Deadly Engagement - Ep. 2: He Said, She Said

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Speaker 15 Some stories are written before the first keystroke, as if the ending were a foregone conclusion. That's particularly true of those stories in which a man or woman attempts to live a double life.

Speaker 15 Cheating business partners, for example. Deceiving old friends.
Lying to lovers.

Speaker 16 I was shocked. It was nothing there to make you doubt their love and where they were headed.

Speaker 15 The beginnings of stories like that are as easy as sliding between satin sheets. That's when those lies of omission are tiny ones.
When dishonest acts can go unnoticed.

Speaker 16 I cannot tolerate a liar.

Speaker 15 I don't lie for my children.

Speaker 16 I don't lie to my children.

Speaker 15 And the endings to those stories?

Speaker 15 You won't be shocked when I tell you, they usually don't end well.

Speaker 15 There's some people in this world, you go, okay, well, they got themselves in a mess. We watch this kind of stuff on TV all the time.

Speaker 15 That's when secrets can be revealed in a pyrotechnic display of guilt and public humiliation.

Speaker 17 The shame, it was there for everyone to see.

Speaker 17 Everyone to see.

Speaker 16 The main thing is I wanted my friend to be there and for us to continue living life. So no matter what the circumstances were, the main point is Danita's no longer with us.

Speaker 15 This is a story about a promising young life, one cut much too short, in part due to the actions of someone they loved. The decisions we make make us, I mean, this is

Speaker 15 sad.

Speaker 10 Yes, it was a tragedy.

Speaker 16 And yes, I lost my daughter. I knew that she was going places.

Speaker 15 I'm Josh Mankowitz, and this is Deadly Engagement, a podcast from Daylight.

Speaker 15 Episode 2: He Said, She Said.

Speaker 15 It was mid-afternoon when Detective Sean Pate walked into interview room 2 at the Durham Police Headquarters. Danita Smith had been dead for about 30 hours.

Speaker 15 Waiting for him in an uncomfortable chair was Danita's fiancée, Jameer Stroud. He sat at the left end of a small table that was shoved up against the far wall.

Speaker 17 When I walked in, Jameer stood up, introduced himself, and shook my hand.

Speaker 15 And he doesn't show up with an attorney.

Speaker 17 No.

Speaker 15 And he doesn't say, I can't talk to you about this now.

Speaker 17 No, he wanted to talk about anything we wanted to talk about.

Speaker 15 And when he's asked, do you know anybody who would want to hurt Danita?

Speaker 15 He says, no. Correct.

Speaker 17 But he was also asked, Do you know anyone that drives Burger Def SUV? And he tells us about Shannon Crawley.

Speaker 15 Jameer began to unspool a story, a tale of two cities, of two women, of two different realities.

Speaker 15 Shannon Crawley, Jermir explained, was a 911 operator in Greensboro, the person who asks you where and what your emergency is.

Speaker 15 Jermeer told the detective, Shannon Crawley drives a Burgundy Ford Explorer.

Speaker 17 He tells that he met Shannon when he was in the police academy. and she was one of the people that was in the training session.
He said, yeah, she caught my.

Speaker 17 I mean, she's 5'10, long, pretty hair, thin. And we spoke for a short time.

Speaker 15 This was in early 2003, and Jermir was well into his relationship with Donita Smith. So he did little more than smile and

Speaker 15 remember Shannon's name.

Speaker 17 Around 2004, they bumped in again through work. And he asked her for her number.

Speaker 15 And at this point, he's involved with Donita.

Speaker 17 Involved with Donita. And

Speaker 17 he actually said that he told Shannon that he was involved with Donita.

Speaker 17 Well, in 2004, they start having a relationship that actually started kind of like friendly, but then turned sexual toward the end of 2004, around September of 2004.

Speaker 15 Jermeer told the detective Shannon was a single mother of two, a boy aged 10, and a daughter. who was eight.
Jermeer also said that in December of 2005, Shannon became pregnant.

Speaker 15 There was no question who the father was.

