Part 2: Stalked & Followed 60 Miles Before Being Found Dead | Shannon Sanderson

Gerald was released on parole in 1991, and in July of 1992, less than a year after walking out of those gates, he married a woman named Sharon, his fifth wife. And what Sharon experienced inside that marriage tells you everything you need to know about who Gerald Powers actually was when no one on the outside was watching. But before we get there, here's something that isn't in most of the retungs of the story, and I had to find it by going back through original court documents. Gerald Powers was not born in the United States. He was born in Taiwan. And he came to this country when he was only 10 years old. His first wife was Pamela, who he started dating back in high school, and they got married in 1973 when she was 17, and he was only 18. She knew, and when later reveal, that his relationship with his own mother was deeply difficult. His mom, Taiwanese, significant language barriers between them, and Gerald never developed what Pamela described as a normal mother-son relationship with her. Pamela said, his mother-in-law, her own mother, actually stepped into that role for him. She became the maternal figure in Gerald's life that he never really had. And there was actually something I learned recently that I want to share. It really profound phenomenon, their researchers and soldiers and hospital workers have all observed independently in people's final moments. When they are in extreme pain or fear or facing death, they call for their mother, soldiers on battlefields. The elderly in their last hours, people in moments of absolute crisis. It doesn't matter how old they are or how long it's been, their mother is the first attachment figure, the original source of comfort and safety, and unconditional love. And something in us reaches for that when everything else falls away, even if their mother died years ago. Gerald never had that. Whatever that foundational, primal security is supposed to feel like, he never got it. His mother was unreachable. She was there, but she was also gone. And I'm not telling you this to generate sympathy. I'm telling you this because context always matters. Understanding how someone becomes what Gerald becomes requires us to look at the full picture, the displacement, the disconnection, the absence of something foundational without using any of it as an excuse for what he chose to do to women his entire adult life. Because whatever Gerald's story was, he made those choices over and over and over again. He chose Emily, he chose Karen, he chose Clio, and then he chose Shannon. But I want to go back to his wife, Sharon. As I said, wife number five, I wonder why? Because you could only wear a mask so long before it started to slip. Sharon described living with Gerald as existing inside something permanently in chaos. He was what she called an unpredictable, self-centered taskmaster. But man, whose moods would shift without warning and without a reason, he would hit her, he would throw her to the ground, he would kick her, he threatened to kill her four or five times over the course of their marriage. He once smashed one of her antique plates because he wanted Chinese food and she had gotten Mexican food instead. She had three children from a previous marriage and they were all terrified of him. He had once forced Sharon's teenage son to cut the grass using nothing but a pair of household scissors. Not because they need to be done that way, of course not. But because making someone do something humiliating was a reward for Gerald. And he had a bell, a handheld bell, a little bell he would hold and he would bring it. Anytime he needed something, imagine him, sitting on the couch, watching TV, Sharon, taking care of the kids, walking on eggshells and doing all the household chores to his liking. And she's interrupted by the sound of a ringing bell. She needed to stop whatever she was doing and come running or else. You might ask, why, how, who could live like that? Well, it's all Sharon knew and believe it or not, she was in love with Gerald. It became part of her routine, the toxic routine, pain and trauma. They also get imprinted on our brains like happiness. And those intense feelings, whether they're good or they're bad, they have an addictive quality to them. His routine, outside of the home, revolved around casinos. The car he drove was actually Sharon's, a maroon 1989 Chevrolet Beretta registered in her name. He would disappear for two or three days, taking her car, gambling, doing whatever he did, but he would eventually come back. Sharon had to learn to live around his absences, the same way she had learned to live around everything else about him, carefully and quietly. Always aware of where he was in the room because she never knew what he was going to do next. Now, he had told her that he made his living from gambling and he sometimes did come home with some money. The Gerald's relationship with money was the same as his relationship with everything else. It was about taking and taking, not earning. I mentioned that Gerald had children of his own. He had two of them from his marriage to Pamela, the first woman who really fell in love with him. Back when she was drawn to his shy, quiet, polite nature when they were high schoolers. But whatever that version of Gerald once had been, it was completely unrecognizable by April of 1996 because what Gerald did that night that he targeted Shannon was an impulsive. He was on parole. He had five prior convictions. You already know that Shannon was not his first victim, but she was the one he took the furthest. Most cases involve someone the victim knows, husband, a boyfriend, a family member. Someone who was already inside their life, already trusted, already given access. And there's a particular kind of horror in the betrayal of all that, the intimacy of it and the way that it poisons every memory of that person. But this case is different. And in some ways, I actually find it more unsettling because Gerald Powers had never met Shannon in his entire life. He didn't even know her name. He didn't know that she had three children. He didn't know anything about her except she was winning money and she was going to leave the casino alone. So he selected her. And that word selected is really important. He made it calculate the decision. Predatory, stranger violence, that's what it's called. It operates on a logic that's deeply uncomfortable when you look at it because it forces us to ask what made someone a target? And that question, it can very quickly become victim blaming if you're not careful. So I want to be really precise. Shannon did not do anything wrong. She went to a casino. She won money and she left. Those aren't mistakes. Those are just things a person did on a random night of the week that many others were doing to even other women. But Gerald was looking for a specific combination of