True Crime Campfire - Haunted: The Strange Death of Colonel Phillip Shue

Episode Date: April 9, 2021

Imagine trying to go about your life with the knowledge that somebody wants you dead. What would it do to you, day in and day out? Could you go for a walk without fearing that your enemy might be around the next corner? Could you drive home from work without startling at every flash of new headlights behind you? Could you sleep without nightmares? This is the controversial, bizarre, confounding story of a good man hounded by fear. Whichever side of the debate you end up on, that’s what you’ll find at the center. And if you’re anything like us, you’ll be thinking about this one long after the episode is over. Sources:Autopsy report: https://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/pdf/BCME_autopsy.pdfCBS "48 Hours" transcript: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-curious-case-of-col-shue-26-03-2009/4/"Psychological autopsy:" https://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/pdf/psychological_autopsy.pdfJohn Lordan's "BrainScratch" coverage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJQy_21POv4&t=4sPeople magazine coverage: https://people.com/archive/mishap-or-murder-vol-60-no-7/WebSleuths: https://www.websleuths.com/forums/threads/tx-col-philip-shue-54-san-antonio-16-april-2003.95137/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/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]: https://shop.spreadshirt.com/true-crime-campfire/Become 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. Imagine trying to go about your life with the knowledge that somebody wants you dead. What would it do to you? day in and day out. Could you go for a walk without fearing that your enemy might be around the next corner? Could you drive home from work without startling at every flash of new headlights behind you? Could you sleep without nightmares? This is the controversial, bizarre, confounding story of a good man hounded by fear. Whichever side of the debate you end up on, that's what you'll find at the center. And if you're anything like us, you'll be thinking about this one,

long after the episode is over. This is haunted, the strange death of Colonel Philip Shoe. So, campers, we're in San Antonio, Texas, the morning of April 16, 2003. Drivers on their way to work on Interstate 10 were suddenly start, to see a beige mercury tracer speed past them, jump onto the median, then fly back onto the road. For a few moments, it seemed like everything was okay. The car righted itself and drove along fine for a couple of miles, but then it started to weave wildly back and forth across the lanes.

And a moment later, going at least 60 miles per hour, the tracer ran off the road and crashed into a grove of trees. The car hit one tree and then spun around and hit another one, which caved in the driver's side of the car. A couple of horrified witnesses pulled over to try help the driver, but it was clear right away that the man was beyond help. He was motionless, not breathing. When police responded, they found a bizarre scene. The dead man behind the wheel was dressed in military fatigues.

It appeared that he died from horrific head injuries, the result of the crash, but those weren't his only wounds. His shirt had been cut open to the waist, and he had a deep vertical slash to the chest that didn't seem to be related to the car crash. The tip of his left pinky finger had been cut off as well. And weirdest of all, content warning, y'all, because this is pretty upsetting.

His nipples had been cut off with careful precision. Ugh. Yeah. And as if that wasn't strange enough, the man's wrists and ankles were wrapped in duct tape. The man had no wallet or identification on him. What the hell? was going on here? The victim, it turned out, was 54-year-old Air Force Colonel Philip

Shoe, a distinguished military psychiatrist who was in the process of wrapping up a 26-year career. He and his wife Tracy were about to close on their dream house in Alabama and move on to the next act of their lives. Tracy had last seen him only two and a half hours before the crash when he'd brought her a cup of coffee in bed, chatted with her about the new house for a few minutes, kissed her goodbye and headed off to work. He seemed totally normal, she said, just eager to get to work early and finish a few things. The last thing they'd said to each other was, I love you. Tracy was devastated beyond words by her husband's death, and that devastation was about to be made worse by the authority's stunning response. After an investigation that it would actually be generous to call

inadequate, they ruled Colonel Shue's death not a homicide, as Tracy and the rest of his family had no doubt that it was, but suicide. Medical examiner Dr. Vincent DiMaio's official finding was that Philip Shoe, who had recently seen a fellow military psychiatrist about panic attacks and depression, had mutilated himself, duct taped his own wrists and ankles, and intentionally crashed his car into a tree. Was that the truth? Like the Cindy James case, which we covered about a year and a half ago,

whichever side you come down on, this is a bizarre story. Colonel Shew's death was either a diabolically cruel, premeditated abduction and torture murder, or one of the oddest suicides we've ever heard of. For the colonel's widow, though, there is no mystery. Her husband was abducted and tortured, and in his frantic escape from his attacker, he crashed his car and died. To Tracy, this amounts to murder, and she is determined to get justice. Now, why is she so sure?

Well, because in the months leading up to Philip Shew's death, he had been desperately afraid for his life. What was he afraid of? Well, campers, it's a hell of a story. See, Tracy's shoe was the colonel's second wife. At the time of his death, they'd been happily married for 10 years. But before Tracy, there was his first wife, Nancy. Tracy told 48 hours that when she met Philip Shoe while working as an Air Force nurse in Florida,

he was in the midst of an ugly divorce. She said, there was no love in the marriage. Philip had told her that Nancy was focused on spending money and acquiring stuff, stuff they didn't need, and money they didn't have. One of the terms of the divorce settlement between Colonel Schu and Nancy was that she be allowed to take out two life insurance policies on him, adding up to a million dollars. That was in 1988.

At the time, it just seemed to him to be a way to speed the settlement along and get the hell out of his miserable marriage. By then, he had met Tracy, and they both knew early on that they were the love of each other's life. You can really see that in the way Tracy talks about him on that 48 hours episode years after his death. They adored each other. So Philip had agreed to the life insurance thing. Didn't really think much of it at the time. Once his divorce became final in 1992, he married Tracy, and they got on with their lives.

