True Crime Campfire - The Man Who Wasn't There: The Murder of Shannon Mohr

Episode Date: September 12, 2025

If there’s one constant in the kind of people we cover, it’s this—they’re liars. Con artists trying to scam their way into money, murderers denying their crimes, spouses with secret affairs, liars, all of them. This week’s case is about a man who checks all three of those boxes, a man who learned that, if he didn’t have a conscience, deceit could make him more money that hard work ever did. Once he’d learned that lesson, nothing was going to stop him from lying his way to more and more wealth. Certainly not the continued health and well-being of his wife.Join Katie and Whitney, plus the hosts of Last Podcast on the Left, Sinisterhood, and Scared to Death, on the very first CRIMEWAVE true crime cruise! Get your fan code now--tickets are on sale now: CrimeWaveatSea.com/CAMPFIRESources:https://www.mlive.com/news/jackson/2014/11/man_infamous_for_killing_wife.html https://www.cetient.com/case/people-v-davis-1751715https://www.newspapers.com/article/detroit-free-press-um-2a/75455510/Bonnie's Blog of Crime: https://mylifeofcrime.wordpress.com/2013/06/29/psycho-for-love-david-davis-killed-his-new-wife-shannon-mohr-for-the-insurance-money/"Unsolved Mysteries" Wiki: https://unsolvedmysteries.fandom.com/wiki/David_DavisA&E's "American Justice," episode "The Shannon Mohr Story"Follow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfirehttps://www.truecrimecampfirepod.com/Facebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/truecrimecampfire/?hl=enTwitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.comBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Looking for better games? SlotsGem has so much more. Your favorite games, live dealers, and the best tournaments await. Do yourself a favor and claim the welcome bonus. Shine bright like a diamond with slots gem.com. Terms and conditions apply. Please gamble responsibly. 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. If there's one constant in the kind of people we cover, it's this. They're liars. Con artists trying to scam their way into money, murderers denying their crimes, spouses with secret affairs, liars, all of them.

This week's case is about a man who checks all three of those boxes. A man who learned that if he didn't have a conscience, deceit could make him more money that hard work ever did. Once he learned that lesson, nothing was going to stop him from lying his way to more and more wealth. Certainly, not the continued health and well-being of his wife. This is The Man Who Wasn't There, the Murder of Shannon Moore. So, campers, for this one, we're in Hillsdale County, Michigan, where fields and woods stretch out across the land, and there's really just one little town. This is about as country as you can get. July 23rd, 1980 was a beautiful clear day, more like spring than summer, and

in the early evening, Shannon Moore Davis and her husband David headed out from David's farm for a horseback ride. They were still newlyweds. They'd met less than a year ago at the wedding of mutual friends. Shannon, a 25-year-old nurse, hadn't been doing great at the time. She'd just broken up with her firefighter fiance and was back living with her parents in Toledo. When David Davis, tall and charming, approached her at the wedding reception, she fell for him almost right away. The more she learned about him, the more fascinating he became. How he'd been orphaned as a child, then played in Rose Bowl for the University of Michigan football team, then won multiple medals for valor in Vietnam. After the war, he found great success as a real estate developer and owned farms

all across the country. Not that his life was all sunshine and roses. Until he met Shannon, David had thought he'd never find love again after his fiancé had died in a terrible car accident on her way to their wedding. Now 35, he had decided to live a simpler life in Hillsdale County as a farmer. Shannon was swept off her feet, and so was David. At the wedding reception, the first time he saw Shannon, he told her friend, that's the woman I'm going to marry. He was right. Just seven weeks after they met, they got hitched in Vegas. As you might imagine, Shannon's parents, Bob and Lucille, weren't exactly thrilled by this sudden turn of events, at least at first. It just seemed like a dumb thing to do. What was the rush? But David was charming with Lucille. But David was charming

with Lucille and went hunting and fishing with Bob. Most of all, he made Shannon happy. So her parents quickly came around. They liked David, and they liked visiting the farm. They were there on that day in July, along with Shannon's nephew, and watched the couple ride slowly off on horseback along the country lanes. They stopped off for a little while at the farm of David's friend and neighbor, Dick Britton, then headed off along the trails through the woods. 25 minutes later, David came racing back on horseback across the fields. He was sweating and had blood on his shirt. He told Dick that Shannon had fallen from her horse and hit her head on a rock.

