Sheila Davalloo (Part 1)

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Speaker 2 Snapped has covered hundreds of femme fatales, but only one woman stands apart from the rest. Sheila Davalu.

Speaker 2 She's the only killer who's been featured twice. First in 2006 for the attempted murder of her husband, Paul Christos.

Speaker 3 What grabbed everyone's attention right away was certainly the blindfolds, the handcuffs, this sex plague on Haywire.

Speaker 4 He starts screaming, you're going to kill me, you're trying to kill me.

Speaker 6 He believed for a moment in time in that.

Speaker 2 And Sheila Davilu was profiled again in 2012 for the murder of a romantic rival.

Speaker 8 The walkway from the front door was a bloody mess.

Speaker 5 I think the guy attacked my mother.

Speaker 8 She was stabbed numerous times.

Speaker 4 Had she not meant to stab her husband, she would have totally gotten away with this.

Speaker 11 Sheila's a narcissist, and she's a terrible liar. That is a very cold, calculating, devious woman.

Speaker 12 She thinks she's going to get away with it every single time.

Speaker 2 Sheila Davalu is currently serving a 75-year prison sentence at New York's Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women.

Speaker 2 Despite being convicted of two vicious crimes, Sheila has maintained her innocence.

Speaker 2 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 13 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 2 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 12 They're looking at Sheila for another murder.

Speaker 14 The many similarities between the cases were striking.

Speaker 5 It was something that had to be followed up on.

Speaker 13 I told them straight up that I would be the perfect suspect for that case.

Speaker 13 Hello, my name is Sheila Davilu.

Speaker 13 I am convicted of two crimes.

Speaker 13 I'm here right now to talk about it and to put some,

Speaker 13 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 2 To better understand her story, Sheila takes us back to the very beginning when she was born in 1969.

Speaker 13 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 13 At the age of 10, I experienced the revolution there and then a 10-year period of war.

Speaker 2 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 12 Her parents were respectable people. They worked in medicine, public health.
Sheila followed in her parents' footsteps education-wise.

Speaker 12 The woman is super intelligent. She wanted to be a scientist and work in pharmaceuticals.

Speaker 2 In 1994, while in grad school at New York Medical College, Sheila takes notice of a handsome fellow student named Paul Christos.

Speaker 13 I was drawn to Paul

Speaker 13 mostly because of his intelligence. I found him very attractive.
We hit it off. We had a lot in common.

Speaker 12 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 12 Sheila's married. She has a husband living in New York City.

Speaker 2 Although Sheila claims she has a perfectly good explanation for everything in her life, many experts consider her a master manipulator.

Speaker 11 One driving force for Sheila Davalu is self-interest.

Speaker 11 So when she sees something she wants, she will do anything to get it. And that means hiding secrets.

Speaker 2 In the fall of 1995, after dating Paul for more than a year, the truth about Sheila is finally exposed.

Speaker 12 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 2 Experts aren't the only ones who think Sheila twists the truth. Those closest to her explain her chaotic personality.

Speaker 12 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 12 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 12 And I didn't tell Paul because we're separated and I'm going to divorce the guy anyway.

Speaker 13 My first marriage was at the age of 19.

Speaker 13 I mean, it wasn't as happy and healthy. I was

Speaker 13 not

Speaker 13 doing very well. I wanted more and I wanted to pursue my education, so it was not the best of the situation.

Speaker 12 I interviewed Paul extensively and he describes, you know, it's time she comes back and she's very sincere. She's very charming.

Speaker 12 She does get a divorce and she goes back to Paul and tells him.

Speaker 14 And Paul accepts that.

Speaker 2 Despite the fact that their relationship began with Sheila lying from the beginning, she and Paul stayed together.

Speaker 13 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.
And nothing

Speaker 13 sticks out as problematic.

Speaker 2 In season four, Snapped detailed the progression of their relationship.

Speaker 2 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 2 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 woman who had an awful lot going for her.

Speaker 2 But the couple's success came at a a price. Long hours and distant commutes left little time for them to be together.

Speaker 2 About a year into their marriage, their relationship changes.

Speaker 13 Once we got married and lived together,

Speaker 13 things got a little more difficult. I was working a lot around the clock.
He was very busy. PhD program and teaching were just like coexisting, like roommates at one point.

Speaker 12 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 12 And you know, Sheila would be off with her friends from Purdue Pharma.

Speaker 15 So they weren't communicating.

Speaker 12 They weren't having sex.