Nancy had pretty well cleaned him out in the divorce, according to Tracy, but he didn't care. He was just happy to be out. And eventually Nancy remarried too, a guy named Donald Timpson, another Air Force pilot. And everything was great for a while. They ended up transferring to Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, buying a new house, making new friends. Everybody liked Colonel Shue. He was an easygoing guy, somebody who made the most of his life. Tracy loved how he appreciated simple pleasures, how even when he was stationed somewhere far away, he always found ways to make her feel special. Yeah, like in 1995 while he was in Bosnia, he sent her a cute video giving her a tour of the base, and, you know, you could just tell he loved her so much. Mm-hmm.

Life was good for Philip and Tracy. But then, in May 1999, seven years after his divorce from Nancy was finalized, shit hit the fan. Donald Shue received an anonymous letter. Yes. Here we go again with the anonymous letters, campers. We've got a street going, like almost every case we've had lately. The letter was short, not even half a page, but it hit Philip and Tracy's happy, peaceful life like a wrecking ball. It read,

Dear Dr. Shue, please read this letter. You may be in danger. I'm writing because I remember you as such a kind and caring doctor. and I can't just sit by and not help you by telling you what I know. I'll try to keep it short so you're certain to read it. A friend of mine who worked with Dawn, your ex-wife's husband, told me some scary things. I don't know Don or your ex-wife myself. Sorry, I don't even know her name.

My friend told me they wish you were dead so they could collect life insurance. I don't understand why they would have life insurance on you, but that's what my friend told me. My friend thinks they may actually be planning something. I don't know if they would actually hurt you, but please be careful. I had to write. If I didn't, I couldn't bear the thought of something bad happening to you that I could have prevented by telling you what I heard. If I hear anything more specific, I will let you know.

Please, be careful. I'm sorry to worry you, but I just couldn't not write and find out later I could have stopped a bad thing from happening. And that was it. No signature, no return address, no nothing. It was typewritten, so no handwriting. And interestingly, there were several misspellings, Y-O-U-R instead of Y-O-U-R with an apostrophe, B-A-R-E instead of B-E-E-A-R for bear. And this one is odd.

They spelled scary with a K. Yeah, that's weird. I don't think I've ever seen that one before. And the reason we mentioned the misspellings campers is that I have a theory about them. I could be dead wrong. But it's that weird, scary with a K that got me thinking this, because it's just such a bizarre word to get wrong and such a bizarre way to get it wrong. Like I've seen people spell it with a, with an R-E-Y or something like that, but with a K. So I have a sneaking suspicion that the

mistakes may have been put there on purpose. Maybe as a bit of extra insurance to disguise the writer's identity. Now, this has been known to happen when people write anonymous letters. Think back to the Paul Maslin murder case, the episode we called Mad Science. Remember, real-life Spider-Man villain Todd Howley wrote that anonymous letter to try to blame Maslin's murder. on a couple of disgruntled ladies who wanted him to invest in their boxer dog kennel and if you think I'm making this shit up go back and listen to that episode

it was bonkers. But he used a lot of intentional bad grammar and spelling in that letter as a way of disguising who wrote it. Not just education level or whatever because that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with it, but just kind of the voice, like to kind of make it seem like a different sort

of person was writing that letter than the sort of person he was. And I wonder if the same thing was going on, here. Most of those misspellings are pretty normal, but I have been an educator for 20 plus years. Specifically, I've taught writing at every level you can teach it, and I have never one time seen a person spell scary with a K. So, anyway, we can talk more about that later. Yeah, and you see it a lot with serial killers that write letters to police. Yeah. And I think it was started by Jack the Ripper, but most specifically, most recently,

BTK comes to mind as he liked misspelling stuff because I think he just I think like you said I think he liked getting into character but you make a very good point there Whitney right right thank you as you can imagine Colonel Shue was freaked out by this letter and yeah and it was only the first of several all of which had the same basic message Phillips ex-wife Nancy and her husband Don were plotting to kill him to collect on that one million dollars so now Naturally, Colonel Shue's first move was to call up the life insurance company and try to cancel the policy. You'd think this would be a no-brainer, right? Mm-hmm.

Wrong. Yeah, did y'all know that another person can have a life insurance policy on you without your flipping consent? Is that just the most banana pants thing you've ever heard in your life? It's just asking for trouble. You might as well just name the policy ex-spouse ATM. I literally cannot believe it's real, but it is. And Colonel Shue tried like hell to convince that life insurance. company to cancel the policy but they refused again and again they just told him look you don't

own the policy your ex-wife does and she's making payments on it we can't cancel it now campers i don't care what your company policy is if you're a life insurance agent and somebody calls you up in terror and begs you to cancel their policy because their ex-wife is plotting to murder them you better god damn well cancel that policy and do it too sweet good god like can't we ever just be human beings just use a little common sense and decency instead of always falling back on ridiculous corporate bullshit. Like, I'm sorry, sir, that's against our policy. Okay, well, guess what? You have a brain.

So use it. Fuck the policy. Right in the ear. Help this fellow human being out. I'm just saying, I hope those people at the insurance company felt like the assholes they were after this happened. I hope they still feel guilty because they should. Like, okay.

So I've had a little bit of hurt feelings as an insurance professional because, like, there our laws and shit that, like, we cannot violate. So, like, I agree. It's a bullshit law and it's a bullshit policy to be able to, like, but that's like a legal thing. So, like, campers at home, that's why is, like, by law, only certain people can cancel a policy. And that brings me to my next point. If you ever have a weird divorce settlement like this, one, don't. There's no reason your X needs to be named as the beneficiary on your life insurance policy, unless they're planning on murdering you. But also, too, make sure you're named as additional named insured or something similar.

It should be an endorsement that says additional named insured writer. So you have cancellation power. Right. Like, I realize this could mean you could just cancel the policy at a spite, but I am sure that there's some legalese that would prevent that. Well, certainly there should be some kind of flipping cut. Potosil or some shit in there that says, if I get a letter saying that this woman is planning to murder me for this money, we're shutting it down.

Ooh, or if I die under mysterious circumstances. Right. No one gets anything. Go home. When the insurance company refused to help him, Colonel Shue tried another tack. He wrote Nancy a long letter telling her about the anonymous note and demanding that she canceled the policy herself. Not a bad idea, if you ask me.