She was hurt, real bad. They drove back to where she'd fallen at the edge of the woods. Later, when the adrenaline wasn't pumping so hard, Dick Britton would think the scene was weird enough that he went back out there with his wife to look around. They noticed, and I absolutely would not have, circular bruises on two tree branches and recognize them as marks where horses had been tied. About seven feet behind each branch were piles of horse poop, again suggesting the horses had been tied up there. What had gotten Dick's attention in the first place was the fact that Shannon had her shoes off and her blouse was

almost completely unbuttoned. Now y'all, you ever hear of somebody who fell off a horse so hard it knocked her shoes off and unbuttoned her clothes? And this was not rocky country. Shannon would have had to be incredibly unlucky to fall and hit her head on something hard enough to seriously hurt her. Like, unbelievably unlucky. For now, though, the most important thing about Shannon

was that she wasn't moving and her skin was a bluish-gray. She had streaks of blood on her chest. She was in serious trouble. They got her into Dick's car and hurried to the hospital. At the hospital, it was immediately clear that they couldn't help Shannon.

She wasn't breathing. Her heart wasn't beating. Her pupils were fixed and dilated. She was gone. Dick Britton called her parents at the farm, but just told them that Shannon had been in a horseback riding accident. When they got to the hospital,

a doctor and a sheriff's deputy came out to see them, and Lucille started screaming, Is she all right? They didn't answer for a moment. and Lucille sobbed out, is she dead? Yes, the doctor said. David told Shannon's parents the same thing he'd told Dick Britton, that Shannon had fallen off her horse and hit her head.

The hospital said she died of a broken neck, consistent with that story. David embraced the distraught Lucille from behind. She looked down and saw scratch marks on his hands. When she looked up and saw similar marks on one side of his face, Her blood ran cold. Right then, she thought David Davis had killed her daughter. But she kept that to herself, at least at first. When the nurse came to ask the family what they wanted to do with the remains,

David said he and Shannon had just had this conversation. Shannon had wanted to be cremated. At this, Shannon's mom lost it and started yelling, she will not be cremated. And soon, the Moors and David were yelling at each other in the hospital waiting room. Oh, Lord. David said he had no life insurance on Shannon and couldn't afford a funeral. Bob Moore said he'd pay for it and begged David to let them take Shannon's body back to Toledo to be buried.

David still said no until Dick Britton, who'd been watching the whole drama play out, jumped out of his chair and said, Dave, that's her parents. They have rights. You've only been married 10 months. Finally, David backed down. When her temper cooled down, Lucille Moore was more convinced than ever that David Davis had killed Shannon. When they first got back from their Vegas wedding, Shannon told her mom that David had taken out big life insurance policies on both of them. He'd lied.

The police, though, were not eager to draw this thing out. We've seen this a dozen times with small town departments. If there's a way for them to quickly rule a death an accident so that, They've still got time to get down to Cracker Barrel for a chicken-fried steak, and they'll take it. A couple of cops spent about five minutes looking around the accident site. They found a half-buried rock with blood on it, and they found Shannon's untied shoes about eight feet away. They gave these to David Davis, and the shoes promptly disappeared. Oh, great. Good job, guys.

Yeah. What's wrong with handing over potential evidence to the victim's brand new husband? Come on. Without any investigation, the authorities accepted. accepted David's claim that he had no life insurance on Shannon. In fact, they never interviewed him at all after that first night at the hospital. Jesus. With no obvious motive and no obvious evidence of foul play, the medical examiner ruled the death an accident. Shannon was buried three days later in Toledo, and her parents learned some surprising things about David, the orphaned war hero. For one thing, the orphan's parents came to the funeral, and from talking to them and other members of his

family, it was obvious that David had never served in the military at all. The successful life of international real estate was likewise a lie. He'd lived on the farm in Hillsdale County for years, on disability payments from an old job. And of course, there was no tragic fiancé who died on her way to their wedding, just an ex-wife who hated him and two daughters he wasn't allowed to see. Basically, his whole life was a lie. And I want to take a minute to look at the Vietnam stuff, because I think it shows just what kind of drama queen bullshit artists we're dealing with here. David, remember, had never been in the military at all and had never served in Vietnam, but he told the Moors he'd been a major in the Marine Corps. He'd been seriously

wounded when, apparently, simultaneously, he stepped on a landmine and an artillery rocket exploded overhead. I guess just one explosion didn't have the narrative oomph he was after. He'd been blinded for a year and still had scars on his back from the explosions. Everyone else in his platoon had been killed by the rocket. He did, in fact, have scars on his back, from surgery on a herniated disc in 1976 after he'd hurt himself lifting some stuff on the farm. He told his neighbor Dick Britton that he'd been injured when his parachute caught him in a tree, and a Viet Cong soldier shot him in the knee. Despite the injury, David said he pulled out his pistol and shot him right between the eyes.

