The Deck - Shannon Michelle Aumock (6 of Clubs, Arizona)

Episode Date: July 6, 2022

Our card this week is Shannon Michelle Aumock, the 6 of Clubs from Arizona.In the spring of 1992, 16-year-old Shannon Aumock had run away from her group home just outside of Phoenix, Arizona. A chronic runaway and member of the foster system since she was 3 years old, Shannon wasn’t reported missing and eventually was legally relinquished from Child Protective Services’ care. One month after her disappearance, on May 27, 1992, the search for another missing local girl would uncover a body that wouldn’t be identified for nearly 20 years. For more than two decades, Shannon’s case has kept police on their toes as they navigated her tragic life and a cluster of similar cases in the area to continue to try and uncover the person and reasoning behind her even more tragic end.If you have any information about the murder of Shannon Aumock, you’re asked to contact Silent Witness Anonymously at 480-948-6377 or 480-837-8446.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 Shannon Ommock, the six of clubs from Arizona. In February 2011, the Phoenix Police Department finally ID'd a Jando whose case they'd been working for nearly two decades. But learning who their victim was was only half the battle. Investedators have spent the last 11 years since determined to solve her murder, and their work has led to major breakthroughs in recent years. And now, some speculate that her tragic ending is connected to three similar crimes, and a captured serial killer still awaiting trial.

I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is the deck. On May 27, 1992, a young man was riding his ATV through the northern outskirts of Phoenix, Arizona, like he did on many occasions. He was local to the heart of Maricopa County and had driven to an area near the Arizona Canal that had desert terrain perfect for his frequent joy rides. But this day was different because on his ride, a small object on the ground caught his eye. And honestly, this was strange because this unincorporated neighborhood he was in was isolated and underdeveloped and known by local land scapers as a good dumping ground for waste. So with the amount of discarded objects, it was by

complete chance that this small object even caught the writer's attention. It was a thick pair of glasses with wide round lenses. As he stopped to pick them up, the writer suddenly got a whiff of a horrific smell and realized that he had stumbled upon more than another piece of trash. There, amongst the sand and discarded waste, was a heavily decomposed body. Partially skeletal, the remains were dressed in a long sleeve floral top and black jeans with a matching black bow. According to Detective Stewart's summer show with the Phoenix Police Department, the man instantly thought that he knew who's body he'd found.

We actually kind of have to go back a couple days on May 26, 1992, a 13-year-old girl named Brandy Myers went missing. He had left her home to collect money for a schoolbook drive in the neighborhood in Sonny's Loathe Barrier of Phoenix. So Brandy went missing and was never seen again. There was a massive search effort for Brandy. It was all over the news and all that. So a TV writer was in the desert north of Phoenix and that's when he discovered the decomposing body of a jane doe.

He thought he had found Brady Myers. Despite his shocking discovery, the man wasn't rushing to call 911 like most people would if they had found a body. You see, at the time, he had a warrant out for his arrest, so the last thing he wanted to do was deal with the police. Instead, he took the glasses and went home to tell his roommate what he'd found. Fortunately for investigators, the man's roommate convinced him to call about the body. So, he made an anonymous call to a tip line and tried his best to assist in recovery efforts without giving himself away too much.

Initially, he agreed to meet officers at the scene, but then he never showed up. Though he did continue calling back, and he was even connected to officers at the site through dispatch to give directions, but he became increasingly worried about his own criminal history. Backpedaling in a panic, the man actually threw away the glasses that he had found by the body in fear that his fingerprints now covering the delicate frames would incriminate him. Still, investigators didn't give up their search. Summer Shoe says that they kept calling the ATV writer and even brought out canine units. He's trying to describe it to the officer.

So there's hours and hours of him communicating with the police, trying to direct them to where the body was at. And one of those truth is stranger than fiction situations. At the time, there was a convention of canine search dogs in the Phoenix area. So they joined the search for Brandi and so they were called in to help locate this body. As far as they knew Brandi Myers and the answers to her disappearance were mere minutes from being recovered. Though in reality it took more than just a few minutes. Officers located the body around 1am on May 28, only two days after Brandy went missing.

