True Crime Campfire - No Fury: Bad Bitch Cherrylle Dell, Pt 1

Episode Date: May 8, 2020

Fire is an awesome force. If you don’t take steps to keep it under control, it can rip through the landscape with a fury that’s almost surreal to behold. And once in a great while, you find a person like that—every bit as relentless and indiscriminate as a wildfire, and every bit as determined to devastate anything that tries to get in the way. Just like fire, these people can be beautiful, captivating, hypnotic. We can fool ourselves into thinking we can keep them under control—let them brighten and warm us, but not burn us. Sometimes we make that mistake at our peril. Sources:TV show "The Case that Haunts Me," episode "The Murder of Scott Dell""Killer Stripper" by Jessi Dillmanhttps://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/dells-daughter-tells-of-weird-conversation/article4169567/https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/no-early-parole-for-ottawa-woman-who-laced-her-estranged-husbands-wine-with-anti-freeze-in-1995-killingFollow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes 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] 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. Fire is an awesome force. If you don't take steps to keep it under control, it can rip through the landscape with a fury that's almost surreal to behold. And once in a great while, you find a person like that. Every bit as relentless and indiscriminate as a wildfire. And every bit as determined to devastate anything that tries to get in the way. Just like fire, these people can be beautiful, captivating, hypnotic. We can fool ourselves into thinking we can keep them under control. Let them brighten and warm us, but not burn us.

Sometimes we make that mistake at our peril. This is No Fury. Bad Bitch, Shireldell. So, campers, we're in the little town of Killaloo, Ontario, Canada, which makes this our first Canadian case. Very exciting. March 17th, St. Patrick's Day, 1997. Detective Ken Leppert was on his way out the door at the Killaloo police station when one of his colleagues stopped him. The guy said, hey, there's a lady here to see you.

She's pretty insistent. And Leopard had just finished his shift, so he was like, ugh, can't somebody else help her, which would be exactly my reaction. But no, this lady was very insistent that she wanted to talk to the new detective. Ken Leppert was a recent hire in Killaloo. He just moved there recently and was still getting to know the town. So Ken wasn't thrilled because who would be, but he said he'd talk to her. The woman's name was Nancy Fillmore, and she was super worked up. She said she was there to talk about a woman named Shirel Dell. And when Detective Leppert asked her why she'd been so determined to talk to him about it, Nancy said, I wanted someone new to the area, someone she can't have gotten to yet. She's manipulative. She can be

very charming. Now, however tired Detective Leppert may have been, you know this had to get his attention, because it sure as hell would mind, I'd be all in at this. point. I have my popcorn out. Go on. Yeah. This is straight up out of a Scorsese film. It is. I need to talk to somebody she hasn't gotten to yet. Like, yikes, dude. Yeah, it's really freaky, right? Nancy said, Shireldell has committed a whole series of crimes. She's a liar. She's a criminal. Shirel, according to Nancy, had opened lines of credit under fake names. She'd reported fake

break-ins to collect insurance payouts. And most bizarrely, she'd reported that her baby daughter, Bajula had been abducted. But according to Nancy, there was no Bajula. The baby didn't exist. But Cherell had managed to convince her three actual children that Bajula was real. And she'd filed a report with authorities about the baby's supposed abduction. And they actually started an investigation, which had stalled but was still ongoing, and they had no doubt about Sherell's story.

She'd given him a birth certificate and a picture of Bajula and everything. The baby's dad was supposedly Jamaican and supposedly living there now, and Sherella told her three kids that the baby was living there with them. Nuts. Yes. So Detective Leppert listened to all this with what I can only assume was growing disbelief. He said, okay, let me stop you a second. Who is this woman to you? And Nancy said, she's my ex-girlfriend.

So, number one, we've got a woman here who was coming across as a little unhinged, a little intense. And number two, now we find out that this woman is her ex. So Leppert figured he should probably take all this with a pretty huge grain of salt, maybe even a pillar of salt. This could just be a disgruntled ex with an axe to grind. I mean, it happens people turn in their exes for stuff they didn't do all the time. So he said, okay, well, do you have any proof of any of this? And Nancy said, I love this. For right now, all I have is my word.

