The black widow

Keith Morrison Correspondent • Profile

She is cunning - the black widow - deceitful, as she weaves her deadly web. Only the sharpest eye could spot the fault, the clue, the dangling thread. Though, if that thread were ever pulled, what a frightful unravelling might ensue....

Los Angeles. 1998. March 18th.  Evening. The home: a comfortable tract house in the town of Northridge. San Fernando Valley. The TV was on.  There was a man on the couch in the living room. A door opened.

The spider's sticky trap was sprung.

911 Operator: "9-1-1 emergency operator #682."

Diane Bates: "YES,THERE'S A MURDER HERE! I DON'T KNOW WHAT HAPPENED!"

911 Operator:"Okay ma'am, what happened?"

Diane Bates:"I don't know! It's my son-in-law!"

The call was from the mother in law, back from a night at the movies.

Diane Bates: "It's a gunshot! He's bleeding!"

Diane Bates was distraught. It was she who discovered Joel Shanbrom, sprawled on the couch. Dead.

911 Operator: "Got shot by a gun?"

Diane Bates: "He's dead, I think!"

Detective Brian McCartin: He was shot in the head three times.

Keith Morrison: They weren't foolin' around.

Detective Brian McCartin: No, whoever shot him, they wanted him dead. 

Veteran LAPD detective Brian McCartin arrived to find a house ransacked. 

Detective Brian McCartin: At quick glance, it looks like it was a home invasion robbery. So that was the first thing going through our minds.

Home invasion? And then, another shocking discovery.  There was a witness! Still in the house! Joel's wife Jennifer was where she almost always was about that time in the evening...an upstairs bathroom, bathing their three-year-old, Jacob.

Detective Brian McCartin: As she gave him a bath, she heard some voices and some noise.  And she heard what she thought sounded like someone confronting her husband.  And then all of a sudden the shots rang out.

And so, said Jennifer, she scooped up Jacob from the tub and rushed down the hall to hide in the master bedroom shower.

Detective Brian McCartin: She said she heard some voices, and she heard people come upstairs. She thought multiple people. 

Keith Morrison: So, maybe these were the robbers?

Detective Brian McCartin: She thought, "Now they're going through the upstairs."  And she heard drawers opening, noise banging, drawers falling onto the floor. And then all of a sudden-- she said the next thing she heard were the police knockin' on the bathroom door.

So terrified was Jennifer that cops had to slide their badges under the door to coax her out. Her story supported what happened. A ransacking upstairs. A violent shooting downstairs.

But then investigators learned something else that might also explain what happened... Joel Shanbrom was a police officer.

Detective Brian McCartin: Maybe it was job-related.  That was an avenue we had to look at also.  Maybe he arrested somebody that was angry enough to do this to him.

Joel had been an officer for the LA School District for five years. And one of it's most popular.

Officer Russ Orlando: Joel and I just hit it off.  And, he was like the brother i never had.

Russ Orlando went through training with Joel. They were close friends.

Officer Russ Orlando: I never saw Joel upset. I never saw him have a harsh word. 

Keith Morrison: A gentle guy?

Officer Russ Orlando: Very gentle, but firm and would take action when he needed to.

Joel's sister Karen.

Karen Shanbrom, sister: Joey was the kind of guy that would light up a room.

Karen Shanbrom: He didn't get upset. Wasn't confrontational. And things would just roll off him like water off a duck's back.

He was the baby of the Shanbrom family's four kids. He served in the Navy after high school. And then came back home and fell for a sweet, perky blond, named Jennifer Fisher. Met her rollerskating.

She was five years younger than he was. But it was love: her very first love. And though Joel worried that she might someday want to sow her wild oats after all. Jennifer seemed to know just what she wanted. She was just 21 when they married.  But eager to settle down. And life seemed to be just the way it was supposed to be.

Karen Shanbrom: You know he had a home.  He had a wife. He had a baby. He had a career that he liked.

How sudden it was. Whatever the cause” targeted as a cop, or robbed and killed by chance... The end was ugly.

Karen Shanbrom: I remember when my mother told me, somebody killed our Joey. I felt like I had lost my right arm and my right leg. I felt like they were gone.  I felt like I had body parts missing because part of me was gone. 

All night long, that first night, the cops combed the Shanbrom's house. A visibly shaken Jennifer was taken to the nearby police station to provide what information she could in the hope that it might lead to whoever executed her popular husband.

Detective Brian McCartin: Obviously, he's a police officer.  We actually get more pressure from his agency and our agency. And-- but I'm still gonna put as much effort into that case as I would any case.

But for the moment Detective McCartin didn't have much to go on... Except, perhaps, for a small discovery near Joel's body: tiny pellets suggesting he was killed by a small gauge shotgun, normally used for sport hunting.

A clue, possibly?

And then, a few days later - it was at Joel's funeral, of all places - a loose thread caught the detective's attention, like a spider web glinting in the sun.

If he pulled that thread would it tell him who killed officer Joel Shanbrom...and why?

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