True Crime Campfire - Like a Rose: The Murder of Ryan Poston

Episode Date: December 16, 2022

Linda Ronstadt sang "Love is a rose, but you better not pick it--only grows when it's on the vine." It's a song about how love only flourishes when tended to, when you don't pick and choose which parts of the whole to love. When you love the roots and thorns and leaves as much as the flower. For some, though, love is less like a rose and more like a burdock. Y'know? Those thorny little buggers that stick to your clothes? They stick to you and never let you go, even when you've picked them off the fabric and tried to throw them out. For them, love isn't something that you give up easily. For them, it can be deadly. Join us for the story of Ryan Poston, whose on-again/off-again romance with a beautiful grad student named Shayna Hubers turned into a nightmare of stalking, harassment, and murder. This case has striking similarities to the Jodi Arias story, and interestingly enough, the killer herself was obsessed with the Arias trial. Sources:CBS News: https://www.cbsnews.com/video/ryan-poston-murder-part-1-breaking-point-1/https://www.cbsnews.com/video/ryan-poston-murder-part-2-obsessed-1/ABC News: https://abcnews.go.com/US/shayna-hubers-granted-trial-juror-helped-convict-revealed/story?id=41661246CBS's "48 Hours," episode "Breaking Point"CBS's "48 Hours," episode "Obsessed"Oxygen's "Snapped," episode "Shayna Hubers"Lifetime's "Cellmate Secrets" episode "Shayna Hubers"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://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.com/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. Linda Ronstadt sang, Love is a rose, but you better not pick it. Only grows when it's on the vine. It's a song about how love only flurred. when tended to, when you don't pick and choose what parts of the whole to love, when you love the roots

and the thorns and the leaves as well as the flower. For some, though, their love is less like a rose and more like a burdock. You know, those thorny little buggers that stick to your clothes, they stick to you and never let you go, even after you've picked them off the fabric and tried to throw them out. For them, love isn't something you give up easily. For them, it can be deadly. This is Like a Rose, the murder of Ryan Poston. So, campers, for this one, we're in Highland Heights, Kentucky, a leafy suburban college town just across the river from Cincinnati. October 12, 2012, was a clear. chilly fall night. A little before 9 p.m., a Campbell County Police Dispatcher took a call from

Highland Meadows, an upscale condo complex right across the street from Northern Kentucky University. On the other end of the line was a frantic sounding woman. Uh, ma'am? Uh, well, I killed my boyfriend and self-defense. You can hear the clickety clacking of the dispatcher's keyboard in the background as she starts the ball rolling on getting first responders to the scene, but she keeps talking to the caller at the same time, trying to get a clearer picture of what's going on. The woman's name was Shana Huber's, a 21-year-old graduate student, and she was calling from the apartment of her boyfriend, Ryan Poston, a 29-year-old attorney with his own practice up in Cincinnati. Sheena said she'd shot Ryan with his own gun, which he always kept loaded,

and she was 100% sure he was already dead, no need to do CPR. In fact, she'd shot Ryan six times, the full capacity of the pistol she used to kill him. It was self-defense, she kept insisting. He'd come at her, and she wrestled the gun away and shot him. She definitely sounded freaked out to the dispatcher, but there was at least one little red flag. When she asked Shana when the shooting had happened, Shana said, 10 or 15 minutes ago?

10 or 15 minutes ago? Why would she wait so long to call 911? That little detail stuck in the dispatcher's mind like a burr and stayed there. When she asked Shana where the gun was now, she said she'd put it on a bookshelf. But, of course, when the officers arrived, they weren't going to take her word for that. For all they knew, she was still armed and dangerous.

People can do some bad things when they're backed into a corner. So they had the dispatcher tell Shana to walk slowly out the front door with her hands held in front of her. When she'd done that, they had her lie on her stomach while they cuffed her, and then they whisked her out of there, straight to the station for an interview. Back at the apartment, Ryan Poston lay dead on the floor in a pool of blood. a promising life cut off just like that like flicking a switch so how do we get here too smart accomplished young people just on the cusp of really getting their lives up and running and now one's dead and the others in handcuffs so let's put a pin in that and get a little background on shana and ryan

huber's grew up in lexington kentucky and by the time she started studying psychology at the university of kentucky she'd grown into a pretty impressive person on paper at least she was beautiful first of of all, dark hair, megawatt smile, big blue-gray eyes, and always perfectly put together. Plus, she was a classic extrovert. She could walk into a party and immediately buddy up to anybody in the room, make him feel totally at ease. She was smart, too, took a bunch of college-level classes in high school and graduated cum laude from undergrad in only three years before starting a master's program in school counseling. But in the grand equation of life, smart plus pretty doesn't always add up to happy and content. There was a big black fly in Shana's Chardonnay and it had to do with relationships. As her friend Sarah later told 48 hours, if a guy like

