The Deck - Irving Shuman (5 of Diamonds, Arizona)

Episode Date: September 7, 2022

Our card this week is Irving Shuman, the 5 of Diamonds from Arizona. When a Jewish activist and philanthropist didn’t show up for dinner, his friends and girlfriend didn’t know what to expect. In a matter of minutes, their lives would change forever. Strangled to death in his Phoenix real-estate practice’s office in September 2008, Irving Shuman’s family, co-workers and religious community were baffled. It’s been almost 15 years since Irving’s death, and investigators are still hoping for the tip that’ll break this case wide open. If you have any information about the September 2nd, 2008 murder of Irving Shuman, please call Silent Witness at 480-948-6377.  To learn more about The Deck, visit www.thedeckpodcast.com. To apply for the Cold Case Playing Cards grant through Season of Justice, visit www.seasonofjustice.org

Our card this week is Irving Schumann, the five of diamonds from Arizona. On a September afternoon in 2008, 84-year-old Irving, a well-known Phoenix real estate developer and Jewish philanthropist, was firing off some work emails alone in his office when an intruder burst in. Irving tried to fight off his attacker in an intense struggle, leaving behind a horrific crime scene and a mystery that has endured for nearly 15 years. I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is The Deck. on the evening of September 2nd, 2008, 84-year-old Irving Schumann and his good pal Ethan had plans to enjoy a fun night out.

The two had a 6pm dinner reservation and tickets to the Broadway show A Corusline at Arizona State's Gammage Theatre. Ethan was first to arrive at the restaurant, but as he waited and waited, there was no Irving. When Ethan couldn't reach him on his cell, he tried Irving's house phone. And Teresa, Irving's longtime girlfriend of 14 years picked up. Ethan asked her if Irving had been running late or had forgotten about their plans, but she said no. Irving wasn't home, and in fact, she hadn't seen him since she'd gotten home from work a few hours ago. Even more strange, Tari's said Ethan wasn't

even the first person to call asking where Irving might be. One of Irving's grown daughters who lived out of state had also just called the house looking for her father after she couldn't reach him on his cell. This made Tari's uneasy. She stopped making dinner and glanced down at the kitchen counter, and that's when she saw it. Irvings show tickets. And just like that, her unease turned to alarm. After hanging up the phone at around 6.30, Teresa jumped into her car and headed toward Irvings office in North Central Phoenix, which is just about like two miles or so from

their house, so she was there in no time. When she pulled up to the off-white one-story commercial office plaza, which was in front of a busy intersection and bus stop, the pit in her stomach grew, when she realized Irving's 98 gold lexas was not in the parking lot. Trees walked into the unlocked office and called out for her partner as she took in the horror around her. There was blood smears on furniture. There was blood on the walls and window blinds, Irving's glasses which he always had on because he couldn't see without them were on the floor. Frantic, Trees continued her search looking everywhere she could for Irving, but she couldn't find him anywhere. So finally she went to the back end of the office's interior where there's also a storage room.

Teresa's heart must have been racing as she opened the unlocked door and saw Irving, who was unresponsive on the floor, covered in blood. When Irving didn't respond to her cries, she ran out of the storage room and back through the bloody crime scene. didn't respond to her cries, she ran out of the storage room and back through the bloody crime scene. Once she was outside, Tari's cried and screamed into the phone as she dialed 911. Some people in neighboring businesses who knew the couple rushed outside and approached Tari's who was inconsolable. First responders arrived soon after around 7.15 pm, and right away Irving was pronounced

dead. Irving was in bad shape. All they could really deduce by looking at him was that he'd been hit repeatedly with some sort of object and he put up a fight. As far as figuring out what Irving had been beaten with, investigators were stumped because there was no weapon left at the scene. Here's Phoenix Police Detective Michelle Survantis to explain. Typically it's difficult to determine if it's not a pattern wound. So for instance like a hammer, if you're struck with a hammer, it will leave a pattern injury and most time the medical examiners will be able to determine what kind of object was used.

