Death Without Mercy

0:00Music

0:05911, what is your emergency? Hey, we have smoke coming out of the house at Killarney and Eastern.

0:17It was Tuesday, November 29th, 2005, 1027 a.m. in the morning when the call came out. Heavy smoke on the second floor. Okay, we got the fire department on the way. My name is Shelly Michael. I'm 35 years old. I am a registered nurse. When I arrived, the fire was venting through the roof. There was a hole burned through the roof. I pick up the phone and my friend Kelly is on the line and she says, Shelly, your house is on fire. And I just threw the phone down and said I have to go. It was a very intense fire and it was very difficult to extinguish. As I'm driving to the house, I'm shaking, I'm nervous.

1:08I'm calling Jimmy on the phone saying, hey, where are you? Our house is on fire. Call me back. My name is Dennis Michael. I'm the father of James Michael. and when they contacted they said there was a fire and Jimmy was in the fire but they wouldn't give us any details. I see Jimmy's car in the garage and I start yelling what's going on why is Jimmy's car in the garage I just remember saying please go find him please go find him. You had a fully involved fire in that bedroom which had reached the flashover stage which means everything in that room was pretty much on fire at that point. I was in the police car and a fireman I believe said, we found your husband, he didn't make it.

2:01And I was driving over 80 mile an hour all the way and you're just thinking you want to get there as soon as you possibly can. And of course we, my wife Ruth and myself, we both realized that in our hearts that Jimmy was gone.

2:19I have not taken my wedding set off ever since we've been married and I'm not ever going to take it off. Jimmy gave it to me and I'll always be his wife. There were a lot of red flags concerning this fire. the position of the body was unusual for a fire inside of a bedroom. When I made it up the stairs and I saw the damage to that bedroom and I walked in, it actually took me a couple seconds to find the body on the bed. That's how bad it was, devastated. My name is Paul Mesonaut. I'm a Morgantown police detective. And on November 29, 2005, I became involved in the death investigation of James Michael.

3:09From an investigative standpoint, there was just something really wrong. I am the wife of Jimmy Michael, and I am charged with first-degree murder and first-degree arson. And I'm wrongly accused.

3:31Death without mercy.

3:45Opening game for the 2007 West Virginia Mountaineers, pride of the entire state.

3:55From small towns to remote mountain valleys, kids here dream of being part of the excitement in Morgantown.

4:05Young Michelle Gutz, raised in nearby Clarksburg, was no different, and her dream came true. Shelly, as she liked to be called, was a straight-A student at Cheerleader in high school, and it was clear to everyone, including her mom, that she had what it takes. She would go into the backyard and do backflips and cartwheels and getting herself ready for cheering. Cheering was her first love as far as sports. When she got to West Virginia University in 1990, her looks, brains, and talent paid off. She won a coveted spot on the cheerleading squad. And Shelley also had a more serious side. I wanted to be involved with children somehow.

4:55That was never a question. I always wanted to be a pediatric nurse. After graduation, she landed a job at Ruby Memorial Hospital in Morgantown. Respiratory therapist Stephanie Estill remembers Shelly well. Hard not to, she says. Cheerleader moves in the unit, and she was all about flirting with the boys that we worked with. What do you mean cheerleader moves in the unit? You're in an intensive care unit. Right. I can remember she just came over and did this high kick to her ear and just kind of giggled and kept on walking. This did not endear her to Stephanie. I thought she was slightly annoying and she's not a person I would have picked to be my friend.

5:38But what Stephanie found annoying apparently made a very good impression on another therapist in the unit, Jimmy Michael. Jimmy was very handsome. He was very kind and loving and very generous, very family-oriented, very Christian man. But a very married Christian man, married in fact to her colleague Stephanie Estill. Yes, that Stephanie Estill, who had two kids. And did we mention that Shelly by then was married too, to Rob Angus, and Shelly also had two kids? None of which appeared to deter her or Jimmy in the slightest. Jimmy and I would talk off and on at work, and I knew that he and Stephanie were having issues, and Rob and I were not getting along very well, and we kind of just connected that way.

