True Crime Campfire - Deconstruction: The Murder of Shanti Cooper Tronnes

Episode Date: April 25, 2025

There are some people who, if they find themselves stuck in a hole, will just keep digging deeper. Maybe they think they’ll find some highly improbable way out of their troubles, more likely it’s all they know to do. This week’s story is about a man who kept doubling down on his lies and bad decisions until the lives of those closest to him were torn to pieces. Join us for a twisty tale of deception and betrayal.Join Katie and Whitney, plus the hosts of Last Podcast on the Left, Sinisterhood, and Scared to Death, on the very first CRIMEWAVE true crime cruise! Get your fan code now--tickets go on sale February 7: CrimeWaveatSea.com/CAMPFIRESources:ABC's 20/20, S46 E18, “A Killer Renovation” JCS (Jim Can't Swim): "Husband Tries to Look Sad" https://youtu.be/6d-kCW46kqs?si=c5Q5WTBM45H7-OL-CBS News: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/dave-tronnes-shanti-cooper-murder-case-florida-48-hours/Orlando Sentinel: https://www.orlandosentinel.com/2019/05/17/twist-in-strangulation-case-against-delaney-park-man-detectives-explore-poison-theory-while-interviewing-his-ex/Fox 35 Orlando: https://www.fox35orlando.com/news/medical-examiner-called-as-witness-in-david-tronnes-murder-trialThe Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/20/david-tronnes-guilty-murdering-wife-zombie-house-floridaOrlando Sentinel: https://www.orlandosentinel.com/2023/10/18/orlando-man-found-guilty-for-2018-delaney-park-zombie-house-renovation-homicide/Follow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfirehttps://www.truecrimecampfirepod.com/Facebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/truecrimecampfire/?hl=enTwitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.comBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. There are some people who, if they find themselves stuck in a hole, will just keep digging deeper. Maybe they think they'll find some highly improbable way. out of their troubles, more likely it's all they know to do. This week's story is about a man who kept doubling down on his lies and bad decisions

until the lives of those closest to him were torn to pieces. This is Deconstruction, the murder of Shanty Cooper-Tronis. For this one, we're in Orlando, Florida, late in the afternoon of April 24, 2018. In the upscale neighborhood of Delaney Park, David Tronnas made an utterly distraught call to 911, sobbing, my wife, I just found my wife, she's not breathing. I tried to do CPR, I can't get her to breathe. He told the operator he had found his wife Shanti, unconscious in the bathtub, and hadn't been able to wake her up. He'd carried her into the bedroom to try and give her CPR. on the floor, but it hadn't worked. She was unresponsive. When police and paramedics arrived a few

minutes later, David was still distraught, his words barely intelligible between sobs. The first thing that struck the responders was the strange situation with the house. It was a beautiful 100-year-old 4,500 square foot dream home, from the outside, anyway. Inside, it was a ragged shell, every piece of wood and drywall torn out and thrown away. It looked like it was at step one of not so much a renovation as a complete rebuild. David, Shanti, and Shanti's eight-year-old son, Jackson, lived in a tiny apartment above the garage, and in the garage itself. Shanti lay on her back on a blanket on the floor beside the bed,

very obviously dead. In fact, her limbs seemed to be already stiffening with rigor mortis, which was strange, given David's story. of having just found her before the 911 call. Between sobs, David told officers that Chatee must have slipped and fallen while taking a shower. That didn't seem likely, though. If you're a cop for any length of time in a pretty big city like Orlando, you're going to see some shit, and you're probably going to be able to recognize

deliberate and extensive blunt force trauma to the head when you see it. Marks on her neck looked like the kind caused by strangulation. None of the responding officers thought Shanti had died as a result of an accident. She'd been murdered. In 2018, David and Shanti had been together for five years and married for one. It was the second marriage for both of them. They'd met on Match.com with Shanti and Florida and David up in Minneapolis. That wasn't far from where he'd grown up, in Stillwater on the St. Croix River,