Detective Sylvantis wasn't originally assigned to the case, but she's part of the six-person cold case homicide unit responsible for the investigation today. Since the attack obviously took place in Irving's workplace, there were definitely some random office supplies that could theoretically have been used to commit the murder, but none of them matched the injuries on his body, which were mostly on his head in upper torso. As a result, there was a lot of blood at the crime scene, and texts needed to figure out if it was all urwings. So they swabbed blood droplets near the front of the business on the floor, as well as smears that were found on walls and on a paper shredder.

Though they knew that it would be at least a few weeks until results from the testing could be analyzed, so it would be important to find potential witnesses to the crime. Police outside started talking to anyone who might have seen or heard something out of the ordinary that day, primarily people from other nearby businesses.

Police also worked to get statements from some of Irving's colleagues who had started to gather there after word spread. And of course, they talked to Teresa. Teresa told police that the last time she talked to Irving was around 7 that morning when she left the house for work. Now she didn't return home till about 4.30 or 5. And she walked police through her timeline of fielding the phone calls about Irving's whereabouts, rushing to the office, and finding his body before calling 911. In kind of a weird twist, Trees also told the cops that Irving's car was missing, along with a handgun that he usually kept in the drawer of his desk when he wasn't caring at himself. Police learned more about Irving as a person.

They were told that he was a loving partner, dad and grandpa, and everyone said that he was a warm and comforting presence who had a habit of wearing a fanny pack full of cash, and he enjoyed giving out $2 bills and $1 gold coins to kids. Which totally tracks when you consider the fact that between his three kids who were grown, he had six grandchildren and four great grandchildren that he adored. And the $2 bill thing is just such a grandpa move, it's actually something that my grandpa used to do when he was alive. Police also learned that Irving, or Irb, as his friends and family called him, was originally

from Chicago. The U.S. Navy World War II that relocated to the Valley in the 60s and considered himself a proud Phoenician, which was also evidenced by his fierce devotion to the Sun's basketball team. And Irving himself was in great shape and love to play racquetball. A side of his real estate business, which he'd run for 50 years, investigators learned that he was well known in philanthropic circles and was super active in the Jewish Community Foundation of Greater Phoenix. He had even been awarded the Medal of Honor by the Jewish Federation's Regional Chapter,

which is the highest accolade the group gives out. So based on what police were gathering about this guy, it was clear that he was someone who was an incredibly integral and visible part of his faith community. With that in mind, investigators had to entertain the possibility that maybe this was a murder driven by anti-semitism. Irving's employees, who'd started to gather at the scene when they heard what happened, said they didn't know of any bitter clients or sketchy real estate transactions or honestly anything that might have given someone a motive to do this.

The last employee to see Irving alive that day. Again, this is September 2nd, told the police that he left the office at around 2.30 p.m. and that Irving was at his desk sending emails and he seemed to be in good spirits. And after that employee left for the day, Irving was on his own. His employees were forthcoming and helpful, so they were all immediately ruled out, as were the people who worked in nearby businesses. I don't think any of those individuals should be looked at as suspects, you know, you're along a busy street.

We don't know what that area looked like back in 2008. We're talking, what talking 14 years later. So things can change. I don't have any reason to believe that any of these nearby businesses that were contacted, that the employees would lie that they didn't care anything. To try and confirm what Irving had been doing when his killer busted in, police pulled Irving's work emails. And sure enough, he had sent a flurry of emails between 2.15 pm and 4.15 pm, which made investigators think that whoever killed him probably entered the office between 4.15 and 6.45, which is roughly around the time that Terees pulled

up to check on him. Police went through each and every correspondence that he sent, but they didn't find anything weird or suspicious. In fact, other than the large amount of blood, the only thing about the crime or the scene itself that really stuck out to police was the fact that Irving's car, along with his leather fanny pack of cash, and his handgun, and his gold coins, were all missing. Which made them wonder if Irving was the victim of a robbery turned homicide. Perhaps the killer took advantage of an elderly man alone in a business at the end of a work day.

