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Speaker 4 Snapped has covered hundreds of femme fatals, but only one woman stands apart from the rest. Sheila Davalu.

Speaker 4 She's the only killer who's been featured twice. First in 2006 for the attempted murder of her husband, Paul Christos.

Speaker 5 What grabbed everyone's attention right away was certainly the blindfolds, the handcuffs, this sex plague on Haywire.

Speaker 6 He starts screaming, you're gonna kill me, you're trying to kill me.

Speaker 7 He believes for a moment in time in death.

Speaker 4 And Sheila Davilu was profiled again in 2012 for the murder of a romantic rival.

Speaker 9 The walkway from the front door was a bloody mess.

Speaker 10 I think the guy attacked my mother.

Speaker 9 She was stabbed numerous times.

Speaker 6 Had she not went to stab her husband, she would have totally gotten away with this.

Speaker 13 Sheila's a narcissist and she's a terrible liar. That is a very cold, calculating, devious woman.

Speaker 14 She thinks she's going to get away with it every single time.

Speaker 4 Sheila Davilu is currently serving a 75-year prison sentence at New York's Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women.

Speaker 4 Despite being convicted of two vicious crimes, Sheila Sheila has maintained her innocence.

Speaker 4 For the first time on Snapped, Sheila sits down to tell her story in her own words as we look back at the cases that put her behind bars.

Speaker 15 I feel like I had plenty of opportunity to kill him if I wanted to. I think there's a lot of misconceptions out there and I would like my side of the story to be told.

Speaker 4 But there's more to Sheila's past than just her two previous convictions. Now, new information regarding a cold case has convinced detectives Sheila may be connected to a third crime as well.

Speaker 14 They're looking at Sheila for another murder.

Speaker 17 The many similarities between the cases were striking. It was something that had to be followed up on.

Speaker 15 I told them straight up that I would be the perfect suspect for that case.

Speaker 15 Hello, my name is Sheila Davilu.

Speaker 15 I am convicted of two crimes. I'm here right now to talk about it and to put some,

Speaker 15 you know, perspective into things that I think there's a lot of misconceptions out there and I would like my side of the story to be told.

Speaker 4 To better understand her story, Sheila takes us back to the very beginning when she was born in 1969.

Speaker 15 I was born in Charlottesville, Virginia. When I was around two, my family and I went back to our country of origin, which is Iran.

Speaker 15 At the age of 10, I experienced the revolution there and then a 10-year period of war.

Speaker 4 When Sheila was 17, her family fled the spreading violence of the Middle East and returned to the safer shores of the U.S., eventually settling in the cozy New York suburb of Yorktown Heights.

Speaker 14 Her parents were respectable people. They worked in medicine, public health.
Sheila followed in her parents' footsteps education-wise.

Speaker 14 The woman is super intelligent. She wanted to be a scientist and work in pharmaceuticals.

Speaker 4 In 1994, while in grad school at New York Medical College, Sheila takes notice of of a handsome fellow student named Paul Christos.

Speaker 15 I was drawn to Paul

Speaker 15 mostly because of his intelligence. I found him very attractive.
We hit it off. We had a lot in common.

Speaker 14 They strike up a relationship and Paul has finally met somebody who he can relate to. But Sheila is hiding something big from Paul, a huge secret.

Speaker 16 Sheila's married.

Speaker 14 She has a husband living in New York City.

Speaker 4 Although Sheila claims she has a perfectly good explanation for everything in her life, many experts consider her a master manipulator.

Speaker 13 One driving force for Sheila Davalu is self-interest.

Speaker 13 So when she sees something she wants, she will do anything to get it. And that means hiding secrets.

Speaker 4 In the fall of 1995, after dating Paul for more than a year, the truth about Sheila is finally exposed.

Speaker 14 The husband calls, Paul answers, they have a chat, and they decide to meet for coffee in the city. It's not confrontational or anything.
It's like, I'm married to her.

Speaker 4 Experts aren't the only ones who think Sheila twists the truth. Those closest to her explain her chaotic personality.

Speaker 14 The person he describes is really total chaos, total drama, all the time. Now, if you ask Sheila about it, she tells the story of: well, this was an arranged marriage.

Speaker 14 You know, my parents wanted me to marry an Iranian guy because we're Iranian and that's what they wanted, and that's what I did.

Speaker 14 And I didn't tell Paul because we're separated, and I'm going to divorce the guy anyway.

Speaker 15 My first marriage was at at the age of 19.

Speaker 15 I mean, it wasn't as happy and healthy. I was

Speaker 15 not

Speaker 15 doing very well. I wanted more and I wanted to pursue my education, so it was not the best of the situation.

Speaker 14 I interviewed Paul extensively, and he describes, you know, at the time she comes back and she's very sincere, she's very charming.

Speaker 14 She does get a divorce, and she goes back to Paul and tells him. And Paul accepts that.

Speaker 4 Despite the fact that their relationship began with Sheila lying from the beginning, she and Paul stayed together.

Speaker 15 Paul and I dated for almost eight years before we decided to get married. And I would say we had a good you know, relationship those eight years.
Nothing sticks out as problematic.

Speaker 4 In season four, Snapped detailed the progression of their relationship.

Speaker 4 She married Paul right after graduation and took a high-paying job at nearby Purdue Pharma, one of the most prestigious drug companies in the country.

Speaker 4 Paul began teaching classes in New York, and the couple settled into a condo in the posh suburb of Pleasantville.

Speaker 18 Sheila had a good job, good marriage, lived in a nice place in Westchester County. She seemed to be a a woman who had an awful lot going for her.

Speaker 4 But the couple's success came at a price. Long hours and distant commutes left little time for them to be together.

Speaker 4 About a year into their marriage, their relationship changes.

Speaker 15 Once we got married and lived together,

Speaker 15 things got a little more difficult. I was working a lot around the clock.
He was very busy. PhD program and teaching.
We're just like coexisting, like roommates at one point.

Speaker 14 Their marriage starts to drift apart. And the way Paul explained it to me was I wasn't paying much attention really because I was so dedicated to getting that doctorate.

Speaker 14 And, you know, Sheila would be off with her friends from Purdue Pharma.

Speaker 20 So They weren't communicating.

Speaker 14 They weren't having sex.

Speaker 4 Then, in the fall of 2001, something happens that adds even more stress to their relationship.

Speaker 4 Sheila told Paul she had some news. Her schizophrenic brother, Shaheen, was coming for a visit.

Speaker 6 Paul had never met her brother. They had a relationship for years, got married, had a wedding, and Paul had still never met her brother.

Speaker 6 He had always been understanding that the brother was very emotional and that he had outbursts and would be upset if he found out that Sheila had gotten married.

Speaker 18 She told Paul that the schizophrenic brother was going to come visit her and that Paul needed to clear out his belongings.

Speaker 4 It was an odd request, but Paul obliged.

Speaker 23 He would leave and he would take his belongings with him or she would hide his belongings and he would go to his friend's house or his brother or his parents' house, you know, and let

Speaker 23 Sheila have time with her brother.

Speaker 4 Soon, her brother's visits grew more and more frequent. By the spring of 2003, Paul had reached his wit's end.

Speaker 5 Paul is very upset about where things stood in the marriage.

Speaker 14 He goes to Sheila. I'm not doing this anymore.
This is crazy. For Paul, what he doesn't know is that things in his house, it's about to get much, much worse.

Speaker 4 Coming up, Sheila's obsession with a co-worker ignites a plot to eliminate anyone who stands in her way.

Speaker 14 He didn't know it, but he was dying.

Speaker 13 It was a blitz attack. It was violent.
It was personal.

Speaker 4 And Sheila finally breaks her silence about her convictions.

Speaker 15 I still don't believe the DNA that they have in that case. Why did this one evidence leave the crime lab?

Speaker 4 And later, a cold case brings detectives back to Sheila for yet another murder.

Speaker 14 We know what happens to Sheila Davalu's coworkers if she chooses.

Speaker 15 I was visited right here in this room by detectives from yet another precinct.

Speaker 4 It's March 23rd, 2003 in Pleasantville, New York. For most of the residents, it's just another Sunday afternoon.
But not for Sheila Davilu and her husband, Paul Christos.

Speaker 4 The couple are three years into their marriage and struggling to connect.

Speaker 15 My marriage was really falling apart. I was focused on my job and he was rightfully focused on his career.

Speaker 15 We really weren't spending time together anymore and it just sort of happened that we kind of drifted apart.