6:32We would just kind of sit around in chairs around work when it was slow and talk, chit-chat. What you doing? By the fall of 1998, Stephanie suspected something was up. The phone rang, and I said hello, and there was a hesitation, and then there was a dial tone. And I hit the return call code, and this number came back, and I wrote it down. And when I went to work a couple days later, I said to one of the girls, hey, whose phone number is this? and she opened up the nurse's phone number list, and it was the very first number on the top of the page was Shelly Angus. Soon, both couples divorced, and just eight months after hers was final, Shelly and Jimmy, both 28, got married, moving to the house on Killarney Drive, only minutes away from her job at the hospital.

7:26We had a whole future plan together. So you saw yourselves getting old together. Oh, yes. And this blended family was working out fairly well, and that can be pretty difficult when you've got somebody else's kids, your kids, and so forth. Right, and I thought it was working out very well. We thought a lot of her. She was more outgoing than Stephanie, and she was friendly. I mean, she seemed like she was good for Jimmy. It seemed a perfect match, and Jimmy's parents, Dennis and Ruth, say that perfect was very important to Shelly. When I walked out that front door, it was like perfection. Hair was neat, everything was just perfect.

8:05She wanted everybody to think that they were the perfect model family. Jimmy had left the hospital to start a medical supply business, coaching football in his spare time while Shelly coached the cheerleaders and, true to form, made sure everyone knew it. What did she do? Oh, backflips right across this floor. Flipped all the way down through my yard, you know, one right after another. It was just...

8:38November 28, 2005. A quiet evening. The Michaels were alone in the house, the kids staying with their exes. Jimmy turned in early, Shelly says, and was still asleep when she left the next morning. I left to go to work around 6-ish. I got there about 6-10, 6-15. And I went in and just did my normal routine work. Shelly says it was hours later, about 10.30 a.m., when that horrible phone call came, telling her that her house was on fire. So the adrenaline takes over. You race to the house. What's the scene like when you get there? Crazy. Firemen everywhere. I was saying, where's Jimmy? Where is he?

9:20And they just kept saying, we don't know. We can't find him. We don't know. Firefighters fought the blaze for half an hour before finding him. Jimmy Michaels' charred remains were in the master bedroom, still lying in what was left of the bed. I remember crying in the police car. I don't know who was there with me. I remember yelling, go get him, go do CPR. I remember telling Jeremy to ask God to give him back. I just thought that at that time we had a fire with a fatality. But his impressions changed, says Detective Paul Mezenot, the minute he got to the scene and began watching Shelly Michael.

9:59The people that were showing up, they seemed to be more upset than she was. And it was just kind of different when we talked to her that day. The more they talked, the more he was sure that this was a person of interest. She didn't have a reaction. She didn't have a reaction? You mean, was she crying? Was she upset? I never saw her cry. There was something that just kept drawing me to be around her, because something never sat right with me from the beginning of the investigation. And then there was the crime scene itself, with Jimmy Michael's body simply lying on the bed. When we saw the body, something just stuck out to me, that there wasn't something right with this.

10:40Just three days later, the medical examiner confirmed why all these somethings weren't right. Jimmy Michael, he found, had not died in the fire. No, he was dead before the blaze even started. This was murder.

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12:13Morgantown, West Virginia prides itself on being just a little bit sleepy. A quiet place. So we will have a short for tomorrow? Yes. And says editor Jerry Ferrara of the local Dominion Post, it is a place where nothing much happened. Morgantown still maintains a small hometown flavor. Everyone knows everyone. So imagine the shock in town. when police discovered the charred body of a popular businessman and peewee football coach in his burned-out home. And he'd been murdered in his bed. Premeditated murder of that nature, with all the bells and whistles, doesn't happen. Not in Morgantown. But Detective Mezzanot says investigators suspected murder from the minute they saw Jimmy Michael.