But where do you go with that? When a crime is potentially totally random, where do you start? Well, lucky for investigators, two days after Irving's body was found, a call comes in that tells them exactly where to start. The call came in at around 2am, and it was police in San Bernardino, California on the other end of the line. They basically said, hey, one of our traffic cops ran plates on a 98 gold lexas and it came up as stolen. And he's like, you know, when we tried to pull them over, they actually tried to take off, but ended up crashing. And long story short, we got these two guys detained if you want to come

talk to them. And absolutely, they wanted to talk to them. Detectives wasted no time and immediately high-tailed it to San Bernardino about a five-hour drive west, and that's where they met with the officers involved in the traffic stop. San Bernardino police debriefed their Arizona counterparts about how they made the stop in the wee hours of the morning. They said the two people in the car were both 30-something men who local police were familiar with because they had a history of drug-related charges, and in fact, the two seemed to be under the influence of something when the car was pulled over. Detectives were hopeful that these guys might hold the answers to solving Irving's

murder, but what San Bernardino police told them next made them less sure. According to reporting in the Daily Breeze newspaper, they told them that Irvings Lexus had been seen frequently over the last two days near an area in and around a Greyhound bus station on 6th and G streets. This is adjacent to some small hotels. Detective Surveantes said that the two men stole the car from the parking lot of the economy in on West 6th Street the day before. The men told police that the keys were just like straight up on the ground near the car as if someone

dropped them. But the men say that they didn't know whose car it was. And they were adamant that they were in no way associated with whoever stole it first. In fact, they'd only driven the car around for maybe half a day or so before they were picked up by police. So, even though this seems like maybe it's a dead end, the accused car thieves did change the course of the investigation with what they did share with police. According to Detective Servantis,

when they finally spoke with them directly, the men told investigators that word on the street was, prior to them stealing it, the car was being driven by a transient man who ditched it at one of the hotels and boarded a gray hound bus out of the area as recently as September 3rd, which is just the day before. Police continued to question the accused California car thieves about their whereabouts from the past two days, but the pair insisted they were just joy-riding and they had nothing to do

with any murder. In the end, police were able to vouch for the fact that these guys were both in San Bernardino on September 2nd and hadn't been anywhere else in the day since, certainly not Phoenix. Investigators also couldn't find any real connection for either men back to Arizona. Now even if these men didn't seem to be who they were looking for, police definitely weren't leaving San Bernardino empty handed. Phoenix and San Bernardino worked together to process the car, which is how they came upon another possible clue. They came up with partial fingerprints

that belonged to someone who wasn't Irving, and not just in one place. They were all throughout the car, on the rearview mirror, on the gear shift, on the outside of the gas cover. But unfortunately, the prints and any touch DNA that they got belonged to the two men who were accused of stealing the car after the suspect. So this really didn't move the needle at all for police.

Before they hit the road back to Arizona, Phoenix police paid a visit to the hotels in the area near the Greyhound station to see if they could turn up any info about the transient man who supposedly been getting around in Irving's Lexus. But considering they didn't exactly know who they were looking for, their efforts didn't turn up anything solid to run with. In a September 5, 2008 article in the Arizona Republic newspaper, Danielle Schumann-Heller, one of Irving's three-grown children was quoted saying, �We are thrilled they found the car, and hope it will lead to finding out who did this to our father.

Our greatest concern, other than laying our father to rest and giving him a fitting funeral, is finding out who did this to him." End quote. On September 5, Irving's family members held a funeral and services for a man who, by all accounts, was a giant in the community. In no time at all, an online guest book attached to Irving's obituary attracted dozens and dozens of entries from all over as loved ones mourned. They reminisced about Irving excitedly talking basketball over shared Shabbat meals.

