True Crime Campfire - Episode 22: Bad Romance Part 2

Episode Date: December 20, 2019

Join us for part 2 of "Bad Romance: Three Cases of Love Gone Wrong." We continue the story of David Meza and Jay Merendino, and move on to the truly bizarre story of Sheila Davalloo, a woman who makes Glenn Close's Alex from "Fatal Attraction" look stable and relaxed. Sources:Books: Obsession by M. William Phelpshttps://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/texas-doctor-ana-maria-gonzalez-angulo-gets-10-years-poisoning-n214221Oxygen's "Snapped," episode "Ana-Maria Gonzales-Angulo"https://truecrimedaily.com/2017/12/20/gay-porn-model-convicted-of-murder-and-conspiracy-with-pregnant-girlfriend-in-killing-of-wealthy-businessman/https://www.courthousenews.com/personal-lives-display-love-gone-bad-murder-trial/CNBC's "Deadly Rich," episode "The Boy Toy Killer"Oxygen's "Snapped," episode "Sheila Davalloo"Follow us, campers!Patreon: https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail] 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. So, campers, in part one of this two-part grab bag episode, we told you the disturbing fatal attraction-like story of Dr. Anna Maria Gonzalez and Goose. A brilliant cancer researcher who tried to poison her boyfriend in an, if I can't have you, no one can scheme. Then we began the story of Jay Merendino and David Meza, a May-December romance that began on an online escort page and then moved quickly into passionate I Love Yous. But some of Jay's friends were concerned when they recognized young Hunk David as a porn star and realized that Jay didn't seem to know anything about that. And they were a little concerned about how much money Jay was spending on his new bow. Were David's motives sincere? Was he really as in love with Jay as Jay was with him?

Jay's friends wanted to think so. And the longer they got to know David, the more optimistic they became. The young man really did seem to enjoy being with Jay. Maybe it would all work out, after all? Every now and then, though, weird things would pop up with David. For example, when Jay's decorator friend came down at Thanksgiving to travel with Jay and David to Rosarito to take a look at the condo and plan the interior design, David called the last minute with a family emergency. The same thing happened a few months later, another family emergency. It seemed like family crises were suddenly popping up left and right for David, interfering with his and Jay.

his plans. No one thought anything of it at the time. They just kind of assumed he was having some family troubles. And about David's family. As we told you earlier, they had no idea he was working as an escort or doing gay porn. They thought he was in finance. Well, they also didn't know that he was anything other than straight because David was hiding another secret from Jay. He had a girlfriend. Boom. Yeah, mic drop. Her name was Taylor Langston, and she was 19 years old. David had known her ever since she was in high school. Her Facebook page was full of gushing posts about how in love they were.

They had a cat, they had a dog, they were planning on getting married. In one picture, Taylor and David kiss as Taylor holds out her hand toward the camera showing off her engagement ring. Wow. Yeah. And in one picture, she shows off a pair of positive pregnancy. Nancy tests. A later pick shows her sporting a baby belly. She was having David's baby, and she seemed thrilled about it. Oh, boy. Yeah. So when he told Jay, he had a family emergency. What that usually meant was he had to be with Taylor that weekend. They had an engagement party or a sonogram appointment.

This guy was living a double life in a big way. While he was romancing Jay Marindino, he was also in a committed relationship with Taylor Langston with a baby on the way. They had an apartment together in San Diego. It seems clear that Maza viewed Jay as a mark from day one. Within a week of their first meeting, he was already dropping I Love U's, already sending syrupy romantic cards and letters. He worked Jay effortlessly. Love bombing. We've seen it before. Yeah, we sure have, and you see it a lot in these cases, unfortunately. And I don't want to beat a dead hole. course we've said this before we're probably going to say it again but you know when somebody wants to move that fast especially when they're dropping i love you's basically if you bought a bagged salad

the day that you met this person and it's still good in your fridge the day that they say i love you that's a red flag because no you don't love them you don't even know them your britta filter is older than your relationship okay that's not it's not possible to love you love someone in that amount of time and you gotta wonder if somebody is i love viewing you that fast it's either that they don't have an accurate picture in their own mind of how relationships are supposed to develop and what's appropriate you know to drop on somebody when and they're like creepily into you and you better go like find a hiding place or something or they're working you right you know most likely i mean of course there are going to be exceptions to this i'm sure there are some great love