Speaker 4 Making matters worse, Sheila's husband Paul is fed up by being forced to leave his home every time her brother comes to visit.

Speaker 4 Looking for ways to rekindle the spark in their relationship, Sheila comes up with an idea.

Speaker 26 Sheila told him that she wanted to play a game with him in which he would be handcuffed and blindfolded, and they would touch each other with objects, and they would have to guess what those objects were.

Speaker 26 And they would take turns being the person touching with the objects and actually being handcuffed and blindfolded.

Speaker 15 This is not the first time that we had done this. He has handcuffs and

Speaker 15 he has some

Speaker 15 paraphernalia like that. And it was a,

Speaker 15 without getting into detail, it was a

Speaker 15 sort of

Speaker 15 mutually agreed-upon game that we played. The game was mostly for Paul's benefit.
It was for his gratification.

Speaker 15 I can't say that I

Speaker 15 get any pleasure out of it or anything like that.

Speaker 15 I don't. We were trying to work on our relationship.

Speaker 4 It was a bizarre proposal, to say the least, but Paul was up for anything that might help his troubled marriage. The couple stole away to the spare bedroom.
Sheila went first.

Speaker 23 She was handcuffed to a chair with a blindfold, and Paul rubbed a remote control for a television on her face.

Speaker 11 She had to guess what it was.

Speaker 6 And then it's Paul's turn. Sheila blindfolds Paul.
He's handcuffed to a chair in the room.

Speaker 5 She touched him with an item or two, and then all of a sudden he felt this, you know, sharp thrust in his chest.

Speaker 4 Paul cried out in pain.

Speaker 6 He hears Sheila say, Oh, it was an accident. And like a second later, he feels another pain to his chest.
And Sheila tells him, I believe you'll be bleeding.

Speaker 4 When Sheila removed the blindfold, Paul saw blood spreading all over his shirt. He told Sheila to uncuff him, but Sheila couldn't find the key.

Speaker 15 I had to break the whole chair apart

Speaker 15 and slide his hands out of it.

Speaker 15 Eventually, when he moved, I found the key and

Speaker 15 I took the cuffs off of him. But that was after I broke the chair.

Speaker 4 Experts believe this proves the depths of Sheila's deceptive manipulation.

Speaker 13 Here's this supportive, sweet man who constantly does the things that she asks,

Speaker 13 putting himself in a position of extreme trust, blindfolded and handcuffed, bound to a chair, and she's going to take advantage of that.

Speaker 13 That is a very cold, calculating, devious woman.

Speaker 4 Paul didn't know it at the time, but he'd been stabbed. Sheila continues to claim it was an accident.

Speaker 15 At the time, I was very confused and I was in shock. My intent was never to cause his demise.

Speaker 4 He screamed for her to call 911. Sheila grabbed her cell phone, but half an hour later, help still hadn't arrived.

Speaker 6 The ambulance never shows. So Paul starts to question her.
Please call back, tell them, you know, I need somebody here.

Speaker 6 And she makes excuses that they're on other calls and they can't get here so quick. But be patient.
They say to wait.

Speaker 4 Losing blood and growing weaker by the second, Paul begged Sheila to take him to the emergency room.

Speaker 4 But Sheila had an idea she told paul she would go get a doctor from a nearby walk-in clinic she's in and out of the door within five minutes and she comes back in and tells him that um they were closed and it's they couldn't help him and he insists on going to the hospital at this point She threw Paul in the backseat of their car and sped off towards Westchester Medical Center.

Speaker 4 But just before they arrived at the hospital, Sheila took an abrupt detour.

Speaker 18 She drives past the emergency room and she goes to a remote area of the parking lot.

Speaker 4 The strange detour is a detail that will eventually be used against Sheila in court. If she was trying to help Paul, why would she park so far away?

Speaker 15 I think I've been criticized a lot for not driving him directly to the

Speaker 10 ER.

Speaker 15 I drove him directly there, but

Speaker 15 I didn't know exactly what building. I didn't, I wasn't paying attention, so I drove him to a different building.

Speaker 15 I think it was the psych unit, which I had been to before because my brother was hospitalized there.

Speaker 13 Her behavior is not odd if you think about her as just a self-centered person who wanted to kill her husband.

Speaker 13 It is very odd if she were genuinely a loving wife who was hoping that she got to the ER in time.

Speaker 13 But nothing about her behavior suggested that she cared that Paul survived.

Speaker 4 Sheila's dangerous behavior doesn't stop after they arrive at the hospital.

Speaker 6 She parks the car, she steps out of the car, and she leans into the backseat as if to help him out.

Speaker 4 Paul noticed a flash of metal in Sheila's hand. Suddenly, she plunged a knife deep into his chest.

Speaker 26 That's when you realize that she was trying to kill him.

Speaker 6 He starts screaming, you're gonna kill me, you're trying to kill me.

Speaker 4 Paul lunged from the car and struggled to fight back.

Speaker 26 He grabs the knife away from her and he's able to throw it amidst amidst some bricks that are piled up so that the knife is then unreachable.

Speaker 4 Seeing the scuffle, a group of bystanders rushed to Paul's aid. But before they could get there, Sheila hopped back in the car and tore out of the parking lot.

Speaker 13 I think at some point she realized he wasn't dying, and she better at least make it look like she's trying to help him. So she decided to take him to the ER,

Speaker 13 thinking and hoping he'll die in the car. He didn't.

Speaker 13 So she passed by the ER and took him to another place. He still isn't dead.
So she stabbed him again.

Speaker 13 And at that point, clearly she's not thinking long-term consequences because that will never in a million years look like an accident.

Speaker 14 Nat knife blade had just nicked his heart, and he's got some internal bleeding going on.

Speaker 14 He didn't know it, but he was dying.

Speaker 4 As Paul lay bleeding on the pavement, Sheila's taillights faded into the distance. But she wouldn't get far.
Someone had called 911 and police were on their way.

Speaker 4 Soon, all of Sheila Davilu's secrets would be on the table and police would discover why she was so desperate to get rid of her husband.

Speaker 15 You know, I lied to the police. I lied to the detective as to what happened.

Speaker 15 And I think that was just my shame, embarrassment. I just didn't want to discuss it.

Speaker 6 Tell me about the winefoke.

Speaker 8 Tell me about the minefold.

Speaker 13 Okay, I'm not at all.

Speaker 7 I just want to.

Speaker 27 I think something went wrong. Yeah.

Speaker 4 On March 23rd, 2003, a horrifying scene is unfolding outside a hospital in Westchester, New York.

Speaker 15 It was very bizarre.

Speaker 15 It's nothing I've ever done before.

Speaker 4 36-year-old Paul Christos had been left for dead in a remote parking lot just a block from the Westchester Medical Center after his wife Sheila had stabbed him and fled the scene.

Speaker 4 Some bystanders had come to his aid, and an ambulance was on its way to rush him to the emergency room.

Speaker 26 They see that he has life-threatening injuries. One of the knife wounds has actually nicked the heart.

Speaker 4 But just before paramedics showed up, Sheila pulled back into the parking lot. Panicked, she tried to force Paul back into her car, but the others wouldn't allow it.

Speaker 4 Finally, the ambulance arrived, with the police just seconds behind it.

Speaker 4 As an officer rode with Paul in the ambulance, another drove Sheila down to police headquarters for questioning.

Speaker 13 Paul had been fighting for his life, so he had a heightened state and was alert enough to tell the police that his wife had tried to kill him. She had stabbed him.
They'd struggled for the knife.

Speaker 13 He'd gotten the knife away and he'd threw it into a certain area.

Speaker 4 As doctors worked to save Paul's life, police questioned his wife, Sheila. In the interrogation room, detectives told Sheila that Paul might not make it.

Speaker 4 But instead of concern, Sheila's reaction was one of indifference.

Speaker 26 Instead of asking about how her husband is doing, she starts asking about other things, such as, can someone go by my house to take care of my dogs? And this is when

Speaker 26 her husband is possibly dying in open-heart surgery. So obviously, that gave us clues that something bizarre was happening here.

Speaker 4 When detectives asked Sheila how her husband had been stabbed, she said that Paul had come home from work with the mysterious wounds.

Speaker 8 Come to the door, but what are you doing when he

Speaker 8 I said it's not bleeding.

Speaker 13 She had a story prepared. This is probably a story she had prepared well in advance.
And police let her know. Well, Paul actually told us a different story.

