MURDERED: Patrick Shunn & Monique Patenaude

0:00Hi, Crime Junkies. Britt and I did not make a new episode this week, but don't you dare hit pause because I actually still have an episode that is brand new to you. And that is because I'm going to give you one of our fan club episodes. People ask me all the time, like, oh, is the fan club just ad-free content? Yes, everything is ad-free, but that's not it. Oh, do we just get the episodes early? Yes, you get them early, but that is not just it. Oh, are the bonus episodes like short or just behind the scenes? And no, the episodes are exactly like the ones you get here in your feed. And so that is why I wanted to drop this one to show you what you guys are missing if you are not in the fan club.

0:41If you're in the club, you will find all of our episodes, tons of bonus episodes, early releases. And it's not just Crime Junkie. It's so many of the audio Chuck shows. So if one episode this week isn't enough for you, maybe you're looking for some extra listens or you're traveling this holiday season, the Crime Junkie Fan Club is where you'll want to be. And because today is Cyber Monday, you can join the Crime Junkie Fan Club at a discount today. Just head to CrimeJunkie.com to learn more and to join. Now, let's get into this special release from the Crime Junkie Fan Club. Hi, Crime Junkies.

1:19I'm your host, Ashley Flowers. And I'm Britt. And the story I have for you today is my umpteenth reason to stay out of Washington. This twisty and gut-wrenching tale includes a double murder, a historic landslide, a trail of evidence, and a manhunt to Mexico. And I'm going to take you along and explain how investigators combined old school boots on the ground investigative methods with modern day forensic evidence to get the killer captured all over the course of 100 days. And listen closely, because in this story, there are two central themes. Details matter and the truth never dies. This is the story of Patrick Shun and Monique Patinon.

2:08Thank you. Thank you.

2:41April 13th, 2016, with plans to drop his stuff and go home and rest. He and the rest of the homicide squad had just wrapped up about 40 hours of work at a murder scene, and they were beyond tired. But before he can walk out the door, a notice lands in his hands from the patrol unit about a missing couple up in the Oso area. That's about 45 minutes northeast. The notice says it's a missing husband and wife who were last seen the day before. Their cars are missing. No one can get a hold of them. And there is no activity on their socials. So is this report just coming in or is this just like the official handoff to major crimes here?

3:20That's the latter. So the report actually came in the day before. So day one of this case started April 12th. That's when the first call about the missing couple came in to Snohomish County 911 dispatch. And that actually came from the couple's neighbor friends, Mike and his wife, Suzanne. Basically, the reason he called, the four of them were supposed to go to an Iron Maiden concert the night of the 11th. But Patrick and Monique were a no-show. Red flag number one. Now, Mike had gone to their house to see what was up, sees their beloved dog Cairo running loose. Red flag number two. Which is what prompted Mike to call Patrick's work on the 12th.

3:54And they told him that Patrick was a no-show at the office. Another red flag. Yeah, that's when he calls police. So patrol deputies had gone up there to do a welfare check. They get Mike's official statement and they see that the couple's cars are still missing, which I'm sure to a lot of people would give the impression that everything's fine. They'd be like, oh, they're just like went somewhere. They're just not here. Yeah. But Mike can just like feel whatever this is in his bones. So much so that he told the deputy he actually grabbed the SD card out of Patrick's trail camera and he was going to check it himself to see like when they were last on it because it's kind of like near the entrance of their long driveway.

4:31but he's like, you know what, since police are here, like, here, I'll just give it to you guys. And the conviction in his voice, his actions, like that's being picked up on by patrol deputies who then pass this notice off to Detective Dave Fontenot in major crimes. And on day two, the official criminal investigation kicks off. Now, his first move is to put in expedited requests for their cell phone data, which comes back pretty fast. It shows that Patrick and Monique's phones both stopped transmitting at 8.32 a.m. on April 12th. But the activity before that is odd. Now, most of the activity from the 11th looks normal.