13:06The body looked as if he was asleep. It was like no fire damage I'd ever seen on a body. It just struck you as bizarre? Very bizarre. Bizarre because intense heat normally causes muscles to contract. Not only was Jimmy Michael lying flat on the bed, this healthy 33-year-old man apparently made no effort at all to escape. The house was pretty much salvageable, other than just some water and smoke damage, and I thought that was very weird. When the medical examiner found no soot in Jimmy's breathing passages, police knew this was murder. The fire set by someone to destroy evidence. Rumors began that that someone was Shelly Michael.

13:55One anonymous caller even naming a drug she might have used. Everybody that we talk to, you know, are you looking at the wife? Are you looking at Shelly? Shelly's this, Shelly's that. Check for drugs. She's got access to this. Was he poisoned? Everybody that we talked to wanted to talk to us about her. Toxicology results would take weeks. But meanwhile, investigators interviewed family and friends. And when they checked out the Michaels' perfect marriage, they hit pay dirt. They thought that there was possibility of an affair. Often speculation like that though is just sheer gossip. Because who could believe it's true?

14:40Not here. The perfect family wasn't so perfect after all. We were able to confirm that there was an affair. And then that kind of started driving the investigation. Shelly Michaels' lover was a man named Bobby Teets, who worked for her husband. When questioned, Teets admitted the affair. It started, he said, at this Chicago hotel, when the two supposedly were on a business trip. And it was ongoing. Teets said they'd had sex just three days before the fire, in the very bed where Jimmy Michael was found. Did he have an alibi? He had an alibi for the day of the fire. He was making deliveries and he was at the warehouse and we have people that are putting him there.

15:29Investigators also briefly looked at Jimmy Michael's ex-wife, Stephanie. But although she and Jimmy had had an ugly divorce, Mesonat couldn't see her killing her children's father. She has a new husband. At the time this murder happened, she had a four-month-old baby. You know, she has no motive to do this. No, every lead led him to the same place.

15:56but Shelly had an alibi she'd been at work when the fire was discovered apparently sure that that would clear her she actually asked to come in and chat with detectives a second time and she came without a lawyer the interview took place for about nine hours did you see Jimmy before you arrived? I gave him a kiss before I Okay. Anything weird about that? Okay. And you're at the hospital by what time? I think I was there by 6.10 or 6.15. The only time she left, she said, was to retrieve a forgotten pager from her truck. Now, how did you know that this wasn't the case? With video from the hospital, security video.

16:44Something Shelly apparently overlooked. On the video, she is seen leaving the hospital at 8-11 and returning at 8-28 a.m. 17 missing minutes. Surveillance cameras don't lie. We got your car leaving the hospital grounds. I didn't leave the hospital grounds. Complicating her denials, a neighbor actually saw her pull out of her own driveway at 8-20 when she insisted she was at work. Why did you go home? I didn't go home. That's something that we can't explain away. We got your car leaving the hospital grounds. I didn't leave the hospital grounds either. In the end, Shelley finally admitted it, saying, okay, she did leave briefly for an errand around 8.

17:37But that was a full two hours before the fire was discovered. And she doggedly stuck to her denial of the affair, not knowing that Bobby Teets already had fessed up.

17:56The detectives were flabbergasted at her denials and completely unpersuaded. She brought the investigation to herself. We didn't center it around her. Everything that she did was a lie. You know, everything that she did was a lie. Then in February of 2006, the toxicology results finally came back. And just as that anonymous caller had suggested, Jimmy Michael did indeed die of a lethal dose of a drug. A drug called rocuronium. Rocuronium is used in hospital procedures when doctors need to temporarily paralyze muscles. But the patient always is put on a ventilator to help him breathe. because without a ventilator, an injection of rocuronium causes slow suffocation.