stories where people have fallen in love at first sight or whatever, but those would be the exception, I think, to the rule. 99.9% of the time that is not the case. Yeah. And what you're calling love bombing, I mean, not just moving fast, but also just showering somebody with praise and, you know, too much too soon is a red flag. Right. Exactly. And David seemed to have figured out quickly that all he had to do to keep getting presents and cash was to keep saying, I love you. Like Jay was an ATM machine and those three little words were the PIN number. That's exactly right. He was a con man. And Jay was falling for it, hook, line, and sinker. And now David has agreed to move in with Jay

in Mexico. And at some point, the other shoe was going to drop. Two worlds were getting ready to collide. During the last week of April in 2015, Jay packed up his stuff and drove from Houston to San Diego to pick up David and go down to Rosarito. He told friends he was leaving Texas and never looking back. This was his next chapter, his life with David. He wanted all his friends to come and visit him. Wait till you see my place. It's fabulous. Bless his heart.

His friends were happy to see him so excited, but sad to see him go. They would soon be sadder. The closing of the condo was scheduled for April 30th. At the closing, Jay officially named David Mesa as the beneficiary of the condo. Oh, man. The day after the closing, Jay and David checked out of their hotel in San Diego and crossed into Mexico. Jay was in his range rover with David following on his little red motorcycle, the one that Jay had bought him. They crossed into Mexico that afternoon.

The condo wasn't quite ready to move into, so they checked into a nice hotel for the night. They had dinner, and Jay opened a nice bottle of wine to celebrate the closing. They were going to move in the next day. Later that night, around 10.15, David told Jay he'd had a text from a friend in San Diego. His friend was sick and needed him. He had to go back across the border. Now, Jay wasn't, like, stoked about this, but, But David insisted he had to go be with his friend.

So David left the hotel around 10.30 that night and headed back to San Diego. At about 2 a.m., hotel staff saw Jay in the lobby headed out to the parking lot. The concierge said hello to him, and Jay told the guy that his friend was broken down on the side of the road, and he had to go rescue him. Now, there's only one person I can think of that Jay would leave his hotel room at 2 a.m. to go rescue by the side of the road. David Mesa. The roads would have been dark at this time of night, and beyond the downtown area of Rosarito, the landscape was remote and desolate. The blood spatter on the ground tells us the attack began in front of the range rover. Jay ran from his attacker, and the attacker chased after him, stabbing him two dozen times and slashing his throat. Oh, my God, so brutal.

finally jay collapsed in a pool of blood and his murderer dragged him through the dirt and tossed him down the ravine his murderer david maza one can only imagine the horror that jay had to endure that night like lacy peterson like so so many people before him jay experienced the most horrifying personal betrayal a person can experience. The man he loved and who he thought loved him had turned on him with a knife. I can't. I really can't even imagine. It's stomach turning. The day after the murder, David Mesa went with his girlfriend to a baby shower for a friend and a birthday party for his niece in San Diego. Wow. Later that evening, David and Taylor crossed the border into Mexico. David wanted to get some of his stuff from the hotel he'd been

at last night with Jay. As police later pointed out, unless David knew Jay wasn't going to be there, why on earth would he bring his pregnant girlfriend to the hotel they had shared? Exactly. Jay didn't know anything about Taylor and no good could come from him finding out about her. This trip to the hotel was a clear indication that Mesa knew Jay was dead. After the murder, David Mesa was a busy bee on Google. trying to figure out how to find out where somebody filed their will.

It turned out that Jay did have an old will written in 1998 that left his estate to his former partner. A few days after the murder, David and his girlfriend went to the post office to mail a handwritten will to a probate office in Texas. This will was scrawled on a piece of hotel stationary, unwitnessed. It just said, I, Jake C. Marindino, leave everything to David E. Meza. Hmm. Now, such a document can sometimes be legal, but it was extremely suspect. Would somebody with as much money as Jay Marindino be this slapdash about writing his will? I sure as hell wouldn't think so, no.

No. And if the will did hold up, David would stand to collect about three million dollars plus that nice condo right which well i guess he's getting the condo regardless though isn't he because he's the beneficiary so he gets a ton of good stuff now police have never been able to determine who wrote this will which convinces me that it wasn't jay since i'm pretty sure they would have been able to match his handwriting pretty quickly yeah i think it's it's it's very like hastily scrawled and the handwriting is kind of messy and one of jay's friends has said on a true crime show, I forget which one, that, you know, maybe they were just goofing around in bed, and David said, if you really love me, you know, you'll leave me all your money.