Of course you did, Dave. Of course you did. His friend Tom Davis was a high school teacher, and he invited David to come talk to his class when they were studying the Vietnam War. David told the kids what it was like to hold men in your arms and watch them die, then broke down and wept in front of the class. Good God, man, chew the scenery one. Don't you? Just unreal.

My dude had actually spent the war as a student first, then an encyclopedia salesman, an apartment complex manager, and a hearse driver for a funeral home. That one was prophetic. Now, after Shannon's funeral, David went out for dinner with some of her family. He didn't seem to be mourning at all, just enjoying being the center of attention. He made a toast. To my lovely wife, Shannon, who is looking down on me at this moment. We're all looking down on you, David.

This upset Shannon's cousin, Cheryl, so much as she ran out of the room. David followed and apologized for upsetting her. And then he folded her up in a hug and told her she was now the most beautiful woman in his life. Then he firmly grabbed her butt and squeezed. Oh, my God. How did she manage to stand there? I would have gone like red mist berserker, like just full on screaming out for blood berserker. That man would have been in the ground by the end of the day.

That woman had remarkable self-restraint. A few days later, David dropped off some of Shannon's things at her parents' house in Toledo and told them he was going to a desert to sink. Please do, David, and please stay there until the vultures peck your bones dry. But surprise, surprise. was another lie. In reality, he was flying down to Florida with his girlfriend, because of course there was a girlfriend. Just be patient. We'll get back to her. After the funeral, Bob and Lucille Moore went back to Hillsdale County to see the sheriff, specifically to tell them they thought David had lied

about not having life insurance on Shannon. The sheriff found out that David had in fact taken out three life insurance policies on Shannon, all with double indemnity clauses that paid out double if she died in an accident. He stood to make a little over $300,000, which today would be just north of a million. This made the cop suspicious enough to reopen the case. A month after her death, Shannon's body was exhumed for an autopsy, but this still revealed no evidence of foul play. The cause of death was changed from a broken neck to a traumatic brain injury, which was

still consistent with a fall from a horse. And once again, Hillsdale County determined that the death was accidental. Bob and Lucille Moore were furious and sent letters to the state attorney general. So did Dick Britton, who had become convinced his neighbor, had gotten away with murder. Yeah, Dick is awesome, by the way. He's on this episode of American Justice about it. I know I just said Dick is awesome. Let's move on from it.

Phrasing. But yeah, I love this old dude. He smelled a rat from minute one. he was not going to let it go. He seems like an old cowboy, like the kind who's probably eating a lot of baked beans right out of the can, you know, like under the stars, around a campfire with the other cowboys. He's great. As a matter of fact, Dick took an additional step and went to see Detroit Free Press reporter Billy Bowles. Bowles thought there was a story here, and he started investigating. And he soon uncovered that David Davis was no stranger to insurance

payouts. Not long ago, he'd bought a new property in Hillsdale County and had it insured. And wouldn't you know it, the barn and house on the property both burned down soon after. Separately. Wow, what bad luck. Poor David. In October, Bowles' story was on the front page of the free press, which at the time was one of the biggest newspapers in the country. It laid out the sketchy details of Shannon's death, the lies of David Davis, and the half-hearted investigation of local law enforcement. There's nothing like bad publicity to get the wheels of government turning. Just a couple of days after the story hit the newsstands, the attorney general assigned a state

police detective, Don Brooks, to look into Shannon's death. And right away, Brooks thought he was looking at a murder case. The Moors, meanwhile, filed a lawsuit to stop David from collecting Shannon's life insurance money. David, probably afraid he'd be scooped up by the cops. cops didn't show up in court, and the money went to the moors instead. They also demanded that more tests be done on Shannon's remains, and samples were sent to the Medical College of Ohio and Toledo. And it's a good thing they were. The tests revealed a foreign substance in Shannon's tissue. The lab couldn't identify what it was, but it was a flaming

