True Crime Campfire - 'Til Death Do Us Part: The Crimes of A.B. Schirmer

Episode Date: March 21, 2025

For people of faith, a minister is supposed to be a figure of trust, a rock to support you in times of trouble. Not everyone who holds that position meets those ideals, though. This week’s story is about a man whose minister’s robes and carefully practiced smiles hid a heart burning with violence and dark desires, someone who would betray every trust given to him and leave pain—not salvation—in his wake. Join us for our latest "Sinister Minister" episode. 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:Investigation Discovery's True Crime with Aphrodite Jones, S4E1, “Sins of the Father" CBS's 48 Hours, S26E17, “Death at the Parsonage” NBC's Dateline, S21E21, “Fallen” Pocono Record: https://www.poconorecord.com/story/news/crime/2013/01/12/suicide-dominates-schirmer-trial-testimony/49162405007/ https://www.poconorecord.com/story/news/crime/2013/01/16/two-wives-one-cause-death/49158909007/ID News: https://www.ldnews.com/story/archives/2015/12/16/schirmer-gets-20-40-years-murder-bethany/77424050/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.

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. For people of faith, a minister is supposed to be a figure of trust, a rock to support you in times of trouble. not everyone who holds that position meets those ideals though this week's story is about a man whose minister's robes and carefully practiced smiles hid a heart burning with violence and dark desires someone who would betray every trust given to him and leave pain not salvation in his wake this is our latest sinister minister tell death do us part the crimes of a b shirmer

So, campers, for this one, were in the tiny community of Reader's Pennsylvania, up in the wooded hills of the Poconos, October 29th, 2008. Secretaries arriving early at the United Methodist Church were alarmed to see the door to the church office standing open, the window in it broken. They cautiously looked inside and discovered an awful scene. 50-year-old Joe Mousante, a builder and carpenter and longtime congregant of the church, sat on the chair behind the pastor's ornate desk, a desk Joe himself had built. Joe Mousante was dead. He had shot himself in the head with a handgun, and as his body slumped in the chair, blood had run down his left arm to pool on the floor.

Joe had been a well-liked member of the church, always ready to help anybody who needed it, and his tragic death was an awful shock. Shock. United Methodist's popular pastor, A.B. Shermer struggled to help his congregation through this dark time. To most, it was a baffling mystery why Joe had decided to end his own life in the pastor's office. To most, but not all. Reverend Shermer had preached at the United Methodist Church for seven years at the time of Joe's death, most of it quiet and peaceful. But A.B. had recently suffered a tragedy of his own. Just three months earlier, his wife Betty had been killed. a car accident. So 2008 had been a dramatic year for this little church, and the drama wasn't done yet. It's hard to keep secrets in a small town, and it didn't take long for one to pop up once investigators started looking into why Joe Mousante had killed himself at the pastor's desk. It turned out that Joe's wife Cindy was A.B. Shermer's personal assistant at the church, with the emphasis very definitely on the personal. A couple of the sources we've seen go to some

lengths to describe what was going on between Cindy and A.B. as an emotional affair, as opposed to a physical one, but I don't know about all that. All we know is what the two of them have said, and, you know, wait till the end of the episode and see if you think these two are the most reliable narrators. This supposed emotional affair had been going on for about a year, since long before the death of A.B.'s wife Betty. Things had come to a head about a month before Joe's death when his and Cindy's 16-year-old daughter Samantha was snooping through her mom's phone, and that's how she described it herself. Now, listeners with teens, come here a second. I hate to break this to y'all, but there's like a 90% chance they're snooping through your stuff. Okay, it's the natural order of things.