And maybe it was a joke or something like that, but it's also very possible that Mesa just wrote it himself. Right. The FBI got involved in the investigation soon after the body was discovered, and of course, they looked into Mesa right away. The border crossing records became the main piece of evidence. The first crossing happened late. on May 1st. This was when David left Jay at the hotel and drove back to San Diego,

supposedly to take care of his sick friend at 11 p.m. GPS technology in his motorcycle tracked David headed back to Mexico around 1.30 that morning toward the murder scene. Crossing number three happened at 355 a.m. back into the states after Jay's murder. Crossing four was the next day when he and Taylor Langston crossed back into Mexico to get his stuff from the hotel. Of course, David denied everything, but in his initial interview, he omitted that second border crossing. When confronted about that, he clamped up. But Taylor's voicemail messages obtained later via search warrant showed he had a guilty conscience. In one message, he said, ever since I did that, I just hate myself. I need to talk to somebody because I don't know how to

cope with what I did. I feel like shit about myself for doing that. I didn't have a choice. I mean, I did have a choice. I did it because I wanted to for my family, but the price was too high, higher than I thought. I need to get some help to figure out how to move past this and get on with my life. You need to get help. Is he talking about talking to a therapist? So I committed this murder and I'm feeling going to bad about it. And I really just want to move on. Are you kidding me, dude? guess what asshole jay doesn't get to get on with his life jay's dead forever and i think it's it gives me chills to think he says you know i well i didn't have a choice i mean i did have a choice that's how they think i think that's how killers think a lot of the time i don't have a choice

yes you do you don't need millions of dollars to live are you kidding me you don't need to kill this innocent man who was nothing but kind to you just so you can have his money didn't have a choice my ass and then when he says the price was too high higher than i thought meaning he's considered this he knew that he would feel bad he just didn't think he'd feel this bad and now he just really wants to know how he can move on and get on with his life

oh screw you dude the worst and yeah don't think we missed how you were sniffing around your girl when she was still in high school I know right that's too gross because he's six years older than Taylor it's fuck so

Mesa was tried in federal court and convicted, sentenced to life in prison for the murder of J. Taylor Langston did 22 months in prison for lying to the FBI and obstructing the investigation. And by the way, I totally think she was in on it. I absolutely think she was in on it. I think she had to know what was going on. I mean, he brought her back into Mexico to the hotel where he had been with the guy the night before. Like you said, she obstructed the investigation at every turn.

I 100% think that she knew what was going to happen and was in on it. And I hate that she only did 22 months in prison. Yeah. It's a sad story. I don't know what else there is to say. Yeah, it's really sad. And it's more evidence that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. Exactly.

Man, please. Please remember that because it will save you an enormous amount of heartache. something seems too good to be true it almost certainly is and you know we all want to believe that we'll be the exception to that rule you know sure if a friend told us hey I met this guy and he's related to British royalty

and he works with the CIA and he has his own private jet you know we'd probably think girl no he's lying to you shut it down but when it happens to us somehow we're able to look past the red flags a lot of the time and most people are really good at convincing

themselves of things they really want to be true. And we all have to watch that tendency in ourselves and fight through it because sometimes that can be a matter of life and death. So, okay, moving on to case three, the schemer. We are in Westchester County, New York, March 23rd, 2003. Emergency room staff at the local hospital are alerted to a fracas in the parking lot, about 5.30 on a Sunday evening. man and a woman are struggling, fighting physically, next to a car in the parking lot of the

hospital. So the hospital employees approach the car and are just horrified to see that the man is covered in blood and has been stabbed by the woman. So they separated the two. They rushed the man into the emergency room for treatment. He'd been stabbed pretty badly, like the knife had actually nicked his heart. So they took him back for emergency surgery and the woman, of course was taken into custody. This was 33-year-old Sheila Davaloo, and she told detectives that she was a research scientist at Purdue Pharma. So yet another pharmacy employee involved in all this. So it's cancer research and pharmacy, like it's just hot beds. Yeah, in Texas. Hot beds of intrigue and drama. She said she'd gotten home from work that afternoon and found her husband bleeding on the

floor and that he had asked her to look at his wounds, which not the best really in terms of a believable story there, Sheila, but good try, baby girl. She seemed to assume that her husband was dead. She didn't know that he was still alive and in surgery. She said she'd rushed him to the hospital right away. Back at the hospital, meanwhile, her husband, Paul Christos, was coming out of surgery. They had managed to save him just in time. And the story he told police, interestingly enough, was quite different than the one that Sheila was telling. They had been having some trouble in their marriage, he said, and Sheila had said she wanted to try and work on it, spend more time together. And that afternoon she had said to Paul, let's try this game that I heard about from somebody at work.