which, like a lot of Minnesota, looks like a beautiful little town until you think of what the winters must be like. Oh, thank you. After college, David had gotten a job at 3M in St. Paul. He told Shanti he'd been an engineer, and he'd been so successful at it that he'd been able to retire as a millionaire in 2008 when he was just 40 years old. But that wasn't quite the truth. He had worked for 3M, but in sales. He'd been good at it and made a healthy 140,000 a year. Just good money, but it's not retire when you're 40 money. According to his first wife, Carol, David didn't retire. he quit because he was burned out. Carol divorced David in 2013. She stayed tight-lipped about exactly why she filed for divorce, so much so that when detectives asked her about their marriage, Carol invoked spousal privilege so she wouldn't have to answer any questions on the matter,

which does spousal privilege even still count if you're divorced? I genuinely don't know. So lawyers, let us know. Like, no, right? That's the whole point of divorce. You're unspousing. You're unspousing each other. Right, but like maybe it would still count for stuff that happened while the marriage was still legal. Like, that's what I'm wondering. I don't know. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I could be wrong.

I got my law degree from a guy in a van, so I don't know. And the van said free candy on the side of it. But 2013 was also when David started his internet romance with Shanti. And if you want me to speculate on whether the divorce or the match.com profile came first, I'm going to guess the latter, and that Carol found out about David's internet romance. There might have been others before Shanti, too. Who knows? Shanti was quite a catch, beautiful and charismatic with her own successful financial consulting business, a smart, successful woman, sailing confidently on the seas of life.

She'd recently gone through a messy divorce from her first husband, a relationship she described to David as toxic. And she wasn't messing around with what she wanted from her next relationship. I am looking for it all, Dave, one of her emails read. I want to be in love so deeply, so pure, and something that is lasting and a growing, living thing. That's a really lovely way to describe a love relationship, a growing, living thing. Soon, one or the other of them was flying either north or south every other weekend to visit. Just a few months after they'd first connected on Match.com, David moved in with Shanti down in Orlando. At least initially, it seemed like a fairy tale.

Shanti gushed to her friends about how old David treated her, and they were intensely affectionate with each other. Sometimes a little too much for Shanty's friends, one of whom described all their lovey-dovey stuff as, quote, a little nauseating at times. Oh, Lord, not bunny and snuggles again. In 2017, David and Shanty had a courthouse wedding, and Shanty got a beautiful custom-made diamond ring that she loved to show off. That ring was important to her, and it would also be. important after her death. There was no sign of forced entry into her home, no sign of robbery or a struggle. There was cash and an expensive watch sitting right out in the open that weren't taken, but Shanty's beautiful diamond ring was gone. David said he had no idea where it was.

It's around 4 p.m. by the time the police got to David and Shanti's house, and one of the officers realized that eight-year-old Jackson had been waiting to be picked up from his elementary school for an hour. Oh, Lord. He had to be picked up. He had. had the school called Jackson's dad, Jim Cooper, to come get him. Jim wasn't told what was happening, but he knew that something was bad, wrong. Shanti would never just neglect to pick up her son. So Jim made what I think was a reasonable decision, but it was one he would later call the biggest mistake of his life. With Jackson in the car beside him, he drove to Shanti's house. There was a bunch of police cars and officers outside with crime scene tape blocking the driveway. With Jackson

already starting to worry if something had happened to his mom, Jim got out and asked an officer what was happening. Someone's deceased, he said. Jim knew right away he meant Shanti. That was the only way she wouldn't have taken care of Jackson. Oh my God, that poor baby. Eight years old. David was both Shanty's spouse and, as far as anyone knew, the last person to see her alive. That meant he was the first person investigators needed to look at. At the Orlando PD station, David surrendered his clothes for forensic analysis and was taken to an interview room, where he was soon questioned alternately by two homicide detectives, Teresa Sprague and Barbara Sharp. I'm sure you're all familiar with the idea of good cop, bad cop.