Speaker 26 She's told that Paul is alive. And that not only is he alive, but he's saying that she stabbed him.

Speaker 15 I already had a statement from your husband saying you stayed not only once, but advice by you.

Speaker 7 Tell me about the winefold.

Speaker 8 Tell me about the winefold.

Speaker 4 Realizing she was caught in another lie, Sheila struggled to come up with a new story.

Speaker 5 She said that, no, I didn't stab my husband. You know, we were playing this game and he moved into the knife.

Speaker 26 She creates this implausible scenario where she nicks him by accident once, he lunges in shock back into the knife, and then just the resulting tussling results in a third stab wound.

Speaker 4 Sheila told detectives that she rushed Paul to the hospital after her 911 call was left unanswered. But the cops knew this was also false.
The 911 operator had never received that call.

Speaker 4 Sheila finally opens up about how she lied to investigators.

Speaker 15 There are a lot of contradictions and

Speaker 15 I can't really account for it. I just know that

Speaker 15 I don't even remember the interrogation.

Speaker 15 I know I was interrogated for a long time. I don't remember it.

Speaker 15 I just gave them some kind of explanation which was

Speaker 10 a lie.

Speaker 15 I just know that my intention was never to actually kill him.

Speaker 15 I, you know, to put it in context, this was a very small knife.

Speaker 15 Paul is rather a big man. We had plenty of knives in the house that were much, much larger.
This is the smallest. It's a pairing knife.
It's the size of one of my fingers, you know.

Speaker 15 So

Speaker 10 it's,

Speaker 10 I,

Speaker 15 you know,

Speaker 15 I feel like

Speaker 15 I had

Speaker 15 plenty of opportunity to kill him if I wanted to.

Speaker 4 Sheila doesn't deny stabbing him, so why does she call out the size of the knife?

Speaker 13 When Sheila says, I used a small knife, so clearly it was not not my intent to kill,

Speaker 13 this is all self-serving, and this whole narrative she has around this is so blatantly untrue. Sheila used a small knife because she wanted to stage it as an accident.

Speaker 13 A large knife would have just been outright murder.

Speaker 13 So I'm not here, Joe, okay? I'm not at all. I just want to...
No, I mean, you think I did it?

Speaker 7 Well, I think something went wrong.

Speaker 8 Yeah, something went terribly wrong, but I didn't...

Speaker 7 I'm not not saying he did it with intent to hurt him.

Speaker 15 I'm not saying that. I just got accountable.

Speaker 7 He's giving me a story that we're playing a game and everything was fine.

Speaker 4 And then he gets hurt.

Speaker 7 That once you can understand an accident happening, he's mindful that he said, you know, something went wrong. And, you know, but I'm trying to understand the second salad,

Speaker 7 which I know didn't occur at the same time the first one did.

Speaker 7 And I know he didn't do it to himself because it was impossible.

Speaker 10 I think it was possible to do it to himself.

Speaker 4 For more than two hours, Detective Allison Carpentier questions Sheila but gets nowhere. Thankfully, Paul survives.

Speaker 4 But Detective Carpentier keeps Sheila in custody on assault charges while she continues to investigate.

Speaker 14 Great detectives rely on one thing,

Speaker 14 their gut.

Speaker 14 And Detective Carpentier is really in a class all by herself when it comes to detectives because she listens to her instinct here.

Speaker 14 She knows there's more going on. She knows there's got to be a motive behind why she tried to kill her husband.
So Allison doesn't leave it alone with just interviewing Sheila. She starts digging.

Speaker 4 And the detective soon discovers a suspicious call made from Sheila's phone. One call in particular placed at the time of the incident caught investigators' eyes.
And it wasn't to 911.

Speaker 4 It was to a stamford connecticut number labeled nelson on sheila's caller id

Speaker 6 and we see a number that comes up nelson that she had made that call in between the stabs stabbing her husband armed with a name and a hunch they tried some old-fashioned detective work so we call her work and we say we just spoke to somebody named nelson we didn't get his last name could you tell us his last name and that's how we learned for nelson sessler's last name by kind of just fooling his employment that we were another company looking for information Detectives were very interested in speaking with Nelson Sessler.

Speaker 4 At the interview, investigators asked Sessler about his relationship with Sheila Davalu. He told them that he and Sheila had been dating on and off for over a year.

Speaker 4 But when detectives revealed that Sheila had been charged with stabbing her husband, Nelson Sessler was baffled.

Speaker 18 He was stunned. He didn't know she had a husband.

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Speaker 4 It's 2003 in Westchester, New York. Following Sheila Davalu's arrest for the stabbing of her husband, Paul Christos, detectives catch her in another lie.

Speaker 4 She was having an affair with a man named Nelson Sessler.

Speaker 14 Sheila's married to Paul Christos, and now she starts dating a guy at her work,

Speaker 14 not telling him she has a husband in New York.

Speaker 4 In her interview, Sheila breaks her silence about her relationship with Nelson.

Speaker 15 I joined Purdue Pharma in

Speaker 15 the year 2000, and I think shortly, like six months after I joined, Nelson joined that company. And we had

Speaker 15 a lot of projects in common that we worked together. We were on the same research team.

Speaker 15 Nelson is very funny and very outgoing

Speaker 15 and we hit it off.

Speaker 15 It seems like I was spending more time with Nelson than my own husband. Nelson's very persuasive.

Speaker 15 When he wanted to get together with me, he would be actively pursuing me. I've never experienced anything like that before and that was

Speaker 15 a heady feeling and very thrilling for me who, you know, I'm not a type of person who gets pursued. You know, it just doesn't usually happen like that.
So it was an exhilarating feeling.

Speaker 4 Nelson told the detectives that eventually he began spending the night at Sheila's condo, but he claimed there were no signs of a husband anywhere in sight.

Speaker 23 He stated, How could somebody be married and not have anything to show that a man lived in that apartment?

Speaker 25 No clothes, no photos.

Speaker 4 To get Paul out of their home and spend time alone with Nelson, Sheila made up the story about her schizophrenic brother coming to visit. It was Nelson all along.

Speaker 14 When Nelson came over for the weekends, there was no sign that she was married to Paul Christos because Paul and Sheila would scrub the house before the weekend started, Paul believing that it was for her brother to come over.

Speaker 13 It was all a lie, but it worked for her. It's all about her.
There's a pattern with Sheila where she will say or do whatever it takes to serve her own needs.

Speaker 4 But now, after 15 years behind bars, Sheila admits the truth about her ruse.

Speaker 15 It was deceitful.

Speaker 15 It was in furtherance of the affair.

Speaker 15 It was

Speaker 15 just

Speaker 15 a huge mistake. You know, Paul is genuine.
He's a real person. He's sincere.
He does not lie.

Speaker 4 There is at least one truth in Sheila's web of lies. She does actually have a brother who suffers from mental illness.

Speaker 15 My brother is schizophrenic and didn't know anything about either of my husbands.

Speaker 15 So

Speaker 15 it was convenient to use my brother and say, well, he's coming over

Speaker 15 and when in reality, Nelson was.

Speaker 4 As detectives learn more about Nelson Sessler's affair with Sheila, they arrive at a startling revelation. Paul may not have been the only casualty in this case.

Speaker 4 Nelson told detectives that he decided to break things off with Sheila to date another co-worker named Annalisa Raimundo.

Speaker 9 She was an educated young lady and she had worked in the pharmaceutical industry.

Speaker 18 Who knew that a pharmaceutical company could be such a hotbed of emotion and passion?

Speaker 4 According to Nelson, Sheila didn't take the breakup well. Soon, he and Annalisa were engaged.
But on November 8th, 2002, Annalisa was mysteriously stabbed to death inside her Stamford apartment.

Speaker 9 Ramundo was laying just inside the threshold of an apartment, a very brutal, large crime scene.

Speaker 4 There's very little evidence in her case, except for a bloody crime scene and a strange 911 call.

Speaker 4 Yet after detectives learn about the murder of Nelson's girlfriend, Sheila quickly becomes a suspect.

Speaker 4 Although investigators don't have enough evidence to arrest her, they do learn that Sheila and Nelson rekindled their romance after Annalisa was killed.

Speaker 4 Which would explain the call Sheila made to Nelson right after Paul was stabbed a few months later.

Speaker 4 According to Nelson, the call was to ask him to come over later that night.