And this was a game that I find this amusing, that he swore wasn't sexual. Okay. Which, I'm not going to argue with you there, dude, but I'm not sure I believe you. Let's just be honest. So basically this game was that she would handcuff her husband to a chair, blindfold him, and then she would take various objects from around the house and just rub them against his skin, like against his face and his arms and his hands and stuff. And he would have to guess what the object was.

And, I mean, you know, again, like, there's no sexual element to that. And by the way, later Sheila said the same thing. I don't believe either of them. That sounds like a sex game to me. So she touched him with an orange, a TV remote, some other stuff. Very erotic. Yeah, I know, like sex-A. And then he had felt a hard thump on his chest and then a sharp pain.

and he started screaming and the blindfold fell off and he saw that he was covered in blood. So in my true crime experience, I just don't let your spouse that you're going through issues with. Don't let them blindfold you. Yeah. I mean, I could see how you could be tempted because you think, hey, it's going to spice things up. But we've seen it enough times. Matt Baker with the handcuffs. Yeah.

John Edward Robinson. Oh, yeah. You know, if you're having. issues in particular like if you've ever had the thought you know he she they might be planning to kill me maybe don't you know leave leave it out of the bedroom do not let them blindfold you or tie you up until until you've had that good old marriage counseling and you're feeling better about things we're kidding obviously but yeah so it does come up every now and again i can think of probably half a dozen cases without even trying you too that's what i was like going through like

Somebody's been handcuffed, blindfolded, and murdered by their spouse. Hi, I'm Darren Marler. Host of the Weird Darkness podcast. I want to talk about the most important tool in my podcast belt. Spreaker is the all-in-one platform that makes it easy to record, host, and distribute your show everywhere, from Apple Podcasts to Spotify. But the real game changer for me was Spreeker's monetization. Spreaker offers dynamic ad insertion. That means you can automatically insert ads into your episodes.

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That's S-P-R-E-A-K-E-R.com. Susan Wright, that's another case. That's a banana-pants case. Anyway, so, poor, poor Paul. And he told Sheila to call 911, and she seemed to like he could hear her talking to 911, but nobody came. And after an hour of waiting, Paul begged her, just take me to the emergency room. Obviously, they can't find the house or something.

It was because she didn't call in case anybody had to figure. that out yet so she agreed drove past the emergency room entrance though to a dark kind of back area of the parking lot and then she stabbed him again in the car and they were like grappling with each other over the knife outside like they'd fallen out of the car and were like fighting with each other and if the ER staff hadn't seen them he might have just been murdered right there in the hospital parking lot back at the police station they questioned Sheila about all this obviously and she denied it all she was basically just like blindfold what i don't sex what game i don't even know what you're talking about but eventually she fessed up to the guessing game and she said that the knife had poked paul by

accident she said and i quote it just got rammed into him which is just hate when that happens it's the worst my hand slips and i just stab my husband right in the heart that's just the worse and they're like well what about the stabbing in the parking lot and she just denied that outright despite the fact that like paul had said it happened and people literally saw her doing it so okay she just kept saying the whole thing was an accident and she never admitted to the parking lot stabbing because of course that blows up her hole it was an accident story so she was arrested and booked on attempted murder charges and back at the hospital parking lot police were gathering evidence including sheila's cell phone which she'd apparently

dropped during this melee with her husband. So they checked the phone to see if she'd really called 9-1-1 for Paula, she claimed. And she hadn't, but she had called a guy named Nelson Sessler right after that first stabbing back at the house. So instead of calling 911 to help her bleeding husband, she calls this dude named Nelson. Nelson, it turns out, was a co-worker of hers at Purdue Pharma. When they saw that name, they thought that it ran. a slight bell, like something that they heard or read about, but they couldn't quite place it.