It's a real interrogation technique, and it's real because a lot of the time, it works. Detective Sprague and Sharp used the version where they both started out as the good cop, full of sympathy for David, as he sobbed in the interview room on the worst day of his life. And when we say sobbed, we really mean sobbed. David was a wailing wreck for hours. And top tip here, if you want to convincingly pull off some fake grief, maybe sneak a little bit of onion under your fingernail or something. Because if you make weepy noises for hours and yet not one single tear falls from your eyes, cops are going to notice. They're not stupid. I mean, at least force yourself to think about our attacks and the swamp of sadness or something.

something. You got to get those waterworks running. Oh, my God, never, never bring up R-Tax. My entire generation was friggin' traumatized by that scene. Oh, I know, I know. I know. I can't even think about it now. Artax, don't give into the sadness. Oh, God, so sad. David's story was that Shanti came downstairs a little after 9 a.m. and then went back up to the garage apartment to work. David took their dogs for a walk in the park, did some yard work, clean the pool, and the day ticked along with no further interaction between them. I can't stress enough just how tiny the garage apartment they were living in was. Even with Jackson out at school, you'd have to work hard to keep from getting in each other's way. But somehow David and Shanti had nothing to do with each other all day.

No conversation, no text, nothing. Around 3.45, David went up to ask if he should go pick up Jackson from school. He said, hello, as he entered the little apartment, but got no reply. He could hear a trickle of water running and went into the bathroom. Shanti was face down in the tub, partially submerged in pinkish water that trickled from the shower head. She was bleeding from the head. Obviously she fell or something happened, David told Detective Sprague. That was clearly not what had happened to Shanty, but for the moment Sprague kept quiet and let David keep talking. He insisted that he and Shanty had been deeply in love with each other, although he did admit things had been a little tough lately. At the start of the year, Shanti had suffered through a nasty case of

appendicitis and had to have an appendectomy. Ouch. She'd had a tough recovery. She was in pain and had trouble eating and a chronic illness like that is a big stressor for both halves of a couple. But David stressed that they'd been happy. No affairs, no financial problems, no serious arguments about anything. And David wasn't the only person that police needed to look at. This was Shanti's second marriage. Her first one, to Jim Cooper, had started happily, but started to fall apart not long after their son Jackson was born. Shanti had had an affair. Jim still wanted to keep the marriage going, but Shanty wanted out. That's a set of circumstances that could make somebody real angry for a long time, especially with a difficult, messy divorce on top of it. And when Jim Cooper

came in to talk to the Orlando investigators, he didn't do enough to convince them of his innocence. He's not cleared, Sprague said afterward. He would soon be nearly cleared, though. Jim had just started a new job, and he'd been on-site and surrounded by witnesses the whole day. Neighbors had also reported a suspicious figure wandering around, a rough-looking dude who looked like Woody Harrelson, which is pretty distinctive description, and local cops knew exactly who they were talking about. But this was a nothing burger from the get-go. Everyone involved knew that a random stranger just wandering in and killing somebody is vanishingly unlikely. But the investigators did their work, and a detective found Woody and interviewed him. Just as they thought, he had nothing to do with the

case at all. Other than David Tranus, this case was quickly running out of suspects. But what possible reason could David Tronis have for killing us wife? It was a question investigators would struggle to answer, but they soon began to suspect it centered around their beautiful old house on East Copeland Drive. David bought the place outright for around $600,000 in 2015. Well, maybe. His finances were always a little murky, and the deed named both David and his mother as owners,

so I'm guessing at least some of that $600K came from Mommy Dearest, who'd followed David down to Orlando not long after he hooked up with Shanti. Shanti was not on the deed, which at this point was fair enough. She and David weren't married at that point, but even after they did get married, her name stayed off. the deed. He kept saying he'd adder to it and never quite got around to it. Given what happened next, we should be clear that this house was not a fixer-upper. It was an old place, but it was in beautiful condition with hardwood floors and a tile roof, a gorgeous pool, and everything neat and