Oh. Yeah. Well, that's not going to do it, which is, of course, what Leppert told her. And suddenly she burst into tears. She said, I just feel so horrible about what happened next. I'll have to live with that for the rest of my life. So he's like, okay, well, what happened next? What are you talking about?

But Nancy, bless her heart, she just clammed up. She said, I can't tell you, I'll incriminate myself. And she said, look, Shirel has my personal property. She owes me six grand. I just want my money and my stuff back. Can you help me get it? So now we come to the crux, right? So feeling bewildered, I'm sure Detective Leppert agreed to go with Nancy to Cheryl's house the next morning and help her get her stuff back.

So the next day, he met Nancy at the home of 42-year-old Shirel Dell. Leppert was curious to get a look at this woman who was allegedly involved in all this massive fraud. Well, Shirel was all smiles as she opened the door. This could have had something to do with the fact that Detective Leppert, a little bit of a silver fox. I'm not going to lie. and was probably even foxyer back in 1997. And Ms. Dell was a pretty lady. Delicate features, long curly red hair.

She came across like the kind of person whose first instinct is always to try to flirt with and charm you, no matter who you might be. So she opened the door all, hello, what can I do for you? But then she looked past Detective Leopard's shoulder and saw Nancy standing on her porch. And man, her face changed like that. She said, what's she doing here?

And it was startling because she had turned on a dime, like from this friendly, flirty, open attitude to just completely furious. And it was such a striking change that it actually took the detective aback a little bit. Did you ever like piss off your mom while she was on the phone with somebody? And so she'd be like, hey, Cheryl, what's going on? Katie, good, I'm on the phone. And then she'd go, okay, Cheryl, let's talk about it. It's crazy.

It's just like that. It is. It is. And it took the detective a back. He was like, damn. And he could practically feel this like pissed off electricity just zinging back and forth between these two women. So you know what the hell was going on here. And poor detective Leppert tried to explain, okay, look, it's cool.

Nancy just wants her stuff back. Let's make this easy. So Sherell stormed back into the house and they could hear her like stomping around in there and banging stuff around. And a few minutes later, she came out with a couple of trash bags full of Nancy's stuff. And she just kind of tossed him out the door. I was clothes and knick-knacks and stuff mostly. but when Nancy opened the bags, she found her stuff completely ruined, covered in garbage and, like, rancid dog food and stuff, just gross. And Sherell was like, that's your shit.

Now get off my property. So, charming, right? You can feel the love between these two ladies. And as Detective Leppert was sort of gently steering Nancy away, you know, back toward the driveway, Nancy, like, whirled around and screamed, this isn't over, Shirel. She's just like out of a soap opera or something. And then she turned to Detective Leppert and said, okay, damn it, I wasn't going to tell you this, but she's dangerous. Her ex-husband didn't die of natural causes. She killed him.

Okay. Nancy. Nancy, why weren't you going to tell him? Because she'll incriminate herself because she already said. Jesus Christ. So this seemed to knock Shirel off her axis a little bit, which, of course. But once she had a moment to recover, that murdery look was back on her face and she said, she's crazy. you get her out of my life.

High drama campers. High drama if you're not getting that yet. I heckin' drama. And I'm sure Leppert was deeply regretting having to be all professional and shit and not being able to just pull up a lawn chair and enjoy this live broadcast of Mori or Jerry Springer or whatever.

But Nancy had just casually dropped a murder accusation into his lap so he hustled her off Cheryl's porch and into his car before things could escalate any further. And he said, Nancy, if you meant what you just said, I'm going to need you to come back and make a statement. And Nancy kind of sighed and she said, yeah, I meant it. And she agreed.

So Nancy was weepy as she laid it all out for the detective. What had happened to Sherell's ex-husband Scott. And you could tell as she spoke that this had been weighing on her for a while. But we're going to put a pin in that for a few minutes, campers. And we're going to go back to December 29, 1995, about two years earlier. A woman named Gay Doherty showed up at her friend Scott Dell's house. She and Scott had planned to take Scott's kids shopping that morning, but he hadn't shown up. That wasn't like him, and although everything had been okay with him lately,

he had a history of some pretty serious health problems in the last year. He had just come through a tough battle with throat cancer, so she went over to make sure he was okay. Gay found Scott's back door unlocked, which was also weird for him, so she led herself in. And the first thing she saw was his writing desk with a big, mostly empty bottle of wine sitting on it and a glass. And the wine in the glass didn't really look right. It looked like the color was off. And there was this kind of oily sheen to it, which was weird.