And the next day, they drove out to Stamford, Connecticut, a short drive from Westchester to see what they could find out about and from Nelson Sessler. So why was Sheila calling him right after attacking her husband instead of calling 911? So they got to Nelson's condo complex and started canvassing his neighbors. And one lady said, oh, you must be here about the murder. and the detectors are thinking how the hell does this lady know about what just happened with Sheila Davaloo and her husband

but you know news can travel fast so they said well we're here about the incident the attempted murder and the lady said oh no I assumed you were here about Annalisa's murder and they're like who's Annalisa and the neighbor says

Nelson Sessler's fiancé Annalisa Ramundo so huh right? Interesting. So from there, the detectives went straight to the Stanford Police Department and learned that for the past five months, they'd been trying to solve the brutal murder of Annalisa Raimundo, a beautiful young pharmaceutical executive at Purdue Pharma,

and the fiancée of Nelson Sessler. The murder had happened in November of 2002, and the case had gone cold. But now, it sure as hell was heating up, especially when the Stanford detectives placed. the 911 call they'd received alerting them to Annalisa's murder. Okay, so this was on the day of Annalisa Raymondo's murder they'd gotten a 911 call with a woman's shaky voice

saying, I think a guy is attacking my neighbor. And the caller had given really vague, inconsistent details about the address, like several different, you know, condo numbers and stuff, a kind of really vague description of the guy, and then the caller had hung up. And when they heard that 9-1-1 call, the New York detectives knew immediately that that was Sheila Davaloo's voice.

Damn. This is getting interesting, right? So, Annalisa had been brutally stabbed and beaten. There was blood everywhere at the crime scene, and she had fought hard, but she'd lost, sadly. The medical examiner found two small burn marks on her body. It looked like her attacker had subdued her with a stun gun. And creepily, Annalisa had been on the phone with a friend the morning she was murdered, and she'd gotten off the phone really quickly,

and the friend had gotten the impression that there was somebody at the door. It was probably her killer, which is just, like if I was the friend, I would just get goosebumps every 10 seconds for the rest of my life thinking about that. So now that they had this dynamite new suspect, the Connecticut police rushed to get a sample of Sheila's DNA to try to match to the samples found at Annalisa's murder scene. and Sheila in her holding cell in Westchester County was cooperative but totally denied any involvement. I don't know what you're talking about. I didn't kill Annalisa.

And Annalisa, bless her heart, was the bright star of her family. She went to Harvard for undergrad. She went to Columbia for graduate school. She was top of her class. And she was working at the time of her murder as, like I said, a pharmaceutical executive at Purdue. She was in her early 30s, but she was living the life of Riley already. She had a wide circle of friends, a great. career, gorgeous two-story condo on the waterfront, and a boyfriend, who she was madly in love with, Nelson Sessler. After her murder, police had initially been really suspicious of Nelson, and mostly

that was because of his weirdly calm demeanor on the day of the murder. He had actually fallen asleep on the couch in the clubhouse of their condo complex while waiting for the police to take his statement, and he didn't seem to show one iota of emotion, like they were like, your girlfriend's been murdered and he was like okay well what do you need for me and they're like well we'll need to talk to you in a little bit he's like okay i'll go wait for you in the condo you know complex clubhouse and he just fell asleep on the couch like that was literally how he reacted according to the police which is bizarre right it's so weird but nelson had a pretty solid alibi and police couldn't find any financial motive for him to kill annalisa it didn't seem that they had any

kind of history of abuse or violence so the case just kind of stalled and Unbeknownst to police, Nelson continued his relationship with Sheila Davleu, who unbeknownst to Nelson was married to Paul Christos. What a flippin' mess. Good gravy. We need some red string to link the pictures on the wall. It's a love rectangle. Yeah. So it wasn't so much that he continued the affair without missing a beat.

He did grieve for Annalisa. At first, it was, oh, Nelson, you poor thing. You lost your girlfriend. How can I help? Oh, isn't she sweet? Yeah, Sheila was his shoulder to cry on. She brought him food. She took care of him. And it drew them closer and closer. I doubt that you'll be surprised here that before Annalisa's murder, they had been drifting apart.

Or at least Nelson had been giving clear signs that he was probably going to pick Annalisa over Sheila. Annalisa was pushing hard for an engagement ring, and Sheila knew it. Nelson was pulling away from her. It was probably partly because of Sheila's approach. She'd always make sure to be at the same bar he was after work, the same restaurant. Once, she made sure she was on the same plane when he flew somewhere on vacation. Oh, hey, Nelson, isn't this such like a coincidence? That is so disturbing.

Oh, wow. So stalker shit going on for sure. Yeah. And actually, I want to add a little detail here. She at one point actually stalked Annalisa and Nelson with night vision goggles. Oh, my God. That's just creepy. Oh, yeah, there's so many steps to getting night vision goggles.