About how Irving still took the time each week to call his 94-year-old aunt just to check in, about how he, quote, was just a ridiculously likeable guy. Someone also wrote, �You will always be remembered by me as a man with a kind heart, a strong sense of justice, and a soul filled with kindness.� By September 12, about two weeks after the case agents returned to Phoenix, Irving's autopsy findings, as well as the results from blood swabs taken at the crime scene, came back. The medical examiner concluded that Irving's cause of death was a result of blunt force trauma

and strangulation. It still wasn't clear though what kind of object Irving was beaten with. As for the blood found throughout the business, it mostly belonged to Irving. And while the lab results indicated that there were some foreign profiles in the submitted samples, there weren't enough markers in any of them to submit to Codis. Despite the promising momentum at the front end of the investigation, police started to hit a wall after about three weeks of legwork. Then, months later, an officer accidentally stumbled upon a new lead in the case. On November 19th of 2008, a Phoenix patrol officer came across a man who was asleep at

a bus stop in front of Irving's workplace. Now the man was local, but didn't have a place to live full-time, and Phoenix has a law on the books that makes it a crime to sleep in a city-owned space, so the guy was actually arrested. And this was a guy who was also known to police. He had a history of drug and weapons-related offenses and was known to regularly hang out in the parking lots and surrounding areas behind the bus stop.

Despite the man being arrested in a public space, Detective Sylvantis declined to provide us with his name and referred to him only by his initials, D.A. According to the detective, though, the officer who arrested and booked D.A. got to talking with the sky and was asking him what he'd been up to lately. D.A. told police that he'd taken a trip relatively recently to visit some friends, in San Bernardino. Investigators' interest was officially peaked, especially considering D.A. couldn't tell them the exact dates of his trip, nor could he say how he even got there. He originally said he flew to California, but that story fell apart when he couldn't even say what airline he traveled with, or provide any kind of trip confirmation. Then, D.A. relented and was like, oh, okay, I was just confused and I actually

took the bus there. More specifically, he told police he'd taken a greyhound to and from San Bernardino. Now, even though D.A. supposedly couldn't recall the exact dates he traveled, officers had something to work with. Because police knew D.A. and where he tended to loiter, it wasn't difficult to infer when he skipped town. So investigators were able to figure out the approximate time frame of his trip, and that it was likely in the first week of September, based on when he wasn't known to be hanging around the bus stop and the Plaza parking lot.

So police were extremely curious to learn more about what specifically took DA out to San Bernardino around the time a local murder victim's car was found in the same city. It also wasn't lost on investigators who were working the murder, that pretty much all of this information was circumstantial, no matter how incriminating. That is, until police compared the items that were found on D.A. during his arrest with a list of known missing items from the crime scene. And get this, on D.A.'s person, police found multiple golden dollars and a $2 bill, just like the ones Irving used to gift to kids.

And they also found a couple hundred in cash, which wouldn't have been uncommon for the 84 year old to be carrying in a fanny pack that he usually wore. Now the fanny pack itself and the gun, however, were not found on DA. But what they did find was enough for police to consider him their lead person of interest. When he was asked about where these items had come from and how he got them, DA stopped cooperating with investigators altogether and he refused to answer any more questions. So they had to release DA. With this individual, I did not run across any reports indicating that they attempted to contact him again.

When our reporter asked Detective Sylvantis why the items found on D.A. weren't grounds for an arrest, or even a search warrant to go through any of his belongings, she said that the evidence was purely circumstantial and that a warrant was never even considered since the items found on D.A. were the only items he had on him. There were no personal belongings or backpacker really, anything else that they even could search. She also said to her knowledge, none of the items underwent any kind of DNA testing, so they couldn't be like definitively linked back to Irving. After that, the case went completely cold.