But in a surprising twist to everyone, officers immediately determined that the body was not that of Brandy Myers. They knew right away just based on the level of the condition of the body, like I said, it was mostly skeletal, So a body doesn't get that skeletal that quickly, you know, within a day, unless there's some other, you know, means or some way of, you know, making the body decompose more or something like that. But there's no indication of that. So, amid the countywide search, investigators were suddenly met with a whole new set of

questions. If this body didn't belong to Brandy, who was it? Investigators quickly got to work on an autopsy, but in cases with heavy decomposition like this one, additional exams are needed. So the department's anthropologist and odontologist, basically a forensic dentist, Dr. John Piochus, also conducted exams. Their examinations determine that the body was female,

most likely white, and her cause of death was strangulation. Dr. Piochus estimated that she was between 11 and 18 years old based on her unique dental features, but she still had some of her baby teeth, and there was evidence of some dental work. It was Maricopa County. The odontologist who examined her was a Dr. Piacus. He's actually still with the medical examiner's office. He had, it was very

familiar with his case and had worked at years and years trying to identify this female. He had sent out parts of her teeth to the area dental associations trying to find, might recognize the work that was done on the teeth and all that. Did anyone recognize it? No. But the autopsy didn't provide any additional clues, and since there were no other missing person reports matching the body's description in the area at the time, investigators turned to what little evidence they had collected for answers. Right from the start, Detective Summershoe says

investigators were drawn to Jane Doe's unusual clothing. I mean, springtime temperatures in Arizona were already reaching well over 80 and 90 degrees, way too warm for long sleeves and pants. Officers even looked into the manufacturer to see if they could narrow down like a specific location where the clothes had been sold, but it was another dead end

since the clothes were a fairly common brand. I couldn't pinpoint an exact time frame from our source material, but eventually police tracked down the ATV writer for an interview, even taking him to an eyeglass shop to pick out a pair that was closest to the one that he had disposed of from the original scene. We asked who he was, but Detective Summershoe didn't want to identify him as he's not a suspect in the case. With the similar pair of glasses, investigators had a full composite of Jane Doe's outfit, which they released to the media for help identifying her. All of her information was also entered into the National Crime Information Center, and multiple composites were created over the years, including a full body sketch from

1992 that can be seen online at thedeckpodcast.com Yet in every search officers kept coming up empty handed So this went on for years trying to figure out who she was. I mean, that's one of the Dumbling blocks when you have a homicide You're not gonna if you don't know who your victim is, you hit a wall. That's generally where you're the first step of a homicide investigation.

Who is your victim? And then from there, you build who would have a reason to harm this person. So the case without knowing who your victim was, the case really didn't proceed much further than initially. Eventually, Jane Doe's body was buried in twin-butte cemetery in Tempe, Arizona, just 13 miles southwest of Phoenix. Given a blank headstone, she'd joined about 2,000 bodies buried there, about 10% of which

are unidentified, according to Mike Sikhal's reporting for the East Valley Tribune. Investigators spent the next 19 years doing everything they could to identify Jane Doe, and her story gained some public attention. She was profiled in America's most wanted, and featured on the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's website. Finally, in 2004, thanks to the progression of DNA technology, Jane Doe's DNA was uploaded into CODIS. Still, the case slowly grew colder and colder and colder. But in 2011, one year after Detective Summershoe

was assigned the case, new resources helped investigators unravel clues to the crucial piece of information that they'd been searching for since 1992. Summershoe, who has actually been with the Phoenix Police Department since 96 and joined the Missing Persons Unit in 2007, began to take note of the roughly 2000 unidentified remains in Arizona alone, and he initiated steps within the department to review cases like Jane Does.