red flag for investigators. Detective Brooks's investigation revealed that David Davis had briefly been a postgraduate pharmacology student. He also knew that farmers often have access to powerful drugs to help them treat livestock. When he talked to veterinarians about what drugs might be used in a homicide, one of them

made a suggestion that'll be familiar to many true crime nerds. Suxanolene. Hello again, succulent coline. This shit pops up in true crime more than the phrase, it was the kind of town where nobody locked their doors. It's an incredibly powerful, fast

acting muscle relaxant that can be used to medically induce paralysis, like for intubation and other kinds of surgery. It's not really recommended for veterinary use now, but in 1980, it was used a lot in large animals like horses and cattle to briefly relax them for difficult stuff like positioning fractured limbs. It has a lot of legitimate uses in human medicine, but as I'm sure you all will remember, it's also been used in some nightmarish murders. Nightmarish because succulent coline is not an anesthetic. You'll be completely immobilized, but you'll still be awake and aware of everything that's happening to you. It's like being buried alive. Just absolute horror. Detective Brooks's suspicions were essentially confirmed by Shannon's cousin

Torrey, who testified that in the summer of 1980, she'd been visiting the farm and seen syringes in the refrigerator and in the freezer, several medicine bottles labeled anectine, the brand name for succulentoline. Thing is, one of the reasons why this has been a popular drug for murder is that it breaks down really quickly in the body, and at the time was considered impossible to detect. The Toledo lab worked with the renowned Karolinska Institute in Sweden. If you want to know how renowned, this is the place that hands out Nobel Prizes in medicine. Okay. Together, they developed new techniques that allowed them to determine whether the

unidentified substance in Shannon's tissue was succulentoline. And it was. Her body was yet again exhumed, and another autopsy performed with the specific purpose of looking for injection sites, which were found on the shoulder and wrist. And the pathologist determined that while Shannon certainly had suffered a head injury, it hadn't damaged her brain enough to killer, and probably hadn't even knocked her out. Detectives now thought they could piece together what Shannon's murder had probably looked like. She and David had gone out riding, and once they were in the woods, they'd tied up their horses and gotten down on the forest floor for a little, you know, afternoon delight.

At least, that's what Shannon thought this was about, hence her unbuttoned blouse and kicked off shoes. It was a pleasant experience, and she was completely relaxed. And then, David stabbed her in the shoulder with a syringe. They struggled and Shannon clawed at David's hands and face, but soon the drug took hold and she went limp. David went down to her wrist, found a vein, and injected her again. Now that Shannon was completely paralyzed, but still alive, he bashed her head against a rock half buried in the ground

so she'd have the bleeding and bruising that you'd expect from an injury received before death. And then he stood back and watched as his wife, immobile, but still awake and aware, slowly suffocated as the overdose of succulent coline shut down her respiratory system. It probably took about ten minutes, five or six for her to go completely unconscious. Just deal with that fact for a second, how long that would feel like if you were drowning on dry land and fully feeling every moment of it. Just, it's horror movie stuff. In October of 1981, an arrest warrant was issued for David Davis on charges of first-degree murder, but authorities tried to keep this on the hush-hush. They didn't know exactly where David was, and they thought that if he knew he was wanted for murder,

he'd just rabid and disappear completely. And they were very much right about that. David's attorney found out about the arrest warrant and got in touch with him while David was sailing in the Caribbean with yet another girlfriend. His attorney told David he needed to come back north and turn himself in. David said, I'll be there in two weeks. He sailed to Haiti, ditched both his boat and his girlfriend, and poof, vanished. It would be years before authorities had any clue where he'd gone.

So other than a murderer and a liar, who exactly was this guy? While he was missing, investigators were able to piece together a solid picture of his life, especially around the time he knew Shannon Moore. David Davis was born in Flint, Michigan in 1944. He was a smart kid who had, or at least claimed to have, a photographic memory. He was on the high school debate team, as well as being a member of the literary society and the French club. He went on to the University of Michigan where he'd get a psychology degree, and in his junior year, he married his high school girlfriend, Phyllis. the first of their two daughters was born a year later.

Always interesting to me to see how many people who end up murdering somebody studied psychology. I think it's because people with sociopathic tendencies, they want to understand themselves. Like they want to understand why they're different. It's really common for people like that to study psychology. Also, about the photographic memory, okay? I used to serve on the appeals board at the university where I teach. And one time we had this plagiarism case where the girl claimed that she had a photographic memory. And that's how she just happened to type, you know, the exact same answers as the ones that come up on Google for the test questions.