So for the love of God, hide the good stuff, okay? Samantha found text messages between her mom and Reverend Shermer that were clearly way beyond the norms of boss assistant communications. I love you. You looked great today, lots of X's and O's, all kind of syrupy sweet, until you stopped to think that one of them was already married, and the other was both her employer and the local minister. This was a heartbreaking discovery for Samantha, as it would be for any teenager who finds out one of their parents is cheating. The news hit her especially hard because she knew perfectly well that her parents' marriage was already in trouble. When he was younger, Joe Mousante had had a lot of trouble with alcohol. At the end of the 90s, after he joined the

church, he'd gotten sober, but in 2008, he'd started drinking again. This was after Cindy and A.B. had begun their kissy-kissy affair. There's no way to know if finding out about that is what knocked Joe off the wagon, but the timeline matches up, and it's the answer that makes the most sense to me. So to Samantha, her parents' marriage was already teetering on the brink, and all of a sudden she finds out that A.B. Shermer is threatening to push the whole thing into ruin. Now, there's not much a 16-year-old can do in a situation like this other than feel helpless as things fall apart around her. Samantha set up a fake email address and sent an anonymous message to AB, warning him that someone knew about his affair with Cindy and he better shut it down. But somehow or other, her mom

and AB found out that Samantha was the one who sent the email. Maybe she sent it from her mom's computer or something. Cindy dragged Samantha into the reverend's office and together she and AB chewed the poor kid out. Aby insisted that he and Cindy just worked together. They were just friends, and Cindy went after her daughter for threatening the good name of this righteous, holy man of God. Oh, man. For a kid who was already worried about her family falling apart, the message from her mom was perfectly clear. Cindy's new boyfriend came first, and the family she already had was a long way behind.

Yeah. Samantha told Aphrodite Jones, the role was almost like parent child. She was defending him. He was the child and I had hurt him. Which is just so messed up I can barely get my head around it. Gross. Yet another mom picking the flavor of the month over her child. It is hard to watch.

Cindy and A.B. told Samantha to keep her mouth shut. She didn't tell her dad either because of her mom's pressure or because she didn't want to hurt him. But she didn't have to. Joe already knew. One day he called Samantha and just asked her, does she love him? She told him the truth, even though it broke her heart. I think so.

Oh, God. On October 28th, AB called Cindy and told her he'd just been on the phone with Joe. Joe, he said, had just threatened to kill AB and then himself, said he was going to kill AB's kids too. And remember, AB is the only source for this call. Part one, yeah. I believe Joe threatened to kill him. I mean, he was sched up and his wife. Yep.

Part two, nah. I think that was just a lie. I can't see Joe threatening to hurt someone's kids. Yeah, it was just a way for AB to dirty him up a little, I think. A.B.'s response was to haul ass out of town, which was probably the smart thing to do. But leaving town was all he did. imagine A.B. Shermer was a normal everyday citizen and his relationship with Cindy was entirely innocent. He gets a call from a dude who, according to him, threatened his life and the lives of his children. Sure, get out of town, but don't you call the cops too? Right. And remember,

A.B. is a pastor. I mean, a member of his congregation is threatening to kill himself. If a religious leader doesn't try to help somebody in that situation, then what the hell good is he? But A.B. did Nothing. Because AB had his reputation to lose. Yep. His reputation was worth more than... Joe's life. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Later, after he'd move in with Cindy, what? They weren't just friends? I'm just as shocked as you are. A.B. would say that Joe's death had done him and Cindy a favor so they could be together. Yikes. Yikes on bikes.

Eich. A phone call from either A.B. or Cindy. could have stopped Joe from killing himself, but neither of them did anything. Joe broke into the Reverend's office that night but didn't find him there. He tried calling people, including Samantha, but no one picked up. Then he shot himself in the head. A few weeks after her dad's funeral, Samantha discovered he had hidden his briefcase and laptop under her bed. In there, she found phone records of calls between AB and Cindy,

notes Joe had made about AB and contact information for Methodist church officials. Not long after, Samantha's aunt, Joe's sister Rose, sent a letter to the area's Methodist bishop asking for an investigation into A.B.'s behavior. Fair, right? It was not the first time the bishop heard about the pastor's affair. Joe had called her, too, the day before he killed himself. A.B. was called to attend what was essentially a church trial, but rather than face, you know, consequences for his actions, A.B. just resigned from the church. Cindy sent a full furious email to all of Joe's family, saying, I don't know which of you made this complaint, but you're all to stay away from me and my family.