I know. That's like Buffalo bullshit right there. Like, just in the darkness with that little whirring noise that they make watching them. It's so creepy. So creepy. So let's get a little background on this beast. Sheila was born in Iran. Her family was wealthy and well-educated, full of scientists and academics.

They emigrated to the U.S. when Sheila was very, very young. She was a high achiever like everyone in her family. She studied biochemistry and undergrad, then went to grad school. And it was in grad school where she met her future husband slash stabbing victim, Paul Christos, and started a passionate affair. Sheila told Paul her family wouldn't approve of their relationship because of their religious beliefs. They were Muslim and Paul was Catholic. But he got the sense that there was a big family secret in the mix, too, something Sheila didn't want him to know about. And it turned out to be Sheila's secret, not so much for families. One day, Paul got a call from a soft-spoken man named Amir. He was

Sheila's husband, he said. Paul met a met a coffee shop, not believing the story at all. He thought it must be a bad joke, but Amir proved it to him by taking him by cab to his and Sheila's apartment in the city and having the concierge call up to their place. When Sheila answered the phone, Paul knew he'd been played. Sheila begged him not to dump her. Amir was an arranged marriage. Her parents made her marry him. It was an Iranian thing. He was older. She couldn't relate to him. She'd never been happy with him, but her parents would lose their minds if she left him. She was trying to figure out a way out. Years later, Paul spoke with Sheila's parents about all this, and they told him it wasn't true. They hadn't arranged Sheila's marriage with

Amir. They didn't even want her to marry him, but she insisted. It was true that once she married him, they wanted her to stick it out. They didn't believe in divorce, but she'd chosen Amir for herself. Amir finally divorced Sheila when he figured out that she wasn't going to stop seeing Paul and Paul and Sheila married soon after the divorce was final. Sheila went to work for Purdue Pharma after grad school as a research scientist. Paul took a research job with Cornell University, and they had a nice condo in Pleasantville, New York. It all looked great, but they soon started drifting apart. By 2002, they were really more like roommates than husband and wife.

But Sheila didn't want a second divorce. her family would be super pissed and Paul was so easy going he would have given her a divorce no problem if she'd asked for it and he would have been fair about it It's just incredible to me how many people have lost their lives

because some asshole did not want to go through a divorce Right What is so terrifying about divorce? I mean I get that it costs money and it's a hassle and everything but is it really worth like spending the rest of your life because you're going to get caught

I just assure you you are And is it worse spent in the rest of your life in prison And being known as a murderer Come on, people Just get the damn divorce already It's not that bad I've known lots of people have gone through divorces

And they're still alive and kicking And doing just fine Yeah I think an amicable divorce Is probably cheaper than a criminal defense lawyer Believe me on that Absolutely everybody just settle down about divorce It's not going to kill you, God

I know it's unpleasant Please don't kill somebody And every person I know who's gotten a divorce is super happy about it. Yeah, I don't know anybody who, like, regrets their decision to divorce. They're all like, thank God I got out of that. So they just, they were living as roommates, basically, which seems miserable to be, but whatever. So one day, Sheila made an odd request, which this is going to be a red flag, you guys. This is beyond belief.

This is, oh my God. she had a brother who suffered from schizophrenia, she said, and he was possessive and jealous. He didn't like spending time with Sheila when anyone else was around. Sheila told Paul that her brother wanted to come visit for the weekend, and she asked him, could you move out of the house while he's here? And she didn't mean, oh, just pack a little overnight bag and go to her friend's house. Oh, no, no, no. every sign of Paul had to be out of the house.

He had to take everything and load it into his car. Like, including pictures of the two of them, like any trace that this man existed had to be removed from the house. Every trace. Every trace. Which, it's just such a bizarre request. But because Paul is apparently the chillest man on the planet, he agreed. And soon, this started happening pretty regularly. I imagine that he just had bins by the door of his stuff.

It was so regular and you're thinking, what a hassle this would be to get every sign that you live in your own house out of your house. And he was doing this on a regular basis so that supposedly she could have her brother over. Yeah. Right. And campers, I'm sure you're like, that's a weird request for your brother. But it's not a surprise that this was not really about Sheila's schizophrenic brother. In reality, she was having Paul clear out the house so she could be with Nelson Sessler, her Purdue co-worker and lover. She'd become totally obsessed with him in recent months.