5:10It has Monique kind of out and about running errands. Patrick is placed at work. Monique's phone shows that she arrived home to where their driveway gate was at 11.04 a.m. And then Patrick's phone shows him arriving home at that same spot at 3.07 p.m. Now, their phones don't seem to move for a long time, as if they are home. But remember, the 11th is when they're supposed to go to that concert. And Mike said that he actually went over to the house on the 11th at about 4.30 p.m. Their car's already gone then. So if they both arrived home earlier that day, where are they? The next activity Detective Fontenot sees on the phone data is at 3.26 a.m., when both of their phones travel up an old logging road, And then they both stopped transmitting five hours later at 8.32 a.m.

5:58Now, the 3.26 a.m. time is strange in and of itself, right? Like, where are you going? Why are you going up this logging road in the middle of the night? It's super weird. But where this road is, is like the weirdest part of all. You see, two years before this, Oso, Washington was home to one of the deadliest landslides in American history. I mean, some 40 houses got buried and 43 people died. Oh, my God. Patrick and Monique's house was spared, but barely. I mean, the aerial photos of this landslide are bonkers. It took out an entire mountainside along with houses and roads. And so much of it dumped into the North Fork-Stiliguamish River that the whole river dammed and caused even more houses to flood.

6:41I mean, this was a huge tragic mess that ended up in FEMA, but basically having to buy out much of the properties. So all that to say where their phones were traveling was like even higher up the mountain than where this landslide had been. There is nothing there. Certainly not at 3 o 'clock or 3.30 in the morning. And were the phones in that same location when they stopped transmitting at like what 8.30ish? Same general area. Now another super weird thing about the phone activity is that friends and family are telling detectives that the messages that they've been sending to Patrick and Monique on the 11th, Like between the time they got home to them moving up the mountains at 3.30, those were all getting actively read.

7:25Like they can tell from read receipts. Right, like someone's opening the phone and seeing the messages. Yeah. They just don't think that it's Patrick and Monique because no one's responding. And the read receipts stopped completely that morning at around the same time that the phones just totally stopped transmitting. So it would seem that something happened to them after they got home, if they were in fact the ones in possessions of their phone when they got home to begin with. That SD card from the trail camera that Mike took could come in real handy now. Except when they look at the files, the card was completely full.

7:59So it had stopped recording before all of this. It's like, how? I had gotten my hopes up. I thought maybe we could like trust trail cams more than like business. I would say I have no faith in business surveillance, but like even the trail cam. Once again, I'm disappointed. Upgrade your SD card gigabytes to those trail cam people like me. So, yeah, this could have shown if it was them, who they were with, when and where they got home. All of that is stuff they need to know. It's going to be important. But first things first, they need to try and find Patrick and Monique. And the best place to start is where the phones were pinging on the morning of the 12th.

8:37So by day three of the investigation, this is now April 14th, major crimes detectives are pretty sure they're dealing with foul play. And they put eagle-eyed searchers up in a helicopter. And Britt, when I say eagle-eyed, like just you wait, I'm going to be testing your eyesight in a minute. And while they're up in the air, detectives work to search the wooded area on the ground while they wait for their search warrant on the house to go through that. And Britt, this terrain is wild. And I mean that in the literal sense of the word. I mean, yeah, I'm picturing western Washington, like mountains, rivers, woods.

9:10Beautiful, but like really vast, really dangerous scenery. Yeah, it is rugged on the ground. There's like also huge canopies of trees up above from the sky, like covering all of that. Plus, remember, add the whole oh-so-landslide debris stuff on top of this. I actually have some footage if you want to take a look at it over here. Okay. Oh, there it is. Is that like 33 seconds in? I mean, that looks like a car. Yeah, so that's their first sighting of Patrick's missing Land Rover. Once the heli folks radio major crimes, they get out there on foot. But it's a struggle just to get down to where the car is because it's a steep treed hillside and the Land Rover is fully like nose down 90 degrees and it's stuck on a stump.