This is the family that just lost someone to suicide, and this is how she's talking to them. Not long after, A.B. Shermer moved in with Cindy. So classy. But Joe's sister Rose hadn't only gotten in touch with the bishop. Before Cindy had shut off all communication, she'd told Rose that A.B.'s wife Betty, who died in a car wreck, wasn't the first wife A.B. had lost. The preacher's first wife, Jewel, had also died in a tragic accident, falling down the basement stairs. To Cindy, this just made A.B. a tragic, unfortunate figure, someone she needed to care for. To Rose, who by now had a much different opinion of A.B. Shermer than her former sister-in-law, it was just flat-out suspicious

as hell. And it's going too far to say that A.B. engineered Joe's suicide, but he knew it was likely to happen, knew he was likely to benefit from Joe's death and took no steps to prevent it. Could someone as callous as that be responsible for the death of his wife? For the deaths of both wives, even? Rose certainly thought so, and she told the police everything she knew about the good Reverend A.B. Shermer. The chief of police thought A.B.'s situation was sketchy enough that he assigned Detective James Wagner to reopen the investigation into Betty Shermer's death back in July. Betty and A.B. had met and gotten married in 2001. He was a grieving widower, and she was recently divorced with an adult son. Betty and her family were deeply religious, and she and the

charismatic preacher seemed like a great match. They'd moved to readers not long after getting married and were both popular there. A.B. for his soaring sermons and singing voice, Betty, because she was always friendly and helpful. Everybody loved Betty. There's was an increasingly troubled marriage, though, because throughout his religious career, A.B. Shermer had thought that the best way to minister to his female parishioners was to get him naked and horizontal. By 2008, Betty had almost had enough, and then she died. And they were usually vulnerable women who came to him for counseling, by the way. So he's just a, he's a champ. Peach. Here is A.B.'s version of what happened late on the night of July 15, 2008. Betty had woken up in the middle of the middle of the

night with a really bad pain in her jaw, and A.B. was rushing her to the hospital in Stroudsburg, just about 15 minutes away. Speeding on a dark country road, a deer jumped out in front of their PT cruiser, and I'm sorry, I have to pause for a second. I got to say it, of course this dude drove a PT cruiser. Like, of course he did. That is the most on-brand thing for this man that I could possibly think of. I bet it was one of the purple ones, like you know it was. A.B. claimed he'd swerve to avoid the deer, lost control of the car, and slammed head on into the guardrail. A.B. had his seat belt on, but bad luck, Betty had just undone hers shortly before, and she flew forward, the right side of her head smashing into the windshield. Some unknown time later, a guy named Stanley Dickerson drove by with his girlfriend, saw the crash, and stopped to see if anybody needed help.

This is where things started getting weird. The windows of the PT cruiser were up, the lights were off, and A.B. Shermer was just sitting in the dark in the driver's seat. He wasn't hurt at all. He was just sitting there. I think my wife's hurt, he said. After Stanley asked him to, he turned on the interior lights, and Stanley saw Betty unconscious, soaking wet with blood from injuries to her head. Stanley asked if A.B. had called 911. He had not, even though he had a cell phone and didn't seem at all confused by what had happened. as people often are after car wrecks. He didn't call, and he wasn't out of the car trying to flag down anybody passing by for help. He was just sitting there with his critically injured wife right beside him.

Stanley called 911 and a police car showed up a few minutes later. You could say that the responding officers didn't exactly cover themselves in glory here. You could also say they might as well have driven up in a clown car because they fucked this up nearly as comprehensively as you can imagine. And they're only getting that nearly because one deputy, at least, had the presence of mine to take pictures of the accident scene in the interior of the car. Other than that, there was no investigation at all. And the accident report was just A.B.'s version of events verbatim. We'll look at the crash in more detail a little later once the investigation reopens, but as a taste of how incompetent the initial response was, A.B. said the car's airbags deployed in the crash.

so the official accident report said the airbags deployed, despite them very obviously not being deployed. Oh, my God. The cops had just watched EMTs pull Betty out of the car with non-airbag in sight, but they just copied and pasted that into their report. Wow, great job, guys. Way to protect and serve or whatever.