I mean, it kind of spoils the murder plot when the would-be victim finds out about it ahead of time. And, you know, it tells everybody and stuff. Yeah. But Nancy refused to cancel the policies. She said she couldn't afford to. Which is just kind of ghoulish. Like, even if she wasn't planning to have him kill, what a freaking weird conversation. Like, hey, I don't want you to have this life insurance policy on me, so be a lamb and cancel it, okay?

And she's like, nope, can't afford to. I'm banking on getting that million bucks when you die. That's my retirement package. Sorry. Yeah, it's creepy. If your retirement plan requires someone else die to go into effect, you're a super villain. I don't make the rules. That's just how it is.

And it goes back to your statement. Just be a human being. Like, makes me so angry. Well, yeah, at that point, like Nancy better hope he doesn't so much as come down with a cold. because everybody knows now. So your plan is, you know, it's really not that smart to enact it at this point. Right. And of course, Nancy denied that she and new hubby Don were plotting against him.

She said, it must be somebody's idea of a sick joke. But Colonel Shue wasn't buying it. He wrote, I feel helpless to prevent my eventual murder if you hire good assassins. Bless his heart. Now, of course, when you get an anonymous letter like this, there's every possibility that it is a sick. joke. In fact, if you just look at the statistical likelihood that somebody you broke up with seven years ago is plotting your death, it's probably more likely to be a joke. Sure.

Most people don't solve their money problems with murder. But in this case, Colonel Shue took it seriously immediately. I think that's important because, I mean, he was married to this woman. They were married for 20 years, in fact. He knew Nancy pretty damn well. Yeah, exactly. Like, if you tried to convince me that one of my exes was plotting to have me killed, I'd have a pretty hard time believing that. You know, I mean, they're dorks, most of them, but not like murderous dorks. Well, except for one of them, him, I wouldn't put anything past. But if it was any of the other ones, you know, I don't think my first thought would be, holy shit, I'm in danger. I think my first thought would be, who's punk in me?

So this went on for years. Colonel Shue occasionally getting another warning letter, trying and failing to get the damn insurance company to do something, and trying to talk Nancy into giving up the policy, which she always refused to do. You can really see Colonel Shue's frustration and worry in a line from one of the letters he wrote the insurance company during this time. He said, Thoroughly examined my death for evidence of foul play, even if on the surface the cause would appear natural or accidental. He also took a lot of steps to protect himself,

varying his route to and from work, using a P.O. box in case his mailbox was booby-trapped. Despite how seriously he seemed to be taking the warnings, Colonel Shue never called the police. This is one of the things that really confuses a lot of people about the case, but to Tracy, it makes sense. She explained to CBS reporter Troy Roberts like this. We as military members are clearly trained to first go through our chain of command. It's drummed into us from day one. She says she hasn't been given access to any information about what the military did, or didn't do about the warning letters.

You'd think they'd do something since everybody involved was on active military duty at the time. We just don't know what. The worry took a serious toll on Colonel Shue. I mean, how could it not? Suddenly, where before he'd been a laid-back happy guy, he was having problems with anxiety,

fear and feeling of being hunted, a helpless sense that a shadowy assassin might take him out at any time. But he was a psychiatrist. He knew how important it is to reach out for help when you need it. And he was being proactive about trying to fix a problem. He started seeing an Air Force psychiatrist, Dr. Douglas Dion, to talk about his anxiety over the letters. He confided his frustration about the situation, told Dion about the nightmares, panic attacks.

In fact, only six months before he died, Colonel Shue told Dr. Dion about an especially vivid nightmare. He'd lost control of his car on the drive to work, he said. crashed violently, sustained catastrophic injuries. It was a disturbing dream, the kind that clings to your brain like cobwebs all day, which is just incredibly creepy, because it's literally what happened to him, like foreshadowing of his actual death. That said, though, at the time of his death, Dr. Dion felt Colonel Shue was making good progress in therapy.

So when the medical examiner ruled his bizarre, violent death a suicide, Tracy and the rest of Phillips's loved ones and colleagues and friends were shocked. An outrage, too. Tracy said she never considered suicide a possibility, not even for a split second, and the people who knew him best agree, including his psychiatrist. So how the hell did this happen? What led the authorities, the Bear County and Texas state police, a 12-person grand jury, and the U.S. military, to the conclusion that Philip Shoe took his own life, and to the

even more shocking conclusion that he may have staged the warning letters himself and all those injuries and everything? And might they be right? Or is Colonel Shue's case a glaring example of justice denied? So we're going to break down the case piece by piece, what we know and what we don't know, and we'll see if we can figure this out. Katie, you hanging in there, sport? You all know she hates unsolved cases, right? Can't stand it. She just can't stand not having a definitive answer. I have been nauseated about this all week. Yep. I specifically. specifically don't think about this case for more than five minutes at a time, lest I lose control and start walking circles around a yellow wallpapered room. What kills me more than there

being no quote, unquote, answer is when none of the pieces fit together. Like, in a lot of unsolved cases, you can kind of draw conclusions based on the evidence. That is not the fucking case here. There's no nice little Thomas Kincaid jigsaw puzzle to assemble. This is one of those impossible all-white puzzles that exist only to torment me and my ancestors. See, I like those too. Oh, my God. This case is a curse that exists to punish humanity for our sins. I'll make it, though, if only for the campers and you. We appreciate your sacrifice. So Colonel Shue left his house at 5.45 the morning of the crash. He never made it to work, and we have no idea where he was for the two and a half hours between kissing Tracy goodbye and crashing his car into a tree.