18:47The way that it was explained to me that made the most sense would be that you would be awake and kind of watch yourself die. Can you imagine a more agonizing way to die than that? No. For police, it was the last piece of the puzzle. And on March 10, 2006, they charged Nurse Shelly Michael with first-degree murder and arson. It was front-page news. Our readers wanted every single detail. Our single-copy sales were phenomenal. Morgantown was reeling again. People look at her as a cool cucumber. That's the word around town, is that they thought that she was so cold. Yet there were questions. Could Shelly Michael really leave work, kill Jimmy, ignite a fire, and return to the hospital in just 17 minutes?

19:45And why was it two hours before any sign of fire? The whole story, says her attorney Tom Dyer, is preposterous. The defense is able to contend that the murderer and the arsonist or one in the same person. And we know absolutely this young lady is not the arsonist. So it's going to be our position. She's not the murderer.

20:23This is the type of case that people didn't want anyone to get away with. And no one was more determined to make Shelly Michael pay than District Attorney Marsha Ashdown, especially given how rocuronium kills. It's like being buried alive, not being able to move. What an awful way to die. Exactly. It's unconscionable. The lead prosecutor on the case, Ashdown says that as paralysis slowly crept over him, a terrified Jimmy Michael would have been totally helpless. That's like Edgar Allan Poe. Not being able to cry out. The state's theory of the crime is this. Shelly lifted the vial of rocuronium from the hospital, injected Jimmy probably while he slept, and then around 6 a.m.

21:16left for work as usual, only to secretly return home some two hours later. So you think she had time to leave the hospital, go back to her house, set this fire, and get back to the hospital in 17 minutes? Yes. It only takes, even by her own accounting, maybe four or five minutes one way. And how long does it take to flick a BIC? But why then was the fire not spotted until 10.30, two hours after Shelly was seen at the house? Ashdown says it's very significant that all the windows and doors to their bedroom were closed. This was an oxygen-deprived fire, meaning that it could burn in a limited area for a period of time until some smoldering is sufficient to burn into something else that then becomes fuel.

22:13A fire that smolders for hours and then suddenly bursts into flames? To Shelley's lawyer, Tom Dyer, that makes no sense. This fire had to have started sometime after 10 o 'clock. There's no evidence of any delayed combustion device or anything like that. Not only is there no hard evidence against Shelley, Dyer insists she had no motive, not even the affair. Shelley's reputation, after all, was for loving and leaving her men, not killing them. She has had affairs and run around on other men previously. She's divorced previously. She's taken advantage of her relationships with men in the past and never harmed any of them.

22:57Prosecutors say the motive is obvious. Turns out Jimmy had recently taken out a half-million-dollar life insurance policy. But despite the money, despite the affair, Shelley swears she's innocent. You had absolutely nothing to do with his death? Nothing at all. With this drug that you work with all the time? I work with it every day. I have nothing to do with it. And she has another suspect in mind. Is there a scene in your mind that puts anybody else in that room with him when this is happening? Kind of, yeah. And who would that be? I know that there was one person that gave him a lot of trouble all the time, constantly.

23:42Made him miserable. Seemed like it was her point in life to make him miserable.

23:52And it worked. Shelly is talking about Stephanie Estill, Jimmy's ex-wife. But she has an alibi. Stephanie was at home with her new baby. Making trouble for somebody is a long way from injecting them with rocoronium and setting the house on fire. You can't believe that about her. I can believe that she is capable of it. Yes, I can. But the challenge for the defense is to convince the jury that Shelly isn't capable of it. and her lawyer is worried. Worried that jurors may decide to punish her for the affair, for lying, or for simply not really being the bubbly ex-cheerleader and perfect mother she tried to present to the world.

24:38She has a reputation for being a bit abrasive, a bit of a disciplinarian around her children and those who are working with her and for her, under her at the hospital. Is the jury going to like this woman? Does it matter to you? Sure, absolutely. I mean, it's especially important when the state's case is entirely circumstantial. But Shelly doesn't always make herself easy to like. Out on bail, she was put on strict home confinement by the court. Not that Shelly seemed to care. We had people calling saying, I think I saw Michelle Michael drive by the Killarney house. Is it possible? She was getting her nails done?