And doesn't this remind you so much of Matt Baker, one of our earlier sinister ministers, who tried to stage the murder of his wife, Carrie, is a suicide. And that was the same thing. Cops showed up. Oh, you're a preacher? Cool, no problem. Bye. Have a good rest of your day. If the accident had been a little more convincing, we might cut the cops a little more slack. This was rural Pennsylvania. Several of the officers knew Reverend Shermer and his wife. You're not going to jump to, this popular pastor just staged a car wreck to cover up the murder of his wife. But the staging was crude. And just a few seconds of curious thought, maybe not even

curious thought, just thought, would have seen right through it. This was god-awful, lazy police work. Betty, still unconscious and barely clinging to life, was rushed to the hospital. When her son Nate hurried to be by her side, he barely recognized her. Her head was so swollen and misshapen from her injuries. Oh, bless her heart. Nate was deeply shaken up. A.B., on the other hand, looked about as upset as if he'd been watching a baseball game,

and the other team hit a home run. His behavior was really weird. Nate had brought some pictures of himself with his mom, and when a nurse was looking at one of them, A.B. said, out of the blue, you know, she really had a nice ass. Wow. Wow. Way to stay under the radar, by the way, man. Good job. Betty was on life support and the doctors declared her brain dead.

A.B. told Nate that he and Betty had both decided that if something like this ever happened, they wouldn't want to be kept alive artificially. They'd also agreed that if they died, they wanted to be cremated. Nate had to take him at his word. It's something a lot of parents don't discuss with their kids, at least not when they're in their 50s, and have every expectation of a long life. The life support was withdrawn, and Betty died. A.B. didn't waste any time. She was cremated the next morning. The urn that he picked out for Betty's ashes had a deer on it, which struck Nate and others as in kind of bad taste, considering the story A.B. had told about the accident.

But Betty had always been a nature lover. Maybe this was just a sincere reflection of that. I mean, A.B. would have to be a real prick to turn his wife's memorial into some kind of sneering joke, right? On that theme, a couple of weeks after his wife had died in a tragic accident, A.B. met his girlfriend in a motel to boink his brains out. Not Cindy, by the way, this was his other girlfriend, Dawn. A.B. and Don Bear had known each other when they were teens, then reconnected in 2003, when A.B. had been married to Betty for less than two years. He was very quickly screwing around behind Betty's back, and he and Don met up once a year to fool around. Just diddle in a minister in a Poconos motel. All very classy, very sophisticated. A.B. certainly wasn't going to let a little thing like the death of his wife get in the way of his good time. In fact, A.B. had never let having a wife get in the way of a good time. time. He cheated multiple times on Betty, as well as on his first wife, Jewel, most often with members of his congregation, most often with vulnerable women who came to him for counseling.

You know, you don't really think of Methodists as one of the hornier Christian denominations, but A.B. Scherer was apparently determined to change that view because he was a porn-addicted, sex-obsessed, cheating, predatory freaks slamming ass all over God's creation. Share how you really feel, Whitney. Four months later, Detective Wagner was taking a closer look at the crash that had supposedly killed Betty, and the whole thing looked as hinky as hell. Not only had A.B. not used his cell phone to call 911, his car was dented, but still running. The hospital was maybe ten minutes away. He was calm and completely unhurt.

Why not just keep driving after Betty was so seriously hurt? And the fact that the car was still running didn't fit with A.B.'s story either. He'd said he'd been speeding on the dark country road doing at least 55 miles an hour. If you smash into something going that fast, you're going to end up with more than a crumpled front bumper. In fact, computer simulations showed that if AB's PT cruiser was going anything like that speed, it would have smashed through the guardrail and carried on into the woods. It was obvious the car had not been going anything like 55 miles an hour. There was minimal damage, the airbags hadn't deployed, and there were no skid marks on the road,

despite A.B.'s story of breaking and swerving to avoid a deer. And the PT cruiser had a little change bin in the front of the gear shift, slots where you could keep quarters and dimes to pay road tolls and stuff. The photos the deputy had taken showed those quarters and dimes were still neatly slotted in place, which didn't seem likely after a high-speed collision. Based on the damage to the car, Wagner determined it had been going maybe 20 miles an hour. If you hit something at that speed without a seatbelt on, it's not going to be a good time, but it's certainly not going to cause the bloody,