broke up with her or something or if a guy just said they weren't interested in her, she'd take it pretty hard. Crying, maybe a little screaming, she didn't really like to let things go. Just a little light screaming, you know, no big deal. Shana could not handle rejection. That's right folks. It's our old familiar true crime friend, high drama relationship girl, the world's most exhausting superhero. One of Shana's friends in college was Carissa Carlisle, who's named like a fucking sitcom character. I love it. I like the alliteration. They were friends on Facebook, too, of course, and when Shana posted some Thirst Tramp bikini

pictures of herself, Carissa's cousin Ryan saw them and thought, I want to go to there. The thirst trap was sprung. Ryan Poston grew up in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky, just a couple miles from Highland Heights. He was a child of two prominent families. His dad, Jay Poston, worked for various senators and governors in Kentucky, and his stepdad, Peter Carter, was a marketing exec at Procter & Gamble. Things aren't always great between kids and stepparents, but Peter was really a second father to Ryan, so much so that Ryan legally took Carter as his middle name. Ryan spent most of his childhood with his mom and Peter, and along with second dad came three younger sisters. This was a big kind of privileged and well-to-do family and offered Ryan the sort of experiences most teenagers could only daydream about.

He went to high school at the International School in Manila and Geneva while his stepdad worked overseas, graduating high school in Switzerland. After that, Ryan came back to the States and went to college at Indiana University, then on to law school at Northern Kentucky University. By the time he was 28 and met Shana Huber's, Ryan had his own law firm, which is, A, impressive, and B, probably a lot easier if you come from a wealthy influential family. But, you know, having two rich dads wasn't his fault. And to his credit, Ryan's firm was geared towards providing good representation to people who wouldn't normally be able to afford it. That's awesome. Good for him.

Yeah. And he was a good lawyer. He worked hard at it. His firm was really starting to get a solid reputation and build momentum. And it seemed like it was about to really take off. and he wasn't even 30 yet. Ryan was also pretty easy on the eyes. I mean, if you were casting good-looking, successful young attorney for like a lifetime movie,

you'd cast him in a heartbeat. If he hadn't gone to law school, he could have had a career as a model. He definitely knew how to work the blue steel in pictures, handsome dude, never had any trouble attracting women. Yeah, and according to Carissa, he was just a joy to know, like, just great to talk to about any and everything and kind and compassionate. He meant a lot to a lot of people. In the spring of 2011, Ryan went down to Lexington to see his cousin, Carissa,

and while he was there, he met Shana Huber's, who he recognized immediately from those Facebook bikini picks. Sparks flew from minute one, and before you knew it, they were dating. They were a gorgeous, sparkly couple, and at first they had a ton of fun together, but it didn't take long for cracks to form. Ryan was going through some major work stress. A former partner was suing him and he was losing sleep over it,

working crazy hours to try and stay on top of the lawsuit and his regular work. He just wasn't looking for anything serious relationship-wise. He never had been. From the start, he'd looked at Shana as more of a casual thing. I mean, she lived an hour and a half away and she had her own stuff going on. It seems like Ryan may have missed some early indications that Shana saw the relationship in a totally different light, but some of his friends sought right off the bat. They got the impression that Shana had set her sights on Ryan from the minute she met him,

and her goal was to lock it down. Get a ring on it, the sooner the better, no matter what it took. A psychologist would later diagnose Shana with low self-esteem and narcissism, a more common combo than you might think, because as grandiose as they may act, narcissists tend to be super insecure underneath. In Shana, this was a combination that led her to constantly seek social validation, especially for men. According to Carissa, she couldn't stand not being the center of attention. Anytime somebody else had the spotlight, Shana would do something to grab it back. Burst into song, start dancing around, whatever she had to do.

Okay, I've said it before, but losers that randomly burst into song do need to be imprisoned. Like, this isn't West Side Story, man. It's an airport gate, and I'll invite you to shut the fuck up. You have no poetry in your soul, Katie. Oh, my God. But nothing rang her bell so much as male attention. And now all of a sudden, she's hooked perfect boyfriend, TM, a handsome lawyer from a prominent wealthy family, a golden boy.

Ryan wasn't a perfect boyfriend, of course. He was a complicated person like we all are, so burned out from work and stress that as a doctor prescribed him anti-anxiety meds. But to a narcissist, what something actually is ain't near as important as what it looks like on the outside. and Ryan looked fantastic. It's probably too simplistic to say that what was going on with Shana was,

I'm not a sad loser, look at my rich, handsome lawyer, boyfriend. But it's probably not too simplistic by much. Shana was getting her master's at Eastern Kentucky University, about an hour and a half south from Highland Heights, but she made the drive up to stay with Ryan as often as she could. Sometimes unannounced, which is dirty pool. Don't do it. There's just never really been an excuse for the pop-in out of the blue And in the age of cell phones, it's just an unpardonable offense.

Yeah, second annoying charge, double prison. Double prison, yes. Especially if you're driving an hour and a half to get there. I mean, what's he going to say? Sorry, I'd rather be alone tonight, enjoy your 90-minute drive home. Most people just aren't going to do that because, you know, social expectations and all that shit. I mean, I probably wouldn't. My southern hospitality gene would kick in and I'd just grit my teeth and offer you a cup of coffee.

