Post Mortem | My Uncle Joe’s Murder

0:10Welcome to Postmortem. I'm your host, Anne-Marie Green. And today we're discussing the case of Joe Shemansky. In September 2023, Joe was reported missing by his ex-wife, Heather Snyder, after she arrived at his Maryland home to drop off their two children. She said that he wasn't there. She told investigators that she'd recently broken up with her ex-boyfriend, Brandon Holbrook. And just days after she spoke to investigators, Joe's remains were found in a clearing near Holbrook's home in Pennsylvania. Heather has not been charged with any crime, nor has she been named a suspect, and she has an alibi.

0:51So joining me today is CBS News correspondent Nikki Batiste to talk about this case. Nikki, it's always great to have you here. Good to see you. This is interesting because you actually have a connection to this case. This was an unbelievable coincidence. And so I actually grew up with Heather Snyder in a really small town in rural Pennsylvania. Only about 1500 people, give you a sense. We went to the same high school. She was a year below me. And in 1997, I was homecoming queen. In 1998, I went back to our small town and crowned her homecoming queen that year. And that was the last time I'd seen her before this.

1:29So then had you heard about this case before you were assigned to it by 48 hours? because I would think that this would have been the talk of the town. Remarkably, no. I hadn't heard about this story. My family, my parents still live in the same house I grew up in in that town. Heather's family still lives there. My parents hadn't heard about it. I first learned about this story from 48 Hours producer Josh Yeager. I was riding on an Amtrak train. I get a text from Josh telling me about the story and Heather Snyder's connection, And I was shocked. And to this day, that was probably over a year ago.

2:04It's still hard to believe. So when Josh brings up her name, I mean, do you instantly remember? Oh, I immediately knew who she was. Again, this was a tiny town. We were on the field hockey team together. She was a cheerleader. I saw her at all the games. She often cheered for some of my games. her sister was a grade above me. I mean, this was such a small town where truly everyone knew everyone. So immediately I recognized her name, but I was confused at first. Like, wait, what? There's no way someone from my hometown, there's no way Heather Snyder could possibly be involved in any way in a murder case.

2:42Wow. Okay. So I want to dig into your conversation with her. But first, of course, I want to remind the listeners that if they haven't listened to this episode of 48 Hours yet, you can find the full audio version just below this episode that you're listening to in your podcast feed. So go take a listen and then come on back. All right. So Heather Snyder reported Joe Shemansky missing on the night of September 4th, 2023. But Joe's friend, Annalie Werner, who you spoke to in the hour, said that we all knew that Joe wasn't missing. We knew that Joe was gone. Did she explain why she was so convinced so quickly that, you know, this is much, much worse than it looks?

3:29I think the fact that Joe's keys and wallet were inside the house, his cars were there, all signs that didn't really make sense for someone who just ran to the grocery store and hadn't come back yet, someone who was late. The Shemansky family heard these details. And then the next morning, again, it was nighttime when Heather arrived for the child custody exchange. So dark. But the next morning, investigators saw blood in Joe's driveway. And that was obviously a sign that something terrible had happened. And early on, one of Joe's best friends, who we also spoke with in the hour, Alton McDougal, said he thought it was strange that Heather Snyder had called 911 so quickly.

4:12Heather Snyder told me that her custody lawyer had advised her to call 911. But sort of all of this together made the family convinced right away that something terrible had happened. And pretty quickly, they were suspicious about what Heather Snyder may have known or, you know, even any involvement she may have had. But again, to this day, she's never been charged with any crime and never been a suspect. Heather told investigators, right, that she had recently broken up with a boyfriend, a man named Brandon Holbrook. Joe's family, they believe that she actually lied to investigators about that, that she hadn't broken up with him.

4:50And I got to say, I was sort of surprised to learn in the hour that she had been texting him, Holbrook, the evening of the disappearance. So I think for many of our viewers, this will be the part of the story that they're really interested in. They have questions about whether or not they believe what Heather's saying. When she arrived at Joe's house, notices he's missing, she texted Brandon Holbrook that evening. And she said, in part, I have no idea where he is. The car is here. And all Brandon Holbrook texted back was, he has a couple of vans, I thought. And Heather said, no, just one. But I think what is important to point out, we talk about this in the hour, less than a week before Joe was murdered, Holbrook texted Heather Snyder, I like the smell of your hair on my pillow.