fatal head trauma that Betty had suffered. And the kicker was the blood stains the photographs showed inside the car. They didn't look like the result of a violent crash. They looked more like the result of someone seriously injured, just slumped in the seat for a long time. Most significantly, there were stains that looked to have been pressed into the fabric of the seat, as in there was already blood on the seat when Betty sat or was put in there, because she was already bleeding before the journey began. So it looked like A.B. Shermer had deliberately engineered a low-speed collision with minimal risk of injuring himself. It wasn't enough to cause Betty's terrible head wounds, so what had? Things weren't looking good for A.B. Shermer as far as the death of

his second wife went. But he was a widower two times over, and his first wife, Jule, had also died in a tragic accident. A.B. and Jule had married young, and at the time of her death, they'd been together for 31 years. They spent the last 20 of those in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, where A.B. worked as an associate pastor. A.B. and Jule both loved church music, and they were popular singing duo at regional churches. They seemed to be a devoted couple, but A.B. was already indulging in his lifelong hobby of screwing around with vulnerable congregants behind his wife's back. This This dude used his congregation like his own personal tinder. Just like Jesus would do.

Such a man of God. That's what Jesus said, right? Like swipe right. Swipe right. That's in one of the books, I think. Jule died on April 23, 1999. Here's A.B.'s version. He came home from jogging and found Jule lying on her back on the cement

basement floor at the bottom of the concrete steps, with blood pooling around her head. A vacuum cleaner was beside her, its cord tangled around her leg and ankle. A.B. called 911. When they arrived, the paramedics noted that A.B. seemed weirdly calm and relaxed. He also just vanished after he'd led them to Jule, like he had something else to do. Jule was initially unresponsive, but started to flail wildly when paramedics put an oxygen mask on her. They transported her to a trauma unit for head injuries as quickly as they could and friends and family hurried to the hospital. This included Jules' dad and her brother John. When they got in to see Jule lying unconscious, she had swollen eyes, a bruised head, cuts and bruises on her arms,

split knuckles, and swollen fingers. John later testified, it looked like she was hit by a truck. It looked like she'd been in a fight and somebody had given her a beating. My dad turned to me and said, something's not right. Yeah, that does not sound anything like the kind of injuries you'd get from a fall. Dr. Ross, the forensic pathologist who examined Jule after she died, agreed. In his report, he noted that Jewel had plenty of cuts and bruises, but not the injuries you'd expect from a hard fall down concrete steps, no cracked ribs or anything like that. He did find multiple impacts to the right side of her head, maybe 14 of them. And there was no way to get those by falling down the stairs. He listed the cause of death as undetermined and suggested the police investigate it as a possible homicide.

Jules' brother, John, suggested the same thing. He and his dad had gone to the Shermer House and looked in the basement and saw that big patches of the floor and wall had been scrubbed clean. A.B. told them the paramedics had done that, which was obviously ridiculous. For God's sake, yeah, the paramedics are going to hang around and play Molly Maids for your dumb ass. Are you kidding me? They got better things to do. Yes. I'd love for you to suggest that to an EMT. I'd love for you to go up to your nearest EMT and be like,

can you scrub the blood from the floor while you're here? Like, I, please. I, my cousin. Just hand him. Yeah. Just hand him a mop and some cleaner. Yeah. My cousin's, my cousin's a paramedic and I, I, I, please.

Please do it. Please. Someone, and I'm guessing it was A.B. had told the cops, Jewel had a heart condition and must have fallen over after a heart attack. Just like with Betty's car crash, the authorities went along with the respected pastor's version of events and didn't care to investigate further. Perhaps because a pastor would never lie. Perish the thought. Even with the pathologists telling them there was something fishy here, the Lebanon County DA's office wasn't interested. Jewel had been an organ donor, and a couple weeks later, the doctor who'd removed her heart told Dr. Ross it had been perfectly healthy. Still, the DA wasn't interested. Case closed. If Lebanon County hadn't just been sitting there with their entire thumbs up their asses, Betty would still be alive, and most likely Joe Musante, too. Not only had both of A.B. Shermer's wives apparently died in tragic accidents, they'd both suffered serious injuries to the right sides of the head, which is stretching coincidence to a breaking point. A.B. was looking less like a tragically unfortunate husband and more like a spousal serial killer with a particular M.O. Michael Peterson, anyone? Sorry, guys. I've never bought The Owl Theory. No.