Which to me is one of the most fascinating things about it. We don't know where he was. We do know that when he crashed, he was heading in the opposite direction from work, and that he just passed the exit he'd take to get to his and Tracy's house. Now, why was he going in that direction? Why didn't he take the exit to get home? we don't know. But Tracy thinks he was probably fleeing from his abductor and trying to wait until the last possible second to get onto that exit ramp and head home. And he lost control of the car at that point and crashed, which is a definite possibility. One of the most infuriating things about this case is what a hot mess on toast the quote investigation was. And I put that in quotes because there really wasn't one. It was just a comedy of errors from minute one. The lead investigator at the time was a guy named Roger. Anderson, and he now admits that the police screwed the pooch on this case in truly epic fashion. He told 48 hours that the problem started when he got into it with the responding officers at the crash like, this is just infuriating. They were all milling around, not even remotely treating the site as a crime scene, not following any of the protocols you'd follow in a possible

suspicious death. And when Anderson got there and saw Colonel Shue's body and realized there was mutilation and duct tape and all that kind of stuff in play, he freaked out. And he tried a couple times to like politely get the cops to follow protocol but they weren't paying any attention to him so finally he just yelled at him like get the hell out of my crime scene and because apparently the responding officers were giant babies who can't handle a little ripper man without getting their undies in a twist this was apparently enough to create bad blood between anderson and the state cops so that meant that Anderson didn't get the cooperation he needed evidence was compromised most likely some evidence was lost and leads that should have been followed up on weren't

just dominoes falling from that one moment of him yelling at them. Jesus fucking Christ. A man is dead, and the authorities can't put the rulers away long enough to do their fucking jobs. They might as well have started spraying the corners like cats. I know, God, it's ridiculous. So for one thing, Philip's shoe's body was transported not to the medical examiner's office, but to a local nursing home. His car, which should have been regarded at that point as a possible crime scene, was taken to a junkyard. And later it ended up in police custody, but by then they lost all semblance of chain of custody.

They didn't even keep chain of custody intact with the body. So it's just ruining any chance you could possibly have of evidence gathering. Did you guys hear that? It was my blood pressure hitting the fucking roof. Roger Anderson is one of Tracy's biggest allies now. He feels a lot of guilt about the way this case was mishandled. Whatever else may have been going on, at the end of the day, it was his case, and he dropped the ball. Or at least, he allowed it to be dropped.

And now it keeps him up at night. A few years after the fatal crash, after a grand jury upheld the conclusion that Philip Shu died from suicide and that his wounds were self-inflicted, the show 48 hours hired an experienced private investigator to look into the case. His name is Joe Mora, and he has an impressive resume that includes the Madal McCann case? Wow. Mura is adamant that Colonel Shue did not take his own life. He told 48 hours, if there had been a true investigation in this case, I assure you this would never have been put down as a

suicide. Okay, so let's get into it. Point counterpoint. Medical examiner Dr. DiMio, who's firmly on the side of the suicide theory and Tracy and her supporters, including P.I. Joe Mora and rock star forensic scientist Dr. Cyril Wecht on the abduction slash murder site. Y'all know who Dr. Wecht is? He pops up all the time in these big cases. One of his big claims to fame is that he worked on the Kennedy assassination, which is impressive. He's weighed in on everything from Anna Nicole Smith to Kurt Cobain, and he is very well respected in his field. Tracy hired him to do an independent autopsy. Dr. DiMaio, by the way, the one who did the original autopsy, got to say, not a fan.

I'm saying it. On that 48 hours episode, he just comes across to me as close-minded and smug and condescending. Like, at one point, Troy Roberts says something like, you know, Colonel Schu's wife doesn't believe this was a suicide. And his answer is just so, like, gross and patronizing. Basically, the gist is, well, bless her heart, she's just blinded by love. It's like, okay, well, guess what, asshole? She knew him. You didn't.

So maybe don't dismiss her like that. Anyway, proceed. Okay, item one. Colonel Shue's behavior the day of the crash. Medical examiner DeMayo argues that if Shoe is fleeing from the scene of his abduction and torture, he passed up several opportunities to get help along the way. Several exits where he could have pulled off the interstate and gone for help. He didn't do that.

He also points out that Colonel Shue had a cell phone in the car. If he just escaped from an abductor, why didn't he use it to call the police or call Tracy? And those are fair points, though I would argue that they'd don't really prove anything. If I had just escaped from a torturer, I would probably be in a panic. I mean, I could see just wanting to get in your car and just drive, drive, until your adrenaline calm down a little bit. And you could think straight.

And interestingly enough, a little bit of Colonel Shue's blood was found on that cell phone. It was a flip phone, and the blood was on the inside, like where the buttons are. So maybe he tried to call and just realized he couldn't dial unless he slowed down or stopped. Maybe he was trying to call when he crashed. Maybe that's why he crashed. You know, one thing they should have damn well done is ping that cell phone to see where Colonel Shue had been all morning, but guess what? They didn't do that.

So yet another ball dropped in this sham of a non-investigation. Also, if Colonel Shoe had escaped from an abductor or abductors, he might have been afraid they were following him, chasing it. In that situation, unless I knew exactly where a police station was, I might be panicky enough to just put the pedal to the metal and haul ass, try to lose them. Absolutely. And it's not like you can concentrate enough to dial a cell phone in that situation, driving like a bat out of hell to get as far away from the torture scene as you can.

Mm-hmm, absolutely. He might have been in a full-blown panic attack. And it's not like now where you can just ask Siri to make a call for you. Mm-hmm. Item two, the chest injuries. DeMayo found traces of lydicane, a numbing agent in Colonel Shoe's system. It appeared to him that whoever cut off shoes nipples had numb the air. area first. Would a torturer do that? DeMayo didn't think so. To him was more likely that

Colonel Shue had numbed his own chest, so he wouldn't feel any pain when he made the incisions. Yeah, I'm not so sure about this. I mean, at first glance, I can see where he's coming from with that, but think about it. The torture of watching your nipples cut off would almost be worse, in my opinion, if your torment or numbed you up first. Because, you know, if he didn't, you'd just be screaming in pain and you might pass out, you might not experience the same level of psychological torture, like the fear and the just creepiness of having such an intimate part of your body cut into. So what I'm saying is I think I could go either way on this point. Mm-hmm. And as Dr. Wecht points out on the 48 hours episode about the

case, there were no visible needle marks on Colonel Shoes' chest, which would seem to contradict DiMaio's theory that he gave himself an injection in each nipple. Though he could have injected himself in the nipples to themselves, we don't know, because they were gone, couldn't be examined. Plus, to me, this is very significant. No syringes or empty lydicane vials were found in the car. No scalpel either. They did find a straight razor and a blunt little Swiss army knife. The straight razor, the kind used for shaving, didn't have blood on it.