So I was like, all right, show us. Read this passage and say it back to me word for word. I'm a scamp. I'm sure you can imagine how that went. Yeah. Yeah. Girl looked at me like I was Charles Manson. She was so mad.

But what do you expect when you make a claim like? That, like, is really easy to prove, so we're going to ask you to prove it, babe. Don't cheat on your exams. Yeah, that's silly. David did about a semester and a half of Pharmacology Graduate School before dropping out to work at a Chrysler plant. Six years later, David and his family were living on the farm in Hillsdale County, and he was the head of security, with his duties including processing disability claims. And this apparently gave him some ideas. On January 1st, 1974, David was in a mysterious accident at the Chrysler plant and was found unconscious.

This was a holiday, and he wasn't scheduled to work that day, but he'd shown up anyway. He went to investigate a supposed burglary that nobody else knew anything about, and a security guard found him unconscious on the floor. David said he woke up with his fear headaches and was nearly blind. He couldn't read or tell the time, and his sense of smell and taste were impaired. Funnily enough, though, doctors couldn't find this faintest trace of an injury to his head, brain, or eyes. Still, he was placed on medical leave and started collecting disability checks from both Chrysler and the Social Security Administration. In today's money, over the next five years, he made over $600,000 from disability payments.

Rime, a nutley, good God. Obviously, it was a total scam. When his neighbor saw him tooling around in his car, they'd joke, well, there goes the blind man. David never went back to work at Chrysler. Just picked up his checks and made a half-hearted attempt to farm corn and soybeans. He never made any money at it. Right after he accepted a lump sum payment from Chrysler,

his debilitating condition seemed to magically clear up, and he started taking graduate courses in education. able to see and read just fine. What a little prick. You know, it's all the people who legitimately need disability, like, desperately and can't get it. It's just, ugh, makes me sick. Yeah, I was thinking about that, too. It's honestly so infuriating.

It's disgusting. In 1976, Phyllis divorced him and filed for a protection order, alleging that David was violent both with her and their daughters. The order was granted, and she won... custody of their kids. David was never the kind of person to stay single for long, though, and almost immediately started dating a woman named Kay Kendall. We don't know much about their relationship, except that David once excitedly told Kay he'd read about this drug called Soxanolcoline that could, if injected, kill someone by suffocation and leave no trace. It'd be the perfect crime, he told her. Yeah, it would. If you didn't tell any about it beforehand,

you big goob? Shortly after that, in 1978, David put together a false identity, David Bell, and got a Florida driver's license under that name. So a year before he'd even met Shannon Moore, David had already set up the new

life he'd run away to after her death. Now think about that for a second. The premeditation, so, I'm like, before he'd even met her, that is just so creepy to me. Shannon, obviously, wasn't his first choice. He kept asking Kay Kendall to marry him, but she wouldn't.

As far as we know, she didn't have any suspicions along the lines of he's going to murder me for the insurance money and run off to Florida, at least that she was aware of. But I wouldn't be surprised if some part of her had unconsciously put two and two together and was flashing up those danger signs. They broke up in April of 1979. Right away, David had a new girlfriend, Jeannie Holman, to whom he spun a similar yarn to the one he'd done.

used later on Shannon. He was an orphaned war hero and college football star, but with Jeannie, he added a twist that we've heard all too many times before. Get ready for it. He also worked for the CIA. Now, I know we've been here before, many, many times before, but I'm going to just say it one more time, ladies, the guy who just picked you up and wants to get married after six weeks does not work for the CIA. Okay, nobody works for the CIA. Say it with me. I promise you. Shut it down. David did try to get Jeannie to marry him after just six weeks of intense love bombing, wanted to fly her off to Vegas as soon as he could. Jeannie didn't quite say no, but she wasn't sure and kept putting off the decision. And that would not do for Mr. David. In August, he went to the

wedding of his friend Tom Davis, and although he was still dating Jeannie, he made a point to ask Tom if there'd be any single women at the ceremony. And there was, of course, Shannon Moore. She and David started dating immediately after the wedding. They got married seven weeks later, and for the first six weeks of that, David was still seeing Jeannie, too. One week before he and Shannon got married, David told Jeannie the truth. I mean, not the truth, truth. course that would be ridiculous. David told her he was about to start a dangerous super secret CIA mission and wouldn't be able to see her for about a year. As part of the mission, he had to pretend to be married and Jeannie should ignore anything she might happen to read or hear about that