Even if on the inside, I wanted to punt your ass out the door like football. Now, we've talked a lot about love bombing in previous episodes, but we've kind of got the Martha Stewart version of it here with Shana. She'd cook for Ryan, she'd take his dog out, she'd pick up his laundry, clean his place, because, and I know this will shock you, about a dude in his 20s living alone, Ryan's apartment was kind of a mess. Helpful little acts of quote-unquote kindness to make his busy life easier. Normal things to do for somebody you love, a little bit less normal if you're showing up out of the blue after a long drive and insisting. on doing all that stuff. Doing it that way says you're trying to level jump the relationship, to turn a simple boyfriend-girlfriend situation into something more.

Remember back to our Gift of Fear episode, how Gavin DeBecker calls it loan sharking? Make no mistake, the way Shana was doing this was pure manipulation. And when Ryan wouldn't bite, it ramped up her insecurity to 11, and her behavior got more and more obsessive. Shana told Ryan's cousin, Carissa, that she couldn't wait to be related to her for real

once she and Ryan were married. even though Shana and Ryan were never engaged or even living together. Not for lack of trying on Shana's part, of course. One day she just showed up with a chest of drawers, moved it right into Ryan's apartment. Who does that? That's just unhinged behavior, but something like that was just a normal Tuesday for Shana. Of course, the flip side of dramatic and needy is often bright and exciting, and that can go a long way to holding guys' attention.

There were big ups and big downs, but the downs soon started to way outweigh the ups. Shana took things big, and her relationship with Ryan soon developed a volatile edge. They started fighting a lot. One time getting into a screaming match at 2 a.m. in the parking lot at Ryan's condo complex, waking up their neighbors, which is not something you want to do because nobody's ever, ever going to forget it. You could discover the lost city of Atlantis, okay? And to your neighbors, you're still going to be the screaming in the parking lot people. You just, you can't live that shit down.

Over the 18 months that they were sort of kind of together, Their relationship was on again, off again, with Ryan calling things off and Shana pleading and weeping and coaxing her way back in. She once texted a friend, he says he's only with me because I make him feel so awful about it when I cry. Yeah. A couple of things about that. The first and most obvious being, for God's sakes, woman, get some self-respect. If someone says that to you, do not date them. Another thing is that if Ryan did say that, and as we'll see later,

Shana is an unreliable narrator, so who the hell knows. But if he did say that, he was trying to drive her away, telling her, I don't want to be with you. Leave me alone. But what an obsessive narcissist hears is, so that's what it takes to keep him. Basically, so you're saying there's a chance. Yeah, exactly. I think Ryan was trying to let her down easy. He knew that he and Shana were trouble and that her behavior was getting increasingly weird.

Still, when she showed up crying, he'd take her back. It doesn't make sense from the outside, but like we've said before, it can be hard to give up on toxic relationships, especially if one half is as relentless and manipulative as Shana. According to Shana, the poison in the relationship wasn't all one-sided. Months before the murder, she befriended one of Ryan's neighbors and told her that Ryan had been abusing her. He told her that she was fat and needed a boob job, Shana said, and one time he slammed

her arm in a door. She even showed the neighbor some ugly bruises on her arm. But put a little pin in that, because later on, Shana would tell somebody else a very different version of that story. For the 18 months they were together, Ryan was the center of Shana's world. She talked about him constantly. But according to Ryan's friends, he saw Shana as more of a rebound relationship. He was never in love with her. She was definitely way more into him than he was to her. And according to Carissa, for a good chunk of the relationship, Ryan was just trying to figure out how to get himself the hell out of there. He just wanted to do it gently, she said.

He was trying to extricate himself with the least amount of damage for everybody. But good luck letting a girl like Shana down easy. This was not a girl who was willing to take a hint and lose her golden boyfriend. She didn't understand the meaning of easy. If Ryan didn't want to talk to her and wouldn't respond to her texts or calls, Shana would swipe Carissa's phone without asking and use it to call him. He'd always pick up for Carissa. When they did break up,

Shana would cry and beg and bombard Ryan with texts. If that didn't get his attention, she'd just show up at his condo or in downtown Cincinnati when he was getting lunch at work, just constantly there trying to convince Ryan to take her back until he finally gave in, just to make life easier in the moment. Beautiful story, right? Yeah, perfect story to tell at their wedding. And bless him, it's not the way to handle a stalker.

If a stalker calls you 500 times and you pick up on the 500 and first, the stocker just learns that that's the price of a conversation with you. And they'll keep trying and trying until they wear you down. Yeah, and look, we're not saying it's Ryan's fault for giving in. Don't think that for a second because this kind of manipulative shit is very, very easy to fall for. So we're only saying this just as a cautionary thing so that we can all learn from what Ryan and so many others like him have gone through. For sure, Shana was like a force of nature, just totally relentless, and she'd keep coming until she wore him down. She might have been needy and insecure, but she was also a narcissist to the core, totally unwilling to accept anything that tried to stop her getting what she wanted.