In December, investigators got a warrant to search the church parsonage where A.B. had lived with Betty. A.B. had moved in with Cindy by now, but to make sure he wasn't around during the search, the state police called A.B. in for an interview, supposedly to get more details about Joe Mousante's suicide. While he was in the interview room, detectives were opening up the garage at the parsonage. There were signs of the garage floor being cleaned, but A.B. had been careless. Almost immediately, detectives found blood drops on the concrete. On one side of the garage were stains that looked like blood had been partially washed away with water. This was where the passenger side of the PT cruiser would have been. Luminal revealed a trail of blood leading from the back door of the garage to the side of the car, where there was a larger pool of blood. Detectives thought this was where AB had propped a bleeding, unconscious Betty against the car while he opened the door. Detective Wagner called up the state police who were talking to AB and got them to ask him if he or Betty had ever bled significantly at the parsonage.

He told him, no. because he is a dumbass. When the cops said that blood had been found in the garage, though, A.B. suddenly remembered that Betty had cut herself really badly the previous summer while they were moving firewood out of the garage. Sure enough, police at the parsonage found a stack of wood out in the yard. They started looking through it for blood evidence, and at the bottom found a bunch of old newspapers, dated September 2008,

two months after Betty had died. Investigators by now had no real doubt that AB had murdered Betty, and most likely his first wife, Jewel, too. But as far as taking the case to trial went, they were still kind of short on hard evidence and motive. In a lot of cases of spousal murder, like we've seen a million times on this show, a hefty life insurance policy provides all the motivation a jury could want. But that wasn't the case with either of AB's wives. When investigators got hold of emails between AB and Cindy, they uncovered one possible motive. that he was just a horny old bastard who wanted to screw around. He told Cindy that after menopause,

Betty had lost interest in sex and did not enjoy it, which doesn't say much for our Methodist Lothario's skills in the sack, in my opinion. For A.B., who apparently thought about sex more often than a teenage boy, for Betty to not be interested in boning him, was a fatal flaw. Literally. Investigators came to believe that Betty had found out about one or more of A.B.'s affairs and was threatening to divorce him and expose his shitty behavior. A.B.'s carefully crafted persona as a moral pillar of the community would come crashing down.

He might even lose his job. He had already racked up quite a backlog of complaints about his behavior with female parishioners, and this might be the straw that broke the camel's back. So either A.B. would have to face the consequences of his actions, or maybe Betty could just suddenly be out of the picture. A.B. had moved in with Cindy, which meant he also moved. moved in with her 16-year-old daughter Samantha, and he and Cindy pressured her to not talk to the detectives. Samantha thought A.B. was indirectly responsible for her dad's death. As soon as she turned 18 and no longer a minor, she left home and did what she could to help investigators,

getting them access to emails and text messages. Two years after Joe Masanti's death, Samantha called investigators in a panic. She just learned that her mom and A.B. Shermer were going to get married, and she was worried that Cindy was going to wind up as number three in A.B. series, bludgeoned to death and then insert it into a staged accident scene. There's every chance this would have happened as soon as he got bored of her or a better option came along. Someone who gets away with two murders is less likely to hesitate about a third. Yep. What was it? Ted Bundy said it gets easier every time. Prosecutors were still a little leery about whether they were really ready to go to trial,

but they had no idea of A.B.'s mental state and didn't want to risk another victim. On September 10, 2010, cops put the old habeas grabis on A.B. Shermer at the house Joe Massanti had built for himself, and where the unemployed A.B. had been living and sponging off of Cindy for almost two years. The case against A.B. was mostly circumstantial, but as we said before, circumstantial doesn't mean weak. And the prosecution was able to bring forward some compelling expert testimony. as their investigation into Betty's death stretched back to include Jewel, investigators met with Dr. Ross, the pathologist who tried to get the police to investigate Jules' death as a homicide. Although Betty had been cremated, she had been taken to the hospital with a serious head injury.