marriage. His wife, wink wink, was the person the CIA was having him protect. But whatever his intentions at the time, David discovered that he didn't want to go a year without Jeannie. He started seeing her again just a few weeks after marrying Shannon. He told her that once the mission was over, the government would pay him around a quarter of a million dollars, right in the ballpark of the amount he'd insured Shannon's life for. In June of 1980, three or four weeks before Shannon was murdered, Jeannie asked David how much longer his secret undercover mission was going to last. Three or four weeks, David told her. Oh, bless her heart. But to be fair, like, in 1980, that was probably a lot easier to believe. You know what I mean? Because people just were not as

true crime aware back then, and there weren't a million stories out there like this. So I can actually kind of forgive her for falling for it, you know? I think back then it'd probably a lot easier to believe that kind of stuff. On July 29th, Jeannie flew down to Florida with David after his long mission was finally over. She didn't know that Shannon Moore was dead and had been buried just days ago. David certainly didn't act as if he was mourning anybody.

Apparently, Jeannie and David's relationship really needed one of them to be mostly unavailable due to secret spycraft. After a year of passionate clandestine hookups, they broke up after just one week of actually living together in Florida. The bloom fell off of that rose quick. Jeannie flew back to Michigan, and David got on with his new life as David Bell. As we saw earlier, David enjoyed the yacht rock lifestyle for a while,

sailing around the Caribbean with a new girlfriend, until he learned there was a warrant out for his arrest. Then he disappeared. The search for David Davis was intense at first. with him making an appearance on the FBI's most wanted list, but the authorities couldn't find him. And other crimes happened. Other things needed investigators' time and attention.

The hunt for David Davis went cold and stayed that way for years. In 1987, Unsolved Mysteries ran a segment on Shannon Moore's death and the vanished David Davis. That show helped investigators catch a lot of assholes, but not this time. Two years later, though, a rerun of the episode aired. A Beverly Hills dentist thought David Davis looked a lot like a guy she dated a few years ago. The show included pictures of David's hammer thumb, which is the kind of thing you notice on someone you know well,

and her boyfriend had a thumb just like that. And there was this. When they were getting to know each other, the dentist's ex had told her his wife Shannon had recently drowned. A stuntman in Hollywood thought the guy on Unsolved Mysteries looked like a buddy of his, Rip Bell, who'd given him a few free flying lessons. But it was an anonymous caller, a woman in Hawaii who called the show's toll-free number to say she thought she knew the man they were after.

Unsolved Mysteries put her in touch with Michigan State Police. RIP Robert Stack, the legend. Ugh, legend. David Davis had kind of a distinctive face, and although half of it was now covered by a big bushy beard, he didn't look all that different. The man this woman knew was called David Bell, although he preferred the nickname Rip. The state's police file on Davis include the fact that when he was young, his nickname was Ripper. That's a pretty ominous name to true crime people, but given how high school nicknames worked, it probably just meant he farted really loud one time,

and was never allowed to forget it. Oh, yeah. David Bell had apparently lived in Alaska and Hawaii and was now a pilot in American Samoa, which I think might literally be as far as you can get from Michigan and still be in U.S. territory. Yeah, probably. Just minutes after this call,

Detective Brooks had the Alaska Department of Motor Vehicles fax over a copy of David Bell's driver's license. Big, bushy beard or not, there was no question about it. That was David Davis. Three days after that rerun of Unsolved Mysteries, FBI agents and Samoan police waited for David to show up at Pongo Pongo Airport. Just before 7 a.m., they saw him walking towards the terminal.

An agent called out, David Davis, and he turned around. Dufus. But when they got closer, he claimed. not to know anybody by that name. When they asked if he was David Bell, he said, yes, and they arrested him. The bushy beard had been trimmed and was now half gray, and he was about 40 pounds heavier, but there was no doubt that this was David Davis, and he finally admitted as much on the long flight back to Michigan. Back in 1981, after ditching his girlfriend in Haiti, he'd grown a beard

and moved to Santa Monica, where he'd had flying lessons and got up. pilot's license. He spent time in Alaska, then Hawaii, pretending to be a doctor, a nurse, and even a professional harpsichord player. I mean, who hasn't pretended to be a professional harpsichord player? Right. Then in 1985, he got a job he was actually qualified for, flying for the small airline Samoa Air, and moved down there. A year later, David, now 41, married a 20-year-old Samoan girl called Maria. I take his word for it, Maria said after David's arrest, which is not exactly a ringing declaration of eternal faith, is it? We don't know quite how their marriage dissolved, but as far as we know, Maria never went to Michigan and just pretty much picked up her life in Samoa.