She'd later tell a cellmate her philosophy of life, that she deserved what she wanted when she wanted it. Sounds familiar, right? How many times have we covered people who think they or the lead character in life's big show. Yeah, y'all, I hate to break it to you, but it's an ensemble piece, okay, not the flippin' Truman show, so get used to it. None of us is really that special. All right. Speak for yourself.

I'm joking. I'm joking. It's a joke. So, Ryan and Shana broke up and got back together several times throughout 2012, which sounds exhausting. Friends on both sides never knew when Ryan and Shana were or weren't dating. They were on and off like a damn broken stoplight. By the fall of 2012, though, Ryan was finally getting tired enough with this whole over-dramatic soap opera of a relationship that he wanted to end it for good.

Just because she obsessively pursued Ryan doesn't mean Shana was happy to be with him, too. She did not take rejection well, and Ryan kept on rejecting her. So even though she managed to get him to take her back, again and again, she was slowly building up a big simmering cauldron of rage. Eleven days before she killed Ryan, she texted a friend that she talked him into taking her to the gun range for some target practice. which just, holy shit, dude. Like, he obviously did not see the danger he was in. Because, I mean, bless his heart, he wouldn't have let her anywhere near a firearm if he had.

On the way over, Shane texts at her friend, Ryan doesn't love or care. He's an evil person. I want to turn around and shoot him and play like it's an accident. Yikes. So, going back to Gavin DeBacker and the gift of fear, one of the most interesting points he makes is that people often hide the truth in dark,

humor. Like, there's a story in that book about the Unabomber, how a guy in one of the offices that he bombed took one look at the package that the mailman had just delivered and said to his co-workers, well, you guys can open it if you want to. I'm going back to my office so I don't get blown up. And, of course, when they opened it, that's exactly what happened. And this guy knew it. Like, he made it into a joke in the moment because logically it seemed like a crazy thing to worry about. But damn it, if he didn't know it was a bomb, in his heart of hearts. And he was right.

I mean, this is a thing. People sometimes tell the truth through really, really dark humor. Now, obviously, it's not always the case. I mean, I've made some jokes that would curl your toes, you know, and I didn't really mean them. Even Ryan himself, remember how he told you

his former law partner was suing him at the time of his death? Well, he once said he wanted to bury the guy up to his neck at low tide and throw darts at his head. And, you know, I hope we don't have to tell you that he had literally zero intention of abducting this man

and transporting him 500 miles to the coast and burying him. It was a joke, you know, to blow off steam. But in this case, I'm going to go out on a limb and say this text was a red flag, especially since she texted the same thing to another friend a little later, along with a picture of her grinning and holding a rifle. Shooting Ryan was on her mind. Not long after that day at the gun range, Ryan texted his cousin Carissa. This is getting to be restraining order level crazy. She's shown up at my condo like three times and refuses to leave each time. And he texted a friend that Shana was literally probably the craziest fucking person I've ever met. She almost scares me. Almost. That breaks

my heart a little bit. She should scare you. Man, she should. It's not crazy to think that. That's your intuition talking to you. I know y'all remember how many of the victims we've covered told somebody they were scared of the person who wound up hurting them. That doesn't come out of nowhere. That little voice does not lie to us. It's ancient stuff. It's left over from before we even had language. And that's what we mean when we say that fear is a gift. Yeah, I like to think that it's like thousands of our ancestors

peeking over our shoulders and telling us the lessons they've learned, like giving us the answers to the test. It's not nothing. It's not a trick or paranoia. It's instinct. And we would do well to trust it. Damn straight. Everybody read that book.

It's the true crime, campfire, sacred text. Like three of my friends have sent me pictures of them holding the book and being like, I'm starting it today. So I'm so proud. Good job, guys. It's so good. It's so good. It could save your life. Literally, that book could save your life.

Seriously. So besides just getting sick of all the drama, Ryan had another reason for breaking things off with Shana. He'd recently hit it off with a young woman called Audrey Bolte, who just happened to be Miss Ohio, 2012. Gorgeous, obviously, blonde, accomplished, pretty much a jealous girlfriend's worst nightmare. And it just so happens that Ryan and Audrey had made plans. to go out on a date the same night that Ryan was killed. The day before, Ryan had asked his stepdad, Peter, for advice on how to handle this upcoming date with Audrey, specifically that he was afraid to tell Shana about it. Peter told him to be

honest and kind to Shana to tell her up front so she wouldn't be heard if she found out about the date later on. Pretty good advice on the normal run of things. I mean, how could Peter know what the inside of Shana's head was like. Mm-hmm. Like a fucking Goya painting. Shana would always claim that she knew nothing about Audrey or the date they had planned,

which I find hard to believe. It seems like an awful big coincidence that Ryan's outgoing girlfriend would happen to kill him on the same day he had a first date with a potential new love interest. And not only on the same day, but literally within an hour

of when Ryan and Audrey were supposed to meet up. In fact, Shana shot Ryan right about the time he'd have to start getting ready for his date. It's easy to imagine a scenario where Ryan, following his stepdad's advice, tries to finally, finally break things off with Shana and get her out of his apartment. Tells her he has a date that night, and Shana decides right there to pick up one of his guns and shoot him. And that's not quite a spur of the moment act. The gun had a safety. She would have had to deliberately take it off before it would fire.