So, that was, we kind of renamed the unit from the missing person's unit to the missing and unidentified person's unit and we began to gather all these cases and incorporate them into our work units. At the time, I believe we had about 125 unidentified remains in Phoenix. So, and that was just a matter of looking at them again, reviewing what evidence there was and trying to give these people their name back. When I approached my supervisor, he was a Brian Chapman at the time, and I brought in a selection of some of the cases that were there to try to explain to him what the problem was, and

he reviewed them, and then he picked up this case and said, you know, if we do nothing else, we're going to identify this girl. Summershoe and his team reviewed Jandos' case files from the beginning, and one detail stood out from the rest. In 20 years, they had never found a matching Missing Persons report. He knew that someone had to be missing a child, so he developed three different theories. One, this was a parental homicide. A parent who had killed and dumped their own child wouldn't necessarily file a report

if they didn't want to be caught. His second theory, while less heartbreaking, was just as frustrating. What if law enforcement had made a mistake? As we've seen in many cases on this show and others, police officers are human, and human air, whether intentional or unintentional, does occur within investigations. Summershoe says it could have been as simple as not closing a file correctly or filing the report in the wrong place and losing it. And then there's the third and unfortunately most common option. The concept of what officials call a quote-unquote throwaway child.

I use the terms that other people use that they're horrible terms, but in the world of missing, there is the concept of the throwaway child. And these are children who get into the system. They're abused at home and they end up going to child protective services and they get placed in group homes, foster homes, and it's a vicious cycle of these children just going from place to place. And a lot of times they end up starting to incriminate activity just to survive on the streets.

And a lot of these kids, you know, they fall between the cracks sometimes because there's nobody really looking out for them. Detective Summershoe decided to put this theory to the test. He initially gathered more than 1600 reports of missing girls and runaways who fit Jane Doe's description within two years before the discovery of her body. One by one, Summershoe, along with two colleagues. Detective Jack Nielsen and Officer Ricky Sullivan reviewed each report.

They ran background checks. Red Runaway reports looked for criminal records, found issued driver's licenses, and whatever other documented information they could gather. Basically, they were looking for proof of life beyond May 28, 1992. They did this over a three-month time span during every spare moment they had between incoming cases, and they were able to narrow down their stack to only 100 reports marked with a question mark for further review. Starting with the A's,

Detective Summershoe went back through the list, and there, where she had been for almost 20 years, was Shannon Amoff. Shannon was the definition of a runaway. Under the care of CPS and she was three years old, she had been entered into NCIC 40 times from 1990 to 1992. Whether it was foster homes or group homes, Shannon had runaway, been returned and moved to a new home and then repeated the process. Constantly being running away and then being found and returned, and just back and forth,

it was kind of a very turbulent part of her life, and a very sad chapter of her life. But for Shannon, that instability had been a defining trait of her life. According to more of Mike Sikhal's reporting, a family in Flagstaff adopted Shannon when she was three years old. By the time she was 12, the family had relocated to Scottsdale and given custody of

the preteen back to CPS, citing uncontrollable behavioral issues. You can only imagine the effect that would have on a 12 year old girl. To be kind of, you know, living with a family for most of her life and then to be put into this new environment of foster families and group homes and that life.

So I can only surmise that that partly explained why she was constantly running away, constantly having issues because of the trauma of losing everything she knew at that age. In interviews with Detective Summershoe, people from Shannon's life didn't shy away from her challenging side, but they also described her as intelligent and social. She was Jewish and very religious, and her CPS file said her IQ was 123. When they talked to her friends, they all said that Shannon liked everybody and didn't have any enemies. She organized a student council at the group home,

was that active and that, you know, trying to do things, and, you know, she loved to swim. She was elegant, smart, and she's very nice. It was just this life that she's thrown into that probably led to her, you know, what happened to her. At 16 with no driver's license or Social Security card, Shannon had fallen into sex work and drug use while living on the street. A detective summer shoe says that she even spent time at a juvenile prison center, Adobe Mount School.

After being released, CPS placed Shannon at her final foster home in Mesa, Arizona, where she ran away two weeks later, that was on April 28th of 92. She ran away under the guise of walking the family's dogs. Though even in running away, Shannon's tender heart comes through. She actually tied the dogs to a tree outside of a nearby store and risked capture to call her foster parents and tell them where to pick up the dogs. It was the last time any of the adults responsible for her care would hear from her. And exactly one month the day before Jane Doe's body was discovered.