5:41And then later that day, Heather texted back to Holbrook, wish I was in your bed. Of course, I asked Heather about this. And I said, look, this was just a week before the murder. You had told authorities that you had broken up. Why is there a smell of hair on your pillow? And she told me that she'd gone to see Holbrook then, that they were still friends and that she was lying on his pillow, but that they were just talking. And that's why there was a smell of hair. And I pointed out to her, I said, some of her viewers aren't going to believe you. They're going to think that you're lying. But she insisted that they were just talking.

6:13And she stuck with what she had told investigators that they had formally broken up before that. It struck me how many of Joe's family and friends were willing to talk to you. It felt like to me that they really wanted you to get a sense of who the man was, what he meant to them. I think no one will disagree that Joe Schemansky was a popular, charismatic, full of life guy, dad. He was a well-known photographer in D.C. He made these images that many of them had Lego figures in them. Some people listening probably will say, oh, I know who he is. And he had so many friends from so many different walks of life.

6:53And he had been married before but didn't have children. Heather Snyder had been married before and had three kids from a previous marriage. And then when they had their own two children, both the Shemansky family and Heather Snyder said he just loved those kids more than anything. You know, Joe's family and friends, when they spoke about their relationship that Heather had with Joe, they said that the divorce was contentious. It certainly seems like there might have been some toxicity on both sides. In the hour, we heard some voice recordings that Joe's friend Annalise says he made expressing his anger toward Heather Snyder that were apparently meant for his children to hear one day.

7:36Heather Snyder told me that she actually wore a body camera at some of her custody exchanges with Joe because she wanted to document his behavior. She talked to me quite a bit about what she says was Joe's emotionally abusive behavior. And she says in one instance, he even got physical with her and she felt that it was bad enough that she wanted to document how he treated her. And she has a website called Heather's Abuse Story. Did she talk a little bit about why the relationship went south so badly? I mean, people divorce, but it doesn't have to be this acrimonious. It's a really good question, Anne-Marie.

8:16Heather told me that after their own two children were born, that she felt like Joe was almost obsessed with those two kids, that he sort of turned his attention away from her, didn't really want to work as much anymore, that he was just so focused on these two kids that that's when the relationship, the marriage, started to fall apart. Heather also told me that Joe would tell his family stories about her that weren't true, painting this sort of ugly picture about her to Joe's family. And the Shemansky family very much disputes what Heather says about Joe, that he was emotionally abusive to her.

8:55And they say that that just wasn't the Joe that they knew. So really two sides to this story. And as you point out, many people divorced, but this had gotten quite contentious pretty quickly. They shared joint legal custody of the children, but a judge awarded Joe primary physical custody during the school year. That's, you know, sometimes out of the ordinary. Often these custody agreements lean more in favor of the mother. Do we know why Joe ended up with physical custody? We don't know the exact reason for sure, but it seems that, and I did ask Heather about this, that their two children were already in school in Maryland.

9:36It was a good school district. And so that seemed to play probably a role in the decision. Two, Joe was really the breadwinner. He provided the financial support for the family. And lastly, Heather told me that when she left Joe, she didn't tell him. She just took the kids and she left. So perhaps that was another factor. But collectively, that was the decision by the judge. And the children were mostly with Joe during the school year and then spent more time with Heather in the summers. authorities pulled brandon's car registration and they discovered that a camera had actually picked up his license plate near joe's house the very day that joe vanished authorities arrested him september 6 2023 and then they obtained a search warrant and discovered power blades in his garage cleaning supplies and tools in his trailer as well as gloves plastic sheeting in his truck in a clearing near his house they find these human remains and of course they later confirm that they are Joe Shemansky.