tidy on the inside. The decor and countertops and stuff like that looked like what they were, which was an old person's choice, but those were an easy fix. Certainly not something you'd have to to tear the house down to its bare bones to fix. Right? Right? David started renovating the place. This essentially became his job. Shanti still worked hard at her career, but David dedicated himself to puttering around in his new house. I mean, he could afford to because he was independently wealthy, although Shanti's friends and family quickly started to wonder about that. Dave was, well, insert whatever polite term you want for cheap as shit. With his own money anyway, he spent Shanty's money like it was water.

And it was Shanty's money, tens of thousands of dollars at a time that was paying for the renovation. And just to reiterate, Shanty's name still wasn't on the deed. Shanty's money was remaking David's house. Did David have the skill and experience to take on and undertake? of this size? Absolutely not. But he did have the confidence to try. Is confidence a reasonable substitute for said skill and experience? Again, absolutely not. It started out as nothing too extreme. Replace some of the flooring and a little bit of the drywall, stuff like that. But it really seems like David lost his damn mind. After one piece of the original interior was ripped out,

He'd change his mind on what he wanted to do or fire a contractor and move on to something else without finishing off the first thing. He had multiple different blueprints drawn up of what he wanted the finish house to look like, right in the middle of tearing it to pieces inside. Soon, there was no floor at all, and the family had to walk across planks sitting on the floor joists. Shanti wouldn't let Jackson go in because of all the bare nails. All the interior walls and drywall were taken out. The place looked like a bomb went off. The likely genesis for all this insanity was that David was a big fan of home renovation shows and apparently believed that if you watched enough of them, it meant you were qualified to do the work yourself.

You know, like how if you watch enough Roadrunner cartoons, you can make a tunnel out of black paint. I watch a lot of Star Trek. I can fly a spaceship, obviously. Sure, of course. A staple of those shows is where they take out existing work, often with sledgehammers, sometimes to the extent of bulldozing a whole wall. Of course, those people know what they're doing. And though it's fun, dramatic TV,

the destruction is just preparation for the real work. David doesn't seem to have grasped that. His idea of renovation was to tear everything to pieces and then maybe, someday, get around rebuilding it. It's like he just went in there with the sledgehammer, like, whoa, woo, woo. It was just having fun gutting the place. He didn't really think to the next step. Having hooked up with a putative millionaire and moved into his dream project home,

Shanty was living in a tiny apartment over the garage. Her twin bed crammed tight up against Jackson's bunk bed. They cooked their meals on a camping stove down in the garage. There was something missing from this picture, of course. Shanty's husband, David. Not long after they'd gotten married, David had started sleeping downstairs on a couch in the cluttered garage with their dogs. Even when Jackson was away, staying with his dad.

It was his decision. Doesn't every new bride dream of the day her husband says he'd rather sleep in his own bed? He told detectives it was because Shanti snored. Okay, earplugs are a thing. y'all just got married. Despite David's attempts to paint the rousiest of pictures, this does not sound like a marriage where everything was sweetness and light.

Just a year after their wedding, they were sleeping in separate beds. While Shanty's friends had found the couple's overt affection nauseating early on in the relationship, by 2010 there was not much sign of that. A friendly neighbor said she never saw them hold hands or even touch each other. They were so frosty together

that the neighbor thought it was weird. Interviewing David, detectives pressed him on whether the stress of the renovation project was affecting his marriage. We love what we're doing to the house, David said. We love the vision that we had for the house. The word we seems to be doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Everybody knew that the house was David's project, David's baby. Shanti just paid for it. By the time of her death, she'd paid about a quarter of a million dollars, and it started stressing to her friends about not being on the deed. If something happened, if they broke up, she'd take a big hit. When they'd started the house project, that hadn't been a concern at all. The fact that it was a concern now suggested Shanti was finding it all too easy to imagine a future without David in her life.