Speaker 2 Then, in the fall of 2001, something happens that adds even more stress to their relationship.

Speaker 2 Sheila told Paul she had some news. Her schizophrenic brother, Shaheen, was coming for a visit.

Speaker 4 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 4 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 2 It was an odd request, but Paul obliged.

Speaker 19 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 19 Sheila have time with her brother.

Speaker 2 Soon, her brother's visits grew more and more frequent. By the spring of 2003, Paul had reached his wit's end.

Speaker 3 Paul is very upset about where things stood in the marriage.

Speaker 12 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 2 Coming up, Sheila's obsession with a co-worker ignites a plot to eliminate anyone who stands in her way.

Speaker 12 He didn't know it, but he was dying.

Speaker 11 It was a blitz attack. It was violent.
It was personal.

Speaker 2 And Sheila finally breaks her silence about her convictions.

Speaker 13 I still don't believe the DNA that they have in that case. Why did this one evidence leave the crime lab?

Speaker 2 And later, a cold case brings detectives back to Sheila for yet another murder.

Speaker 12 We know what happens to Sheila Davalu's co-workers if she chooses.

Speaker 13 I was visited right here in this room by detectives from yet another precinct.

Speaker 2 It's March 23rd, 2003 in Pleasantville, New York. For most of the residents, it's just another Sunday afternoon.
But not for Sheila Davalu and her husband, Paul Christos.

Speaker 2 The couple are three years into their marriage and struggling to connect.

Speaker 13 My marriage was really falling apart. I was focused on my job and he was rightfully focused on his career.

Speaker 13 We really weren't spending time together anymore and it just sort of happened that we kind of drifted apart.

Speaker 2 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 2 Looking for ways to rekindle the spark in their relationship, Sheila comes up with an idea.

Speaker 3 Sheila told him that she wanted to play a game with him in which he would be handcuffed and blindfolded.

Speaker 3 And they would touch each other with objects, and they would have to guess what those objects were.

Speaker 3 And they would take turns being the person touching with the objects and actually being handcuffed and blindfolded.

Speaker 13 This is not the first time that we had done this. He has handcuffs and he has some

Speaker 13 paraphernalia like that. And it was a

Speaker 13 without getting into detail, it was a

Speaker 13 sort of mutually agreed upon game that we played. The game was mostly for Paul's benefit.
It was for his gratification.

Speaker 13 I can't say that I

Speaker 13 get any pleasure out of it or anything like that.

Speaker 13 I don't. We were trying to work on our relationship.

Speaker 2 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 19 She was handcuffed to the chair with a blindfold, and Paul rubbed a remote control for a television on her face.

Speaker 3 She had to guess what it was.

Speaker 4 And then it's Paul's turn. Sheila blindfolds Paul.
He's handcuffed to a chair in the room.

Speaker 3 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 2 Paul cried out in pain.

Speaker 4 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 2 When Sheila removed the blindfold, Paul saw blood spreading all over his shirt.

Speaker 2 He told Sheila to uncuff him, but Sheila couldn't find the key.

Speaker 13 I had to break the whole chair apart

Speaker 13 slide his hands out of it.

Speaker 13 Eventually, when he moved, I found the key and I took the cuffs off of him. But that was after I broke the chair.

Speaker 2 Experts believe this proves the depths of Sheila's deceptive manipulation.

Speaker 11 Here's this supportive,

Speaker 11 sweet man who constantly does the things that she asks,

Speaker 11 putting himself in a of extreme trust, blindfolded and handcuffed, bound to a chair, and she's going to take advantage of that.

Speaker 11 That is a very cold, calculating, devious woman.

Speaker 2 Paul didn't know it at the time, but he'd been stabbed. Sheila continues to claim it was an accident.

Speaker 13 At the time, I was very confused and I was in shock. My intent was never to cause his demise.

Speaker 2 He screamed for her to call 911. Sheila grabbed her cell phone, but half an hour later, help still hadn't arrived.

Speaker 4 The ambulance never shows. So Paul starts to question her.
Please call back. Tell them, you know, I need somebody here.

Speaker 4 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 2 Losing blood and growing weaker by the second, Paul begged Sheila to take him to the emergency room. But Sheila had an idea.
She told Paul she would go get a doctor from a nearby walk-in clinic.

Speaker 4 She's in and out of the door within five minutes, and she comes back in and tells him that they were close and they couldn't help him. And he insists on going to the hospital at this point.