But if that's the case, it's also easy to see why Shana would claim complete ignorance about Audrey. Whatever spinning lights and circus music were happening in her head, Shana was not dumb. And he ditched her for the beauty queen, is the kind of motive juries don't even need explain to them. Right. Shayna's original version of events, the one she told the 911 dispatcher was this. He beat me and tried to carry me out of the house and I came back in to grab my things. And he was right in front of me and he reached down and grabbed a gun and I grabbed it out of his hands and pulled the trigger. When the dispatcher asked if she was injured, Shana said,

I'm not injured, ma'am. I was thrown into the side of the couch, which, you know, is already kind of a contradiction from he beat me a minute earlier. and there was more of that to come. He threw me across the room, Shana told the dispatcher, and I was very startled, and I was laying on the floor, and I killed him. Now, 911 calls are often messy because they're usually made by people in high-stress situations, like on the worst days of their lives. But to have a caller give two different descriptions of the same event,

practically within the same sentence, is weird. Weird. The next thing Shana told the dispatcher, without prompt, by the way, illustrates her fatal flaw. Shana is incapable of shutting the fuck up. One of the more annoying fatal flaws, in my opinion. From the moment she pulled the trigger, this woman started digging her own grave, and I have never, ever seen anybody dig harder.

She said, and then, because he was twitching and I knew he was going to die anyway, and he was making funny noises, I shot him a couple more times just to kill him. I had to make sure he was dead because he was twitching. because he was twitching so bad and I didn't want him to lay there in Twitch. Oh, my God. I don't think many proponents of the stand your ground law would argue that he was twitching and it was grossing me out is enough justification to shoot somebody. He was no longer a threat.

He could have still been alive. He could have been helped with quick enough medical attention. People have survived horrible gunshot injuries with fast enough help. And even the most staunch, self-defense instructors tell you that as soon as the attacker is no longer a threat, you have to stop. But Shana shot him again, then waited 15 minutes before calling 911. Yep, and later, at the police station, she'd expand on her reason why. I shot him a couple more times just to make sure he was dead because I didn't want to watch him die. Those extra shots

weren't a mercy killing. They were to spare her own feelings, because it was kind of skeeving her out to watch a man die in his own blood. Just, holy shit, wow. So there were immediately two avenues in the investigation into Ryan Poston's death. Officers at the police station would interview Shana Huber's, while detects and crime scene texts would study Ryan's apartment and talk to his neighbors. In the apartment, Ryan's body lay on the floor between the dining table and the wall. Blood soaked into the carpet underneath him, with further bloody stains on the wall and on the dining table right in front of one of the chairs. The apartment itself was pretty normal for a young professional guy living alone, kind of messy with clutter on a lot of the flat

surfaces, a pre-tied tie hanging on his bedroom door to save time in the morning. There were several guns in the apartment, ranging from concealed carry pistols up to a semi-automatic AK-47 copy. And how that strikes you might depend on where in the world you are, but it's really not that weird for Kentucky. Straightaway, Shana's story that Ryan was right in front of her when she came back in, then threw her across the room, was looking pretty shaky. Ryan had clearly been sitting at the dining table when he'd first been shot. That was where the biggest bloodstain was, and with the body lying where it was, it was hard to picture any other scenario than her shooting him in the head while he was sitting. Then he'd slumped forward, his head on the table and blood spilling out

from it. Moments later, he'd fallen out of his chair to the right and onto the floor. So if Ryan had been sitting, what did that mean for the next part of Shane's story that she'd wrestled the gun out of his hands? Well, like we said a minute ago, there was a lot of clutter in Ryan's apartment, including on the dining table, stuff like empty drinking glasses and bottles of prescription meds and vitamin supplements, sitting directly in front of Ryan. Ryan was a big guy, six foot three and in good shape, so there's a reasonable question of how believable it is that 120 pounds of Shana Huber's could wrestle a gun out of his hands in the first place. But regardless of that, nothing on the table was disturbed. Not one glass had been

knocked over, not even one of those little plastic pill bottles. Do you think it's possible to have a life and death struggle over a gun with a big dude seated at that table and not knock over or disturb anything at all? Because I'm going to go ahead and say, no, that doesn't seem likely. And when police spoke to Ryan's neighbors, they poked a few more holes in Shana's story. I don't know if you've ever lived below somebody in an apartment building, but you'd know if a big fight was going on up there. You'd know if their dog needed his claws trimmed, let alone if somebody was getting thrown around the room. None of Ryan's neighbors had heard any sounds of a struggle whatsoever. They'd heard the gunshots, and initially thought they were firecrackers.

