Forensic Files - Season 6, Episode 13 - Horse Play - Full Episode | Forensic Files

on a warm summer evening in 1980 a young married couple took their horses out for
a leisurely ride through the woods one of the horses bucked and threw the rider the autopsy confirmed it was an accident
but the family wasn't so sure [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]
hillsdale county michigan population just over 40 thousand this is farm country soybeans and corn
mostly a hospitable place where friends drop in unexpectedly and there's always room for one more at the dinner table
[Music] 25 year old shannon moore was a quiet unassuming young woman who grew up in
nearby toledo ohio she was a very good student in school and she said when she was in first grade
because she went to a catholic school i'll be a nun or i'll be a nurse and she became a nurse
in september of 1979 shannon moore met an eligible bachelor from hillsdale county 36 year old david
davis the two met at a friend's wedding shannon came home from the wedding of this other nurse
and said mom i met this real nice man and he's just we spent the whole evening together
we had such a wonderful time he told me he was a millionaire he has farms all over the united states
and in belize and he's going to call me we have a date set up i thought the world of them from
the very beginning he was just a kind of a rugged outdoor type person liked to fish and hunt i thought he was
good to my daughter and that's the only thing that i cared about and i said to her
shannon if you let this one get away from you you're nuts after an eight-week courtship shannon
and david married and moved to david's michigan farm it seemed to be the ideal place to raise
a family they bought two tennessee walking horses which were recommended because of their
gentle nature on july 23 1980 10 months after the wedding shannon and david rode their
horses to see their neighbor dick britton how's your eye great good real good dick was having a problem with some farm
machinery so david spent time helping him we worked probably half an hour on this
tool then shannon came up and asked me about taking our boy norman home with him and
i went i went to turn around and tell her sure go ahead and take him and dave said no
you can come get him in the morning and you know shannon had asked me the question but he had answered
and so i dropped it david and shannon then mounted their horses and left [Music]
instead of going back the way they came they took a shortcut through the woods a short time later david raced out of
the woods back to dick britton's farm nick come quick he'd come riding back and he had blood on his shirt he was
sweaty perspiring hard like he'd been in a fight or something kind of half fell off his horse
and said that shannon had fell off her horse and she was hurt bad davis said that shannon's horse had
bolted he said she fell and hit her head on a rock shannon was lying on her back
her eyes were closed there was blood on the back of her head shannon's blouse was undone and her
sneakers were off which britain thought was unusual i think we better get her to the car
okay shannon was rushed to the nearest hospital and i was blowing the horn tooting as
loud as i could and this nurse come running out and i says we need a we need a doctor i said
i'll run to the front and tell him she's hurt bad shannon's lifeless body was wheeled into
the emergency room where doctors checked for vital signs there weren't any the time of death was arbitrarily set at
8 45 pm the wound in the back of shannon's head and the x-rays taken at the hospital
were consistent with david's explanation that she had fallen from her horse and hit her head
her death certificate listed the cause of death as multiple cranial and cervical spine injuries
[Music] since shannon died in one county and was declared dead in another no autopsy was
performed because of a jurisdictional mix-up that failure would later come back to
haunt shannon's family shannon moore had two lifelong dreams the first to become a nurse the other to
raise a family she graduated from nursing school and had been married less than a year
her dreams for a family would never be fulfilled because of a freak horseback riding
accident which took her life at 26. when shannon's parents lucille and bob moore arrived at the hospital her
husband david davis was in the hall crying they all instinctively hugged each other
just as they always did he grabbed me and as he grabbed me he ran his hand under my face
and i looked and it was three deep scratches and i mean deep scratches oh please god
[Music] shannon's father had other concerns david insisted that shannon's body be
cremated as a catholic bob moore was opposed the moore family wanted to take shannon's body back to ohio to bury her
there at that point dick britton stepped in you know her mother was crying and bob
was crying so i stood right up yelled at him i said dave that's her folks they said nobody knows her out here i said
let let him take her back to toledo and bury her there i said her people will come to her grave and put flowers on it
i said she don't know anybody here and he backed down and said okay the next day
deputies from the hillsdale county sheriff's department visited the scene of the accident
they found the bloody rock the only rock for some distance around not far away were shannon's untied
sneakers lying about five feet apart and there was an area where the grass had been matted down
then looked around a little bit took a few pictures and left and i asked him about the shoes and they
said now you can have them over the next several days the moores made arrangements to bury
their daughter david's parents whom the moors had never met came to the funeral and what they had to say