Speaker 2 She threw Paul in the back seat of their car and sped off towards Westchester Medical Center. 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 2 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 13 I think I've been criticized a lot for not driving him directly to the

Speaker 16 ER.

Speaker 13 I drove him directly there, but

Speaker 13 I didn't know exactly what building.

Speaker 13 I wasn't paying paying attention, so I drove him to a different building. I think it was the psych unit, which I had been to before because my brother was hospitalized there.

Speaker 11 Her behavior is not odd if you think about her as just a self-centered person who wanted to kill her husband.

Speaker 11 It is very odd if she were genuinely a loving wife who was hoping that she got to the ER in time.

Speaker 11 But nothing about her behavior suggested that she cared that Paul survived.

Speaker 2 Sheila's dangerous behavior doesn't stop after they arrive at the hospital.

Speaker 4 She parks the car, she steps out of the car, and she leans into the backseat as if to help him out.

Speaker 2 Paul noticed a flash of metal in Sheila's hand. Suddenly, she plunged a knife deep into his chest.

Speaker 3 That's when you realize that she was trying to kill him.

Speaker 4 He starts screaming, you're gonna kill me, you're trying to kill me.

Speaker 2 Paul lunged from the car and struggled to fight back.

Speaker 3 He grabs the knife away from her, and he's able to throw it amidst some bricks that are piled up so that the knife is then unreachable.

Speaker 2 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 11 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, thinking and hoping he'll die in the car.

Speaker 11 car. He didn't.

Speaker 11 So she passed by the ER and took him to another place. He still isn't dead.
So she stabbed him again.

Speaker 11 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 12 Nat knife blade had just nicked his heart. And he's got some internal bleeding going on.

Speaker 12 He didn't know it, but he was dying.

Speaker 2 As Paul lay bleeding 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 2 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 13 You know, I lied to the police. I lied to the detective as to what happened.

Speaker 13 And I think that was just my shame, embarrassment. I just didn't want to discuss it.

Speaker 4 Tell me about the blindfold.

Speaker 20 How about mine?

Speaker 20 Don't either jokes.

Speaker 4 Okay, I'm not a woman. I just want to.

Speaker 20 Oh, you think I did it?

Speaker 6 Well, I think something went wrong, yeah.

Speaker 2 On March 23rd, 2003, a horrifying scene is unfolding outside a hospital in Westchester, New York.

Speaker 13 It was very bizarre.

Speaker 13 It's nothing I've ever done before.

Speaker 2 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 2 Some bystanders had come to his aid and an ambulance was on its way to rush him to the emergency room.

Speaker 3 They see that he has life-threatening injuries. One of the knife wounds has actually nicked the heart.

Speaker 2 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 2 Finally, the ambulance arrived, with the police just seconds behind it.

Speaker 2 As an officer rode with Paul in the ambulance, another drove Sheila down to police headquarters for questioning.

Speaker 11 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 11 He'd gotten the knife away and he threw it into a certain area.

Speaker 2 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 2 But instead of concern, Sheila's reaction was one of indifference.

Speaker 3 Instead of asking about how her husband is doing,

Speaker 3 she starts asking about other things, such as, can someone go by my house to take care of my dogs? And this is when her husband is possibly dying in open-heart surgery.

Speaker 3 So obviously that gave us clues that something bizarre was happening here.

Speaker 2 When detectives asked Sheila how her husband had been stabbed, she said that Paul had come home from work with the mysterious wounds.

Speaker 20 I get nauseous when I look at what I couldn't look at it. So I said, before seeing he wanted me to look at it to make sure it was okay.
And I looked at it and

Speaker 20 I said, it's not bleeding.

Speaker 11 She had a story prepared. And 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 3 She's told that Paul is alive. And that not only is he alive, but he's saying that she stabbed him.

Speaker 6 I already had a statement from your husband saying to say I'm not only once, but advice by you. Talk about wineful.

Speaker 20 Tell me about the wineful.

Speaker 2 Realizing she was caught in another lie, Sheila struggled to come up with a new story.

Speaker 3 She said that, no, I didn't stab my husband. You know, we were playing this game and he moved into the knife.
She creates this

Speaker 3 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 2 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 2 Sheila finally opens up about how she lied to investigators.

Speaker 13 There are a lot of contradictions, and

Speaker 13 I can't really account for it. I just know that

Speaker 13 I don't even remember the interrogation.

Speaker 13 I know I was interrogated for a long time. I don't remember it.