Speaker 17 When Shannon said, Jameer, I'm pregnant. What are we going to do? He said, I don't want to have a baby with you.
He told me that's how he said it.

Speaker 15 Not just, I don't want to have a baby, or I don't want to have a baby right now.

Speaker 17 I don't want to have a baby with you. And that was in December 2005.
I imagine that sucked just a little bit of her soul out when she heard those words.

Speaker 15 That had to sting.

Speaker 17 I imagine it did.

Speaker 15 In January 2006, Jermeer said, Shannon had an abortion, and the two of them decided to go their separate ways.

Speaker 17 The boyfriend-girlfriend thing, there was no more going to movies together. There was no more sleeping together, going shopping together, that kind of thing.

Speaker 17 It was more just see you in passing at work.

Speaker 15 So basically, they broke it off.

Speaker 17 They did.

Speaker 15 According to Jermir, the two barely had any contact for the next six months. Then, one evening in July 2006, he says he spotted Shannon's Burgundy SUV driving around his neighborhood.

Speaker 17 He said, look, like everywhere I am, she pops up.

Speaker 15 Then, months later, in November 2006, Jermir said he learned Shannon had bought a home in his neighborhood, just half a mile from his house.

Speaker 17 He said, you know, I did actually have to go to speak to one of my friends at Internal Affairs about it. Not an official complaint, but

Speaker 17 kind kind of judging where do I go from here. She moved into my neighborhood

Speaker 17 and then she's joined my church.

Speaker 15 It's worth noting that November 2006 was also the month Jermir asked Danita to marry him. And she said yes.

Speaker 15 It's the month Danita put on that ring. The future may have looked bright to her.

Speaker 15 But Jermir, no doubt, feared what could happen if the two lives he'd led bumped into one another.

Speaker 17 I said, Well, have they ever met? And he said, No, they've never met. Shannon knew about Donita, but Donita had no clue.

Speaker 17 And everyone I spoke to about Donita said if she even suspected she would have been out of that relationship, she had too much dignity for that.

Speaker 15 So this was an affair Jermir was hiding. Correct.
The detective estimated Jermir Stroud at about six feet tall and a solid 190 pounds.

Speaker 15 Except as the hours passed, and as Jarmir doled out the details of his affair like small change,

Speaker 15 he seemed to grow smaller.

Speaker 17 When we mentioned Donita, his head dropped, I mean chin to chest every single time. And the shame in his eyes was, it was there for everyone to see.

Speaker 17 Everyone to see.

Speaker 15 Jar told the detective the last time he laid eyes on Shannon Crawley was two weeks earlier at Christmas Eve services at their church.

Speaker 15 Donita, who was with him that day, was all smiles as Jarmeer introduced her to friends as his fiancée. It should have been an unadulterated moment of joy.

Speaker 15 Except, seated three rows behind him and Danita that Sunday was Jermir's ex-lover. And if Jarmir turned around to look at her, he did not mention it.
The two women did not actually meet that day.

Speaker 15 There was no chilly confrontation, no no ugly scene in a church on Christmas Eve to mar the season.

Speaker 15 Okay, but what about now? With Danita murdered? Jermir wondered if Shannon had preferred her revenge on him and Danita to be served cold. How did Jermir describe Shannon?

Speaker 15 Dangerous, unpredictable, violent?

Speaker 17 I remember when I interviewed him in length the next day, I asked him, do you think that Shannon is capable of killing someone? And he said, yes.

Speaker 15 Soon after Jermir left the police station, Detective Pate called the Greensboro PD.

Speaker 15 He was on his way, he told them. He wanted to talk with one of their 911 operators, name of Crawley, Shannon Crawley, he said.

Speaker 15 By the time Detective Pate and a partner arrived at the 911 center in Greensboro that evening, Shannon was waiting with a story she wanted to tell.

Speaker 17 As far as she knew, we were there about Jameer.

Speaker 15 And Shannon Crawley had plenty to say about Jermir Stroud. In fact, just that morning, she had filed a complaint with Internal Affairs, accusing Jermir Stroud of stalking her.