made it clear that everything david had told the moors about his past was a lie he was not a millionaire he didn't own
farms all over the country and even more shocking was the fact that he had been married before and had two daughters
the moors believed their daughter's death was no accident dick britton had come to the same
conclusion because of something davis had said the day after shannon's death so the next morning we're sitting at my
table and he wants to know about the neighbor he said does the neighbor still want to sell his farm and i said huh
and he said never mind and i'm thinking how can you be thinking of buying a farm
the next morning after your wife died and then he left and i just that just kept working on me i kept thinking what
that don't sound right you know just a week after shannon's death dick britton and the moors took their
suspicions to the hillsdale county sheriff's office [Music] the more is discovered the davis had
taken out insurance policies on shannon's life totaling 330 000 during the ten months they were married
the morris demanded an autopsy and shannon's body was exhumed a month after her death
the autopsy revealed a three and a quarter inch dash on the back of shannon's head along with bruises on her
upper back left shoulder her upper right arm right hand and left cheekbone but they found no evidence of foul play
the coroner concluded that shannon died of the head injury the sheriff's department considered the
case closed believe it or not yes when they first brought her up and said there was no
evidence i thought they're missing something there has to be and i knew then we had to keep going one
way or another because something was wrong the moors weren't the only ones who were
suspicious billy bowles a reporter for the detroit free press uncovered some devastating
information on david davis painting him as a consummate liar who lived off money
gained from suspicious insurance claims one claim was for a questionable fire on a farm
davis once owned the vacant farmhouse burned and he collected about 30 thousand dollars insurance for
that the barn burned mysteriously while he was away and uh and he collected six thousand dollars
for that uh in addition to those uh he had left a job at uh chrysler after a very suspicious
injury uh and he was collecting workman's compensation and social security for that
bowl's investigation revealed among other things that davis had studied pharmacology in college
armed with this new information the moore family asked the state's attorney general to open
a new investigation shannon's autopsy revealed she died of a single blow to her head
detective don brooks had two theories number one this young lady actually felt on a horse
and struck the only rock around squarely and it really is an accident or number two he killed her and the only way in my
opinion for him to get her in a position where he could slam her head into that rock was to have
her completely immobilized so we wanted to look at the possibility that she was drugged at the time
something that would paralyze her but leave her heart still pumping and still she's still alive with davis's
background in pharmacology police asked local veterinarians what drugs farmers use with their animals that can cause
paralysis one of the drugs mentioned was a powerful muscle relaxant named succinylcholine used in animal surgery
after anesthesia has been induced they will go ahead and give you some succinylcholine and what it will do is
completely paralyze every what we call skeletal muscle it won't hurt the heart but it will
all the intercostal muscles which help in breathing or anything that you use to voluntarily
move it will absolutely prevent those muscles from functioning it's also used in humans
in large doses succinyl choline can be fatal but there was a problem succinylcholine is broken down in the
body almost immediately and is therefore undetectable if this was the drug david davis used on
shannon he had gotten away with murder [Music] in the seven months in shannon moore's
death her husband david davis sold his michigan farm and moved to the bahamas where he lived on his sailboat with his
new girlfriend davis was waiting for the conclusion of shannon's investigation so that he could
collect the 330 thousand 000 from her life insurance policies although the autopsy was consistent with
davis version of her death the crime scene wasn't davis said he and shannon were riding
back to their farm when shannon's horse bucked threw her to the ground and her head hit a rock
but the rock she hit was the only one within a hundred yards for some unexplained reason shannon's
blouse was unbuttoned and her shoes were removed and placed a few yards away the
grass was matted around the body police wondered whether davis might have injected shannon with some kind of
paralyzing agent like succinyl choline before her death there was no known test to identify
succinylcholine but local scientists heard about a new test developed in sweden which was
having some success finding succinyl choline even in embalmed tissue dr robert forney and tom carroll took
shannon's tissues to the karolinska institute in sweden it took a team of toxicologists several
weeks of trial and error just to extract a sample they could test we were working 10-hour days
working on trying to get the method perfected and once we got the method perfected then we started analyzing all
of shannon's tissues the tests were conducted with the mass spectrometer which bombards chemical
molecules with ions shattering them into their molecular components the fragmentation creates a chemical
fingerprint that can be compared to other chemical fingerprints to determine the unknown's identity