And there was some like Christmas wrapping paper scattered around it and some other papers too. And from just glancing at them, they looked like a love letter to Scott's ex-wife Shirel. but the handwriting was weird and scrawly and a lot of what he'd written was pretty incoherent so Gay was getting a little worried at this point the house was so still it was almost eerie except there was some faint music coming from the record player which I think makes it like ten times creepier

correct Gay was getting a sinking feeling in her stomach she called out for Scott no answer and then she found him Scott Dell was lying on the floor of his bedroom partially clothed. He'd thrown up on the floor. He was gone. The first thought, naturally, was that Scott had died of the throat cancer that he'd fought so hard to beat over the past year. But Scott was in remission, so it was a shock. And then, there was an even bigger shock.

The autopsy showed that Scott Dell had died of ethylene glycol poisoning. Damn. Which you'll recognize campers as antifreeze. And that big wine bottle, Gay Doherty had seen on his desk, it tested positive for large amounts of antifreeze. When he died, Scott had no signs of cancer anywhere in his body. The police looked at the scene. There was a wine bottle full of antifreeze. There was a sad, incoherent love letter to his ex-wife, Shirel.

There was the fact that he'd been struggling with serious illness over the past year of his life. Remission or no remission. cancer can come back at any time. They looked at the fact that he was very clearly depressed over the loss of his marriage. And they decided, suicide. Now here was Nancy Fillmore, drinking a cup of coffee in the Detective Leopards office, saying, that's not what happened. She said, Shirel hated Scott. All she ever wanted from him was the money.

She told me she wanted the farmhouse, and she wanted the kids, so she could collect the social assistance checks. In 1994, when Scott was diagnosed with end-stage throat cancer, Sherell abruptly put the cabosh on the divorce she'd been pushing so hard for before. She was giddy about his illness, like a kid excited for Christmas. Oh, it's so gross, God. So gross. She wanted to inherit his money, his house. But much to Shirel's annoyance, Scott just wouldn't die.

Well, how inconvenient. Right? He fought. He wanted to live for his kid. and he gave it everything he had. And he won. According to Nancy, Shirel was livid. And she decided to do something about it. She gave Scott his favorite wine for Christmas. She told him, I got this special for you. I had a dream last night that you were drinking this wine, listening to our old music, talking to me about our future. She told him to take his wine, go home, put on our song, and call her. They could

drink together over the phone and talk about maybe getting back together. Scott was elated. Oh, God, bless his heart. I hate this bitch already. But he did what she told him. He called her that night. Nancy said she stayed on the phone with him for nine hours. Making sure he was drinking that wine. When she could tell he was starting to feel the effects of the poison, she told him to go get a notebook. She said, I want you to write down your thoughts about us. us, our future. I want you to write down your biggest fears, too. And Scott did what the love of his life asked him to do. As he wrote, every now and then, Shirel would say, Scott, you still there? Checking on the progress of the poison. My God. So, ethylene glycol poisoning will initially

make you feel and act really drunk. You may remember this from previous episodes. You remember the Julie Jensen case? That was what effect it had on her. She was jumping on the bed and all giddy. and then the awful gastrointestinal symptoms and pain will start as your body fills up with crystals and your organs start to fail. It is not a nice way to die. Not at all. Scott read Choral some of what he was writing. You're here with me. I can see your angel spirit. I love you so much. She could tell he was fading. She said, you can let go now, Scott. The angels will take care of you. Nancy burst into tears at this point in the story. Detective Leppert said, how do you know what they were

saying on the phone? And Nancy said, I was listening on the extension. Oh, my God. Holy shitballs. And it gets worse, y'all. Nancy admitted she'd help Shirel plan the murder. She said, putting the antifreeze in the wine was Shirel's idea. But

she bought the stuff. She said, I'm going to have to live with this for the rest of my life. Boo-hoo. She said she'd watched Shirel pour the antifreeze into the wine with a big plastic funnel. She knew Scott didn't have a strong sense of taste anymore. His radiation treatments had killed it.