One of her friends had Shanti called her crying one time, not long before the murder, and said, I'm so scared and I just need to get out. He knows I know too much and he won't let me go. Whoa. What was that about? Shanty never brought this up again and brushed it off when her friend tried to get her to say more. But it was clear something had shaken her up badly. One of David's favorite shows was A&E's Orlando-based zombie house flipping, where a crew find homes that are in really bad condition and often abandon and knock them back into quality shape in just a few weeks.

Now, maybe David walked into the shell of his house and said to himself, I've made a huge mistake and realized he was going to need to. serious helped put the place back together. The other alternative would be that he deliberately wrecked the place in the hopes of getting on one of his favorite shows, which would be bug nuts bonkers, but who knows?

Anyway, David had one of the zombie house-flipping hosts, builder Keith Ory, come over to take a look at the place and see if it would be a good fit for the show. Keith was impressed, as in impressed by what a god-awful mess the place was in. As he told 2020 later on, holy cow,

there's no house on the inside of this house. house. He was fairly alarmed. He couldn't quite work out how the place was still standing, as David had knocked out a lot of the interior walls and supporting structures. God, he's such a turnip. Have you never heard of a load-bearing wall, you dip shit? God, it's so dangerous. One of the engineers Keith brought with him said the only thing holding up this house was two inches of stucco. The whole place looked bizarre to Keith. No one in his industry ever took apart interiors as extensively as this. Of course, given the show he worked on, bizarre and alarming, were exactly negative traits for a property to have. The worst the house, the better the show.

Keith thought the house was a good fit for zombie house flipping, and when he spoke to the show's producers, they agreed. They all wanted to get a load of this disaster. So in mid-April, a week or so before Shanti's murder, Keith went back to see David and Shanti to make sure they were on board with the project. He'd been having a lot of trouble getting them both together and person, but really needed face-to-face confirmation from them both before things could go any further. Shanti barely said a word throughout the meeting and was palpably pissed at David. The tension in the air was thick enough to spread on a slice of sourdough. She did agree to go forward with the show, but then flat out just stormed out of the room. Super awkward for poor Keith.

Shooting was supposed to start in May. In the interview room at Orlando PD, hours into talking with David, detectives Sprague and Sharp were about to turn the corner from good cops to bad cops to try and shake something loose. They had plenty of reason to be suspicious of him. His story did not add up at all. He said he found Shanti half submerged in the tub and carried her to the bedroom to try CPR. Police arrived just a few minutes after he called 911. If this story was true, Shanti's body would have been soaking wet and so should the carpet, but she was barely even damp and the the floor, not at all. The bathtub did look like it had been stained by bloody water, but not recently. The medical examiner confirmed the suspicions of the responding officers. There was no way

Shanti had gotten those awful injuries by falling down in the shower. They were a type familiar to homicide investigators. She'd been severely beaten and then strangled to death. And not recently. Shanti's body was already going into rigor mortis when authorities arrived at the scene. to an extent you don't see until hours after death. Shanti was definitely still alive at around 8.30 p.m. on the night before David called 9-1-1 because she'd called to say good night to Jackson, who was staying with his dad. Police discovered that Shanti's cell phone hadn't moved after 11.30 p.m. She'd gotten a work text around 7 a.m. and hadn't responded, hadn't even read it. Shanti's friends all thought she worked

too hard. She wouldn't flake on a client like that. So it looked like Shanti had been killed between 8.30 and 1130 on the night before David called 911, and detectives thought they could pin down the circumstances a little further. When they found her, Shanti had one diamond earring stud still in. The other was on the nightstand by the bed. So maybe she'd been attacked while she was sitting on the bed, taking out her earrings, getting ready to go to sleep. Yeah, that is such a chilling image. Just sitting there, just, you know, you don't know anything's up, taking out your earrings. Oh, boom. That's awful. Yeah. So scary. David, of course, had said he'd seen Shanti on Tuesday morning before he'd taken the dogs out for a walk. Rigormortis and data from her cell phone indicated that Shanty was already hours dead by then. When Detective Sharp started aggressively questioning David on why his story didn't match the evidence, he just started whimpering. I don't understand. I've told you everything.