Detectives never found any threats or indications that Irving was targeted because of his religion. And after finding that stuff on DA, they pretty much decided that it had been a robbery and that DA was responsible. But there was still not enough for an arrest. In 2009, a year after Irving's murder, Silent Witness, which is a nonprofit public information arm of the Phoenix Police Department, tried to drum up interest for the case by upping the reward offered for information. Investigators say that on Tuesday, September 2, 2008, sometime between 2 and 5 pm, 84-year-old Irving Schuman was murdered inside his business off of Kamelback Road in North 7th Avenue. They believe the suspect may have stolen his car, which was later recovered in San Bernardino, California, but they've not yet identified a suspect in this case. If you

have any information that would lead to the arrest or indictment of the suspect in this case, the reward has been increased to up to $11,000. But as far as we know, nothing came from the announcement. In the fall of 2012, Irvings' family announced that, for a limited time, they would increase the reward money to $30,000 for information that led police to their dad's killer. Here's Amy and Rick Schumann in a October 2012 interview with Phoenix's ABC affiliate. I want justice for my dad and nothing is going to bring him back, but I, for me, I really think I would feel better. It is our deepest prayer that someone will come forward

and do the right thing. Around the time of the five-year mark in 2013, the Phoenix PD's cold case unit performed an audit of all the work done in this investigation to date, poking holes in their own work to determine what, if any, fresh steps could be taken. It didn't yield us any prohibitive results. At this point, we've done all of the DNA that we could,

and also all the latent print analysis that we could. So right now, we're heavily relying on the public to come and hopefully give us some new information. After that case review in March of 2014, police got what some might consider to be a huge break in the case. Irving's handgun was recovered at an undisclosed location in Las Vegas. Detective Servanta said that police were led to the stolen gun when they were investigating an unrelated home invasion case. The person who had Irving's gun on him told police that he had obtained the gun from

a third party, who law enforcement never identified, and therefore couldn't track down. And I know this sounds out of the blue and totally random, and unfortunately that's all detective's revantists said that she knew about the recovery of the gun. She didn't have any other information that would shed light on why or how authorities were able to locate the gun 300 miles northwest of Phoenix, and six years after it was believed to have been stolen. You know, questions we have were like, how were Phoenix police even informed that it was found, who made the connection that it belonged to Irving?

Was there any kind of DNA testing performed that could maybe lead to any insight? It was a little frustrating because detectives or vantists couldn't tell us if any real investigative work was done after that, or if they were continuing to try and build the case just against DA. The most she could account for in the next stretch of time that was from 2014 to 2019, was pointing to some unfounded tips that would come in here and there. For example, police fielded theories and speculation

about the possibility some disgruntled tenet Irving leased property to, had it out for him, but that never checked out. Beyond that, even if they were getting closer to charging DA with Irving's murder or looking for a chance to interview him again, they lost their chance in 2019 because he died. Now Irving's family and friends are left hoping that the truth about his murder didn't die with D.A. Maybe Phoenix police know more than they're telling us, but it seems

like they're still missing a piece of the puzzle that could actually close Irving's case. of the puzzle that could actually close Irving's case. I believe every co-case is softable. In this case, unfortunately, we don't have any witnesses or any witnesses that have come forward. I don't believe that there are witnesses because he was alone in this business. So I would hope that there's people out there that have more information because whoever

did this most likely spoke about it and talked about it, but those people aren't coming forward to let us know for unknown reasons. There's multiple reasons why people don't want to come forward. That would be big if they could. And it is unfortunate that if it doesn't be in this person of interest, he's already deceased. Just because the primary suspect is dead doesn't mean that Irving and his loved ones don't deserve to close this horrific chapter of their lives. If DA did do it, police believe that he would have told someone.

Maybe it was when he allegedly drove Irving's car to California, or when he got back to Phoenix. If you knew DA, a transient man who was known to hang out near the bus stop and business complex off Camelback Road and North 7th Avenue in Phoenix, Arizona, and you think that you may have information about the September 2nd, 2008 murder of Irving Schumann, it's time to speak up. Or if you interacted with him in San Bernardino in early September 2008 at the economy in where Irving Stolencar was ditched. Or maybe you know something related to a different suspect the police should consider.

If you do, please call silent witness. You can remain anonymous and earn a reward up to $2,000. Their number is 480-948-6377. Irving's children and grandchildren deserve answers. Let's help them find some. The Deck is an audio-chust production with being music by Ryan Lewis. To learn more about the Deck and our advocacy work, visit thedeckpodcast.com. So, what do you think Chuck? Do you approve?