Nancy said she'd tried to talk Shirel out of killing Scott. The whole idea freaked her out. But Shirel just kept telling her to shut the hell up and do as she was told. And she went along with it. Oh, what a spineless little worm. I always have special contempt for accomplices. It's like you have the power to save a human life and you don't do it. I'm sorry, you suck.

don't deserve to live on my planet. Yeah, she listened to a man dying and kept her mouth shut for two years. And only when it was convenient for her did she come forward. Yep. It's this kind of apathy that allows evil to exist. But Nancy claimed that Shirel told her, if you don't help me, if you tell on me, I'll tell the cops, you did it. They'll believe me. You're jealous of Scott because you're in love with me. And to be honest, Detective Leppert was wondering about the that right now. Was Nancy just a jealous, jilted, pissed-off ex-lover? Was she making this up? Had she killed Scott herself? He needed more info. He asked her, why are you just now coming forward with this? Nancy said she'd hated Scott at the time. At the time, she thought she was protecting Cheryl and the

kids by helping her kill him. See, Shirell had told her Scott had been abusing the kids for years. But now, Nancy didn't believe a word of it anymore. She was sure it was all part of Sherell's manipulation. She told Detective Leppert, I know now, she made it up. Scott was probably just a nice guy who didn't deserve any of this. And when Leppert asked her if she'd be willing to testify to all this stuff, Nancy said, yep, I'm ready to face the consequences. And that's heavy.

I mean, this woman didn't have to come in and incriminate herself in a murder plot. So when you do that, it tends to make the cops think that you're probably telling the truth. So Leppard and his fellow investigators knew that this was worth digging into, and they set about digging. Okay. So now we're going to put a pin in that for the moment. A lot of pins, a lot of pins in the story. Keep up. The investigations gearing up into the possible murder of Scott Dell. Now, let's cast back to 1970. Wilberforce, Ontario. 15-year-old Shirell met 18-year-old Scott Dell at a party when he stopped on his way across the room to light her cigarette. Now, I don't know about you campers, but I used to be a smoker.

Quit in 2002, thankfully. But back in my smoking days, there was nothing more romantic than a man lightened my cigarette for me. I don't know what it is. There's just something kind of old Hollywood about it. It made me feel like Catherine Hepburn or something. Or maybe Audrey Hepburn. One of the Hepburns, definitely. Just, you know, glamorous.

Even though at the time that I was going to house parties like that, I was probably like wearing a flannel shirt and like a concert tea underneath it. so I don't know if glamorous is the right word, but I liked it, is what I'm saying. I can see, you know, why it turns Sherell's head. Hang on. Flannel and banties is a face? That's just by day-to-day wear. Well, it was a face for me. Well, I don't know.

I still occasionally, you know, wear a concert teen, a flannel shirt. But, I mean, who am I to judge? I literally barely ever get out in my pajamas. The dream. Yeah. But my husband says I have pajama glamour. like he literally did say that one time you definitely do like i feel like you have pajamas that like aren't coming a set my pajamas are literally like a ratty old t-shirt and then like shorts well it's

it's mostly what i wear so i have a wardrobe i have a pajama wardrobe the dream so scott's family lived most of the year in the states in connecticut but his family had a cottage in ontario and he hadn't registered for service in the vietnam war and he decided to move to ontario to have the draft. He later said it was fate that brought them together that he was put on this earth to protect and care for Shirel. Barf. But okay, bless his heart. Okay, campers. It's relationship advice hour. Yay. It's like 30 seconds. So don't do this. No. You don't need to save someone. No. It's not your responsibility. Nor can you. No. And you'll see this throughout the story, but Shirel was real good at getting dudes to think that they're Richard

gear from pretty woman when they're really just like a moth being attracted to it, the bug zapper. And like, here's the thing. Being Captain Savahoe is a real good way to attract someone that's going to manipulate you. Yeah, that's so true. Don't get caught up with somebody that's just going to manipulate you because they certainly don't deserve you. definitely not but you know charelle dell was all scott ever knew of love and as you'll soon come to see that's the greatest damn tragedy of this seemingly very nice man's life they were both young when they