Speaker 17 Shannon hears through a friend that the police department is looking for 5'10 black female that drives a Burgundy SUV.

Speaker 17 Shannon gets up, goes and speaks with her supervisor, and wants to make a complaint against Jameer.

Speaker 17 And starts rattling all the wrongdoings of the past and in the relationship.

Speaker 15 Interesting. So that first day that she's a suspect, Shannon files a complaint against Jameer.
Correct. Alleging.

Speaker 17 Well, it was internal or affair issues, but basically boiled down to stalking.

Speaker 15 He was stalking her.

Speaker 17 He was stalking her. Calling her at work all the time, showing up at her house unannounced.

Speaker 15 As you will see in future episodes, that stalking allegation would remain a point of contention throughout this case. How is she?

Speaker 17 Honestly, she was pretty calm, easygoing, kind of like us sitting here.

Speaker 15 She was, as they say in Carolina, a long drink of water, tall and thin, with thick hair that fell to her shoulders. What'd you ask her?

Speaker 17 First, I asked her about Jameer, whatever, and she admitted that she knew him and about the relationship that they'd had.

Speaker 15 Shannon's version of the story mirrored what the detective had heard from Jermir.

Speaker 15 They met in 2003, became lovers in 2004, and the romantic relationship ended after Shannon's abortion in January 2006. A year before Danita was killed.

Speaker 17 A year.

Speaker 15 And whatever contact they had during that year, Shannon and Jermir, you don't think there was anything untoward going on.

Speaker 17 I honestly believe them because they both agreed on what it was about.

Speaker 15 Then the detective turned the line of questioning to the murder.

Speaker 17 She says she's never been to Durham. I ask her about owning a gun, and she tells me that I've never owned a gun.
I can't stand guns. I'm scared of them.
I said, okay, I can understand that.

Speaker 17 A lot of people feel that way.

Speaker 17 And i asked her where she was the day that denita was killed and she told me that she was at a doctor's appointment with her one of her children

Speaker 15 then the detective asked shannon a version of the same question he had asked jarmeer hours earlier

Speaker 15 did she think jarmeer could have killed danita

Speaker 15 she told me that she didn't think jameer was capable of violence she wasn't scared of him Shannon would later change her story about how much she feared Jarmeer Stroud, but more about that later.

Speaker 15 Several times during the interview, Shannon excused herself and left the room to either take or return phone calls.

Speaker 17 So everything is all glass soda. She gets up and she goes outside and speaks in the hallway.
And we can't hear anything she's saying, but we can see her reactions.

Speaker 17 And she's, you know, trying to be calm. But, I mean, it was a serious situation.

Speaker 15 She wasn't doing you know some people talk and they get their their hand gestures wasn't a lot of that Shannon told the detective she was speaking with her sister and brother-in-law who were at that very moment driving down to North Carolina from New Jersey I said why are they coming down she said to watch my kids

Speaker 17 To watch your, where are you going? To watch your kids for what?

Speaker 15 Why do you need somebody to watch your kids?

Speaker 17 We didn't get an answer on that one. She just looked at me.

Speaker 15 According to Shannon, her sister and brother-in-law were telling her she needed a lawyer and that she should get up and leave that interview.

Speaker 17 I told her about wanting to search her card and naturally she didn't want that to happen.

Speaker 15 After about an hour and 40 minutes, Shannon told the detective she had had enough.

Speaker 15 And out the door she went.

Speaker 17 She was frustrated and she was leaving.

Speaker 15 Minutes after Shannon left the room, Detective Paint says one of her supervisors handed him a note. There was another 911 operator named Ronnie.

Speaker 15 He was waiting in the hall, and he had something he wanted to tell police.

Speaker 17 Ronnie was white male, I don't know, probably 40 years old,

Speaker 17 short, want to say sandy, blondish hair.

Speaker 15 Ronnie told the detective he and Shannon were friends and often ate their lunches together. He said Shannon had spoken often about her ex-boyfriend, Jarmeer Stroud.

Speaker 15 And Ronnie corroborated the story Shannon had just told in that interview room with

Speaker 15 one important addition.