The army knife did have a little bit of the colonel's blood on it, but there was no. way it was sharp enough to make the cuts on the body. And we have no way of knowing how old that blood was. It could have been from years ago. So if Colonel Shue did this to himself, where the hell did he do it? Right. And also, this is one of those little details that make you want to punch a hole in the wall, Katie. Colonel Shoe apparently self-prescribed a topical solution of Lytocaine 10 days before the crash.

Now, at first glance, that seems pretty damning. like, okay, he prescribed himself lytocaine, he must have done this to himself. But here's the rub. The lydicane found in his system wasn't the same kind. So it's just infuriating. So is that detail important? Or is it not?

Who the hell knows? We literally have no idea. Last but not least, Dr. Wex's examination found that the amount of lytocaine and Colonel Shue's system wouldn't have been enough to numb his chest against the pain of those injuries, which as a doctor, you'd think Colonel Shue would have realized. So if he was trying to numb himself, he didn't do a very good job. It's also important to note that the nipples were never found, nor was the severed pinky joint. They weren't in the car, so whether Colonel Shue cut them off himself or somebody else cut them off him, we have no idea where it happened. Yeah, and one of the things that makes me not trust DiMaio's interpretation is in his report, he was like, well, we can't be sure if the severed pinky was a result of the crash. Dude, it wasn't in the car. Right. It wasn't in the car. It wasn't around the car. You didn't find it. So how do you figure it's part of the crash? Do you think he swallowed it? It's ridiculous. And another thing we can't forget is the hesitation marks. Now, DeMaio seems to put a lot of weight on those. In addition to the big gash on Colonel's chest and the excise nipples, there were several little shallow sort of scratches on his chest. And DeMaio says they're consistent with hesitation marks, which are shallow,

That's made by somebody who's trying to get up the nerve to make a real cut. And those are pretty common in suicide cases where there's cutting involved. Yeah, that's one possible explanation. But as Dr. Wecht points out, those shallow scratches could just as easily be evidence of torture. Somebody kind of cruelly teasing their victim. So we can't know for sure either way. God fucking damn it. I know.

I'm sorry. Another issue I have with DiMaio's autopsy report, by the way, is that it doesn't include a diagram of the body. So you know, usually get a body map. We don't have that. So we don't have nearly as much information about the wounds as we would like. So it just seems like a shoddy job to me. Okay, item three, the duct tape. First glance, you'd think somebody used that to immobilize him. But here's the thing. The tape wasn't wrapped in such a way as to bind wrists and ankles together. Each individual wrists and ankle was just wrapped it up in duct tape by itself. It wouldn't have been an effective way of restricting Colonel Shoes' movement as you'd think an abductor would do.

Right, but on each wrist, there was some extra tape sort of hanging down with like a knotted, balled-up wad of tape at the end. So it's possible that his wrists were taped together at some point with this extra tape and he just managed to get free, or more likely that he was taped to a chair, because it would if you tape somebody to a chair, that would make sense. So we can't be 100% sure. It would be a weird way to tape somebody. though, just to kind of wrap it around and around like that on each individual wrist and ankle, but we do know this. Colonel

Shoes' fingerprints were not found on the duct tape, and there also was not like a duct tape roll in the car or anything like that. It's hard to believe he could have taped himself up without leaving fingerprints. Now, this is going to piss you off. I apologize in advance, but there's contradictory information

about whether there were any gloves found in the car. The report that the military put together said there was one latex glove found. Not a pair of them, though, and I think it would be really tricky to avoid leaving fingerprints on something like duct tape without wearing a glove on each hand. But in other official paperwork, like Cyril Wecht's autopsy report, for example, it says there were no gloves in the car. So, for God's sake, you know, we have another question mark. So we don't know if there was or if there wasn't.

There were some minor injuries like contusions and scratches on Colonel's shoes hands and one of his wrists, by the way. the kind of injuries you'd get if you had to escape from duct tape bindings, maybe so. Also, there were two little gray hairs stuck to the duct tape, which, to the best of my knowledge, have never been tested. Which is infuriating. Now, he did have gray hair, but like so do lots of other people. And some blood on the inside of the tape stuck to his wrist with no corresponding injury to that wrist. Also, never tested. What the fuck?

This is what I mean when I say there was no investigation. Yeah, no. Next we have a very strange bit of evidence. During the autopsy, Dr. DeMaio found small remnants of what he thinks was a diaper on Colonel Shue's body. When his underwear was removed for the autopsy, there were white fibers under there consistent with the kind you found in diapers. There was also a tab, like the kind you find on the sticky part of a diaper with a cartoon picture of a sun and moon on it. And attached to Colonel Shoe's genital area was the kind of gel, like that absorbent gel that you find. in a diaper. Now the diaper itself was not there, just remnants. So what the heck was this?