10:37The coroner determined that the cause of death was a gunshot wound to the head. But, and I know there was, you know, blood found in the driveway. Do we have any idea where, how, more details about how Joe was killed? What the prosecutors allege is that Holbrook shot Joe Shemansky in his driveway in Maryland, put his body in his white truck, drove that truck, It's Pennsylvania with Joe Schemanski's body in it and then dismembered and burned his remains in Pennsylvania. That is what the prosecution argued at the trial.

11:52Welcome back. So Nikki, as we mentioned earlier, you actually knew Heather personally back in high school. You crowned her homecoming queen. How well did you know her back then? And what was it like to sort of to meet her again as an adult and walk through the hallway of your old high school? So the word that best describes how this is all felt is surreal. Everyone knew everyone pretty well in our town, in our high school. You know, my class, about 90 people. She was a year below me. Her boyfriend in high school was one of my good friends in my class. So we're all just around each other and our families were around each other.

12:29You see people in the grocery store and certainly no one would suspect something like this to have happened. And this was a story that was getting national attention. There were other news magazines interested in hearing from Heather, too. Heather agreed to do the interview with no questions off limits. It's remarkable. You asked her some pretty tough questions. I want to play an unaired portion of that interview where you ask her about Brandon Holbrook's defense attorney's suggestion that she, in fact, was the one that had the most to gain from Joe's death. You said you had a one million dollar motive and custody of your kids.

13:11Right. How do you respond to that? I didn't even know about the million dollars.

13:21I would never murder someone. You have to admit, though, it looks suspicious. Of course, on its face, it does. It does. I mean, it's just wild. But it doesn't mean that I had anything to do with it. And for Brandon, I mean, what else was he going to, who else was he going to accuse of doing it? Like, I don't, there's just so much evidence against him. There's only really one other person, me, that he could throw under the bus. I just, I mean, it wasn't shocking that they did that, I guess. This was an extraordinarily difficult interview. and I do want to point out that Heather, she didn't come out and say, I really want to talk about this.

14:15She really didn't at first. And the reason she told me she ultimately did is because she understood that the best person to tell her story was her, even though she was reluctant to be on national TV talking about this. This was an exclusive interview with Heather Snyder. And when we first sat down, we're in a renovated barn in our hometown on a rainy night. But then we talked for three hours without taking a break, even for a sip of water. And she did answer everything. And again, this was a story where the Shemansky family very much believes that Heather has some sort of involvement in this murder.

14:54She knew something. She may have convinced Brandon Holbrook to do this. They understand. And they've said to me, look, we know this is a gut feeling. We understand there's no evidence at all against Heather Snyder in any way. And she's never been a suspect and she's not charged with a crime. But this is how they feel. And I asked Heather a lot of the questions that I believe the Shemanskys have and I think that our audience will have. She insisted that what she was telling me was true. And I will say she made eye contact throughout the interview, which I did note. So I was going to sort of take your temperature on something.

15:28You bring up the Shemanskys and they I mean, they don't like her. it struck me that she said she still considers them family do you understand that heather told me in the interview that she still considers them family and in that three-hour interview never once did she speak poorly about the shemanskis and and even when we spoke off camera before this interview when i was talking to her about doing it she never badmouth them and that struck me too and i think for her she understands that the shemanskis want to see their niece and nephew that they want to see Joe's two kids with Heather. And she's open to that, she told me, but she's only open to it if they will stop blaming her for something she says she didn't do.

16:13Right. Brandon Holbrook's trial began March 31st, 2025. Were the Shemanskys there? Did 48 Hours have a producer there as well? The courtroom was pretty packed most days. The Shemansky family was there, are many of Joe's friends from D.C. I was at the trial for a large part of it. Our 48 Hours producers, Josh Yeager and Shaheen Toki, were there every day in court. We saw Brandon Holbrook in person for the first time. But yeah, it was a packed courtroom. It certainly seemed like the defense's strategy was to turn the jury's attention away from Brandon Holbrook by arguing someone else could have been involved in the death.