Speaker 17 She said something about fearing for her safety. And, you know, he's a cop.
He always has a gun. I don't feel safe.

Speaker 15 Do you have a gun I can buy?

Speaker 15 The detective was all ears.

Speaker 17 He was anxious to tell. Not so much as far as like, ooh, I'm going to tell on her.
It was like, hey, I don't want this to come back on me.

Speaker 15 According to Ronnie, it was sometime in late October 2006 that Shannon asked him if he could sell her a gun. That was two months before Danita Smith was murdered.

Speaker 17 He said that he sold Shannon a.38 caliber Taurus revolver with hollow point ammunition.

Speaker 17 In my mind, I'm thinking, you know, wait a minute, I just finished an interview with her five minutes ago, and she told me I never owned a gun.

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Speaker 15 It was nearly 9 p.m. when Shannon Crawley walked out of the 911 Operations Center in downtown Greensboro that night and into a light drizzle.

Speaker 15 Under the city's lights, the parking lot looked as if it were coated with a sheen of black lacquer.

Speaker 15 As she approached her vehicle, a burgundy 1999 Ford Explorer, Shannon saw a police car and a couple of officers standing near it.

Speaker 15 By then, a photo of the SUV had already been emailed to the maintenance man at the campus crossing's apartments.

Speaker 15 He confirmed Shannon Crawley's Burgundy Ford Explorer looked exactly like the one he'd seen the day before.

Speaker 17 She came out to the car and the look on her face She did not expect to see everyone out there around her car when she came out. She thought she was going to get in her car and just ride off.

Speaker 17 And that didn't happen.

Speaker 15 When asked to unlock the vehicle so officers could search it, Shannon refused.

Speaker 15 That standoff lasted several minutes when the ranking officer told Shannon that if the police had to break a window to gain access, the repair cost would be on her.

Speaker 15 Shannon then unlocked the door and

Speaker 15 Gotta ride home.

Speaker 15 A couple of hours passed before police received a signed search warrant allowing them to enter the SUV.

Speaker 15 By then, rain was coming down in sheets. So hard, in fact, investigators feared the rainwater would destroy potential evidence if they tried to do a proper search right there.

Speaker 15 So the SUV was towed to the Greensboro Evidence Garage. where it could be securely stored until police technicians could conduct a thorough search the next day.

Speaker 15 The Ford Explorer wasn't the only thing investigators wanted to search that night. They also had a warrant to toss Shannon's house.

Speaker 15 It was after 1 a.m. when Detective Pate and other investigators rolled into the suburb where Shannon Crawley lived.

Speaker 15 Although it was dark, The detective could see this was a neighborhood where lawn care and home maintenance were clearly priorities.

Speaker 15 Shannon and her kids were not there, but a neighbor who had a key was on hand to let investigators in.

Speaker 17 When we served a search warrant on that house, there was hardly any furniture in that house. The children were well cared for.

Speaker 17 Their room, you would never know, but the living room, her room, there was no, she looked house poor.

Speaker 15 The good thing about a nearly empty house is, It's easy to search.

Speaker 15 And for the next two hours, investigators went over that house, looking for a gun, for bullets, journals, emails, anything that could conceivably connect law-abiding Shannon Crawley to the murder of Denita Smith.

Speaker 17 So we searched for the rest of the house, and we do find Greensboro Communication 911 Center uniforms.

Speaker 17 And they are exactly as described by the maintenance supervisor, down to the color, the patch, and the shape.

Speaker 15 You find a gun?

Speaker 17 No gun was found. No bullets were found.
Nothing incriminating other than that.

Speaker 15 The detective hoped crime lab technicians might find something else more incriminating once they were able to take a look inside that burgundy SUV. Is there a gun in the car? Nope.
No gun in the car.

Speaker 17 No bullets. Nothing that just screams, hey, it's me.

Speaker 15 The gray interior of the Explorer looked the way you'd expect any single mom's car to look. Children's clothes and notebooks, games and candy wrappers, plastic shopping bags and empty soda bottles.

