have any belongings on her such as a purse or a wallet. They canvassed the whole

Starting point is 00:08:25 area searching for anyone who might have seen a young girl in the area in the early morning hours and even looked for any video surveillance from nearby businesses. They followed up on reported tips including one about a man and a woman in a mid-1950s Ford truck and with the metro officer who heard the gunshots, but they didn't learn anything useful. It was the coroner who found the key piece of evidence they needed, that she had on a class ring. When they removed it, they saw it was from Buena Vista High School, class of 1997, and on the inside was inscribed with a name, Shauna Maynard. They cross-referenced that name with known runaways in the system and found that

Starting point is 00:09:05 Shawna had been reported missing to the Colton Police Department in December. They were able to find out where her family lived, and that was when Inez got the call that every parent dreads. She'd had no idea where her daughter was for almost five months and only found out she was in Las Vegas when the Clark County coroner called her to give her the heartbreaking news. Her family drove to Las Vegas immediately to meet with coroner called her to give her the heartbreaking news. Her family drove to Las Vegas immediately to meet with Metro and identify her. There are definitely some strange things here. Shawna was murdered almost 15 miles from where she lived in North Las Vegas. How did she get there? Who drove her? What possible motive could there have been? As the police investigated, it only got stranger. They visited the apartment

Starting point is 00:09:46 where Shauna lived and talked to her roommates, who gave pretty consistent stories. They both denied that there had been any arguing or fighting, and one of them said that around 1am, Shauna knocked on her door and said she was going out. The other roommate said that a group of people were hanging out in front of the apartment, and that she came into the apartment and saw Shauna on the phone around 11pm, although she didn't know who Shauna was talking to. The police said that the roommates were pretty unhelpful, and none of this matches what Shauna's friend said about what happened that night. Also, and maybe the weirdest and most suspicious thing of all, was that when the police visited the apartment, there was nothing there that belonged to Shauna. Nothing. Not a purse, not a pair of jeans, nothing. When the roommates were asked about this, one of them said that when they heard the news

Starting point is 00:10:34 that Shauna had been murdered, they went to the closet where Shauna had kept everything, but they found that her stuff was just gone. As strange as this is, there wasn't any evidence to charge the roommates in her murder. There was another incident in 2015 involving a claim made online on the website 4chan, but we're going to save that discussion for the Swing Shift episode. It didn't turn out to have any material impact on the investigation, and for reasons you'll understand when you listen, it caused pretty horrifying and unnecessary distress to her already suffering family, so we're going to talk about that separately. If you want to hear that in the Swing Shift episode, and hear all the Swing Shift episodes, head over to SinsPod.co slash subscribe and sign up on Apple Podcast

Starting point is 00:11:18 subscriptions or on Patreon. Shauna's family has lived with the unbelievable pain of not knowing who did this to their beloved sister and daughter for 27 years. Shauna would be 45 years old today, and who knows what might have become of her life. In 2024, Channel 8 News spoke with Shauna's family and the cold case detective assigned to the case, Terry Miller. In that interview, her family floated some theories about what might have happened to Shauna. They thought that Shauna might have rejected someone's romantic advances, leading to someone wanting to harm her, but it wasn't clear what that theory was based on. Shauna was traveling back and forth from Las Vegas to California in the weeks before her murder. She was seen just the week before by friends of the family back in California, and her family never knew. One thing is quite likely, though. Someone knows what happened to

Starting point is 00:12:10 Shawna. Someone knows more. She had friends in Las Vegas, and of course, anyone who was a witness or heard about the crime could report it to. Anyone can report a crime anonymously by visiting crimestoppersofnv.com or calling 702-385-5555, or you can contact LVMPD Homicide directly at 702-828-3521. There is a reward, and a separate reward is offered by her family for information leading to a conviction. We've mentioned this before, but in 2022, then sheriff, now governor, Lombardo authorized a much-needed and long-overdue expansion to Metro Police, a fifth squad dedicated to cold cases. They have a sergeant, three full-time detectives, and five part-time investigators who are diligently working on and pursuing a resolution to unsolved homicides, and you can help. If you get your DNA tested by Ancestry.com, 23andMe, MyHeritageDNA.com, sites like that, you can upload your DNA to DNA Solves, Family Tree DNA, or GEDmatch to make it accessible for police investigations and genealogy research.

Starting point is 00:13:20 If you're not comfortable with that, you can upload directly to AuthRAM using AuthRAM's own swab collection kit. That last one is just for AuthRAM, and it's only used to aid in unsolved cases rather than the DNA being in a recreational ancestry or genealogy database. We've both done that, and we recommend that you do it too if you can, and if you're comfortable with it, it can really make the difference to a family and help solve crimes. Shawna deserves justice, and her family and our community also deserve closure and to know who did this to her. Shawna was a white female, approximately 5'4 and about 150 pounds. She had red hair and brown eyes. She was last seen in North Las Vegas near Owens and Las Vegas Boulevard, and it's unclear how she managed

Starting point is 00:14:05 to get to Blue Diamond and Decatur. If you have any information about what happened to Shauna, please come forward. Her family has waited long enough. If you're enjoying the podcast, please take a moment to leave us a review on your platform of choice. It helps us get these important stories out to a wider audience. And as always, we remind you that what happens here happens everywhere. Thanks for listening. Visit sinspod.co slash subscribe for exclusive bonus content and to listen ad-free. Remember to like and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Threads at Sins and Survivors. If you're enjoying the podcast, please leave us a review on your podcast platform of choice.

Starting point is 00:15:05 You can contact us at questions at sinsandsurvivors.com. If you or someone you know is affected by domestic violence or needs support, please reach out to local resources or the National Domestic Violence Hotline. A list of resources is available on our website, sinsandsurvivors.com. Sins and Survivors, a Las Vegas true crime podcast, is research written and produced by your hosts, Sean and John. The information shared in this podcast is accurate at the time of recording. If you have questions, concerns, or corrections, please email us. Links to source material for this episode can be found on our website, SinsandSurvivors.com.

Starting point is 00:15:41 The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the podcast creators, hosts, and their guests. All individuals are innocent until proven guilty. This content does not constitute legal advice. Listeners are encouraged to consult with legal professionals for guidance.

Your Ad Here

Sins & Survivors: A Las Vegas True Crime Podcast - The Murder of Shauna Maynard

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.