A Cold Dose Of Vengeance

By Timothy Roche/Franklin

Amy Shanabarger sat up all night, watching over her husband Ron. She had sent him to bed after he had told her the story. Only she and God knew what he had said--and Amy wanted to make sure someone else heard from Ron's own lips the enormity of his crime. He was the only proof she had. Then, the horror story echoing in her head, the words hanging in the air of the house in Franklin, Ind., they had scrimped and saved to buy, she stayed up to make sure he did not do anything to himself. They had loved each other very much--or so she had thought. He had bagged groceries at the supermarket where she worked and brought her roses nearly every week. He gave her a nice diamond when he proposed. Her parents loved him. They kept a neat home in spite of small salaries (she worked a cash register; he retreaded tires at a Goodyear plant). Now they had three bedrooms: one spare, one sheltering the shards of a marriage, one painfully bereft of a baby.

Tyler was just seven months old and beginning to sit up on his own, playing peek-a-boo with a washcloth. Amy found him face down in his crib on Father's Day. That morning, instead of rousing their son, as he often did, Ron had jumped into the shower and told her to wake Tyler. She pulled on the infant's hand to turn him over and discovered his body stiff. She screamed. Ron told her to dial 911. The doctors said it was SIDS, sudden infant death syndrome. They buried Tyler two days later.

Hours after the funeral, Amy sat sobbing in her living room. Could she have saved her baby from SIDS? The night before Father's Day, she had come home from work exhausted. She had simply asked Ron how the baby was. "Fine," she recalled him whispering.

Then, as she wept, Ron told her his story. As Tyler was cooing and playing with his feet in the crib, Ron wrapped the baby's head in plastic wrap. He then sat down for dinner and brushed his teeth before returning to see his son's last breath. He removed the wrap and turned the baby onto his stomach, switched off the light and went to bed. He wanted Amy to be the one to discover the body. "Now we're even," he said.

For what? Ron said he never forgave Amy for refusing to cut short an ocean cruise with her parents to come home and comfort him when his father died in 1996. So, he said, he decided to marry her, have a child with her and kill it. He researched SIDS while waiting for her to bond with Tyler. He confessed, he said, because he was haunted by the corpse.

Amy reportedly told a friend later that Ron said he had taken out $100,000 in insurance on Tyler--and that he had plans on how they could spend it together. She slammed down her wedding ring and was walking out when Ron threatened suicide. Who'd believe this? she wondered. Who could believe this thing? She sent him to bed and sat watch. In the morning she drove him to the sheriff's, where he repeated his confession and was charged with murder. She has been back to the house only once.

--By Timothy Roche/Franklin