Two shots, then a long pause, then four more. So between Shana's sketchy story and the fact that she'd shot Ryan multiple times after he was already incapacitated, police knew right away that they were probably looking at something very different than a shooting in self-defense. And then came Shana's interview at the Highland Heights Police Station. And who boy, y'all. This interview, you know, I've seen a lot of police interrogations, but this one is just from flipping Mars. Like, in fact, it's not even from Mars. It's from one of those weird moons of Saturn with oceans of liquid methane, you know.

So we should start by pointing out that Shana, who would later claim to have the same IQ as Einstein, was apparently not aware that police interviews are recorded. Now, I can't say for sure, but I'm pretty sure that if you dropped Albert Einstein into a Highland Heights interview room in 2012, he'd probably figure out right away that that little thing on the ceiling is a camera, but whatever. Even before the interview started, an officer asked Shana if she wanted a cigarette. Shana was crying that weird kind of crying that true crime fans have seen a lot of, a lot of big sobs, but not much in the way of actual tears, you know? And when the officer left the room to get the siggies, she turned it off like flipping a switch.

Just flip on a dime. I've never seen anything like it. Like I've seen a lot of like liars do that, but this is like instantaneous. It is a, it's a thing to see. It's, it's, yeah, there's no hesitation. She just stops. It's crazy. Shana asked for an attorney right off the bat, so the police couldn't question her till one arrived.

But the thing is, they didn't need to question her. Because despite asking for a lawyer, Shana, with her fatal flaw, just started talking and would not shut the fuck up. Some of this was just babbling nonsense. Like, she said to one officer, I'm going to try to do a southern accent. I apologize in advance. You have really pretty teeth.

Did you have orthodontia? She goes, it's a little more Texas than eastern, southern, but I tried. But did you have orthodontia? But it wasn't all rambling. And Shana was soon digging a hole for herself, again, that she'd never be able to crawl out of. Sheena's story changed again and grew. She said Ryan was throwing her around the room like a rag doll before the shooting, but she had no injuries and nothing in the apartment was disturbed.

She specifically said that Ryan had picked her up and thrown her against the bookshelf, but on top of that bookshelf was a little display Ryan had made of empty bullet cartridges of different sizes. It was the kind of thing that would fall over if you sneeze too hard, never mind, threw somebody into the bookshelf. And the cartridges were all still standing, neatly lined up. Shana's story of wrestling the gun from Ryan's hand changed too. Now, she said that Ryan had stood up behind the table and was yelling and gesturing at her,

telling her to hurry up and get out. Sheena said, and I just picked up the gun and in the middle of him doing something with his arm or saying something crazy, I shot him. Now, this was sounding more believable than the previous story she had spun, but it was a long way from self-defense. If an unarmed guy is yelling at you from across a table and you pick up a gun and shoot him, that's just, I don't know, murder? Plain old, born old murder?

Shana also added an extra little chapter to her confrontation with Ryan. At one point, she said, he just gone into his bedroom and locked the door behind him. So he was the one attacking her, but he also walked himself in his bedroom to get away from her. She could have left right then, but you don't want to know what she did instead. She took out her phone and Googled How to Unlock Interior Door with Bobbypin, which she successfully did. And despite Ryan's attempts to escape, the argument started up again and moved into the dining room.

The officers who took turns sitting in the interview room was shot. Sheena just sat and listened while she rambled on and offered occasional sympathetic comments. They couldn't question her, remember, because she'd asked for a lawyer, but they had no obligation to tell her to stop talking. And the officer who was in there with Shana for her very next little outburst had to struggle to keep her jaw off the floor. He's very vain, Shana suddenly piped up. He wants to get a nose job, just that kind of person.

and I shot him right there. With her finger, she drew a circle around the bridge of her own nose. I gave him his nose job he wanted. I gave him his nose job he wanted. Wow. Wow. Wowie. That's bonkers. So let me just check. You shot your boyfriend in the face about an hour ago, and now you got jokes?

And honestly, if you see video of Shana's interview, that part comes off kind of like a pre-prepared line. Like, she'd had that little zinger bouncing around her head for a while. Yeah, especially since she ended up repeating that same line a few times later on. Like it was her fucking personal catchphrase or something. Yeah, you know, Urkel had, did I do that? Cartman had, Respect my authority. And Shana, of course, had, I gave him his nose job he wanted. You know, this may be the worst case of main character syndrome we've covered this far.