The family reported her missing to CPS, but investigators didn't have access to the same databases. Only six months later, CPS petitioned the courts to relinquish responsibility of Shannon, citing her prior run-ins with the law and her disappearance as reasons to let her go. And just like that, Shannon's records were gone, and no one was looking for her. I mean, obviously, this is back in the 1990s, so things are done a little differently, but my experience, CPS, will often, when a juvenile turns 18, they will close reports, close their file on that juvenile, because the juvenile is an adult.

Shannon's case is unusual and she was only 16 when they close their file on her. So the court granted that? Yeah, the court granted it and her file was closed. CPS was no longer responsible for her. Summer shoe was sure that Shannon was his Jane Doe, but circumstance and gut feeling weren't enough for a positive ID. He needed scientific proof. Identifications are generally made using three methods, fingerprinting, dental records

or DNA. The verse two weren't an option for Shannon due to her lack of records, but Detective Summer Shoe says that DNA was a potential method if he could locate a biological family member for sample comparison. And, as had been the case with all of the progress in Shannon's investigation, officers' persistence and a little bit of luck led to the confirmation detective Summershoe needed. He reached out to Shannon's adoptive parents in his hopes that they might have some insight into her life before her adoption, and miraculously they did.

Her adoptive mother told him that she had happened to see some paperwork that listed Shannon's biological mother's name while Shannon lived with them, and somehow she still remembered it. So with name in hand, investigators launched into action. Summer shoot located and visited Shannon's mom and collected a DNA sample in February 2011. Shannon's birth mother told him that she had been sexually assaulted and gave birth to Shannon when she was only 16 years old. When Shannon turned three, her mom gave her to CPS in hopes of giving her a better life. Crime-lap technician Kelly Moran, who did Jane Doe's original DNA collection in 2004, still had the files on her desk ready to go, and she rushed the samples through the testing

process as fast as possible. A few weeks later, Detective Summershoe had the results. Jane Doe was, in fact, Shannon O'Mock. Investigators were relieved, but Summershoe had to be the one to tell Shannon's mom what happened to the toddler that she gave up in hopes of a brighter future. And so she said she'd always wanted what happened to her and she gave us the DNA sample.

We finally got the results. Obviously that's not a painful meeting with her to tell her, you know, we know we're Shannon's dad and this is what happened to her. So it was very devastating for her. Still, giving Shannon, who had been lost in both life and death, her identity back was a victory for Summershoe and his team. Reading further into her CPS files, Summershoe dug deeper into the teen's troubled life and considered what her identification might mean to the girl, who once said that she wanted her headstone to be blank.

After minor suicidal actions and superficial self-harming during one of her many times on the run, CPS made Shannon C a psychologist upon her return. So when she was brought in to talk to a psychologist, I think the psychologist was trying to give her like a shock and say, you know, Shannon, you can't do this. And one of the things just say, you know, shan, you can't do this. And one of the things he said, you know, if you die, what would you want on your your headstone?

The answer that she would want it to be blank kind of ironic because that's what happened for 19 years. She didn't have a name on her headstone. One of those things that kind of sticks in my mind out her, how sad her life turned out to be. I think she felt that nobody cared about her and nobody wanted her. That was her reply to that. One had suddenly blanked so nobody would miss her.

A lot of us had worked on this case. A lot of us were very invested in it. And the sad story of Shannon's life impacted a lot of us. And Shannon didn't have a home in her life. We wanted to have a home when she was dead. In March 2011, investigators worked with a local church and funeral home to exume Shannon's body and give her a proper burial. Detective Summershoe, her biological mother and friends from her group homes attended the funeral ceremony

and the installation of her new gravestone marked with her name and information. But even though it had taken years to identify Shannon, it was only the beginning of solving this case. No longer cold, but not exactly hot either. Detective Summershoe and his team knew they still had work to do. solving this case. No longer cold, but not exactly hot either. Detective Somershoe and his team knew they still had work to do. A killer was still walking free. A few months after Detective Somershoe identified Shannon, new tips

and leads started to slow once again. And then a new witness was uncovered, who had seen Shannon after she ran away. It was someone who had run away with her. The person who had run away with Shannon was another girl about Shannon's age, who also had lived at the last group home. They didn't know each other well, but Somershu says that they had similar stories. There's indication she was following the same pattern as Shannon and getting placed in homes and foster homes and group homes and running away. Um, she was, uh, through some of the paperwork, the records that we found on