Under Lock and Key in Michigan, David, of course, protested his innocence and seemed to be astonished that anyone could think he'd murdered Shannon. David, the former pharmacology grad student, seemed baffled by the idea that he'd used succinalcholine on Shannon, claimed to have never even heard of the drug, could barely pronounce it. He said his exes, Kay Kendall, and Jeannie Holman just had it in for him because he dumped them both, those bitches. You couldn't trust anything they said. He apparently thought he could just schmooze his way out of all this. He told Detective Don Brooks that after he'd gotten everything straightened out, they should go get a beer together. The nerve of this prick, Lord have mercy. In November 1989, David Davis' trial for first-degree murders started in the Hillsdale County Courthouse.

This was a tough road to hoe for his defense team. The prosecution had testimony from David's exes and Shannon's family that firmly established David both knew about how sex and succulent coline could be used to kill somebody and that he kept some in the freezer at his farm. The jury learned that David established a false identity. in Florida the year before Shannon's death, and then in quick succession, over the course of just a few months, tried to pressure three different women into quick Vegas weddings. He'd taken out heavy double indemnity life insurance policies on Shannon, then lied about them after her death to try and avoid suspicion. And of course, when the heat was on, he'd run, living as a fugitive for years. He looked guilty as hell, and that was before the physical evidence that showed the presence of

succulent coline in Shannon's body, and the last most thorough autopsy that revealed needle marks on her body and a brain injury that was insufficient to kill her. This was a strong case even without the detection of succulent coline, but that was the part the defense decided to attack the hardest. It's not an uncommon tactic when you're faced with highly specialized and complicated scientific evidence that you know the jury isn't going to be able to fully grasp. Just call it junk science and hope your own expert is more convincing. At the very least, they'll kind of cancel each other out, you know, the defense expert and the prosecution expert

and just kind of nullifies it. The defense tried to make a big deal out of the fact that investigators had never been able to show where David might have gotten hold of succulent coline. But that's the reason why the trial standard is beyond a reasonable doubt, not beyond any doubt. What does it matter where he got it

when you've got a witness saying she saw it in his fridge? The defense focused on the complicated science because they knew they were getting killed in the rest of the trial. Prosecutor Mark Bloomer described the scientific evidence as just frosting on the otherwise well-baked cake. The circumstances surrounding the whole courtship, marriage, and death of Shannon Moore overwhelmingly suggested premeditated murder, even if we never figured out what drug he used. Well said. Two hours after jury deliberation started, it turned out that they liked the cake. David Davis was found guilty of murder in the first degree. That came with a mandatory sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Because he'd successfully avoided capture for so long, he was considered an escape risk and held in the maximum security section in the Marquette prison, surrounded by eight gun towers. He appealed, of course, with more hope than most, the techniques used to detect succinal coline were controversial in the scientific community. But the appeals court decided David's defense had adequately questioned the findings with expert testimony during the first trial, and that the new doubts about the techniques used wouldn't have changed the outcome. David Davis spent 25 years behind bars before he died in 2014 at the age of 70. Now, why do we keep coming across these people, y'all?

these narcissists clowns who are so far up their own asses that they assume everybody's going to believe every ridiculous lie they tell and who think so little of the other people in their orbit that they're perfectly willing to sacrifice any one of them to make their own life a little easier. Even though we see them all the time cover their cases all the time, I still don't understand them. I think that's why we keep coming back to these stories to try our hardest to understand. But like the deadly poison David used to murder his wife, the real answer to that question may stay undetected. 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 Camp Fire. If you haven't booked your spot yet on the Crime Wave True Crime Cruise from November 3rd through November 7th, get on it, y'all. Join Katie and me, plus last podcast on Loll. left, scared to death and sinisterhood for a rocking good time at sea. You can pay all at once or set up a payment plan, but you got to have a fan code to book a ticket. So go to crimewave at sea.com

slash campfire and take it from there. And as always, we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely patrons. Thank you so much to Sophie, Dave, Janelle, and Rachel. 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, add free, at least a day early, sometimes more, plus tons of extra content, like patrons-only episodes and hilarious post-show discussions. So if you can, come join us at patreon.com slash true crime campfire.