We don't know. We don't know whether a Colonel Shue had some kind of medical issue that required him to wear adult diapers, whether this was a normal thing for him or not. Now, there are some people who wear diapers for sexual fetish reasons, and that's an interesting line of inquiry because on the 48 hours mystery episode, they point out that Shue's ex-wife Nancy, suspect number one, if this was an abduction and torture, was trained as a sex therapist. And apparently, sort of specialized in BDSM stuff and fetishes. So that might, in theory, have some relevance, not only because of the diaper, but because of the duct tape, too. So the 48 hours reporter asked Colonel Shue's widow, Tracy, about it. You know, was your husband into BDSM or had any fetishes? And Tracy said,

no, definitely not. So could this case have something to do with that whole? world? Could Nancy have used her knowledge of fetishes and bondage and sadomasochism to torture her ex-husband? Could the diaper been a way of humiliating him? Or could it have been some kind of hookup gone horribly wrong? Yeah, interesting questions, which yet again we have no answers to. But Tracy is very definite that Colonel Shue wasn't leading some kind of secret life. On a web sleuths thread in 2011, she said that there were extensive forensic searches done on all the computers he had access to. And there was nothing to suggest he was seeing a mistress or looking at BDSM porn or anything like that. And I would think if you look that deeply into people's

computers, you'd find it. You know, you'd find something. So then there's the way he died, the crash itself. Demayo believes he intentionally drove into that cluster of trees. But if you were going to take your own life, is that really the way you'd do it? I mean, for one thing, Colonel Shue was wearing his seatbelt when he crashed. His car was equipped with an airbag. So there was certainly no guarantee that he would die in the crash. No guarantee that he wouldn't just be paralyzed or badly hurt, which I can't imagine he'd have wanted. If he wanted to die, there were lots of easier ways to do it, especially since he was a doctor and could prescribe stuff for himself.

So, you know, I have my doubts. And I would think he'd pop that seatbelt off at the very least. Of course, for the sake of argument, I guess it could have just been an accident. Like, if you subscribe to the official ruling, you could argue that Colonel Shue accidentally crashed his car in the process of staging an abduction slash torture slash escape. But if he was calculating enough to do that to stage an attack and dispose of all the evidence of it, like the lytocaine vial and the syringe and whatever cutting implement he used to cut off his nibbles and the tip of his pinky finger, then why would he be driving so erratically? You know, those two things just don't seem to jive for me. It seems more likely that he was driving in a panic, like somebody fleeing from danger. Of course, if he staged the whole thing, the erratic driving could be part of that.

I thought about that, but it's just, I don't know, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me that he would need to do that. Like, because if you think about staging and the purpose of staging, it's theater, you know? So if that part was staging, who would be the intended audience, like just random strangers on the road? If he actually intended to kill himself, that would make sense. But if he was just staging an attack and escape, then erratic driving on purpose just doesn't seem to make sense to me. I don't think he's the type to put other people's lives at risk like that. Like, it would be better to just drive to the police station and, like, burst in asking for help.

That's assuming that somebody that would do all this is thinking rationally, which he wouldn't be in this situation. Yeah, that's definitely true, too. So Dr. Cyril Wecht said in his autopsy report that Colonel Shue might have lost control of the car because of his injuries, which I think is also a fair point. I mean, he was missing part of a finger. And one more thing about the injuries, Colonel Shue died from massive head trauma from the tree hitting the driver's side door on the left. But he also had some pretty gnarly head injuries on the right side, and it's not clear how those injuries happened. Now, we're not saying it couldn't be related to the crash, but apparently that's one of the muddy areas.

areas. So there's no way to say for sure, which is one of the many reasons why, after conducting the second autopsy, Dr. Cyril Wecht said that the manner of death should never have been ruled suicide. It should have been, at minimum, undetermined. And Dr. Weck's personal opinion is that Dr. Shue was tortured. But of course, people have been known to take their own lives in bizarre ways. Former FBI profiler Roy Hazelwood is something of an expert in this. In his fascinating book, The Evil That Men Do. He writes about one guy who ended his own life by stabbing himself repeatedly in the face and neck with a ballpoint pen. And there's a picture in the book, which you should be aware if you're going to read it because I was like, blah, when I said it's

really gnarly. Point is, it's not outside the realm of possibility that someone in the midst of a serious mental health crisis or psychotic break, maybe, could cut off his own nipples, gash himself in the chest, and crash his car into a tree. Hmm. On a Reddit post about this case, somebody pointed out a case, which I looked up, it's real, where a guy cut off his own hand before taking his own life. People do bizarre stuff. Wow. Oh my God. And people have also been known to stage their own suicides to look like murders or abductions. There was an episode of the old unsolved mysteries with a case like that, and I wish I could remember the woman's name, but I can't. But I remember her case. She had been taking out lonely hearts ads in the news. newspapers was decades and decades before online dating and answering other people's lonely hearts ads. So she'd been meeting up with men for dates here and there, and her family knew this. Yeah, and one night she got dressed up, kissed her kids good night, and supposedly went out to meet a new guy from a personal ad for dinner. When she didn't come home, her family

called the police, and they quickly found her car in the parking lot at the place where she was supposed to have met her blind date. The driver's side door was open, and there were signs of struggle, stuff from her purse, strewn across the ground near her car. She hadn't told anybody the name of the man she was supposed to be meeting, so the police had exactly zero leads. For years, her family assumed she'd been abducted and probably murdered. But when unsolved mysteries aired their story, a medical examiner a few towns oversawed and thought, that looks like that Jane Doe we found in that hotel room years ago. And lo and behold, it was. This poor woman who had suffered from depression for years, had staged an

abduction, then taken a taxi to a hotel a few towns over and killed herself. She made sure not to have any ID on her when she did it. I can only assume she did it this way because she thought it would be easier for her family to think that she'd been abducted and murdered than to realize

she'd taken her own life. It's really, really sad. Yeah, I can't even imagine the depths of desperation and just pain it would take to do something like that, bless her heart. So my point is, this stuff does happen. Sure.