Speaker 13 I just gave them some kind of explanation which was

Speaker 13 a lie.

Speaker 13 I just know that my intention was never to actually kill him.

Speaker 13 I, you know, to put it in context, This was a very small knife.

Speaker 13 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. So

Speaker 16 it's...

Speaker 16 I,

Speaker 13 you know,

Speaker 13 I feel like

Speaker 13 I had

Speaker 13 plenty of opportunity to kill him if I wanted to.

Speaker 2 Sheila doesn't deny stabbing him. So why does she call out the size of the knife?

Speaker 11 When Sheila says, I used a small knife, so clearly it was not my intent to kill,

Speaker 11 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 11 A large knife would have just been outright murder.

Speaker 6 Jill, not here, Joe, okay? I'm not at all.

Speaker 20 I I just want to... No, I mean you think I did it.

Speaker 6 Well I think something went wrong. Yeah, I'm not saying...

Speaker 6 I'm not saying it was intended to hurt him. I'm not saying that.
I just got at count where he's giving me a story that you were playing a game and everything was fine. And then he gets hurt.

Speaker 6 That would understand an accident happening. He's blindfolded and he said, you know, something went wrong.

Speaker 6 And, you know, but I'm trying to understand the second sample, which I know didn't occur at the same time the first one did.

Speaker 6 And I know he didn't do it to himself because it was impossible that it was possible for him to do it to himself.

Speaker 2 For more than two hours, Detective Allison Carpentier questions Sheila but gets nowhere. Thankfully, Paul survives.

Speaker 2 But Detective Carpentier keeps Sheila in custody on assault charges while she continues to investigate.

Speaker 12 Great detectives rely on one thing,

Speaker 14 their gut.

Speaker 12 And Detective Carpentier is really in a class all by herself when it comes to detectives because she listens to her instinct here. She knows there's more going on.

Speaker 12 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 2 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 2 It was to a Stanford, Connecticut number labeled Nelson on Sheila's caller ID.

Speaker 4 And we see a number that comes up Nelson that she had made that call in between the stabs stabbing her husband.

Speaker 2 Armed with a name and a hunch, they tried some old-fashioned detective work.

Speaker 4 So we call her at 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?

Speaker 4 And that's how we learned from Nelson Sessler's last name by kind of just fooling his employment that we were another company looking for information.

Speaker 2 Detectives were very interested in speaking with Nelson Sessler. At the interview, investigators asked Sessler about his relationship with Sheila Davalu.

Speaker 2 He told them that he and Sheila had been dating on and off for over a year. But when detectives revealed that Sheila had been charged with stabbing her husband, Nelson Sessler was baffled.

Speaker 14 He was stunned. He didn't know she had a husband.

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Speaker 2 It's 2003 in Westchester, New York. Following Sheila Davilu's arrest for the stabbing of her husband, Paul Christos, detectives catch her in another lie.

Speaker 2 She was having an affair with a man named Nelson Sessler.

Speaker 12 Sheila's married to Paul Christos, and now she starts dating a guy at her work,

Speaker 12 not telling him she has a husband in New York.

Speaker 2 In her interview, Sheila breaks her silence about her relationship with Nelson.

Speaker 13 I joined Purdue Pharma in

Speaker 13 the year 2000 and I think shortly like six months after I joined, Nelson joined that company and we had

Speaker 13 a lot of projects in common that we worked together. We were on the same research team.

Speaker 13 Nelson is very funny and very outgoing

Speaker 13 and we hit it off.

Speaker 13 It seems like I was spending more time with Nelson than my own husband. Nelson's very persuasive.

Speaker 13 When he wanted to get together with me, he would be actively pursuing me. I've never experienced anything like that before.

Speaker 13 And that was

Speaker 13 a heady feeling and very thrilling for me. Who, you know, I'm not a type of person who gets pursued.
You know, it's just doesn't usually happen like that. So it was an exhilarating feeling.

Speaker 2 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 19 He stated, How could somebody be married and not have anything to show that a man lived in that apartment?

Speaker 15 No clothes, no photos.

Speaker 2 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 12 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.

Speaker 12 Paul believing that it was for her brother to come over.

Speaker 11 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 2 But now, after 15 years behind bars, Sheila admits the truth about her ruse.

Speaker 13 It was deceitful.

Speaker 13 It was in furtherance of the affair.

Speaker 13 It was

Speaker 13 just

Speaker 13 a huge mistake. You know, Paul is genuine.
He's a real person. He's sincere.
He does not lie.