You're not a good liar, Sharp told him. You're terrible at it. The evidence and her body speak for itself and your story is BS. That detective is great and she seems to almost enjoy letting him have it. That interrogation is a really interesting one to watch and I got to say Tronis is one of the worst actors I have ever seen and y'all know that is saying something. Like he cries like a cartoon like woo hoo hoo like it's like it's like well enunciated sobbing. It's bizarre. It's blue who who, who like he literally does boom. Yeah. It's it's it's it's it's. It's. It's. It's. It's really, really something to behold. They went after him hard, and if David had been half as shaken up as he acted,

he might have broken, but he didn't. And although the police thought he was by far the most likely killer, after 14 hours, they had to let him go, and David lawyered up. But the investigation continued, of course, and it didn't take long for David's story of a picture-perfect marriage to crumble into dust. officers from the Department of Children and Family Services interviewed little Jackson, who told them what Shanti hadn't told anyone, that David was verbally and physically abusive to her. When Shanty wasn't around, David dropped any pretense at acting like a parental figure to Jackson.

He'd get furious at the kids, scream in his face and threaten to hurt him and break his toys. Jackson was eight years old, prick. And David's violent temper wasn't the only secret he was keeping. the street a little from David and Shanti, Ron Gordy lived with his partner, Tom. Quite a while before Shanty's death, Ron was out jogging one day and saw Dave out doing some yard work

with his shirt off and wearing what Ron later called very, very skimpy little running shorts. Oh my. Ron stopped to chat, and as someone who spent a lot of time in the gym himself, complimented David on being in great shape, and said he liked David's new glasses. David gave him an intense look and said,

yeah, and now that I have new glasses, you're much more attractive to me now that I can see. What Ron had said was a friendly compliment. What David said was a pretty blatant come on. It made Ron uncomfortable. Most people who met David for the first time thought he was gay. That doesn't necessarily mean anything, but sometimes it does. Not long after, a friend of Ron's told him he recognized David from Club Orlando. David, it turned out, was a regular visitor to Club Orlando, a gym and private men's club downtown,

which offered patrons the opportunity to relax in the hot tub, dive in the pool, blow off some steam in the steam room, and watch a movie in our video lounge or socialize in your own private room. It was a gym and also very much a hookup spot for gay men wanting to, you know, blow off some steam. David had been going there a lot over the past 18 months. maybe sometimes he just went there to work out but at least one employee caught him twice well let's just say he was being very friendly to two different men once in the steam room and once behind the building if the same guy catches you in the act two different times i think it's pretty safe to assume you're mainly going there for sex david was a frequent visitor

he'd gone most recently one week before shanty's death he'd gone there the day after the two of them got married. Now, there are lots of different shapes of relationship, and some of them certainly include hooking up with strangers. But Shanti was the opposite of a shrinking violet. She was open and forthright, and her friends knew her about as well as it's possible to know someone, and none of them thought that there was any chance in all the netherhills in the universe that Shanty knew about David's visits to Club Orlando, or that she would have been okay with his infidelity if she did. But, had she found out? Was that possibly a motive for her murder? Remember what she'd said to her friend? He knows I know too much and he won't let me go. She'd been talking about David's secret