Speaker 6 She stabs him twice. She pretends to call 911, and then she walks outside and calls Nelson Cesar and asks him to come over later on that evening about 8.30, 9 o'clock for a date.

Speaker 4 However, Sheila claims that's not the way it happened.

Speaker 15 Nelson had called me and said that he was coming over.

Speaker 15 And I had called him and said, absolutely not

Speaker 15 because

Speaker 15 he would have just showed up. And I didn't even have time to ask Paul to leave because I was in that predicament.
And I was driving him to the hospital, and I was calling Nelson off.

Speaker 4 Yet, many question Sheila's version of the story.

Speaker 13 When Sheila says, I'm in a predicament, a predicament is, it's happened to me, and I'm trying to deal with it.

Speaker 13 You did it. This is not a predicament.

Speaker 13 She's using a word

Speaker 13 to wrap it up in a sterile package so that it doesn't at all feel as if she's done anything wrong.

Speaker 4 Investigators believe that Paul's stabbing was premeditated, and Sheila tried to kill him so she could be with Nelson. She's now charged with attempted murder.

Speaker 4 But Sheila continued to insist that she was innocent.

Speaker 15 I could have taken a plea of five years.

Speaker 15 I opted not to do that because I disagreed with the charge of attempted murder. There was no malicious intent or premeditation or whatever they call it.

Speaker 15 I still love Paul.

Speaker 4 At trial, Sheila makes her first attempt at defending herself and her story changes yet again.

Speaker 15 It was a bizarre set of situations that happened on that day. I felt a lot of

Speaker 15 pain and tension

Speaker 15 and I grabbed the knife and I stabbed him.

Speaker 4 On February 4th, 2004, nearly a year after her arrest, Sheila Davalu stands trial for stabbing her bound and blindfolded husband during a kinky bedroom game.

Speaker 4 Charged with assault, criminal possession of a weapon, and attempted murder, the 33-year-old research scientist faced 25 years in prison if convicted. The tiny courtroom was packed.

Speaker 5 What grabbed everyone's attention right away was certainly the blindfolds, the handcuffs,

Speaker 5 you know, this sex plague on Haywire, the irony of the name and something like this happening in a small village called Pleasantville.

Speaker 4 Armed with a slew of evidence, prosecutors began their opening argument by painting Sheila as a deceitful and manipulative woman.

Speaker 26 She had been divorced before and she felt that in her family divorce was a shameful thing and that if she was divorced a second time, it would be too much of an embarrassment for her family.

Speaker 26 To avoid that embarrassment, she tried to kill her husband.

Speaker 4 But Sheila's defense countered that Paul's stabbing had been an accident. They claimed that at the time, Sheila had been emotionally troubled and was not aware of what she was doing.

Speaker 5 It was a psychiatric defense. She couldn't appreciate the consequences of what she had done because, you know, she was battling depression.

Speaker 28 It was her mental illness, which, you know, drove her to do what she did.

Speaker 4 With years between her and the trial, Sheila now tries to rationalize her actions on the day of Paul's attack.

Speaker 15 It was a bizarre set of situations that happened on that day.

Speaker 15 I felt a lot of

Speaker 15 pain and tension,

Speaker 15 and I grabbed the knife and I stabbed him.

Speaker 15 It was very bizarre.

Speaker 15 It's nothing I've ever done before.

Speaker 15 I guess I don't really honestly even remember doing it.

Speaker 15 And

Speaker 15 I was very confused and I was in shock. I just remember being frantic.

Speaker 15 A lot of professionals say that people who commit violence on somebody else, they usually generally don't remember it.

Speaker 15 I just had this dissociative moment that I didn't connect what was going on for a second. I was very, very confused.

Speaker 4 It's only now, years later, that Sheila claims she's able to understand the extent of her illness.

Speaker 15 I've been in therapy for 16 years. I know for a fact now in retrospect that I suffer from PTSD

Speaker 15 from the years that I grew up in a war zone. It was an exaggerated reaction

Speaker 15 to what I felt at that moment. A very

Speaker 15 crazy, exaggerated, bizarre reaction to that moment's pain that I felt.

Speaker 4 Although Sheila now claims that she had a bad reaction, It's still unclear what she's reacting to, or if this is all part of Sheila's history of manipulating the truth.

Speaker 13 Sheila tried to mitigate what she did.

Speaker 13 Nothing about that was true because she didn't state that on the very first night of her interrogation. She didn't say, I have no idea what happened.

Speaker 13 It's all a blank. I don't know what went on.
She had a story crafted and it didn't work.

Speaker 13 So here comes another story. Let's see if this one flies.

Speaker 4 Prosecutors insisted that Sheila knew exactly what she was doing as evidence. They presented Sheila's phone records showing she never called for help.

Speaker 5 This is just you know proof. Her whole intention was killing her husband, and you know, and here she's she's not calling 911, she's pretending to call 911, she's really calling Nelson.

Speaker 4 But to this day, Sheila claims there was nothing nefarious about her deception.

Speaker 15 I get a lot of

Speaker 15 criticism about

Speaker 15 not having called 911.

Speaker 15 I don't think I, I think I was just trying to

Speaker 15 hope that

Speaker 15 it all goes well, that I didn't need to call 911, that he was okay, that we didn't have to get any authorities involved or any hospital involved.

Speaker 13 But in fact, she did pretend to call for emergency services.

Speaker 13 She acted as if, and then told Paul, at least according to one of her stories, oh, they can't come right now because they're responding to other cases.

Speaker 13 They'll come when they can because she's buying time. She wants him to bleed out.
She can't stab him again because that won't run with the narrative that this is a game.

Speaker 4 And that's exactly what prosecutors argued during her trial.

Speaker 26 Her not calling the police and allowing him to bleed,

Speaker 26 that only succeeds if he dies.

Speaker 18 it seemed like everything was going the prosecution's way but then they called paul christos to the stand there's typically tremendous antagonism between the accused and the victim not in this case paul at trial paul goes to bat for sheila paul said during trial that you know He still showed that he loved his wife and he really didn't want her to go to prison.

Speaker 23 He wanted her to get help. He was still loving and caring towards Sheila, even though Sheila tried to kill him.

Speaker 15 Paul supported me and his parents supported me.

Speaker 15 It's awe-inspiring.

Speaker 10 I'm

Speaker 15 indebted to them for that.

Speaker 15 I think part of it is because he knows me and he knows me better than anybody has ever known me.

Speaker 10 And he knows,

Speaker 15 I hope he knows that my intent was not to hurt him.

Speaker 13 When Sheila cries, Sheila cries for Sheila.

Speaker 2 Not for Paul.

Speaker 13 She did intend to kill him. She's crying because she got caught.

Speaker 4 Following closing arguments on February 18th, presiding judge Thomas Dickerson recessed court to contemplate his verdict. The next day, he announced he had reached a decision.

Speaker 18 The judge applauded Paul's compassion, but basically said, I don't buy it.

Speaker 18 The judge looked at Sheila and said, you tried to murder your husband, you waited for him to die, you pretended to call for help, and then you stabbed him again once you brought him to the hospital.

Speaker 18 The judge said to Sheila, you have lied over and over and over. You are a dangerous threat to society.

Speaker 4 Judge Dickerson pronounced Sheila guilty of attempted murder. After Sheila nearly killed Paul, he and his family surprisingly speak out at her sentencing.

Speaker 15 They sent wonderful letters about me to the judge.

Speaker 15 Paul advocated for

Speaker 15 me to get

Speaker 15 less time.

Speaker 10 He did not want me to go to prison,

Speaker 15 and And he was the victim.

Speaker 4 However, the judge is not impressed.

Speaker 4 He sentenced her to 25 years in prison without the possibility of parole. The toughest sentence allowed by law.

Speaker 26 Justice was absolutely done in this case. This was a woman who was a danger to her husband and other people in the community.
She calculated and

Speaker 26 stabbed her husband three times in the heart, almost killing him. And she's not someone who should be walking around in society free to do something like this again.

Speaker 15 I'm definitely guilty of a crime.

Speaker 15 I have no doubt about that.

Speaker 15 But I got the maximum 25 years sentence for somebody who's, thank God, not even dead. You know, people get 15 years sometimes for their first murder.

Speaker 15 You know, it's, I mean, it's not a laughing laughing matter, but 25 years is a long time

Speaker 3 for,

Speaker 15 you know, a person who, by the grace of God, he's alive and well and didn't want me to get any time.

Speaker 4 Although Sheila is incarcerated for attempted murder in 2004, her story is far from over.