Speaker 2 There is at least one truth in Sheila's web of lies. She does actually have a brother who suffers from mental illness.

Speaker 13 My brother is schizophrenic and didn't know anything about either of my husbands.

Speaker 13 So

Speaker 13 it was convenient to use my brother and say, well, he's coming over.

Speaker 13 And when in reality, Nelson was.

Speaker 2 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 2 Nelson told detectives that he decided to break things off with Sheila to date another co-worker named Annalisa Raimundo.

Speaker 8 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 2 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 8 Ramundo was laying just inside the threshold of an apartment, a very brutal, large crime scene.

Speaker 2 There's very little evidence in her case, except for a bloody crime scene and a strange 911 call.

Speaker 2 Yet after detectives learn about the murder of Nelson's girlfriend, Sheila quickly becomes a suspect.

Speaker 2 Although investigators don't have enough evidence to arrest her, they do learn that Sheila and Nelson rekindled their romance after Anna Lisa was killed.

Speaker 2 Which would explain the call Sheila made made to Nelson right after Paul was stabbed a few months later.

Speaker 2 According to Nelson, the call was to ask him to come over later that night.

Speaker 4 She stabs him twice. She pretends to call 911, and then she walks outside and calls Nelson Sessler and asks him to come over later on that evening about 8:30, 9 o'clock for a date.

Speaker 2 However, Sheila claims that's not the way it happened.

Speaker 13 Nelson had called me and said that he was coming over.

Speaker 13 And I had called him and said, absolutely not.

Speaker 13 Because

Speaker 13 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

Speaker 13 I was calling Nelson off.

Speaker 2 Yet many question Sheila's version of the story.

Speaker 11 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 11 You did it. This is not a predicament.

Speaker 11 She's using a word

Speaker 11 to wrap it up in a sterile package so that it doesn't at all feel as if she's done anything wrong.

Speaker 2 Investigators believe that Paul's stabbing was premeditated and Sheila tried to kill him so she could could be with Nelson. She's now charged with attempted murder.

Speaker 2 But Sheila continued to insist that she was innocent.

Speaker 13 I could have taken a plea of five years.

Speaker 13 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 13 I still love Paul.

Speaker 2 At trial, Sheila makes her first attempt at defending herself, and her story changes yet again.

Speaker 13 It was a bizarre set of situations that happened on that day. I felt a lot of

Speaker 13 pain and tension, and I grabbed the knife and I stabbed him.

Speaker 2 On February 4th, 2004, nearly a year after her arrest, Sheila Davilu stands trial for stabbing her bound and blindfolded husband during a kinky bedroom game.

Speaker 2 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 3 What grabbed everyone's attention right away was certainly the blindfolds, the handcuffs,

Speaker 3 you know, this sex plague on Haywire. The irony of the name and something like this happening in a small village called Pleasantville.

Speaker 2 Armed with a slew of evidence, prosecutors began their opening argument by painting Sheila as a deceitful and manipulative woman.

Speaker 3 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 3 To avoid that embarrassment, she tried to kill her husband.

Speaker 2 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 3 It was a psychiatric defense. She couldn't appreciate the consequences of what she had done because, you know, she was battling depression.

Speaker 3 It was her mental illness, which, you know, drove her to do what she did.

Speaker 2 With years between her and the trial, Sheila now tries to rationalize her actions on the day of Paul's attack.

Speaker 13 It was a bizarre set of situations that happened on that day. I felt a lot of

Speaker 13 pain and tension,

Speaker 13 and I grabbed the knife and I stabbed him.

Speaker 13 It was very bizarre.

Speaker 13 It's nothing I've ever done before.

Speaker 13 I guess I don't really honestly even remember doing it.

Speaker 13 And

Speaker 13 I was very confused and I was in shock. I just remember being frantic.

Speaker 13 A lot of professionals say that people who commit violence on somebody else, they usually generally don't remember it.

Speaker 13 I just had this dissociative moment that I didn't connect what was going on for a second. I was very, very confused.

Speaker 2 It's only now, years later, that Sheila claims she's able to understand the extent of her illness.

Speaker 13 I've been in therapy for 16 years. I know for a fact now in retrospect that I suffer from PTSD

Speaker 13 from the years that I grew up in a war zone. It was an exaggerated reaction

Speaker 13 to what I felt at that moment. A very

Speaker 13 crazy, exaggerated, bizarre reaction to that moment's pain that I felt.