Now, did it happen here? We don't know. Tracy's account of Colonel Shue's behavior on the morning of the crash is worth looking at. According to her, he was acting totally normally. Life was going great for him at this point. They were about to retire from their military careers and moved to a new state. They'd just bought their dream house. Tracy says that despite his worry over the warning letters,

He was excited about their plans. And he brought her a cup of coffee that morning. They sat and chatted about their new house. He kissed her goodbye, told her he was off to work. Is it reasonable to think he could get from that mental state to the state you'd have to be in to cut off parts of your own body and then crash your car into a tree in two and a half hours? I mean, it's possible, but is it likely? Yeah, I don't know.

it doesn't seem likely to me. I mean, I have a hard time imagining that Tracy wouldn't have since something was wrong at the very least. And honestly, I'd expect him to be acting weird, like unable to, if you're in a place that dark, like, are you really able to hide it that convincingly? I just don't know. It's true that suicidal people often seem to cheer up before they take their own lives. They've made their decision and they're feeling better because of that. But if Colonel Shue did this all to himself, doesn't that kind of?

go beyond suicidal? Yeah, it's a tough question. And I should say now, I actually don't have a real firm opinion one way or another with this case. Before I started working on this episode, I was leaning really heavily toward the abduction and torture angle, but after digging into some of the paperwork on the case, like the military's psychological autopsy, for example, I'm a little bit less sure of that. Now, I should preface this by saying that Tracy, Colonel Shoe's widow, disputes a great

deal of this, and it's based on interviews with various people from Shue's life, but the two forensic psychiatrists who put together this report never treated Colonel Shue. They didn't know him. And that's important, because however much research you may do, if you've never met a guy, never knew a guy, never treated a guy, in particular, can you really make definitive judgments about his psychological state? Judgments that should carry more weight than the ones of his widow and his actual psychiatrist, who both said he wasn't suicidal or experienced any severe mental health issues at the time of his death, I think that's a question worth asking. And it should be noted that Tracy is actually a psych nurse as well. So she's somebody who is also a medical professional

in this field. That being said, families and friends of suicidal people don't always think or know if their loved one is suicidal. It's part of the disease to hide it and make yourself feel like less of a burden to your loved ones. This is true. But anywho, for the sake of even-handedness, here are some of the things that emerged in that psychological autopsy. In the early 70s,

Colonel Shue was working as a navigator for the Air Force. In January of 73, he was stationed in Okinawa, Japan, and one night he showed up at the infirmary. He said an intruder had, quote, accosted him in his room, hit him on the head, and knocked him out. He was unconscious for about five minutes.

Later that same year, he started having occasional bouts of syncopy. That's when you just suddenly lose consciousness. And those were accompanied by bladder incontinence. So that might actually explain the diaper if he was still having problems with that or if he had anxiety about it. So they tested him for a seizure disorder, but he didn't have one. Some of his doctors thought the fainting spells might be anxiety related. But he wasn't diagnosed with any specific psychiatric issues at the time. And then later on, he was diagnosed with miniere.

disease, which is an inner ear thing that causes vertigo and tinnitus. So it put the kibosh on his ability to fly, which is really sad. So from then on, he worked as an Air Force doctor instead, counseling the troops, conducting hostage negotiations, etc. In 1978, Shue told some of his family and friends that somebody shot him from a car as he was driving home from work. That's all I know to tell you. It doesn't sound like any evidence was found of this or any investigation conducted. Yeah. And the reason why I mentioned those two things of, you know, being accosted in his room at the barracks and then saying somebody shot at him, I mean, maybe those things happened. Maybe they absolutely did. But like, you know, I've never known anybody who's had like multiple things like that happened to them. So it does make you wonder if maybe he did have occasional bouts of like irrational paranoia or whatever. So I don't know that. It's just I suspect that's why they included those incidents because there's a question mark about that. In 99, which is the same year he got the first warning letter about his ex-wife, Nancy, plotting to kill him, he was working on a master's program.

And one day, in July, which was a few months after he received that first scary letter, he was in the library doing some work on his thesis, and he got up to use the bathroom, and when he came back to his desk, his laptop was gone. His laptop, with the only copy of his thesis, by the way, which ended up getting him into some hot water with his advisor later on. He filed a police report about the stolen laptop, and then later that same, month, he went to his car and found it sitting on the hood. Like, it had been returned, and there was a note. The note said, if he reported anything about this to the cops, quote, others will die.

And when he opened up the laptop to use it, he found that the hard drive had been wiped. So his thesis was gone. And Colonel Shue didn't initially tell anyone about the return of the computer. Maybe because he was afraid to, because of the note. But later on, he did tell someone. school security, like months later, and he never told Tracy his wife. And this is interesting. Apparently, multiple people close to Phillips Shu have said that he did have a tendency to keep worrisome stuff to himself so that he wouldn't burden the people he loved. Even his psychiatrist

felt like he was holding back to some extent during their sessions. Now, we could look at this incident two ways. Way one, this is a bizarre story, kind of hard to swallow. And it could be evidence that Colonel Shue was starting to suffer from some mental health issues. He could have imagined it or made it up. Shue had mentioned to a psychiatrist that sometimes he felt like his anxiety verged on paranoia. But of course, it could also suggest that somebody was actually messing with the guy. Nancy, Nancy's husband, or somebody totally unrelated who had a grudge against him for some reason, wanted to scare him. I mean, it's the kind of thing we've seen stalkers do in other cases, so it's certainly not unheard of for something like that to happen.

see the problem with not doing any investigation whatsoever is that you don't get to find out who might have wanted to harm your victim the only suspects we know of are nancy and her husband don there could have been other things going on with our guy that we don't know about because there was no flippin investigation You all noticed I'm a little annoyed with how this case was handled. I know I've been real subtle about it so far. So it's worth noting that although we've talked a lot about the anxiety and fear he'd experienced in the couple of years leading to his death, Colonel Shue was still very much functioning in his role as an Air Force psychiatrist. He was popular, friendly, people perceived him as laid back. He was still treating patients, very effectively. Very few people knew that he was suffering from anxiety about all this.