met and they were both free spirit types which i think i've said before it's funny how the phrase free spirit especially when it pops up in true crime stories is basically just a euphemism for a hot mess on toast more for sherell than for scott but scott was smart but he was kind of a lazy student and dropped out of high school in the 12th grade, or as our Canadian friends would say, in grade 12, which I love. He was your standard issue, late 60s, long-haired hippie type. Get a haircut, Scott. I'm just kidding. He hated Richard Nixon in the Vietnam War, and he was a nice guy. You know, he was peaceful, easygoing. Shirel, on the other hand, was troubled. There have been some hints that she may have experienced some abuse at the hands of her grandfather when she was very young,

but it's kind of murky. But for whatever reason, Shirel had behavioral. problems from an early age. She lived with her other grandparents for a few years as a kid, and she was a difficult kid to handle. She needed constant attention, and when she didn't get it, she acted out, like big. At 12, she was hospitalized for meningitis for almost a year. And after that, according to her dad, she had what he called a split personality. I don't think he meant that literally. I think he just means that she changed, and she could kind of turn on a dime, just like Detective Leopert saw, you know, hey, how are you? Who's that? Get her off my porch. You know, in like one second flat. Yeah, and as if the 10 months in the hospital for meningitis wasn't bad enough,

Shirel also had a car accident that year and ended up with back and neck problems. What a year. Damn. I know, right? It probably shouldn't surprise anyone to hear then that she got into drugs at 13. Not just experimentation, apparently, like a worrying preoccupation with drugs. Her family was worried about her, and they moved several times to get Shirel away from Bad influences. Weird strategy for dealing with your kid. I'm pretty sure if she's got a drug problem in one town, she's going to have it in the next one, too. But okay.

And also, after the first time, maybe your daughter is the bad influence. Right? Like, deal with your child. Don't just move. It's ridiculous. In the 11th grade, Shirel dropped out of school. And in the spring of 1970, she went on a three-day acid and speedbender and ended up in the hospital. Her assessment paperwork said, and I quote,

She's an immature, manipulative, histrionic young lady with severe emotional problems. That is one hell of an assessment, am I right? Yeah. It was very shortly after this that she met Scott Dell at that party. But despite all Cheryl's issues, Scott fell hard, and they moved fast, which I'm sure you've noticed. And that's a common theme in these stories. They married on New Year's Eve in 1971. Scott was 20.

Shirel was 17. One month after the wedding, Shirel overdosed on aspirin. She was rushed to the hospital to have her stomach pumped. And as she recovered, doctors noticed she was bizarrely indifferent about the whole thing. She laughed and joked about it. It didn't seem to touch her at all. That's so strange. So in 1975, Shirel left Scott seemingly out of the blue and moved to Toronto.

She got a job as an exotic dancer, and she got pregnant by another man. But despite all that, Scott took her back in 76 and agreed to raise her baby as his own. This little girl did not find out that Scott wasn't her biological father until she was in her teens, which I think is just bananas. And that same daughter would later end up testifying against her mom in court, saying she was scared of her. How many men would raise another man's child like that? It really shows how bad Scott had it for Shirell. It seems like there was literally nothing that she could do to drive her. away. Scott and Cheryl were married for about 20 years, all told. From the mid-70s to the mid-80s,

Scott worked for General Motors, and then they moved and opened up a group home for special needs kids, which is a pretty sharp turn career-wise, right? I'm not sure whose idea it was or if they both wanted to do it, but that's what they did. And in 1987, they adopted a baby girl. So this was daughter number two. Two years later, they bought the farmhouse in Killaloo, where Scott would take his last breath six years later. They continued to run the group home there and they lived what you might call kind of a hippie style lifestyle. Later that year they added a son to the family and life ticked along for a while and then in February of 1992, possibly seeking some clarity about some memories that had surfaced about her grandfather, Shirel joined an incest survivor's group. This is where

she met Gay Doherty, the first woman with whom she became romantically involved and the one who would later find Scott's body. So let's talk about Gay Doherty. Gay was an interesting character. She was really religious in her earlier life, so much so that she'd been a nun for a while, for years and years. But at some point, she decided she needed to broaden her scope, have more life experiences. Specifically, she said this is so cute that she wanted to have a New York cocktail style romance. Adorable. So she tossed her nun's habit into a closet, and she moved to Barry's Bay in Ontario. When she met Cheryl, she was drawn to her immediately. She told the Canadian true crime show the case that haunts me, which is terrific,

by the way, that Shirel was captivatingly beautiful with perfect Barbie doll looks. I wouldn't go that far, but obviously there was a mutual attraction between these two ladies. In July, Shirel took the family van, their only means of transportation, and went to Toronto for a week with gay. Yep, and she's stranded Scott, their three kids, and two special needs foster kids without a vehicle for a week. Like, What if one of the kids that had a medical emergency? Real nice there, Mom. Great. And when she and Gay got back, Shirel had the almighty nerve to tell Scott she wanted her new girlfriend to move in with them. She got a pair on her. I'll give her that. Damn, can you even imagine?