Speaker 2 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 11 Sheila tried to mitigate what she did.

Speaker 11 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 11 It's all a blank. I don't know what went on.
She had a story crafted and it didn't work.

Speaker 11 So here comes another story. Let's see if this one flies.

Speaker 2 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 3 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 2 But to this day, Sheila claims there was nothing nefarious about her deception.

Speaker 13 I get a lot of

Speaker 13 criticism about

Speaker 13 not having called 911.

Speaker 13 I don't think I, I think I was just trying to

Speaker 13 hope that I don't know, 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 11 But in fact, she did pretend to call for emergency services.

Speaker 11 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 11 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 2 And that's exactly what prosecutors argued during her trial.

Speaker 3 Her not calling the police and allowing him to bleed,

Speaker 3 that only succeeds if he dies.

Speaker 2 It seemed like everything was going the prosecution's way, but then they called Paul Christos to the stand.

Speaker 14 There's typically tremendous antagonism between the accused and the victim. Not in this case.

Speaker 18 At trial, Paul goes to bat for Sheila.

Speaker 19 Paul said during the trial that, you know, he still showed that he loved his wife and he really didn't want her to go to prison. He wanted her to get help.

Speaker 19 He was still loving and caring towards Sheila, even though Sheila tried to kill him.

Speaker 13 Paul supported me and his parents supported me.

Speaker 7 It's

Speaker 13 awe-inspiring.

Speaker 16 I'm

Speaker 13 indebted to them for that.

Speaker 13 I think part of it is because he knows me. and he knows me better than anybody has ever known me and he knows.

Speaker 13 I hope he knows that my intent was not to hurt him.

Speaker 11 When Sheila cries, Sheila cries for Sheila.

Speaker 1 Not for Paul.

Speaker 11 She did intend to kill him. She's crying because she got caught.

Speaker 2 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 15 The judge said to Sheila, you have lied over and over and over.

Speaker 14 You are a dangerous threat to society.

Speaker 2 Judge Dickerson pronounced Sheila guilty of attempted murder. After Sheila nearly killed Paul, he and his family surprisingly speak out at her sentencing.

Speaker 13 They sent wonderful letters about me to the judge.

Speaker 1 Paul advocated for

Speaker 13 me to get

Speaker 13 less time.

Speaker 16 He did not want me to go to prison

Speaker 13 and he was the victim.

Speaker 2 However, the judge is not impressed.

Speaker 2 He sentenced her to 25 years in prison without the possibility of parole. The toughest sentence allowed by law.

Speaker 3 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 3 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 13 I'm definitely guilty of a crime. I, you know, I have no doubt about that.

Speaker 13 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 13 You know, it's, I mean, it's not a laughing matter, but 25 years is a long time

Speaker 7 for,

Speaker 13 you know,

Speaker 13 a person who, by the grace of God, he's alive and well and didn't want me to get any time.

Speaker 2 Although Sheila is incarcerated for attempted murder in 2004, her story is far from over.

Speaker 2 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 2 In hopes of uncovering clues, they turn to the 911 call made on the day Annalisa died.

Speaker 12 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 12 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 12 That person that made that call could be our killer.

Speaker 2 Coming up, the investigation into Anna Lisa's murder intensifies.

Speaker 12 So they have the killer's blood, the killer's DNA. That's huge.

Speaker 2 And then, new information surfaces that Sheila may be involved in another murder dating back to 2001, before Annalisa's murder and Sheila's attack on her husband.

Speaker 10 When she saw us, and she believed 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 9 How hard is it to kill a planet? Maybe all it takes is a little drilling, some mining, and a whole lot of carbon pumped into the atmosphere.

Speaker 9 When you see what's left, it starts to look like a crime scene.

Speaker 2 Are we really safe?

Speaker 13 Is our water safe?

Speaker 1 You destroyed our town.

Speaker 7 And crimes like that, they don't just happen.

Speaker 1 We call things accidents. There is no accident.

Speaker 2 This was 100%

Speaker 19 preventable.

Speaker 9 They're the result of choices by people. Ruthless oil tycoons, corrupt politicians, even organized crime.
These are the stories we need to be telling about our changing planet.

Speaker 9 Stories of scams, murders, and cover-ups that are about us and the things we're doing to either protect the Earth or destroy it.

Speaker 9 Follow Lawless Planet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 9 You can listen to new episodes of Lawless Planet early and ad-free right now by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondry app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.