Speaker 4 Despite her conviction, detectives still consider her the prime suspect in the murder of Annalisa Raimundo and continue to work her case while Sheila serves her time behind bars.

Speaker 4 In hopes of uncovering clues, they turn to the 911 call made on the day Annalisa died.

Speaker 4 I think a guy has...

Speaker 10 has attacked my neighbor.

Speaker 30 Do you think someone attacked your neighbor?

Speaker 14 A female calls 911 to say she heard a commotion and she gives a condominium number and a condominium complex. And she kind of fumbles the address and then she hangs up.

Speaker 14 One thing law enforcement told me when I interviewed them extensively was they listened to that 911 call over and over because they began to think this might be key to the case.

Speaker 14 That person that made that call could be our killer.

Speaker 4 Coming up, the investigation into Anna Lisa's murder intensifies.

Speaker 14 So they have the killer's blood, the killer's DNA.

Speaker 11 That's huge.

Speaker 4 And then, new information surfaces that Sheila may be involved in another murder dating back to 2001, before Anna Lisa's murder and Sheila's attack on her husband.

Speaker 25 When she saw us, and she believed it was law enforcement suits basically sitting there,

Speaker 17 she went to turn back around and said, No, I don't want to do this.

Speaker 4 50-year-old Sheila Davalu is incarcerated at the Bedford Hills Correctional Center in New York. For longtime snapped viewers, her saga began more than a decade ago.

Speaker 4 First, in 2006, after she was convicted of attempting to murder her husband, Paul Christos.

Speaker 18 The judge looked at Sheila and said, you tried to murder your husband, you waited for him to die, you pretended to call for help, and then you stabbed him again once you brought him to the hospital.

Speaker 18 The judge said to Sheila, you have lied over and over and over. You are a dangerous threat to society.

Speaker 4 After Sheila's conviction, investigative journalist M. William Phelps took a personal interest in her case and decided to write a book about it.

Speaker 14 Obsession really is a book that people can't get enough of. It's one of my best-selling books.

Speaker 14 Sheila is obsessed with everybody and obsessed with herself and obsessed with the men in her life.

Speaker 4 And now we dive into Sheila Davalu's second episode of Snapped during its ninth season, making her the first woman on the series to be featured twice.

Speaker 4 33-year-old Sheila Davalu was a woman in love.

Speaker 14 She carries on this steamy affair.

Speaker 4 And she didn't let her marriage stand in the way.

Speaker 15 He believed she was separated, divorced.

Speaker 4 But her lover chose another woman.

Speaker 14 That's the ultimate betrayal right there for Sheila.

Speaker 4 Then Sheila's rival ended up dead.

Speaker 9 She was stabbed numerous times.

Speaker 4 Police were at a loss until Sheila's husband was also attacked.

Speaker 4 It's during the investigation into her husband's stabbing that Westchester police learn of Sheila's lover, 35-year-old Nelson Sessler, and the murder of his girlfriend four months earlier in Stamford, Connecticut.

Speaker 4 At the time, the crime had been reported by an anonymous caller.

Speaker 30 You think someone attacked your neighbor?

Speaker 4 The caller didn't identify herself or the person allegedly being attacked.

Speaker 30 What is your friend's name?

Speaker 10 I don't know her name, but she's my neighbor and she lives in a 105.

Speaker 30 She lives in apartment 105?

Speaker 30 I'm in 106 Harbor View.

Speaker 10 123 Harbor View.

Speaker 30 126 Harbor View.

Speaker 10 123 Harbor View.

Speaker 24 She gave several different addresses, street numbers.

Speaker 4 But the caller was clear on one thing. A man was attacking her neighbor.

Speaker 10 I saw a guy who was going to her apartment.

Speaker 14 It does sound like it's an emergency. So two patrol cops head on over.
They walk up the stairs and they see that the door to Annalise's condo is kind of a little bit open.

Speaker 14 Immediately, they're on their toes.

Speaker 3 Bang.

Speaker 14 You know, what are we going to find in here? So they creep that door open a little bit. And what they find is a freaking horror show.

Speaker 9 The walkway from the front door was a bloody mess, things thrown about and

Speaker 9 knocked about.

Speaker 24 In the far corner, just past the bathroom and the foyer,

Speaker 24 was a female victim lying on her back.

Speaker 4 It was 32-year-old Annalisa Ramundo, and she was dead.

Speaker 4 Like Sheila, Annalisa Ramundo was the daughter of immigrants. Her parents had emigrated to the United States from the Philippines to pursue successful careers in medicine.

Speaker 4 Also like Sheila, Annalisa had followed in her parents' footsteps.

Speaker 14 Annalisa was super intelligent. She's a graduate from Harvard.
Not anybody gets into Harvard. And she worked in pharmaceutical research, which is intense.

Speaker 4 Sheila remembers meeting Annalisa in the early 2000s when they were co-workers.

Speaker 15 Annalisa I both worked at Purdue Pharma with Nelson. Our jobs didn't require us to interact too much, but I had cordial interactions with her, and she seemed very

Speaker 15 nice and level-headed.

Speaker 4 But there was nothing at the time of Anna Lisa's murder to connect Sheila to the crime. Her assailant was gone, and whoever it was had left little little evidence behind.

Speaker 15 It was apart from the blood a pretty clean crime scene.

Speaker 4 Despite the lack of obvious clues at the crime scene, there might still be a way to identify Annalisa's killer.

Speaker 9 Right away, we felt that this might be a case where DNA might be a prominent type of evidence.

Speaker 24 In an edged weapon, assault, or a homicide, It's very common for the hand to slip off the handle or over the hilt and to go down on the blade and the perpetrator cuts themselves.

Speaker 4 Crime scene technicians went to work swabbing the bloodstains, particularly in the bathroom adjacent to the foyer.

Speaker 14 You see a bloody trail going towards the bathroom. What does that say?

Speaker 14 When I look at that, I see that after the murder took place, the person went into the bathroom to clean up because the killer had to then walk out of the condo in the middle of the day.

Speaker 4 So when Nelson shows up at Annalise's condo later that afternoon, the way he's acting makes police think he could be a suspect.

Speaker 14 The first thing detectives notice about him is he's not broken up about this.

Speaker 3 He's not crying.

Speaker 14 He's not saying, who could have done this to my fiancé? He's kind of just sitting there.

Speaker 14 And one of the detectives notices he's got an injury, a fresh injury on his hand.

Speaker 14 So they kind of keep him in this common room. They go in there one time to question him.

Speaker 14 He's sleeping. They got to wake wake him up to question him.

Speaker 4 Detectives think Nelson knows more than he's letting on.

Speaker 14 It's like he wants to walk away, wash his hands. Either that or he had something to do with it.

Speaker 4 November 8th, 2002. 32-year-old Annalisa Ramundo has been brutally murdered in her Stamford, Connecticut home.
And her boyfriend, Nelson Sessler, has become the first suspect.

Speaker 14 The first thing detectives notice about him is, he's not broken up about this.

Speaker 4 Nelson's calm response to the news of Annalisa's death raises the suspicions of the detectives.

Speaker 24 You'd think that a normal response would be, what happened in my my home? How did my girlfriend die once he was told she was dead? We just, we didn't get that from him.

Speaker 4 So later that night, the investigators brought Nelson down to the station for questioning.

Speaker 26 He's the obvious person of interest.

Speaker 9 You right away start thinking due to the over-the-top violence that it's someone with some personal. type of stake in this relationship.

Speaker 13 It was a blitz attack. It was violent.
It was personal. It was punitive.
And it was meant to make Annalisa hurt.

Speaker 4 And according to Sheila, there was plenty of reason to suspect Nelson. He'd been living a double life for months.

Speaker 15 I think that the entire time that Nelson and I were having an affair, they were a couple. I just, I'm not exactly sure at what level.
I know that Nelson was living with Annalisa at some point.

Speaker 15 Almost a week before Lisa's death, Nelson and I were together in North Carolina. We spent three days together in the same hotel, booked by the company, and

Speaker 15 our relationship was just the way it always had been.

Speaker 4 But Nelson claims he had no reason to hurt Anna Lisa. And when detectives look into his alibi, it seems he's telling the truth.

Speaker 4 Whatever suspicions the investigators had about Nelson evaporated the next day when they went to Purdue Pharma.

Speaker 9 They have a very good security cameras, security system, and they were able to show what time he punched in, cameras showing his movement, and he was at work when this assault took place.