16:55Holbrook's defense attorney, Brandon Callahan, told you that Anything that suggests that there were other people involved makes Brandon Holbrook's role in this unclear. I thought that phrasing was so interesting. Can you explain the legal strategy of it? Let's keep in mind the state charged Brandon Holbrook specifically with murdering Joe. That's what his charge was. The defense argued if they can prove or convince the jury that someone else was involved in any way in this crime, it may raise questions about who did what. So simply saying Holbrook was somehow involved in this crime would not have been enough to convict him as being the one who specifically murdered him.

17:37So it's tricky legally and quite nuanced, but it's a point that they really tried to make to try to get the jury, you know, just one juror to come back with a not guilty or, you know, sort of a hung jury if they could. You know, Holbrook's defense attorneys say authorities never sufficiently investigated Heather Snyder. They never searched her property. And even though they learned earlier on in the case that Heather Snyder had a gun in her house, they never collected it until shortly before the trial. We reached out to Maryland authorities. They declined to sit down with us. At times, it really did seem like the trial was more about Heather than it was about Holbrook.

18:16It felt that way. Throughout this trial, Heather Snyder was referenced in some capacity over 400 times. Not always by name, but in references to being Joe's ex-wife. And these mentions, I should note, didn't just come from the defense. They came from the prosecution and even the judge. And it's remarkable because Heather wasn't on trial. And like I said, she's never been charged with a crime, never been a suspect. The defense argued, and this was really one of the first points they made out of the gate, that Heather was the only person whose life was better with Joe dead. Their divorce proceedings were not going her way, and she might gain control of Joe's$1 million life insurance policy for his children.

18:58Because they were minors, Heather Snyder could potentially be able to control that money. The prosecution contended that Holbrook did have a motive and that that was love for Heather Snyder, obsession with Heather Snyder, and hate for Joe Shemansky that was so intense that he took matters into his own hands. And extremely important to note is that Heather Snyder has an alibi. Around the time that authorities say Joe Shemansky was murdered in Maryland, which is about a three-hour drive from Newport, Pennsylvania, where Heather lives, Heather Snyder was on surveillance camera in the grocery store that we both went to growing up in Newport buying pizza.

19:39Both the defense and the prosecution actually wanted Heather to testify, but she pleaded the fifth on the stand. And I wondered just how that played out in court. the jury was desperate to hear from heather snyder when heather snyder walked in to the courtroom the jury went they're all eyes on her she sits down when she pleaded the fifth the jury gasped like clearly frustrated that they wouldn't get to hear her story um she walked out it was very quick the jury even after she walked out was looking at each other sort of in disbelief but innocent Some people plead the fifth all the time for different reasons.

20:20It's important to point that pleading the fifth has no indication that you're guilty of anything. Heather told me that it was her legal counsel who advised her to plead the fifth and that she herself was worried that her words could be twisted. So the jury does ultimately find Brandon Hallberg guilty of first degree premeditated murder. He's sentenced to life without parole. but at the sentencing this is also something that stuck out to me the judge says that he is not closing the book on this case i've never heard a judge say something like that before i hadn't heard a judge ever say that before it's certainly at least rare at the sentencing of brandon holbrook several of joe's friends and family addressed the court and gave victim impact statements and honor Joe's life, but many of them also brought up Heather Snyder and talked about how they still feel she has questions to answer.

21:18Does Heather feel like this will sort of hang over her either metaphorically or legally, I mean, for the rest of her life? I asked Heather if she's worried legally, and she said that she's not worried. She's not worried about being charged with any crime because she says she had nothing to do with this in any way. She knew nothing about it before or after. She told me this is like living a nightmare and it will hang over her for the rest of her life. And I think she is a mother to two children who lost their dad. And so she told me she tries, even though they had an ugly relationship in the end, she tries to honor Joe for her two kids.

22:06And I think part of the reason she moved back to our small town of Newport is that, again, everyone there knows everyone and protects everyone. And I think that for her, being there is a way to escape all of this the best that she can and to raise her kids the best that she can. And I know that Heather hopes the Shemansky family will ultimately believe her. Well, once again, thank you so much for joining us. Another great hour. Thank you. And I want to thank the listeners as well. Thanks for listening. If you liked this episode, please rate and review it on Apple Podcasts and on Spotify.

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