No joke, right? Well, unsurprisingly, Scott said, um, no. Get out. Yeah. He was surprisingly classy to gay about it, though. He didn't yell at her or call her a homewreck or anything like that. like that. What he did do was interesting. He warned her. He said, you have no idea what you're getting yourself into. He was right. Scott's mom said Scott wasn't even angry with Sherell. He thought she was going through something, searching for something. He knew about her troubled history, obviously. He thought maybe she just needed something right now that he couldn't give her. Sometimes going through something is really just being a deluxe meal of crazy. What you need in that case is not a new girlfriend, but instead a licensed therapist. As long as she found what

she was looking for, as long as she was happy, Scott understood. He thought she needed help more than anything. Bless his heart. You know, there's a difference between selfless love and being a dormant. But he clearly really loved this woman. I mean, there's no doubt about that. Shirel and Gay moved in together at Gay's place. And once Sherell was out of the farmhouse, that's when things started getting nasty. Shirell began a relentless campaign of harassment against Scott, almost immediately. She applied for full custody of the kids in possession of the farmhouse. Then, the abuse allegations began. Allegations that would put Scott through a living hell and tarnished his reputation for years, even after his death. She lied about other stuff, too. For example, she told people she had a university

a degree in psychology. Just like Dante Sitorious. Just like Dante Satorius. Oh my gosh. And that they'd bought the farmhouse with money she'd inherited from her grandmother. All lies. Then she said Scott had assaulted her earlier that month. Scott was arrested, but an investigation found the accusation to be totally groundless,

and he wasn't charged. Two days later, Shirel called police. She said Scott had violently assaulted a 13-year-old, developmentally delayed boy in his care. She said he'd given the kid a bloody nose and a fat lip. Police debunked that too. The kids said he was fine. Scott had never laid a hand on him. He was a great foster dad. But child protective services like to try to err on the side of caution and the Dell's foster home was shut down just to be safe. And as a result, Scott had to go on family benefits. Shirell seemed to be relentlessly, systematically trying to ruin his life.

On July 30th, the court granted an interim settlement to their dispute over the house. Scott moved into his family's cottage, and the police began investigating Sherell's newest allegations. These were the worst ones yet. She claimed Scott had been rough with their oldest daughter and sexually inappropriate with their youngest. We won't go into the specific details of that accusation because they're awful and gross, but it was a vile thing she said he was guilty of.

Police talked to the daughter, and soon it became obvious to them that the little girl had been coached. That daughter later talked about how awful she felt about saying these things about her dad, who she loved dearly. None of it was true. She was just parroting what her mother told her to say. Yeah, and, you know, this has got to be one of the most loathsome, just despicable things that you could possibly do to falsely accuse somebody of something like this. And unfortunately, it happens a lot.

custody battles on all sides like moms accused dads dads accused moms et cetera and once that allegation is out there even when it's found to be completely baseless even when you're exonerated from it it can ruin your life for years because people are going to wonder you know right and sometimes it can ruin your life forever and not only that but it puts the kids through hell i mean sometimes they have to go through invasive medical testing and stuff it's just pure evil yeah using your kids as a pawn in a settlement like that is absolutely fucking disgusting It was disgusting. So despite the fact the investigation had found her accusations to be totally without merit,