I can't believe some of it. As time went on, Shana seemed to realize that she might be going to jail. And she started to wonder out loud what it would be like, you know, just important concerns. Like, would they let her keep her cell phone? Could she still text her friends from jail? Would she have to shower in front of other women? Yeah, when the officer told her, yeah, you have to shower with other inmates, Shane has started giggling and went, oh my God, like she was about to go to summer camp

for the first time instead of the county jail. Now, if you've been paying close attention, you might have noticed that nowhere in all of this stream of random neural firings was even an ounce of regret for killing Ryan Poston and devastating the friends and family who loved him. Everything was entirely focused on herself. She was already thinking about how Ryan's death would affect her dating future. saying, I don't know if anyone will ever want to marry me if they know that I killed my boyfriend and self-defense. And that phrase self-defense sits kind of oddly there, doesn't it? That's just not a

natural thing to say. In fact, right from the first sentence of her 911 call, Shana was clearly determined to say the word self-defense as often as possible, as if that alone would be enough to convince the cops to release her. Like, well, chief, we just couldn't get that phrase self-defense out of our heads for some reason, so we just took the cuffs off and let her go. Yeah. I get the impression that Shana had never really been confronted with many people that didn't just believe her lies, like right off the bat up until Ryan. So she was clearly just assuming the cops would be like, oh, she said the magic words, you're free to go, ma'am. Would you like the key to the city on your way out? Shana seemed genuinely astonished when an officer came in and told her she was being charged with murder. She shouldn't have been surprised. Her story was all over the place and not at all supported by the evidence, and even if her claims of self-defense had been believable, the fact that she shot Ryan multiple times after he was already down,

but possibly still alive, would have been enough for a charge by itself. But as we've seen before, a narcissist like our girl, Shana, as the central character in the whole huge story of the universe has a way of convey. fence in herself that things will turn out exactly the way she wants. So Shana had gotten herself in a world of trouble by not being able to keep her mouth shut in the interview room, but what she said to the officers in there with her wasn't even the craziest part. When she was alone, and obviously unaware that she was still being recorded, Shana picked up a cup of coffee and said, I'm going to be talked about for many years.

Then she stood up and did this weird little dance through the interview room, kind of pirouetting around and started singing Amazing Grace like I saw her. I swear to God, I'm not making this up. Really not the behavior you'd expect of somebody traumatized by having to kill a loved one in self-defense. In fact, she looked happy. And then she said, in a cheerful, sing-songy little voice, I did it, yes, I did it. I did it, yes, I did it. Good luck, future defense team, you're going to need it.

She followed that up with something maybe even more damning. I'm so good at acting. Wow. Pretty much admitting, though she didn't know it, because who the heck knows what that little black thing up there at the lens is on the ceiling, right? That she was trying to sell the cops a big old bucket of bullshit. Now, Shana wouldn't go on trial until 2015, three years after her arrest, because she told police she'd thought about fleeing the scene of Ryan's shooting in her car, her bail was set at $5 million, which her family couldn't afford. So she sat in jail. And as you might remember, in 2013, Jody Arias went on trial for the murder of Travis Alexander. The case has a lot of parallels with Ryan Poston's case, and the trial was a media circus.

Shana was obsessed, catching every moment of the trial on TV that she possibly could and frantically scribbling down every little detail in a notebook. Sheena kept comparing herself to Jody Arias, which is hilarious when you consider that she sat there and watched this woman be sentenced to life without parole. but Shana just kind of shrugged that little detail off. She and Jody were soul sisters as far as she was concerned, and Jody's trial was like a dress rehearsal of her own. Shana mostly did okay in jail as she waited for trial, both because she hadn't lost her ability to be charming

and because her family provided her with a lot more commissary money than most other inmates had, and she was willing to share. Coffee and chocolate can buy you a lot of friends in jail. And she also hadn't lost her need to be the center of attention. At the Campbell County Detention Center, where Shana was housed before trial, the male inmates would sometimes serve the meals, meaning they'd pass plastic trays of food through a door that had a slot in a window in it. Shana would prance out of her cell, wearing just a tank top and panties, no bra.

The guards told her to get dressed and not to talk to the male inmates, but she ignored them and chatted the guys up. Sometimes she'd just run butt-ass naked out of a room so the guards would pay attention to her. She's, she's, I think, the most annoying person in existence. I nominate her. I just, so fucking annoying. God. And just like in her police interview, Sheena could not keep her damn mouth shut in jail.

She spent hours bending her cellmate's ears, prattling on about every detail of her and Ryan's relationship, from the mundane to the murderess. and she managed to freak these ladies out, some of whom had plenty of experience with jail. Like, Shana's mom doaded on her and often called her on the phone. While she spoke to her mom, Shana would be crying, sometimes screaming and sobbing, and then she'd catch her cellmate Holly's eye, smile, and wink. Like, the crying was all just an act for her mom.

It creeped Holly out. That's so freaking creepy. And the creeping out did not end there. Shana also told Holly that at night while Ryan was sleeping, she would sometimes record video of him on her phone so she could watch it again and again. Oh, fucking hell, that's some bunny-boiling fatal attraction Glenclothes shit right there.

Yikes on bikes. Yeah. Yeah, is right. In 2015, 24-year-old Shana finally went on trial for the murder of Ryan Post. And it was big news. Not quite Jody Arias big, but it got national attention. And her defense team definitely had a hard time ahead of them.