Speaker 20 We could rule him out as the perpetrator.

Speaker 4 But was there anyone else who might have a reason to hurt Anna Lisa? A jealous ex-girlfriend, perhaps?

Speaker 18 He had dated other women prior to Anna Lisa and really didn't didn't see anything that was of any value to us.

Speaker 4 Nelson never mentioned Sheila Davalu.

Speaker 14 The one thing Nelson Sessler doesn't do is he doesn't say, I'm having an affair with Sheila Davalu, someone I work with. He does not mention her name.

Speaker 11 Why?

Speaker 24 I don't know.

Speaker 14 I'd like to know.

Speaker 4 With no other leads, police focus on their first piece of evidence, the mysterious 911 call reporting Annalisa's murder.

Speaker 4 They have yet to learn the identity of the anonymous female caller and believe she may hold the key to finding the killer.

Speaker 24 She identified the victim as my neighbor.

Speaker 24 That leads us to believe she's living in the complex.

Speaker 9 We canvass all the neighbors, but no neighbor in that area matches that voice.

Speaker 4 When the police traced the call, it didn't lead back to Annalisa's condo complex at all. Instead, the call had been placed from a nearby payphone.

Speaker 9 Why would a neighbor leave the complex, the safety of their home, to travel approximately three-quarters of a mile and use a payphone to call this in?

Speaker 9 If there was an assault, a dispute going on, and they're in their home, they would just call from the home.

Speaker 4 Weeks after the murder, they were no closer to finding Annalisa's killer or the 911 caller.

Speaker 24 Every interview, we played that tape. Can you identify this caller? Does it sound like a friend? Does it sound like somebody you know?

Speaker 11 No one could identify the voice at all.

Speaker 9 Not even close. There was a very frustrating period of weeks, if not months, where it's not moving forward at the speed that everybody would like it to.

Speaker 4 But then there's a big break surrounding the crime scene evidence in the case.

Speaker 14 When forensic starts to analyze all the blood, it's Annalise's blood. But then they find one spot on the sink that's not Annalise's blood.
Another person left blood at that scene.

Speaker 14 So they have the killer's blood, the killer's DNA. That's huge.
Now they gotta match it to somebody.

Speaker 4 After Sheila Davilu is arrested for stabbing her husband, Westchester investigators start working with Stamford authorities to try to solve Annalisa's murder.

Speaker 4 The Westchester County detectives went straight to the Stamford Police Department.

Speaker 4 In the squad room, they briefed the investigators who had spent the past five months trying to solve the murder of Nelson Sessler's girlfriend, Annalisa Raimundo.

Speaker 4 The big breakthrough came when Stanford investigators played the mysterious 911 tape that had first tipped police off to Annalisa's murder.

Speaker 6 When we heard the 911 tape, I said to them, you know, that's Shiladapalu's voice.

Speaker 24 One of the sergeants in charge of major crimes called me up and his exact words were, Craig,

Speaker 24 get in here.

Speaker 24 Annalisa's breaking wide open.

Speaker 4 Then, detectives checked Sheila's work records to see where she was the day Annalisa was murdered.

Speaker 4 When the investigators followed up at Purdue Pharma, the same security procedures that had previously confirmed Nelson's alibi revealed that Sheila didn't have one.

Speaker 9 She had left around lunchtime and taken an extended lunch.

Speaker 14 That's when Annalisa was murdered. That's when the 911 calls made.

Speaker 4 Once again, Sheila claims she has a reasonable explanation for her whereabouts.

Speaker 15 Every day, I would leave for extended periods around lunchtime. oftentimes around 11 or 12 and come back around one or two and i would drive home for lunch and come back

Speaker 15 i I was also very depressed about, you know, what I was doing with Nelson, guilty.

Speaker 15 Talks of divorce or possibly looming divorce. So I would take that extended break during the lunch hours.

Speaker 4 Despite the fact that Sheila insists that she has nothing to do with Annalisa's murder, the DNA results from the crime scene will tell a different story altogether.

Speaker 4 Sheila Davalu is the prime suspect in the murder of Annalisa Raimundo. And after months of intense investigation, there's finally a break in the case.

Speaker 14 They get a hit on a very tiny droplet found in Annalisa's apartment on the tip of a faucet there.

Speaker 9 It's our theory that during this frantic struggle and stabbing, that the suspect actually cut herself during that struggle and went into the bathroom to wash.

Speaker 4 And the test results had matched that DNA to their prime suspect.

Speaker 14 It's Sheila Daluz.

Speaker 20 We got her.

Speaker 4 Although detectives have the DNA match by 2004, over a year after Annalisa's murder, Sheila is already in prison for attempting to murder her husband.

Speaker 4 So, investigators take the time they need to build a solid case against her.

Speaker 4 On December 29th, 2008, six years after Annalisa's murder, the Stanford police went to the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility and placed Sheila under arrest.

Speaker 14 How does Sheila Davalu react to it? The way she reacted to everything else. Didn't kill anybody?

Speaker 13 Sheila's a narcissist and a terrible liar.

Speaker 13 She'll just come out with these things that are so easily proven to be lies, but she seems to think she'll be able to convince anybody of her lies because she's that good.

Speaker 4 On January 24th, 2012, nearly a decade after Annalisa Raimundo was murdered, Sheila Davalu finds herself on trial once again.

Speaker 4 At 42 years old, she has already spent nearly eight years behind bars for the attempted murder of her husband, Paul Christos.

Speaker 4 Prosecutors believe they have an open and shut case.

Speaker 4 But Sheila has one more surprise in store.

Speaker 15 I decided to represent myself in this case.

Speaker 15 Through studies and through correspondent classes, I'd become pretty well versed in the law as it pertains to my case because I had researched it a lot.

Speaker 15 I wanted a little bit more control because once you have an attorney in place, you follow along whatever the attorney decides.

Speaker 4 According to the prosecution, Sheila killed Anna Lisa and then attempted to kill her husband Paul four months later so she could be with her lover, Nelson Sessler.

Speaker 4 Paul's own testimony helps prove that Sheila was trying to get him out of the way.

Speaker 31 Did you ask him to move out for the weekend?

Speaker 28 Sometimes it would be one weeknight. Other times it was a weekend.
Yeah.

Speaker 5 And to keep your wife happy, you would move out.

Speaker 28 Yes, I genuinely believed at the time she was spending qually time with her brother.

Speaker 4 Paul has even more damning testimony. He tells the jury that Sheila concocted a story about a love triangle at work involving a man named Jack and two women, one named Melissa and the other Annalisa.

Speaker 4 The way Sheila told it, her friend Melissa was heartsick because Jack was choosing Annalisa over her.

Speaker 4 What Paul didn't know was that Sheila was actually talking about herself.

Speaker 14 Paul is listening to this and he's being sucked in by it. He's given his wife advice about an affair she's having, about a love triangle she's involved in at work, and he doesn't know it.

Speaker 13 I think she thought that Paul was going to associate her with this love triangle with a woman named Annalisa.

Speaker 13 And I think she thought she needed to eliminate her husband, not just to get him out of the way so she could pursue Nelson, but to eliminate a witness to statements she had made that might trigger something in him and make him go to the police.

Speaker 4 To establish just what Sheila was capable of, Paul concluded by describing the bizarre game that he had been lucky to live through.

Speaker 28 As I was trying to guess what that item was, as it was kind of grazing my cheek, all of a sudden I felt like a large thrust on my chest.

Speaker 4 Sheila's cross-examination does little to help her case.

Speaker 15 What kind of interest do you have in the case, in the outcome of the case? Do you...

Speaker 28 Well, it's a case that's been obviously in my life for many years.

Speaker 32 After what you did to me, it almost seemed like we were all witnessing a couple's argument.

Speaker 15 It was difficult questioning him him and talking about the New York case. It had been five years since I'd seen him or spoken to him, so it was emotional.

Speaker 4 Then the state calls Sheila's ex-lover, Nelson Sessler, to the stand. He describes how Sheila hid her marriage from him with the same cover story she told Paul.

Speaker 20 Sheila

Speaker 12 said that she had a

Speaker 10 handicapped brother, a mentally challenged

Speaker 4 brother.

Speaker 4 Nelson tells the jury that as his relationship with Anna Lisa progressed, he stopped sleeping with Sheila.

Speaker 32 What happened to the intimacy that you had experienced with Sheila Dow?

Speaker 25 It ended.