Shannon, we were able to identify the foster family that she was with. And once we interviewed them, that led us to this other girl. But after almost 30 years, the girl who was now a woman and whose summer shoe didn't want to identify told him her memory was shaky.

She remembered that she and Shannon left the dogs and then left Mesa, making the roughly 20 milemile journey to Phoenix, but then they split up sometime soon after that. Eventually, the lead would become a dead end. Still, it had opened up other questions for investigators. After interviewing more sources from Shannon's life, Detective Summershoe circled back to the clothing that she was found in. Remember, it had seemed unusual to officers and the anthropologist in the initial investigation. Described by many as a scare girl, Shannon had an

edgier style, which was depicted in photos from her teenage years. And you can actually see those photos on our website, thedeckpodcast.com. She often wore baggy shirts or t-shirts with the sleeves cut off. Both her last foster family and the girl that she ran away with didn't recognize the clothing that she was found in. And other sources told Summershoe it doesn't look like something Shannon would wear. It's possible that Shannon changed at some point, but with so much time lost before her identification, investigators had to follow every lead they found, no matter how small it seemed. Again, I don't want to go into the details of what evidence we have, but obviously, you

know, things we would look at, you know, it's safe to develop. Summershoe and his fellow investigators aren't committing to any circulating theories or ruling any out. But since her identification, police haven't announced any official suspects or persons of interest in Shannon's case. There are people that we are looking at as possible suspects and other cases that might be related to hers, but right now I don't have any, you know, clear identified suspect. Over the years, the community has developed its own theories about what happened to Shannon. One popular speculation is that her death actually was connected to the disappearance of Brandi Myers,

who, by the way, her body has still never been found, and both cases could be connected with a number of other young women. See, while Brandy and Shannon's cases may have gone cold after 1992, violence against girls and young women in Phoenix that year was just heating up. On November 8, 1992, 21-year-old Angela Brasso left her Phoenix home for an afternoon bike ride.

When Angela didn't return by nightfall, her boyfriend and mother rushed to file a missing person report. The next day, her nude, decapitated, and mutilated body was found in a grassy area near 25th Avenue and Cactus Road beside the Arizona Canal. But officers wouldn't find the rest of her until two weeks later on November 20th, when witnesses called investigators about a head floating in the canal. Just under a year later, 17-year-old Arcadia High School student Melanie Bernasse would go missing in an eerily similar way.

Her family says that she also left her home for a bike ride around her neighborhood. According to John Lucy's reporting for Penn Live, Melanie frequently liked to ride along the trail next to the canal, and the afternoon of September 22, 1993 was no different. But unlike all the times that she safely returned home, Melanie's family never saw their daughter alive again, and the very next day, her intact and bloody body was found floating in the Arizona canal. Now the women's bikes were never recovered, but investigators did find more substantial evidence. They found matching semen samples that were collected from both bodies, officially tying

their cases together. It wasn't until January 13, 2015, when officials arrested local man Brian Patrick Miller that the investigation's truly made any headway. The 43-year-old divorced father, who local media dubbed the Canal Killer, lived with his teenage daughter in Phoenix up until his arrest. According to an article from AZ Central, officers caught Brian with the help of a profile from the VDoC Society. An organization of forensic experts dedicated to solving cold cases. The profile said that the suspect likely still lived in the Phoenix area and had crossed paths with law enforcement before. Officers then staged a meeting between Brian and an undercover cop to obtain his DNA from a coffee mug that he left at their

meeting. While he pled not guilty on all charges, Brian's criminal record made it no surprise when he matched the DNA in Angela and Melanie's murders. In 1990, while he was still a minor, Brian was convicted for stabbing a woman near Paradise Valley Mall. He was later acquitted for a 2002 stabbing of a different woman in Everett Washington where he lived for several years before returning to Phoenix. While both women survived, it begs the question, how many other women could Brian have hurt? How many besides Angela and