sex life? Did he want to make sure it stayed a secret? And there was also another possible motive, the one we see most often in spouse murder cases, money. David was the beneficiary of Shanti's $350,000 life insurance policy, and he started trying to claim it within a few weeks of her death. He also had access to Shanti's investments, which had a value of nearly a million dollars. He started moving money, hundreds of thousands of dollars, out of their joint bank account. Unbeknownst to him, the police were monitoring his bank accounts. When a murder suspect starts hoarding money, it's odds on that they're about to make a run for it. So even though the case against him was still just taking shape,

prosecutors decided to not take that risk and arrested and charged David Tronis and, in August, four months after Shanti's death. Cops put the old habeas grab us on and met his mom's house, where he'd been staying since the murder. It was an easy arrest. David had been sitting out on the porch and did whatever the officers asked him to do. He didn't say a word, and he didn't look the least surprised. Along with the arrest warrant, investigators were able to search David's mom's house, and among David's stuff, they found Shanti's most prized possession, her diamond engagement ring, that she was never without.

It was worth thousands of dollars, and it seemed very likely that David had pulled it off Shanty's finger after she was dead so that he could make some money from it later. He had previously told investigators he had no idea what had happened to the ring. Well played, man. That was a very sound decision keeping that ring and lying to the detectives about it first. He's the next of kin. He would have gotten it anyway. Yeah, it's bizarre. He's really bad at this. He just wanted to make it look like a theft, I don't know. I guess.

Stupid. Stupid. With the revelations about David's secret life during his marriage to Shanti, detectives were curious about his first marriage to Carol up in Minneapolis. As we said earlier, Carol was not keen to share much with investigators, going so far as to invoke spousal privilege to cut off inquiries. She didn't believe David was capable of murder, she said. He'd never shown any violent tendencies in the 14 years they'd.

been together. She refused to say anything bad about him. But investigators also spoke to David and Carol's friends, and they suggested a very different story. Within a year of marrying David Tronis, Carol had gotten sick with mysterious stomach pains and digestive issues. In fact, her symptoms were astonishingly similar to the illness Shanti had suffered that led to her getting her appendix removed, which struck not long after she and David got married. In both marriages, David was the one preparing most of the food. Carol's health had declined so rapidly from her normal healthy self that several friends wondered, is he poisoning her? Campers, is it a good sign when your friends think your new husband might be trying to murder you? Yeah, I'm going to say no.

Yeah. Carol gave a flat no when detectives asked if she thought David had been poisoning her. As for Shanti, the hospital still had the appendix they'd removed from her, but the the fluids it was stored in would have removed any evidence of poisoning. This line of inquiry was all pretty vague and speculative, but it was soon given new life because David, like many a dumbass before him, had trouble keeping his mouth shut in jail. Of course. His cellmate was a stoner-type dude named Edward Gismondi. David recognized him.

Edward, like David, had been a regular visitor on the D.L. to Club Orlando, the Discrete Men's Club, where everyone apparently has a perfect photographic memory for faces. David and Edward discovered they shared an interest in hallucinogenic drugs. And during one of those conversations, David brought up Sappo, a poison derived from the giant leaf frog of the Amazon. David said you could put the stuff in salsa and poison someone without them ever knowing, which is a very specific little nugget of knowledge to have. He said, the beauty of it is, it can't be tested for, Edward told investigators. David also apparently admitted to Edward that he had killed Shanti. He said they'd argued,

then David had blacked out, and when he came to, Shanty was dead on the floor. I blacked out is a fairly run-of-the-mill excuse used by murderers, particularly domestic murderers, and it's hardly ever true. So all of this was pretty damning, but also of limited actual use. Because Edward Gismondi was shady as shit, a registered sex offender whose second-hand testimony

was not very likely to convince anybody. But there was another twist coming. With David in jail awaiting trial, his defense attorney made a weird call to the prosecutor. He hadn't been able to sleep at night. He had evidence he needed to turn over. When detectives had first arrived at David, in Shanti's house, they'd noticed that the sheets on Shanti's bed were clean and looked like they'd