So was he just bottling it all up? Or was he a lot better adjusted than the authors of this psychological autopsy who never met him seemed to think? His own psychiatrist said he was improving with treatment and that he wasn't suicidal at the time he died. For the record, that psychiatrist also believed his story about the threatening letters. He said his affect and responses when he talked about them were totally appropriate and consistent with the story being true. So he doesn't believe that Colonel Shue faked the letters. Tracy says he was excited about their plans to move into their new house and excited about life in general. He was making plans, looking forward to the future, not contemplating ending his life.

The day before he died, he kept a doctor's appointment, not a psychiatrist, and got a good report on his health. He renewed one of his prescriptions. He picked up a lawnmower at a repair shop. He dropped off a payment on the new house. When he kissed Tracy goodbye, he said, See you later. So you can see why she has trouble with the suicide theory, and not just because she's blinded by love, as doofus Dr. DeMaio says. She knew him. He was her person.

I do sometimes come back to her comment about him hiding, upsetting stuff from her, though. I mean, if he was in severe distress, would he have told her? Or would he have just thought, I can handle this myself? I don't want to worry her. And then maybe he suddenly couldn't anymore. And broke. I don't know. Nancy Shue's lawyer believes that Colonel Shoe faked the warning letters and the attack to frame Nancy and her husband.

If you think back to our Cindy James episode, one of our theories was that Cindy may have initially suffered some real harassment, and when the police didn't take it seriously enough, she faked a few incidents to get their attention. Maybe Colonel Shue was trying something similar. Maybe he was genuinely worried that Nancy and her husband were plotting to kill him, either because they were, and the warning. warning letter was real, or because he was suffering from some paranoid ideation. Maybe he staged the attack on himself to get the insurance companies to take him seriously and cancel the policies. And died by accident because he was driving erratically as part of the staging? Right. Yeah. Or maybe he was driving erratically because he realized he'd hurt himself a lot worse than he intended to and he was just freaking out. I think that theory actually has stronger legs than the suicide theory. I just, I don't see him choosing that particular method if he was trying to end his own life.

Because you just can't be sure enough that you're going to die, and you sure as hell wouldn't be wearing a seatbelt. Yeah, but of course, there are also plenty of good reasons to think this might actually be an abduction and torture, essentially a murder. One of those reasons is Nancy Shoe herself. Nancy has denied any involvement in her ex-husband's death, of course. As has her husband. Right, but she also refers to her.

refused to take a polygraph exam. And when Tracy Shoe sued her to try to keep her from collecting on Colonel Shoe's $1 million life insurance policy, Nancy didn't really do herself any favors in the court of public opinion. Oh, no. She took the fifth on every single question. Oh, my God. Like, is your name, Nancy Shoe? I'll plead the fifth. Yeah, it's freaking infuriating to watch. There were allegedly money problems involved. Money problems that $1 million would go a long way towards solving. Tracy's lawsuit, which involved both Nancy and the life insurance company itself, didn't succeed in preventing Nancy from collecting her money.

But it did score one major victory for Tracy and her supporters. The judge declared that Colonel Shue's death was a homicide, that Bear County should change the official manner of death. to reflect that. For Tracy, that was a major victory. Finally, somebody in a position of authority was acknowledging what had always been obvious to her. Bear County hadn't taken the judge's recommendation, though. The case still sits, closed and collecting dust. In 2011, Tracy, who by the way is a lieutenant colonel herself, I don't think we've mentioned that yet, hopped onto a web-sloose thread about the case to reveal some new evidence. And she said, quote,

Recent developments in the case have included a witness who drove by my husband's car pulled off the side of the road with a blue van with tinted windows, parked directly behind him. The witness saw the car and the blue van on a rural road leading out to the interstate. This was the route he took to work each morning. This evidence completely contradicts statements concluding there was no evidence to support Colonel Phillips-Hugh came into contact with any known person or persons the morning of 16 April 2003. Which is interesting. I see that's the kind of thing you get when you investigate. Mm-hmm.

Is it a relevant tip? Who knows? Eyewitness testimony is tricky. Would it have been a lead worth falling up on? Hell yeah, especially since the person that they saw in this blue van or one of the two, I think there was a man and a woman, and the man, had gray hair. Remember those two gray hairs found in the duct tape? That would never tested?

Yeah. Mm-hmm. Tracy was writing a book about the case at one point, but we weren't able to discover what the status of that is. Maybe she's still working on it. We're not sure. She also started a website called Military Families for Justice to offer help and support to the families of people like Colonel Shue, whose cases ended up collecting dust. The website states its purpose as, quote, to serve as an online resource center to provide educational links and materials enabling bereaved military families to empower themselves with the knowledge necessary

to navigate the military justice system. And I say bless her for using this awful experience for something good. And I hope she's finding some peace in her life. I cannot even imagine the frustration she's been through. And look, we haven't been able to convince ourselves 100% in either direction on this case, which I'm sure would frustrate Tracy if she heard this. But what we are 100% sure of is this. Colonel Shue's case was grossly mishandled and he deserved better than that. And so did his wife and so did his family. At a bare minimum, the police should reopen the case and do a proper investigation, or at least as proper as they can do, given the initial blunders in chain of custody and evidence gathering.

But cold cases get solved all the time, and 17 years ain't that cold anymore. Colonel Shue was a much beloved, accomplished, passionate person who I'm sure is terribly missed to this day, and I think it would be the least they could do to give this case the time and attention that it always deserved and bring Tracy some real answers. So if you're listening, Bear County, get on it. So I think we'll all agree that that especially was a wild one, right, campers? And we're sorry, you know, that we had a little hiccup in the last week, especially for the patrons. I got the second COVID shot.

It kicked my entire ass. So I needed a day or two to recover my oomph. But, you know, we're going to 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 as always we'd like to send a grateful shout out to a few of our newest patrons thank you so much to olivia alex kate and leanne we appreciate y'all to the moon and back and if you're not yet a patron you're missing out patrons of our show get every episode ad free at least today early sometimes more plus an extra episode a month and once you hit the five dollar and up categories you get even more cool stuff

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