Melanie didn't survive? Brian's ex-wife Amy told AZ Central that Bryan admitted to killing a young girl who matched Brandi's description. And the story he told her matched the circumstances around Brandi's disappearance. The Myers family told Adam Bagney of 12 news, they have no doubt that Bryan was involved. Brandi's sister, Kristen Tehlens, said quote, he lived three blocks from our house. He lives one block from our school. So we walked by his house every single day, going back and forth to school.

End quote. Brian is also a suspect in the case of another Everett woman who was stabbed in 2000. While his original trial was scheduled for April 28th of 2017, it's been delayed almost five years in total. His lawyers have cited everything from the COVID-19 pandemic to Brian being mentally unfit to stand trial in order to keep him out of the courtroom, especially since the death penalty is on the table.

On January 6th, 2022, Jacques B. Eud reported for Fox 10 Phoenix that superior court judge Suzanne Cohen ruled that Brian was psychologically competent to be tried, but no further updates have been announced. It's no surprise that Shannon's name also comes up often in the articles and reports discussing the canal killer, and the similarities are hard to miss. Young women, ages 13 to 22, they were all found near the Arizona Canal in Phoenix within a two-year span. But there is a stark difference as well. Most of Brian's victims were stabbed or cut and mutilated in some way, while Shannon

was strangled. Whether the public is right about Shannon's murder or not, someone out there holds the key to unlocking the undeniable truth about what happened to her in her final moments. And exposure is the best thing for a case like Shannon's, where it only takes one person to bust the investigation wide open. Every article about Angela, Melanie, or Brandy that Shannon's name is attached to is an opportunity for someone to remember a forgotten detail or for a witness to gain the courage to finally come forward.

You know, I don't want to get into that. I mean, the important thing is, if, well, I have information about Shannon, you know, or they recognize as clothing or have, you know, somebody out there knows what happened to her. Open that person will come forward and provide that information, give us, give us answers to what happened and why it happened.

In an effort to encourage witnesses or anyone with information to come forward, Detective Summershoe listed Shannon's case on Silent Witness, which is a nonprofit metrophinics program that allows the public to provide anonymous tips. Their slogan is, it pays to fight crime. And when we started reporting on this story, Silent Witness was offering up to $2,000 as a reward for information that would lead to the arrest or the indictment of Shannon's killer.

But, as of today's release of this episode, we are proud to say that the reward has been increased to $7,000 because of a donation made by one of our audio truck producers, Alyssa. Alyssa sits in with me on all of our recordings and reviews all of our scripts, and to give you a little bit of context, as an employee benefit every year on every employee's work anniversary, they get a set amount of money to donate to a cause of their choosing so that their work with the company directly impacts cases and organizations that they care about. And Alyssa was so touched by Shannon's story and so saddened by how she had been forgotten and tossed aside all those years that she put $5,000 of her donation money toward upping the reward. And silent witness will hold that money for a year. So until July of 2023, you can find info about how to submit a tip to claim that reward in our show notes. Still resting in Tempe butte today, Shannon's case

is ongoing, but her story is no longer lost and things to detective summer shoe neither is she. In 2011 he had her new headstone engraved with a quote that describes the case best. I once was lost but now I am found. I get a little emotional just because it's one of the, I've been doing this job for 25 years and I look back at my career now and like one of the, I've been doing this job for 25 years and I look back at my career now and like one of the, I guess, if you look back and you try to figure what have I done that was good and what were the accomplishments given Shannon her name

back was one of the things I'm proud of the stuff in my career. If you have any information about the murder of Shannon Aumach, you're asked to contact Silent Witness anonymously at 480-948-6377-448-0-837-8446. The Deck is an audio chuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis. To learn more about the Deck, visit thedeckpodcast.com. So, what do you think Chuck, do you approve? Aaaaah!