Speaker 14 So on the stand, he's like, ah, we weren't really together. I was telling her I didn't want to be with her, that sort of thing.
He was making it so it was not a big deal, their relationship.

Speaker 14 He wanted to step away from this. He did a pretty good job of trying to defend himself in that way.

Speaker 4 Again, Sheila has her own version of events.

Speaker 15 That never happened. Nelson never called off the relationship.

Speaker 15 Nelson would like people to think that he was not with both of us at the same time, but he was in actuality with both of us during the whole entire time he was both

Speaker 15 with her and with me, except that she didn't know that.

Speaker 4 However, Nelson then admits that a few months after Annalisa's murder, he started seeing Sheila again.

Speaker 32 And did you start to get even closer at that point?

Speaker 20 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 14 They showed that Sheila Davalu was Nelson's shoulder to cry on because he had lost his fiancé. She'd show up at his apartment.
Nelson, you need me.

Speaker 14 I can be here to comfort you, not as a girlfriend, but just as a friend. And she thought that would then blossom back into a relationship.

Speaker 4 The state also calls a voice analysis expert to the stand who identifies Sheila as the one who called 911 after Annalisa was killed.

Speaker 10 I think the guy was just attacked my neighbor.

Speaker 18 When you look, you listen, you listen to it, it sounds like the same person.

Speaker 31 When you visually view the spectrograms, it looks like the same person.

Speaker 4 But Sheila claims she can prove that it's not her voice.

Speaker 15 By the mere fact

Speaker 15 that

Speaker 15 I decided to represent myself in this case,

Speaker 15 you've had ample opportunity to listen to my voice.

Speaker 20 She was trying to prove that

Speaker 32 she was not the one making the call.

Speaker 15 It's very

Speaker 15 weak evidence, in my opinion. Whoever knows me, including my husband at the time and friends, they have said that it does not sound like me.

Speaker 15 The 911 operator

Speaker 15 says that it sounded like a Spanish-speaking person.

Speaker 13 She just thinks, if I say enough times that I am not the voice on the tape, everyone will believe me. That's what will become the truth.
So she's invested very much in controlling the narrative.

Speaker 4 And in Sheila's mind, the fact that she stabbed but not killed her ex-husband proves that she couldn't have been Annalisa's killer.

Speaker 15 Apparently, I had stabbed somebody before my husband, nine times.

Speaker 15 Why did I stop

Speaker 15 after two times with my husband, drive him to the hospital, and stab him again in the hospital?

Speaker 15 I didn't have to stop.

Speaker 13 She's got elaborate explanations around everything and rationalizations, which is more supportive of a liar than a truth teller.

Speaker 4 According to the prosecutor, Sheila left behind the strongest piece of evidence in the case, her own blood.

Speaker 4 DNA tests confirm it's her. But Sheila points out something odd.

Speaker 15 I still don't believe the DNA that they have in that case. Why did this one evidence leave the crime lab?

Speaker 4 Will this be able to help her case?

Speaker 15 The sink handle, for some reason, was a resubmission to the laboratory.

Speaker 15 I can't get to the bottom of why this was resubmitted.

Speaker 4 Coming up, Sheila becomes a suspect in a third crime.

Speaker 14 They're looking at Sheila for another murder.

Speaker 4 DNA tests confirm the blood in Annalisa Raimundo's bathroom came from Sheila Davalo.

Speaker 4 But to this day, Sheila believes the evidence was contaminated.

Speaker 15 The sink handle, for some reason, was a resubmission to the laboratory.

Speaker 15 I can't get to the bottom of why this was resubmitted. I still don't believe the DNA that they have in that case.

Speaker 15 The one item that had my DNA on it, which was a sink handle for the guests' bathroom, left the crime lab

Speaker 15 and was returned to the crime lab at a later date. So, why did this one evidence leave the crime lab?

Speaker 4 But during her trial, few were convinced by her argument.

Speaker 13 She picks apart every single piece of evidence, the voice expert, the DNA, the phone call.

Speaker 13 But she doesn't really give a good explanation about any piece of evidence being poor. You just can't wipe all of that out.

Speaker 4 On February 9th, 2012, after a two and a half week-long trial, the case goes to the jury. They deliberate for only a day before returning a verdict.

Speaker 32 What say you, Mr. Fourperson?

Speaker 11 Guilty.

Speaker 4 At sentencing, Sheila acknowledges Annalisa's suffering, but she still doesn't admit any responsibility.

Speaker 25 I pray for all victims of crimes.

Speaker 17 Especially, especially

Speaker 11 for Annalisa Ramundo and her family.

Speaker 4 Even now, Sheila refuses to admit involvement in Anna Lisa's murder, but expresses sympathy for her family.

Speaker 15 I feel pain for them because, you know, I can't even imagine losing a loved one. I felt the pain and the anguish and it's all directed at me because they

Speaker 15 really believe that I did that.

Speaker 4 Despite her claims of innocence, Sheila Davalu is sentenced to 50 years in prison to begin after she has completed her 25-year sentence for the attempted murder of her husband.

Speaker 14 So, Sheila really had 75 years to do when she's found guilty, which would what?

Speaker 14 Put her six feet under. She'll be dead before she gets out of jail.

Speaker 4 Shockingly, Sheila's story doesn't end there. In 2017, after 13 years in prison, there's a new twist in her case.

Speaker 14 Sheila gets a call that two detectives are here. And these detectives aren't from Stanford or Westchester County.
They're from New Windsor, New York.

Speaker 14 And this isn't about Annalisa Ramundo or Paul Christos.

Speaker 14 They're looking at Sheila for another murder.

Speaker 15 I was visited here, right here in this room, by detectives from yet another precinct about a second murder. They came here to Bedford to question me, and it's a cold case.

Speaker 4 The crime occurred 11 months before the murder of Annalisa Ramundo, and the cases are eerily similar.

Speaker 17 The many similarities between the cases were somewhat striking and it was something that had to be looked into.

Speaker 4 It involves the murder of a 32-year-old woman and former co-worker of Sheila's named Nancy Smith.

Speaker 33 Nancy was my younger sister. We're five years apart.
She was the typical younger child. I was the reserved older child.
She was funny, she loved life, she loved music, she loved to dance.

Speaker 33 She was fun to be around.

Speaker 4 On the morning of Wednesday, December 5th, 2001, Nancy's parents receive a concerning phone call.

Speaker 33 They had gotten a call from her boss or whoever she worked with saying that she hadn't come to work, you know, with something wrong. So they went to her house.

Speaker 33 They had a garage door opener for her house. They went in, they opened the garage and her car was there.

Speaker 10 And they went in and they found her.

Speaker 33 They found her in her living room

Speaker 33 covered with blankets and pillows. They didn't even know what it was until they started pulling everything off and then they found her there.

Speaker 33 And then you just try to wrap your arms around all of that, which there's days, I'm crying now, there's days that you still can't wrap your arms around it.

Speaker 4 The Smiths call 911, and investigators rush to the scene.

Speaker 17 The room was in disarray. It appeared that there had been some sort of altercation, and there was a good amount of blood in the area.
Nancy was hit on the head, and she was stabbed multiple times.

Speaker 12 She was strangled, so it appeared there was a lot of violence right then and there, right at the main level of her house.

Speaker 4 Detectives scour the crime scene for clues, and a few things stand out.

Speaker 17 At the scene, we did find a knife, and we did believe that knife was used as a weapon to murder her.

Speaker 14 Leaving the knife at the scene says a lot. In fact, leaving the knife at the scene is something Sheila Davilu would absolutely do.
And that's to say, come and catch me.

Speaker 17 There was no signs of forced entry. There was nothing taken from the residence.
That leads most to think that she would have known who the person or persons were that did this to her.

Speaker 33 Nancy was very safety conscious.

Speaker 33 She did not open the door unless she knew who you were. She knew the person that did this because she let them into her house.

Speaker 4 So who would have wanted to kill Nancy Smith? In their initial investigation, detectives interview hundreds of potential suspects and follow countless leads.

Speaker 17 We have interviewed friends of Nancy, family of Nancy, people that knew her.

Speaker 17 There was nothing outstanding that, you know, had led to that she had any enemies.

Speaker 33 In the first few months, we were very optimistic that the person who did this would be found. As time marches on,

Speaker 33 you know, in that first year, it became a little

Speaker 33 frustrating. You know, how could somebody do this and walk away and not be caught?