The doctors there had taken a cat scans of her skull. When Dr. Ross examined them, he found Betty's injuries to be creepily similar to the ones he'd seen on Jule years earlier. multiple linear impacts on the right side of her head with a heavy cylindrical object, most likely a crowbar. The odds of either woman receiving those injuries in the accidents they'd supposedly suffered were slim to none. The odds for both of them were just none. Having AB's dirty philandering laundry on display at trial did give his defense team a tactic

to try. A.B. was being tried for the failings of his character as much as the crimes he was charged with, and the media circus around the case had robbed him of the chance of a fair hearing. That was basically Scott Peterson's defense, too. Just because he's a cheater and a liar doesn't mean he's a murderer, too. That's a pretty tough sell, though, and everyone in court could tell it wasn't working, so A.B. decided to swing for the fences and testify in his own defense. Anyone surprised? It's right out of the narcissist playbook, Chapter 3, if you get caught.

He was a preacher with decades of experience playing to a crowd, renowned wherever he'd worked for for his oratorial skills. On the stand, he turned his chair toward the jury so he could address them directly, leaning forward, making eye contact, trying all his little persuasive tricks. Remember, campers, charm is a verb. But he didn't like what he saw in the eyes of the jury. As deputies led him back to his holding cell after he'd testified, he told them, I just got life in prison.

Yeah. He wasn't wrong. At least he's realistic. Mm-hmm. The jury took just 90 minutes to convict A.B. Shermer for the first-degree murder of his wife, Betty. A.B.'s daughters from his marriage to Jewel, Amy and Julie, described his conviction as another tragedy, refusing to accept that their dad could have killed Betty. When authorities told them that the ruling on their own mom's death had been changed from undetermined to homicide,

Julie told Richard Schlesinger of 48 hours that she was angry. She just didn't believe her mom's death had been anything other than an accident. When pressed that the pathologist had found 14 blows to Jules' head, Julie just flat out said she didn't believe the pathologist. We've seen this kind of denial dozens of times with both the parents and kids of killers, just the complete inability to see that someone they love is a different person than they thought. It's both really, really sad and really frustrating and understandable. I mean, I honestly can't say I'd react any differently.

If one of my parents was accused of murder, like, I mean, even if there was a ton of evidence, it's just really hard to wrap your head around that. By the end of 2015, the year that episode of 48 hours aired, A.B. had taken a deal, pleading no contest to third-degree murder charges relating to Jules' death, getting an extra 20 to 40 years along with his current sentence of life without parole. He still insisted he was innocent and just took the deal so his family wouldn't have to go through another trial. As for Cindy Mousante, crank up the Tammy Wynette, because she stood by her man. She and A.B. never got married, but she sent him $600 a month in prison.

What do you even spending that on in there? Is the commissary that freaking expensive? Maybe it is. and as far as we know, she's still doing it. She treated A.B.'s kids like her own. Of course, she already had a daughter of her own, Samantha, and that relationship was the price Cindy paid for sticking with her sleazy pastor. I don't have a relationship with her, Samantha said. I can't really say that she's my mother. She's not the woman who raised me.

Another sad ripple from the selfish actions of one man. A.B. Shermer is certainly not the first pastor this can be applied to, but he's essentially a con man, the dangerous type who can turn to violence without the slightest spark of conscience if he decides it's in his own interest to do so. His con wasn't for money. It was to get respect and a whole lot of illicit sex,

and he spent decades building the lie of a moral man of God so completely that almost everyone who knew him was suckered into it. Some of them were still getting suckered into it. There were tragedies in this case, but none of them were accidents. Betty and Jewel were both sweet people who everyone loved, who never did anybody

any harm. The only thing they did wrong was to fall for a psychopath's snow job. Their violent deaths at the hands of this monster sent pain and shock through dozens of lives. I think we'll leave the last word to Betty's sister Tina, who said after A.B.'s conviction,

I just hope he suffers, and I hope he's in pain and rots in there. Amen to that. 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, your lights and stay safe until we get together again around the true crime campfire. And as always, we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely patrons.

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