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Ummm. Know how to make a dead woman float? Two scoops of vanilla and . . . |
Posted on 03/26/2007 2:44:08 PM PDT by Dallas59
Mar. 25 - For at least two days, neighbors at a city apartment complex noticed an acrid aroma, black smoke and leaping flames coming from two barbecue grills on the balcony of a second-floor apartment. What, neighbors at the Red Oak Place apartments wondered, was going on in the unit where 27-year-old Timothy Wayne Shepherd lived? What was he burning at all hours, for days at a time? The answer turned their stomachs.
According to law enforcement officials, Shepherd dismembered, and then burned the body of his former girlfriend, Tynesha Stewart, a 19-year-old Texas A&M University student. Nothing remains of Stewart's body, Harris County Sheriff Tommy Thomas said at a press conference Saturday.
"I just don't know what to think about it," said Louis Evans, whose balcony faces Shepherd's in the quiet tree-lined enclave in northern Houston. "I thought he was a nice normal person. I guess you never know what your neighbors are doing."
Authorities said Shepherd has confessed to strangling and dismembering Stewart, a college freshman who was home on spring break, because he was angry that she had started a new relationship.
Officials first thought Shepherd had disposed of her remains in a large commercial trash bin that had since been emptied, launching an intense debate in the area about whether the Sheriff's Department should conduct a massive and expensive search of area landfills for Stewart's remains.
Stewart was last seen March 15 and was reported missing March 19. The next day the Harris County Sheriff's Office homicide division launched its investigation.
On March 16, neighbors said they first noticed the unusual activity and the unpleasant odor on Shepherd's balcony.
"The smell was awful," said Evans, who also became alarmed after seeing a blaze shoot out from the grills. "I was wondering: What is he burning? Not cooking, but burning. There is a difference."
At times, Evans said, the flames from the grills leapt dangerously close to the roof of the balcony. Evans says he called 911, but when firefighters arrived, the flames had calmed and Shepherd assured them everything was under control.
A leasing agent at the apartment complex also noticed the thick dark smoke and the intense flames and asked Shepherd what he was doing, Evans said. Another neighbor, 18-year-old James Hebert, told The Houston Chronicle that he often cooked out with Shepherd, and even left his grill at Shepherd's apartment. When he wasn't invited over, he asked his neighbor what was going on. Shepherd replied that he was cooking for a wedding, the newspaper said.
Dionne Whitaker, 31, who lives in the complex, said she saw Shepherd carry the grill and smoker to a garbage bin a day or so later, the newspaper said.
Human remains generally require extremely high temperatures to destroy, and authorities have not said how it is possible that Stewart's remains could be completely burned on a patio grill.
"This certainly turned out to be one of the most heinous crimes I've ever seen in my 38 years (in law enforcement)," Thomas, the sheriff, said Saturday.
Shepherd, who is charged with murder, is being held on $250,000 bond in the Harris County Jail. Telephone message left with his attorney, Chip Lewis, were not immediately returned. On Sunday, the door to Shepherd's apartment was covered with plywood boards.
Agreed. A beautiful young woman with her whole life ahead of her is murdered, her remains are treated horrifically, her family must be in mental hell and some here think it's funny. Makes you wonder.......
Maybe the guy found
a Trioxin cannister
and opened it up . . .
If she hung out with
the kind of guy who'd eat her
the rest of her life
probably wouldn't
have been much of a picnic.
Ooops. I mean, you know . . .
She is a beauty.
What a tragic crime!
Her parents must be devestatd.
I hope he fries for this.
So glad to see your sensitive and grown up side. I have a sense of humor, but this isn't funny.
There's not the least thing about this story this is funny. She was a bright, attractive woman attending Texas A&M University. She had broken off the relationship with this loser and made the fatal mistake of going back to see him one last time while on spring break.
When she disappeared, he became the prime suspect, and when he confessed to killing her and dumping her body in a dumpster, it became a major race-pimping story in town when the Sheriff said that he wouldn't spend the resources to try to locate her body in one of the two landfills she might have been taken to.
Only know we learn that the Sheriff suspected she hadn't been dumped in a dumpster after all.
It was a horrible crime. I'm not sure how they bump it up to capital murder unless they can somehow allege that she was kidnapped before the murder. But I don't know that the facts will show that.
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Ummm. Know how to make a dead woman float? Two scoops of vanilla and . . . |
Only know = Only now
I knew what you meant. Thanks for saying something so nice.
It may have been nice, but I want to discover an angle where we can put a needle in this monster's arm.
The BBQ jokes on this thread disgust me. And I like to kid around as much as anyone.
I know, me too. And we were just discussing this today - that he might get life but not the death penalty. Disgusting.
Good for them...he was a great American.
Amen to that! Slap that stuff onto the meat on the grill and everyone thinks you are a BBQ genius. Good tasty stuff!
BS. Fetuses have a "life interest" to many libertarians.
GMTA! That's exactly what I was thinking when I first read this story.
Not as many as on the thread about the burst sewage dike in Gaza.
That's one of the dumbest things I've ever seen posted on FR.
Stubbs BBQ Sauce is great.
Well, it's coherent . . .
Have you ever visited
the ANS thread?
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