[Music] after weeks of testing and hundreds of tests scientists finally got a break
i looked over in one corner and in that one corner was one piece of paper and on
that piece of paper was a perfect mass spectra of succinyl choline and that piece of paper was identified
to have come from shannon's tissues that caused a riot when prosecutors in michigan learned the
news they were elated but they didn't feel it was enough they wanted more evidence and needed to
know where davis had injected her [Music] as a result for the second time shannon's body was exhumed
the vast majority of the injuries sustained by shannon were on the left side of her body
her left shoulder her left back and the left side of her head which would indicate a fall
to the left and then falling on your left on her right side however there was a bruise
in the upper quadrant of the right arm and also on the hand so those were the only bruises that you saw
on her right side dr fourney took tissue samples from all the brew sites and returned to sweden
he discovered the shannon's right wrist and upper arm had much higher concentrations of succinylcholine than
her other tissues an indication that davis had injected her twice based on that evidence
david davis was finally charged with shannon moore's murder when police went to arrest davis
he was nowhere to be found the search for davis dragged on for months and then years
[Music] police believe that david richard davis murdered his wife by injecting her with
a lethal drug making the death look like a horseback riding accident the drug he allegedly used was believed
to be undetectable but a team of determined toxicologists found it for eight and a half years davis eluded
police before they finally got a break a story about shannon's murder appeared on network television
an old girlfriend of davises called police with a tip she called and she wanted to tell me
about an individual that she thought could be david davis she knew him by a different name
however she was very very reluctant to get involved she was in fear of her own life
the caller revealed that davis was living in american samoa with the samoan wife under the name david meyer bell
in the eight years since shannon's death he had lived in california alaska and hawaii he had taken flying lessons and
had become an expert bush pilot [Music] the fbi arrested davis at the pongo pongo airport
and he returned to michigan for trial we know that he courted and dated several women before shannon and asked
each of them to marry him in an extremely short period of time something like 14 months he asked five different
women to marry him the first one who said yes became his victim bloomer said the motive was money and
that the murder was premeditated prosecutors believe that after the couple left dick britton's farm
davis coaxed shannon off her horse under the pretext of having sex the couple had a habit of making love
outdoors [Music] [Applause] [Music] as shannon took off her shoes and unbuttoned her blouse
prosecutors believe davis snuck up behind her and injected the succinal choline in the shoulder
the injection didn't take effect immediately the two fought matting down the grass
he then hit shannon on the head with the rock and injected her again this time in
the wrist the dose killed her instantly if you're given an injection of succinylcholine outside of the hospital
where they can help you breathe by a respirator you'll die of suffocation and that's exactly what happened to shannon
davis i believe that the sectional calling answered the ever-present question in
the jury's mind and that was if she didn't die from being thrown off a horse then what killed her we had to have that
answer for the jury the jury deliberated for two and a half hours my heart was pounding so hard and i
thought it's over we've got him david davis was found guilty of first degree murder
i remember the courtroom which is full burst in applause and uh instead of standing around and shaking
hands and i had to leave i had to leave the courtroom there's a law library right off the courtroom and
i had to go in there and it was pretty emotional he was sentenced to life in prison
i know we went out to the cemetery right afterwards and we looked down and said we got him
he was that good of a liar so that i shouldn't feel too bad that he fooled us but i think i heard living
with a killer all that time 10 months and i didn't know it and i also think i should have picked
something out and i didn't [Music] [Music] so [Music] you

In 1980, Michigan resident Shannon Mohr died in what was reported to be a horseback riding accident by her new husband David Davis. After her death, Shannon's family reported to police their suspicions that Davis seemed far from grief-stricken.

Forensic Files is the longest-running true crime series in television history. Evidence and interviews with experts help solve real crimes, disease outbreaks and accidents around the world.

Brief Summary

Shannon Moore's death was ruled an accident, but evidence revealed her husband David Davis murdered her for insurance money.

Key points

Shannon's Tragic Accident. A young couple's leisurely ride turns fatal when Shannon falls from her horse.
Uncovering the Truth. Investigations reveal shocking truths about David Davis and his past.
David Davis Arrested. After years on the run, Davis is finally arrested for Shannon's murder.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

I thought the world of him from the very beginning.

Shannon's mother reflects on her daughter's husband.

2:07WatchNov 18, 2021

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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