And Nelson didn't know she was married. Wow. This whole thing just floors me. And it reminds me so much of something that you remember Tracy Richter from our season premiere. Oh, I do. Tracy would so do this. Like she would tell, you know, Michael Roberts or John Pittman, like, you have to just clear everything out because my brother's coming to visit and it would be her lover. you know, one of her bodybuilder lovers or something

and they would just like be shooting up steroids together and like having sex in the marital bed and Tracy would just get off on it because she was putting one over on her husband. And I don't think that was Sheila's motivation exactly. I don't think she was like getting off on deceiving Paul necessarily but clearly this woman wouldn't know the truth if she fell over it. She's such a smooth liar.

This is, it's just, it was, it's insane. And okay, let's talk, let's talk. About Nelson Sessler. That's by all means. Yes. He was handsome, bigger than life, charming. Women fell all over this guy. And Sheila knew he was dating someone.

That's Anna Lisa Ramundo, another pretty co-worker. She knew they'd been on again, off again for a while now, but that didn't stop Sheila from pursuing him with all her might. And during the early months of her affair with Nelson, Sheila started talking non-stop about a love triangle that was going on at work. Her husband, Paul, and all her friends got an earful about Sheila's co-worker, Jack, who was involved with his longtime girlfriend, Anna, and his lover, Melissa. Now, Melissa knew about Anna, but Anna didn't know about Melissa.

And no one could understand why Sheila was. was so obsessed with these people and their ill-advised love triangle. And of course, in reality, there was no Jack, no Anna, no Melissa. This was just Sheila's way of talking about her own situation with Nelson and Annalisa. And she would literally bring this shit up with waiters at restaurant. Like, it was nonstop. She was clearly absolutely obsessed with Nelson Sessler.

And this was her way of, in sort of code language. supposedly without anybody suspecting anything, which, by the way, Paul Christos, bless your heart, honey. How did you not suspect? How, man. Why would she be so obsessed with these coworkers? It doesn't make any sense. Use your head, dude. So she would talk about it just incessantly to the point where people just wanted to climb a tree to get away from her.

It was so annoying. And people would ask her like, why do you care so much? Well, you know, I just want to be a good friend. I want to know how I should advise her. And, of course, everybody was saying this guy's a player. He's a dick. He's lying to his girlfriend and dating somebody else. And, you know, really, they should both dump him.

But, of course, she wasn't going to take that advice. She was going to get her night vision goggles and go and follow him around instead. Sheila, girl, Lord have mercy. Okay. Anyway, back to the present. Cops from Westchester went to go talk to Nelson. He denied any involvement in Paul stabbing. But he admitted they'd been involved.

both before and after Annalisa's murder. He had no idea Sheila was even married, just like Paul hadn't known she was married to a mirror. What had she said when she called him the afternoon she stabbed Paul? You may be asking yourself? Well, she'd called to make a date for 8 o'clock that night. Holy. Wow. So she didn't say like, hey, I just stabbed my husband.

She was just like, hey, you want to have dinner? Eight o'clock? Great. Yeah. Mm-hmm. It seems like her plan was to drop Paul off at the ER near death and then go have dinner with Nelson. And if she was willing to kill Paul to be with Nelson, would she be willing to kill Annalisa? Police quickly determined that she didn't have an alibi for Annalisa's murder, unlike Nelson.

And as soon as they had a match between Sheila's DNA and the blood found in Annalisa's murder. scene. It was game over for she. They also, by the way, discovered that she had bought a stun gun shortly before the murder. And you remember they found those two little stun gun marks on Annalisa's body. So that obviously is how she was able to subdue her and win the fight. She's a stun gun, which is super creepy. So this, I mean, this begs the question. Annalisa's murder was so brutal. It was a fight to the death. So Sheila's obviously proven herself to be able to commit murder. So I'm curious about why she wasn't able to finish the job with Paul.

Yeah, I think that's a really important question in this case and one that I've tried to wrap my head around to. The only thing I can come up with is that I don't know that her heart was fully in it with Paul. I think, you know, she'd obviously been married to the guy. They had a pretty, you know, amicable relationship. They weren't lovers anymore, really. Like you said, they were living more as roommates.

But Paul was such an even keeled kind of easygoing. dude and I don't think she was able to muster the rage that it probably would have needed for her to really, I think once she got into it, she just lost her stomach for it. And then probably when she pulled into the parking lot of the hospital, she kind of panicked and realized like they're going to know what I did and kind of got a new surge of motivation to finish the job and just didn't succeed in doing it. But that's my theory anyway. Whereas with Annalisa, she was really enraged at this woman. This was the woman that was standing between her and her obsession and Nelson Sessler.