Sherell kept the bullshit coming until March 1993, almost a year later, when she finally filed for divorce. This bitch wanted full custody, $4,900 a month in child support, from a guy whose livelihood she'd destroyed with her allegations. a guy who is now living on benefits and exclusive possession of the house she said Scott had cheated on her false and abused two of the kids also false Scott countered with his own petition his attorney cited Sherell's

appalling lack of consideration and concern for the interests of the children in her design to destroy the respondent's reputation by repetitive and unfounded allegations of sexual impropriety to mask or mitigate her own inadequacies Boom. Hell yeah. You tell him Scott's lawyer. Scott wanted Sherell's shit out of farmhouse. And he wanted to share custody. Now, see, this shows what kind of guy Scott is. He didn't want to take his kid's mom away from

them, despite what she was trying to do to him. Yeah, I think, like, he would have been completely justified and taking kids' mom away from them at that point. Like, if she's filling their heads with that toxic crap. But he didn't want to. Yeah. So obviously, Shirel saw Red at all that. And she kept at it with the barrage of abuse allegations. Child services investigated for weeks and found the kids happy and relaxed on Scott's care. Scott, on the other hand, was not happy and relaxed. Scott was folding under the stress. He broke down in tears during one interview with Children's Services saying Shirel had always had bad times, but had always gone back to normal before now. This time was different. This time he was worried about our mental

health and notice campers, he's worried about her. Just, ugh, again, bless his heart. And interestingly enough, Gay Doherty had developed some concerns of her own by now. She later described what she called bizarre rituals. She said Shirel went out and bought some stuff and made a doll. Gay called it a voodoo doll. Shirel made the doll look like Scott, Gay said, and quote, put ropes and ribbons and pins in it. She said incantations and chants over this thing and buried in the yard. which freaked former nun gay right the hell out. Yeah. So Gay wanted out at this point.

I mean, this woman was coming unglued. Wasn't just the voodoo doll, although that was obviously unsettling. She was just sick of the constant drama, just all day, every day. And she said she felt like her whole life was being swallowed whole by Sherell's needs. She said, she seemed like a victim. She seemed like she needed somebody to be a caregiver. Not a partner, which is, of course, what Gay wanted to be. But when Gay brought up the subject of breaking up after they'd been together for about three months,

Sherell took an overdose of sleeping pills and antidepressants and had to have her stomach pumped. So Gay decided to stay. A while longer, anyway. She cared a lot about the kids, and she got along really well with them. She was also starting to notice something. Shirel never seemed to want her to be alone with them. In fact, she'd go to great lengths to prevent it. And Gay wondered, why?

I think it was probably a couple of things. First, she didn't want the kids to like Gay more than they liked her, in my opinion. I mean, that kind of selfish, petty jealousy fits Sherell to a T. And also, I think she was afraid Gay might talk to the kids about her abuse allegations and find out that none of it was true. So Gay hung in there another few months, just completely for the kids. And later, in a family court-ordered psychiatric report, a psychiatrist said that Gay seemed to have a better relationship with the kids than their own mother did.

That report also describes Sherell as immature, narcissistic, self-indulgent, inordinately needy, someone who expected others to ignore their own needs and feelings for her wishes, conceded, disdainful, and spoiled. Wow. Holy crap on a cracker. Put some ointment on that, Shirel. There is nothing funnier to me than bad people being dunked on by shrinks. And the shrinks, by the way, are just telling the truth. Yeah, sure. Although, I don't want to see what my therapists have written about me.

I can see it now. She cries, like, way too much and has a morbid fascination with murder cases. Yeah, I can only imagine what a therapist would make of my true crime obsession. So it gets better. The doctor also wrote that she was, quote, inclined to believe she is above the conventions or ethics of society and acts accordingly without considering the consequences of her actions. Although she is likely to be gregarious and outgoing on first impression, she does not relate very well to others. Does not play well with others.

Yeah, I'd call that an understatement. Very much so. He added that Shirel was guarded, highly sensitive to criticism, and adept at manipulating people. He concluded by saying that he believed she suffered from some kind of longstanding personality difficulties. So, narcissist, most likely. Possibly a sociopath?

Obviously, we can't diagnose her, but this dude made some very definite observations that I think tell us a lot about Ms. Shirel's character and her way of relating to the world around her. And it's all scary as hell. So, we're going to leave it there for part one campers, but part two is out already, so you can go ahead and listen now if you want, or save it for later, whatever bobs your buoy. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe, until we can get together again around the True Crime Campfire. You can follow us on Twitter at TC Campfire, Instagram at True Crime Campfire, and be sure to like our Facebook page. If you want to support the show and get access to extras, please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com slash true crime campfire.