9:58It's immediately clear that someone tried to cover the car up with like brush and debris, also a camouflage tarp. Oh, OK. And guess what else they see below the car? Exactly 268 feet further down is Monique's Jeep laying on its side. So both cars look as though someone pushed them over the upper cliff's edge and just like let them tumble down like a game of Hot Wheels or Domino's or something. But Patrick's car, the Land Rover, that's the one that got stuck on the stump. So interestingly, there is this wooden 4x4 post weirdly positioned, but it looks like someone was trying to like use it as a jack to get the car unstuck from the stump that it's dangling from.

10:39Oh my God. I mean, this scene is obviously no good, but I'm kind of bracing myself for what they're going to find inside the cars. Detectives are bracing themselves too, but what they find is not what they or you probably expected.

10:57Detectives run out of daylight, so the cars don't get processed until the next day, on day four of the investigation. Detectives on the ground are expecting that when they open the doors of the Land Rover, that they're going to find the bodies of Patrick and Monique. But they don't. Instead, they just find loads of suspicious items that just adds to the mystery of what could have happened to them. I mean, in Patrick's car, there's rope, plastic sheeting, tarps, some towels, and blood in the back of the rover. And falling out near Monique's Jeep, they find her wallet with her driver's license, a bag of dog food, a bag of chicken feed, a roll of unopened paper towels, some black plastic gloves, cables, a McDonald's receipt dated for April 11th at 1041 a.m.

11:45They also find some spent shell casings and a shopping list that's covered in blood. Now, all of that stuff that fell out of her car actually matches the shopping list and her phone activity. Because one of the errands that she was going to run was to a co-op grocery store where she bought all that food for her animals. And the McDonald's receipt lines up too. Which all that stuff still being in her car means like she likely never made it back inside her house after arriving like on back on the property at home. Right. But to be triple sure, they even send someone out to the McDonald's just to check the security footage to make sure that it actually was her who was there, make sure that she was alone.

12:26And when they look, sure enough, it's her in the drive-thru with her dog Cairo in the passenger seat at the same exact time and date as the receipt and matching what the cell phone data shows. So with all of this evidence, especially the blood in the shell casings, detectives are now certain that whatever happened to Patrick and Monique, they probably didn't make it out alive. As the car scenes are being processed, neighbor and family interviews are also happening, and this theme begins to emerge. There is one name that almost everyone mentions when asked the age-old question, can you think of anyone who would want to hurt Patrick and Monique?

13:05John Reed. Who? John is Patrick and Monique's neighbor. And there is a nasty dispute going on between them. Patrick and Monique had accused John of trespassing and essentially being a bad steward of the land. And again, the theme of this episode is landslide. So John's property is one parcel closer to where the landslide destruction was. His house was barely missed, but the mudslide actually took out part of his driveway. So he had been using a road easement that was more or less Patrick and Monique's driveway. But here's the thing. John actually took a massive payout from FEMA to allow authorities to seize his house and property.

13:46And part of that deal meant that John had to move out and he wasn't allowed to access that property anymore without a government official present. But he was still like coming and going as if he still lived there, basically squatting on a property that was no longer his. and Patrick and Monique accused him of illegally cutting down trees and like all of this other stuff that they didn't like. The dispute had even escalated to each party calling the cops on each other in the past. So this little neighbor spat had gotten pretty ugly. And has their relationship with John like been rocky the whole time they've been neighbors?

14:20I mean like off and on for like a few years but Patrick's niece Erin told us that there was a time after the landslide when Patrick felt like sorry for John. I mean, he like, the guy lost his property. He showed, Patrick showed him a lot of compassion, giving him permission to use their driveway gate, all of that. But then it reached a point where he felt as if John was abusing their kindness. And Patrick and Monique ended up putting locks on their gate. And then that's why they actually put up the trail camera. Because by that time, they were like, this is it. We need evidence of him trespassing so we can sue this guy.

14:53So, I mean, leading up to this, things had hit a boiling point. And when I say boiling point, I want to make it clear. None of Patrick and Monique's relatives are like, oh, John definitely murdered them. It's more like, you know, they had zero enemies except for this one neighbor. But there was this one guy. Yeah, this one guy who seemed to hate their guts. But everything is now like starting to click into place for detectives. All the stories are merging into one. Because remember neighbor Mike who reported them missing? So his wife Suzanne told detectives that on April 13th, so this is going on two days with no sightings of their friends, She had gone over there to check on things and as she's approaching the gate, she sees John Reed in his red pickup truck exiting the gate.