been hurriedly put on the bed. They'd also found blood evidence on the bed frame. David's explanation was that he and Shanty had had sex while she was having her period, which somehow involved the bed frame getting messy. Anyway, investigators had long thought that David had replaced bloody sheets with clean ones, but they'd never found the bloody sheets. Now, David's lawyer said he'd hired a private investigated to remove the sheets from the home. The story was they wanted to run their own test to show that it was menstrual blood on the sheets. But they'd never run any tests at all, and the sheets had just been sitting inside a paper bag in a bank locker. Either the defense attorney suffered an attack of conscience, or he'd found out his PI was not as tight-lipped as he could be, but either

way, he turned over the sheets. They certainly had Shanti's blood on them, but possibly due to the time they'd spent in storage, there was no way to determine what kind of blood it was. Prosecutors never really nailed down a precise motive for why David Tronnas killed Shanti. That's not particularly unusual in cases without a confession. Real life isn't like a detective novel where all the pieces have to slot satisfyingly together. It's messy. Had Shanti wanted to pull out of the zombie house flipping show and wreck both David's chance to be on TV and his chance to fix the damage he'd done to the house?

Had she found out about his secret sex life with other men and said she would divorce him? Did David just do it for the money? Between Shanti's life insurance and her investments, David could be over a million dollars richer if she died. Having multiple believable motives for murder wasn't exactly a plus for David's new defense team. Besides, the prosecution didn't need to prove why David had killed Shanti, just that he had. David's trial was delayed, both because of COVID and because he was found to be mentally incompetent due to a schizophrenia diagnosis. Now, a lot of people, including Jackson,

who'd known David since he was three years old, thought he was faking mental illness. Who knows? But in 2023, a judge ruled that David was competent to be tried. There was really only one explanation for Shanti's death that made any sense at all, and that was that David Tronis had killed her. In October of 2023, a jury agreed. And David, now a 55-year-old man with a man bun and a big bushy beard, was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. I mentioned that because it's interesting because he was really clean cut and, like, chiseled looking and tan and stuff when he went in.

And he came out looking like a totally different person. It was interesting. There are still some question marks for me on this one. Did David marry Shanti with the intention of killing her? Now if, and this is a big if, because obviously we have no proof of this, but if he was actually poisoning her, then I think that's a distinct possibility, and we've seen that before many times. Remember Paul Curry? Poisoning Linda with the salad dressings with nicotine? I mean, he was planning on killing her from day one. That might account for the love bombing Shanti's friends saw in the beginning when he couldn't seem to keep his hands off her, affection that seemed to totally dry off after they made it official. And then there's the fact that he never put her on the deed to the house, even though he was using her money to renovate it. Well, probably never know for sure, but if I were a betting man, I'd put my money on it,

that David intended this murder from day one. And if that's true, it's absolutely bone-chilling. Shanti seems like a really lovely person. At David's sentencing, her son Jackson spoke about her with pure love. She was the best mom in the world, he said, and he missed her every day. It's really scary to think how the rest of your life could be irreparably altered by something as mundane as going on a date with a guy from Match.com. Whether he began their marriage with murder in mind or just decided to do it so he could be on zombie house flippers, David Tronis will have the rest of his life to think about his choices. I hope that brings those who loved Shanti at least a tiny atom of peace. So that was a wild one, right, campers?

You know, we'll have another one for you next week. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the True Crime Campfire. And if you haven't booked your spot yet on the Crime Wave True Crime Cruise from November 3rd through November 7th, get on it, y'all. Join Katie and me, plus last podcast on the left, scared to death, and sinisterhood for a rock and good time at sea. You can pay all at once or set up a payment plan, but you got to have a fan code to book a ticket. So go to crimewave at sea.com slash campfire and take it from there. And as always, we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely patrons. Thank you so much to Maggie B, Sean, Bina Collada, love it, Amy, Riley, and Angela.

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