Speaker 4 After several months, the killer remains at large and the case goes cold. But then, in 2008, Sheila Davilu is arrested for the brutal murder of Annalisa Ramundo.

Speaker 4 And New Windsor detectives discover something striking. Like Annalisa Raimundo, Nancy Smith was also a former co-worker of Sheila Davalu.

Speaker 17 We know that in the 90s, Nancy and Sheila had worked together at a healthcare type facility.

Speaker 33 Detectives told my family that they had a new lead. It was a woman who lived in New York who had committed a murder in Connecticut.

Speaker 33 She worked at Oxford Insurance and Nancy worked at Oxford Insurance at the same time period. So they thought, you know, there were similarities between

Speaker 33 the murder that she had committed and Nancy's murder.

Speaker 4 When detectives investigate further, many other similarities come to light.

Speaker 17 There were many important similarities between Annalise's case and Nancy Smith's case. They were both successful in living alone.
There was no signs of forced entry.

Speaker 17 There was nothing taken from the residence. Both crimes appeared to be,

Speaker 17 you know, there was some sort of struggle, a brutal fight going on. They were both stabbed multiple times and they had trauma to them.

Speaker 14 Add to the fact that they worked together at the same place.

Speaker 14 And Sheila is definitely in my wheelhouse as a likely candidate to have murdered Nancy Smith.

Speaker 14 We know what happens to Sheila Davalu's co-workers if she chooses.

Speaker 4 And then another stunning clue adds to the suspicion on Sheila.

Speaker 17 In one of Nancy's calendar books, we did find a notation that said Nelson CT.

Speaker 16 We did

Speaker 17 have a thinking that this could be the Nelson in the Sheila Davilu case.

Speaker 14 Was Nancy Smith dating Nelson Sessler?

Speaker 4 In 2017, 48-year-old Sheila Davilu is in her 13th year of a 75-year prison sentence at the Bedford Hills Correctional Center in New York.

Speaker 4 And she receives an unexpected visit from detectives about a cold case in New Windsor.

Speaker 17 She did not know we were coming, so we knew that going in, that it was going to be kind of a surprise for her, and we didn't know what to expect.

Speaker 17 When she saw us, and it was law enforcement suits basically sitting there, she went to turn back around and said, no, I don't want to do this.

Speaker 17 It was explained to her then kind of like at the doorway or in the hallway that we were there for something completely separate than what happened in her past that she was there for.

Speaker 17 We told her that our incident involved a former coworker of hers that was murdered, and that's what we were there to talk about.

Speaker 17 That piqued her interest, and she agreed to sit with us and hear what we had to say.

Speaker 15 I told them straight up that I would be the perfect suspect for that case

Speaker 15 because I have the Annalisa conviction.

Speaker 15 So, if you arrest me, I will be indicted and I will be convicted.

Speaker 17 We did show her photos of our victim, Nancy Smith. She did not appear to recognize her.
She seemed somewhat surprised that she had worked with this person in the past.

Speaker 15 This lady and I used to work at Oxford at the time, and I don't really, I don't even recall her at all.

Speaker 17 During the course of the interview, Sheila did deny having to do anything with Nancy's murder.

Speaker 4 After interviewing Sheila for about an hour, detectives leave with no further insight into the case.

Speaker 17 There was nothing specific gained from her interview other than she claimed that she wasn't involved.

Speaker 17 We did interview coworkers of both Nancy and Sheila that knew them both at the same time period. No one could say that they were friends or saw them outside of work or anything like that.

Speaker 4 But to try to confirm Sheila's story, investigators know who they need to speak with next. Her ex-lover, Nelson Sessler.

Speaker 17 Through our investigative means, we found him out of state North Carolina area, and we went there without letting him know that we were going to show up for an interview.

Speaker 17 When first saying hi to Nelson, he was slightly reluctant to speak with us. He did agree to talk with us.

Speaker 17 Nelson did state that he did not know Nancy.

Speaker 17 There wasn't much information exchange going on.

Speaker 17 There was no new leads gained from him. He was very reluctant to talk about Sheila.
And he did indicate that he was looking to put this behind him.

Speaker 17 And that's for the reason that he didn't want to really speak so much about it.

Speaker 4 Detectives had been certain that Nancy's note gave them the key to unlocking her murder.

Speaker 4 But the investigation is derailed when they discover that the Nelson on Nancy's calendar wasn't Sessler after all.

Speaker 17 It turns out Nelson was actually a band band that was having a concert. Nancy was a fan and

Speaker 17 we had found further proof that she attended this concert and that was the date and notation that she had made in that case.

Speaker 4 Further insight into Nancy's case is made when crime scene DNA that did not belong to her is discovered.

Speaker 17 Sheila's DNA is on file due to her crimes and there was no match of DNA that was found at the scene there.

Speaker 4 It appears that for now, Sheila won't be dragged into a third murder case. But detectives are not about to give up trying to solve Nancy's murder.

Speaker 17 As we have seen in other investigations, as DNA technology improves, some of these cases are getting solved, especially where DNA evidence is present, like ours.

Speaker 17 So we are hopeful for that in the future.

Speaker 33 It's very difficult

Speaker 33 at times to go through the day realizing that my sister's not here. I just want it to be solved.
And I don't know that it brings closure, but it brings some sort of peace. And I'd like that.

Speaker 33 I certainly don't want this person who could commit this murder once to ever do it again.

Speaker 4 While Nancy Smith's murder remains unsolved, Sheila Davalu continues to maintain her innocence and serve out her prison time.

Speaker 4 As early as 2025, she will complete her sentence in New York for the attempted murder of her husband, Paul Christos.

Speaker 4 At that time, she will be transferred to Connecticut to begin serving 50 years for the murder of Annalisa Raimundo.

Speaker 4 With good behavior, Sheila could be released in 2075. If she's still alive, she'll be 106 years old.

Speaker 4 In the meantime, Sheila is appealing her murder conviction and still hopes to clear her name.

Speaker 15 I might not find out exactly who did it, but I will be exonerated.

Speaker 15 People get exonerated all the time. My friend was exonerated last week and went home.

Speaker 15 I feel like it's very easy to get convicted because I saw it happen in Connecticut with very little evidence.

Speaker 15 I have my federal appeal right now and I'm still on the path of researching it and appealing it and

Speaker 15 advocating for myself.

Speaker 4 Sheila's appeal centers on her belief that DNA found in Anna Lisa Raimundo's bathroom was a result of cross-contamination.

Speaker 4 She also insists that she was nowhere near Anna Lisa's Stamford, Connecticut apartment when she was murdered.

Speaker 15 I wasn't there. I was in New York at the time.

Speaker 15 My cell tower records will reflect, because I made calls at the time that should reflect that I'm in New York. But the DA, the prosecutor, is not presenting the cell tower records.

Speaker 15 And I feel like only those who feel a sense of injustice in a certain part of their crime would speak up. That is my

Speaker 15 number one reason for doing this. I want the truth in Connecticut, and I'm going to uncover the truth.

Speaker 4 Sheila continues to justify her story. But is it true or is it all a facade?

Speaker 14 When you look at her, you keep scratching your head saying, I cannot believe she did this. I cannot believe she did that.

Speaker 14 But she did it. And the funny thing about it is, she thinks she's going to get away with it every single time.

Speaker 2 On August 31st, 2018, a judge sentenced Donna Matthews to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Speaker 2 On September 14th, 2018, Derek Matthews was sentenced to seven years in prison for his role in Michael Guyan's murder.

Speaker 4 For more information on Snapped, go to oxygen.com.

Speaker 34 On Boxing Day 2018, 20-year-old Joy Morgan was last seen at her church, Israel United in Christ, or IUIC.

Speaker 4 I just went on my Snapchat and I just see her face plastered everywhere.

Speaker 34 This is The Missing Sister, the true story of a woman betrayed by those she trusted most.

Speaker 15 IUIC is my family and like the best family that I've ever had.

Speaker 34 But IUIC isn't like most churches.

Speaker 14 This is a devilish cult.

Speaker 16 You know when you get that feeling where you just, I don't want to be here.

Speaker 16 I want to get out. It's like that feeling of, like, I want to go hang out.

Speaker 34 I'm Charlie Brent Coast Cuff and after years of investigating Joy's case, I need to know what really happened to Joy.

Speaker 34 Binge all episodes of The Missing Sister exclusively and ad-free right now on Wondery Plus. Start your free trial of Wondery Plus on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or in the Wondery app.