15:36And John's brother Tony is with him. Now, Suzanne doesn't know Tony, but he's wearing a hoodie with the hood like pulled up. He's like wearing sunglasses. Like, let's just say the vibes were off. And Suzanne stops to talk to John and she glances in the back of his truck and she sees in the back are some cables and a four by four wooden post. And based on Suzanne's description of these things, they are a perfect match for the items found by the vehicles up on the mountain. And not even knowing any of that at the time that Suzanne is like talking to them and seeing this, she is already so suspicious of John that she actually rolled some video on her phone during this interaction just in case something went down.

16:18That is such a crime junkie move. I know. Like props to the girlies out there who are basically citizen detectives. So this is enough for Detective Fontenot to do some John Reed homework. He runs a background check on John and sees that he actually is a convicted felon, but not for anything violent, for an old felony marijuana conviction. But Brother Tony, also a convicted felon, and his past is violent. So this is when police roll over to John's house. John's house that he doesn't technically own anymore, where he's not really supposed to be. Correct. Got it. At least in that moment, he is following the rules.

16:55He and Tony are nowhere to be found. Okay. So while they figure out how to track them down, they start knocking on doors of other neighbors to ask if anyone had any information or security footage. And oh boy, does this pay off. Police obtain video from two different houses that are on the road that goes above the landslide. And one of them shows Patrick's Land Rover followed by Monique's Jeep driving up the road, one right after the other on April 12th at 3.31 a.m. It is the exact route and timestamps as the cell phone data. Now, the other video shows John Reed's red truck taking the same route nearly six hours later at 9.21 a.m.

17:37And sticking out of the back of his truck is that four by four wooden post. Detective Fontenot told our reporter Emily Muir that, at least for him, these videos were the evidence that changed everything. I mean, in his words, from that moment forward, the hunt for John and Tony Reid was, quote, on like Donkey Kong, is what he told her. Now they have enough to serve search warrants at John's house or his former property. And even more physical evidence is found there. Shell casings, plastic sheeting, a camo tarp, guns, more 4x4 posts, zip ties in the closet. I mean, there's blood in the bathtub.

18:14And that's just evidence that was collected from inside. By his garage, they find a trash barrel that is full of clothes, not burnt, just soaking in diesel fuel. And they find not one, but two secret underground bunkers. I think the only thing worse than finding one secret underground bunker is the second one is finding two secret underground bunkers. And listen, he said that like each time they were like stumbling across these because like they weren't expecting to find them. Yeah. They're literally thinking like, oh, my God, we're going to find Patrick and Monique either like tied up and bleeding and injured or worse.

18:56But just like the cars, both of the bunkers are empty. Basically, Detective Fontenot told us he thinks that those were actually just former grow rooms for John's marijuana operations. But anyways, they collect everything, they send it off to the crime lab, and bolos are officially issued for John and Tony Reed. The U.S. Marshals Service also sticks some agents on John and Tony's parents' house in Ellensburg, Washington, to do surveillance just in case they showed up there. And do they find anything suspicious inside Patrick and Monique's house? No, not really. So their house is like kind of immaculate.

19:31There's no signs of a struggle. And detectives even had relatives come look around to see if anything looked out of place or missing or whatever. And interestingly, there were only two things that they could note. One, they said Patrick's computer was missing. And like the other one is so small, they said that the wrong cat bowl was out. What exactly does that mean, the wrong cat bowl? They said that there was like a certain cat bowl that Patrick and Monique used for like their cat with like food or whatever. And like the one that was sitting out. Was not it. Yeah. I mean, it must have been so distinct that all of them knew or whatever.