Speaker 15 The back seat on the passenger side was folded down, extending the cargo space.

Speaker 15 There, along with boxes and more clothes, was a pillow, suggesting that at some point somebody might have stretched out there and taken a nap.

Speaker 15 It turns out the real find in that explorer was invisible to the naked eye.

Speaker 17 We did gunshot residue tests on the car, which we swapped a steering wheel. You'd swap anywhere where a person would touch.
Steering wheel, the window handle, gear shifter, you know, normal areas.

Speaker 15 Gunshot residue is basically just sort of like microscopic dust. That's exactly what it is.
It comes off the gun onto the person using the gun. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 17 It's going to be the microscopic dust from the powder that comes from the bullet itself.

Speaker 15 And if you touch something else, you can transfer that back. Exactly.

Speaker 17 That's exactly right.

Speaker 15 So you test Shannon's car.

Speaker 17 Test her car and comes back. There is gunshot residue in the vehicle.

Speaker 15 Tests showed gunshot residue on the steering wheel and the driver's seat. Shannon's a police department employee, but a civilian employee.
Yes. So she doesn't carry a gun.
No.

Speaker 15 She doesn't regularly qualify at the range or anything like that.

Speaker 17 Not at all.

Speaker 15 That gets you pretty far down the road, doesn't it? It really does.

Speaker 17 And the story starts to unravel.

Speaker 15 That bit about never owning a gun? Not true. If the co-worker who said he sold her a gun was to be believed.

Speaker 15 Shannon's story about having a doctor's appointment for her child on the morning of the murder? Well, the detective checked with the child's doctor and learned there was no appointment.

Speaker 15 And as for having never been to Durham, well, cell phone records show she or her cell phone had been in Durham the day before Danita Smith was murdered.

Speaker 17 Nothing is adding up. Actually, almost every single fact.

Speaker 17 that she gave me turned out to be a lie.

Speaker 15 As the detective merged onto the eastbound eastbound interstate that morning, he knew several things he had not known 24 hours earlier.

Speaker 15 That hunch he'd had about Danita's roommate and her boyfriend, the one Donita had words with,

Speaker 15 that was a dead end. Pate's investigation had turned up nothing there.

Speaker 15 And Shannon Crawley? Well, that felt like pay dirt. He expected he'd soon be arresting her for the murder of Donita Smith.

Speaker 15 But

Speaker 15 not yet.

Speaker 15 Pate knew Shannon was just one point of what looked like a deadly love triangle.

Speaker 15 Jameer Stroud was another.

Speaker 15 And the detective wasn't sure he'd gotten the whole truth out of Officer Stroud the last time they spoke.

Speaker 17 Jameer would tell me the truth.

Speaker 17 But you had to ask it.

Speaker 17 There was no, you know, sometimes when you tell people a lie of omission is still a lie, we need everything.

Speaker 17 Some people, you have to ask the correct question to get the answer you're looking for.

Speaker 15 He wasn't volunteering anything.

Speaker 17 Absolutely not.

Speaker 15 The detective knew that in two days, he'd be back on this road fighting the Monday morning traffic going westbound to Greensboro.

Speaker 15 He was going to have another sit-down with Jermir Stroud.

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Speaker 15 Greensboro Police Officer Jarmir Stroud was on duty the morning Detective Sean Pate returned to Greensboro to question him again.

Speaker 15 Now, armed with a few specifics he'd gleaned from Shannon, The detective pressed Jermir on the nature of their relationship.

Speaker 15 The heart of it, the detective thought, was Shannon's pregnancy and the abortion that had led to their breakup.

Speaker 17 When I started asking questions about it, then I see that the physical relationship ended, but not the emotional relationship.

Speaker 15 So when they both agree jointly to break up in early 2006, that, what, lights a fuse that burns for a year?

Speaker 17 Here's the thing. So they really didn't speak until May of 2006.
They broke up in January. And And then Jameer goes on a men's retreat with his church.

Speaker 17 And in his men's retreat, you know, the pastor tells him, anyone you've wronged, you need to go back and get right with e