Hard row to hoe. This would have been a tough case to defend just based on the physical evidence, but add in the video of her bizarre interview room behavior, and she was already waist deep in quicksand. And the defense didn't exactly knock it out of the park. They apparently decided on the strategy of, who are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes. They stuck to Shana's self-defense claim,

even when it went directly against both the physical evidence and Shana's own recorded statements. Like, they claimed Shana had shot Ryan while he was looming over her, but the autopsy showed that the first bullet hit him on downward trajectory, which only made sense if he was sitting and she was standing up. And of course, they tried to dirty Ryan up, saying his anxiety meds, could have made him violent and that he was abusive.

But there was a problem with that theory. The prosecution brought in three women who had been cellmates with Shana, all of whom testified that Shana had bragged about shooting Ryan, using her, I gave him the nose job he wanted line again and laughing her ass off. She showed no remorse at all for the killing, and she admitted she was the aggressor in the argument. And one woman, Cecily Miller, testified, quote,

She said she was going to plead insanity, and then she said she's too smart because she has the IQ of Einstein. So she was going to plead the battered wife syndrome and say that he beat her. But Shana, Cicely said, he didn't beat you. You told me he didn't. Shana just shrugged. I don't care. Yeah, and we have to make something clear about these fellow inmates who testified against her. They didn't get a single thing for doing it. no reduced sentences, no nothing. What they got, in fact, was a lot of shit from other inmates who labeled them snitches

and thought they were assholes and traitors, because Shana had a lot of friends in jail, people that she'd showered with little treats from the commissary. So these ladies didn't get anything for testifying. They did it because they felt like it was the right thing to do. These were not violent people. They were in jail because they struggled with drugs, which is bullshit on its face as far as I'm concerned. So I wanted to make that crystal clear because, of course, you have to take jailhouse in form. testimony with a grain of salt, if you find out there's been a quid pro quo, but there wasn't one

in this case, not at all. And remember Ryan's neighbor who Shana befriended and confided in about Ryan's supposed abuse? Well, another cellmate, Holly Nivens, testified that Shana had told her she made the whole thing up, had even bruised her own arms to make the story more convincing. When Ryan was out, Shana would shout and throw things around his apartment to make it sound like they were having a violent altercation. And the more you think about that, the scarier it gets. She was setting up her self-defense claim before the actual shooting, long before. You have to think, knowing that, that she went over to Ryan's condo that night, fully intending to kill him. Now, we've said this again and again, and we really can't say it enough,

that false abuse accusations are very rare, okay? Most people, if they say they were abused, they were. But when people do make this stuff up, it's usually to manipulate the situation. And if it seems to come up a lot on our show, just to understand, that's because we're a true crime podcast. And we focus on nasty people. Most people would never, ever make up an allegation of abuse like this or bruise their own arms or anything like that. But for Shana, she used that as a tool. She was a tool. She is a tool. After five hours of deliberation, the jury found Shana Huber's guilty of Ryan Poston's murder and recommended a sentence of 40 years. But right up to sentencing four months later, she and her defense team continued to attack Ryan

and paint him as an abuser, an asshole move, but an asshole move with a purpose. Under Kentucky law, if Shana was recognized as a victim of domestic violence, she would be eligible for parole after serving only 20% of her sentence, rather than the standard 85. But the judge didn't buy it, and Shana went off to prison. Just a year later, though, she successfully appealed her conviction. One of her jurors turned out to be a convicted felon, which is prohibited in Kentucky. The guy had fallen behind on child support payments 20 years earlier and didn't remember pleading guilty in his case. So that was infuriating.

So Shana got a new trial, which shook down pretty similar to the first. Five hours of deliberation and a guilty verdict. But she did better on the sentencing this time. life imprisonment, but with the possibility of parole after 17 years. Now, that is scary, if you ask me. I mean, a lot of times you hear these stories and you think, okay, this person obviously needs to be punished for what they did, but they're probably not likely to ever do it again. Like, this was a one-time situation, this person was only a danger to this one person,

it's not going to happen again. I don't think that's the case for Shana. I don't see any reason why she wouldn't do this again. if she ended up obsessed and feeling rejected, I think Shana has, if I can't have you, no one can, tattooed on her DNA, and I worry about her walk in the streets again. I really do.

I hope I'm wrong. I hope she'll get some really good counseling in prison and learn how to, for God's sake, value herself without a pair of male eyes on her. And I have a feeling Ryan's family will be at every parole hearing, and I wish them nothing but success in healing. So that was a wild one, right, campers?

You know, we'll have another. one for you next week. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the True Crime Campfire. And I want to send a special shout out today to our friend Tracy in Australia who sent us a voice message the other day that made our entire year. We appreciate you, darling. And as always, we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely patrons. Thank you so much to Lauren, Rayana, Emily, Joku, Alexandria, Jennifer, and Sarah. We appreciate y'all to the moon and back. And And if you're not yet a patron, you are missing out.

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