20:04Yeah. And it's so interesting because this is one of the things that Detective Fontenot admitted to us. He's like, I kind of just dismissed this as nothing at the time. But it becomes a learning moment for him later on because that different cat bowl, it was a clue. The details matter. The details matter. Now, it's not until day five, April 16th, that detectives get word from those agents who are on the stakeout at John and Tony's parents' house. But on day five, they've spotted John's red truck in the garage. Snohomish County detectives drop everything. They drive the three hours away to Ellensburg to serve search warrants on the parents' house and on John's truck.

20:43But they didn't get there quick enough to intercept John or Tony. Like, they are already gone by then. And their parents, Clyde and Faye, are pretty unhelpful. They're basically like, yep, our sons were here, but we're not going to tell you where they went. Oh, cool. Great. Yeah. Not at all concerning. So in the garage, they find more tarps, more plastic sheeting that match everything found at the crime scene. And inside John's truck, detectives find a small spot of what looks like blood near the passenger side door. Now, this is tiny compared to the blood that they found in Patrick's Land Rover, but it still gets swapped anyways.

21:23And they also find some recent U.S. bank receipts for big cash outs and a 7-Eleven receipt from Arlington, Washington, dated on April 11th, just before midnight. And that, just before midnight, that's like square in the missing time frame we have for Monique and Patrick, right? So detectives decide to take this. They go to the 7-Eleven. And sure enough, on surveillance video, that was working. Praise be. They actually see John and Tony buying energy drinks and chips at midnight wearing, guess what? The clothes that were found at John's in that barrel soaking in diesel fuel. So the evidence is just piling up against these guys.

22:03Yeah. And they just keep collecting more and more. Searchers find Monique's keys and glasses like seven miles away from where the cars were dumped. And they now have help of a cadaver dog who finds Patrick's jacket, which is covered in blood. So five days in, they've basically solved their case. And Detective Fontenot and his team go ahead and make their case to the prosecutor to get arrest warrants issued for John and Tony Reed for a nobody homicide. But now the manhunt begins. Ebola got put out on their mom's car, which is the only car that was missing from their house when John left his truck.

22:42And they get cell phone data for John and Tony. Both investigative avenues are fruitful. Not only do they get a hit on Faye's license plate, but cell mapping is showing exactly where the fugitive brothers are when they go looking for them on day five. And it's nowhere near Washington. By April 16th, the Reed brothers have made it all the way to Phoenix, Arizona. That is a solid 20-hour drive. But before cops can descend on them down south, their phones just go dark. And they are just completely off the grid. Now, all authorities can do is hope for a sighting or another license plate catch or for the brothers' phones to come back online.

23:24Or something even better. And something even better happens on day 35.

23:34In mid-May, a call comes in from an attorney in Ellensburg, Washington. He says that he's calling on behalf of his client, Tony Reid. And Tony wants to turn himself in on one condition. They must agree to take the death penalty off the table. Now, the thing is, the death penalty hasn't even been discussed. Because back then, there was a moratorium on executions in the state of Washington. And while the Snohomish County prosecutor technically could have called for the death penalty or charge and whatever or ask for it, they had no plans to bring any capital charges during the moratorium. But like, whatever, detectives just see this as an opportunity.

24:16So they're like, deal of a century. Yeah, happy to agree. And they do that so they can arrest and interrogate Tony. So deal gets done. And on May 16th, again, same day, day 35 of their case, detectives fly down to the Mexico-San Diego border and Tony surrenders to Washington authorities. They get him back to Washington. And by May 22nd, day 40 of this saga, Tony's ready to talk. Now, he says he didn't kill them. His brother did. But he did try to help his brother cover his tracks. He said that he shot those people. and he told me it was self-defense. He said that they came to the gate with a gun and that he started wrestling with one of them and the gun went off.

25:04Tony says that he's been in Mexico this whole time, but John suggested that he go home and surrender. He's the one that talked me into turning myself in because if something was to happen to me over this, he would not be able to live with himself. Detectives asked Tony to walk them through exactly what happened, and he does. Tony says that his brother John killed Patrick and Monique on April 11th, and that John basically called him to help get rid of the cars and the bodies. What does he tell you? What's the plan? We're going to take the cars up and dump them. Did you stop and look in the cars?