Yeah. I think, I mean, I think that's 100% accurate. And she do, Paul. She didn't know anything. Right. Well, they were co-workers, but yeah, not well at all. Like, they were just, yeah. They worked together.

So I think, I think, yeah, that makes sense to me. And okay, so Sheila gets arrested. She goes to trial and was convicted and sentenced to 25 years for attempted murder for Paul's attack. And then she went to trial for Anna Lisa. Yeah. And, of course, for both trials, this bitch defended her self. Typical narcissists nonsense. Which resulted in what I am positive is the most surreal experience imaginable for Paul and Nelson of being cross-examined by their ex.

And in Paul's case, his attempted murderer. Yeah, like she went up and said so, you know, like was describing the game and everything. So then what happened? Well, you touched me with a TV remote. I mean, just it's bizarre. Like, you can, there's a dateline or 48 hours, something like that out there about this case that I saw years ago. And I remember that part of the trial, they showed a little clip. And it was just surreal, like you said, watching this woman ask this man who she tried to murder about the night she tried to murder him.

Did she do that thing? So it wasn't sexual, right? And he goes, no. Oh, totally. They both denied that it was sexual. It's just, I'm sorry, I just don't buy that for a second. What's the point of it? Otherwise, it's the most boring sounding thing in the world.

Trust game. Well, there you go. There's another similarity with Tracy. Maybe it was a trust game. And I don't know who wins or loses in a trust game, but I think Paul definitely lost that one. Yeah. Because he should not have trusted her. Paul has to take the out.

Oh, poor Paul. And he seems like the sweetest guy, too. Oh, yeah. Really easygoing. He put up with so much. He really did. I mean, there was so no need to harm that poor man, and I'm so glad he got out of it alive. I hope he's happy and found a nice woman, you know. I hope he's doing well. Paul Christos, if you're listening, bless your heart, buddy. We hope you're doing well. Yeah, me too. Well, we both do. So, of course, this woman guy, oh, my God. She was being framed, she said, for Annalise's murder by Nelson, I guess. It wasn't like abundantly clear.

It really wasn't clear at all. It was just general framing. But fortunately, Sheila Davaloo was convicted and sentenced to 50 years in prison consecutive to her sentence for Paul's attempted murder. Because a lot of times they'll do concurrent. They wanted to nail this bitch to consecutive. So that's 75 years in prison right there between the first, you know, attempted murder and Annalisa's murder. Yeah. So, and this might be.

my favorite thing in the last like three weeks that I'm about to say. So at her sentencing, she thanked everyone. Like she was at the freaking Oscars. I'd like to thank my family. I'd like to thank my friends. Bitch, you are going to prison. Not the Golden Globes. It really is the most bizarre thing. And I hope we can find that episode of Dateline or whatever it was. So you can watch this. It is just cuckoo bananas. She's standing up there. like she's just won an award. Thank you. Thank you. Like, okay, go put your jumpsuit on now and rot in prison for 75 years.

Who are you wearing? Yeah, exactly. Prison Orange. Orange is the new black, Katie. And I really think she, to me, she seems like a classic narcissist. You know, you're in my way, therefore you are not a real person. You don't matter. I can do whatever I want and justify it to myself, which might have, again, that might go back to why she didn't follow through with the murder of Paul.

because she might not have been able to quite justify it in her own mind because he would have given her that divorce like it wasn't she didn't need to kill him she really didn't I think she just started worrying that maybe Nelson was going to figure out she was married so yeah to me she's she's a scary person because these folks are able to talk themselves into thinking that they genuinely have the right to take you out of this world if your plans conflict with theirs and And Annalisa did nothing wrong whatsoever. She didn't even know that Nelson was cheating on her. So it's really scary.

And I really kind of feel like Sheila deserves her own full episode. But we wanted a really banana pants one to round out this grab bag episode. But if you want to read more about Sheila Davaloo, there is an M. William Phelps book called Obsessed about the case. And it is fascinating. And there's, of course, a lot more detail in there. It's a good one. So for you campers out there who are looking for love, Be careful, okay?

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. You can follow us on Twitter at TC Campfire, Instagram at True Crime Campfire, and be sure to like our Facebook page. If you want to support the show and get access to extras, please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com slash true crime campfire.