factors criminals always do. Someone visibly winning a significant amount of cash. Someone who appeared to be alone. Someone without an obvious person waiting for them, watching for them, expecting them in a specific time. And Shannon, fit that picture on that night because Robert had stayed home. Because no one was meeting her. Because the argument had sent her across the lines by herself. But it's still not even Robert's fault. Predators like Gerald don't target people because anything that they did. They target people because of what they see has an opportunity. It is entirely about the predator's calculation, not the victim's behavior. Shannon could have been anyone. The tragedy is that on that night, he happened to be there and she happened to be the one that he was watching. What the research on this kind of predatory behavior consistently will show is that these are not impulsive men. They're patient. They're observant. They are so good at identifying moments of vulnerability. And that's because they've usually been practicing that skill for a very long time. Emily survived. Karen survived. Clio survived. But Shannon didn't. And it wasn't because Shannon did something differently, but it was because Gerald had spent decades refining exactly what he was doing. And he had learned somewhere along the way, survivors identify him. And this time, he wasn't going to let that happen. But now back to Sharon, confronting Gerald about not coming home the night before. I told you he confessed in full. He told her that while he was at the casino, he was watching a woman. She was winning a lot of money in cash. She was alone. And he followed her when she left. And then he trailed her all the way back to her house to a driveway on a residential street in Memphis, Tennessee. And he had taken her from her car, forced her into his back seat, and driven her across the lines into Mississippi. Then he forced her to remain quiet. And when they got more isolated, they stopped. And he forced her to move from the back seat into the trunk. And then he came home. When he took her to an abandoned shed, and that is where he beat her, enrobed her, shot her, and left her body. Sharon was shocked. He really did tell the truth, even though she didn't know it yet. It was still just a story, one that she probably didn't want to believe. When Sharon asked how he kept this woman under control in the car, Gerald said he put the fear of God into her. Clearly, he was holding her at gunpoint. When Sharon asked why, why would you do something like that? What he said blows my mind. He told her he did it for their family. That's sick. Almost as though he was justifying it. As if it didn't hurt someone else's family, someone else's loved ones, Shannon's. As if she wouldn't be missed, but they needed the money. Before we go any further, I just want to pause for a moment, because I think a lot of you listening to this are going to be asking the same question that I asked myself when I heard it. Why? Not just why did he do it? I'm talking about why did he tell her? Why would a man who just committed a murder tell his wife exactly what he had done? It's almost really stupid, you know, if stupid criminals, you're glad they're stupid because they usually get caught and that's a good thing, but it happens over and over again. Just like this, killers confess to their partners specifically, and guess what? There is actually a psychology behind why. The first reason is control. For men like Gerald, men whose entire identity is built around dominance and power, a secret and this big is also a burden, this big, carrying it alone is a lot. But sharing it with a partner, one that they already control means transferring some of that weight to somebody else and then pulling that person into the circle. Because now that Sharon knows, Sharon is implicated, which means Sharon has something to lose if she talks. Lasting wasn't a moment of vulnerability if that's what we were thinking. It was a power move, and now I'm sure it makes more sense. The second reason is something that researchers call the need for a witness. And I hope you learned something in these evil minds cases. There is evidence that certain types of violent offenders, particularly those with narcissistic traits, experience their crimes as these big, significant events that demand acknowledgement. They need someone to know what they did. Not because they feel guilty. Because they feel powerful. And power without an audience is like a tree falling in an empty forest, right? If there's no one there to hear it or see it, did it really happen? It's like they say, if you didn't post it, did it really happen? Same for this instance. And the third reason is even more straightforward than those other two. Carol came home, jittery, he was pacing, he was washing the car. He was giving Sharon money out of nowhere, and then she confronted him. She accused him of cheating though. And whatever else Gerald was, he apparently thought the accusation of him being a cheater was worse than accusing him of murder, if you can even believe that. So he wanted to correct her. She wasn't right. She was wrong. And that felt good. He wanted to make sure she knew that's not what I did, as if it were somehow better for her to know the truth. This wasn't a calculation in the moment. It was just ego on display, but it did cost him everything. And there was Sharon just sitting there trying to process what she was hearing. The man she married, the man she shared a home with, the man she was afraid of on any ordinary night of the week, had now just told her he kidnapped and murdered a woman the night before. And he did it for money. He framed it as something he did for her, for them. She continued listening and he continued to speak. He told her afterward, he went behind a different casino in northern Mississippi called Splash, and through the gun and Shannon's purse into the river. And then he told her that he hid the woman's jewelry, five gold and diamond rings behind a lounge in Clarksdale, tucked inside an old couch, wrapped in pink plastic and foil. In case Sharon ever needed money. And then he pulled out the cash, a big stack of it, wrapped in tin foil and plastic. He took it outside and he buried it in their backyard. Sharon went hysterical, but not the way you might think. How does that meme go? That's my man. I'm a sit beside him. Yeah. She told him, take her clothes and throw them in different dumpsters so that it'll be harder for them to be located and connected to him. And he went and did it. On one hand, maybe that was smart of her. Maybe she was just going along with it because she was scared. Or maybe it was because she was in love with him, even after he confessed. If you chose the latter in love with him, you would be right. Because her own confession later on, she said, I love this man. And I know what some of you are thinking right now because I thought it too. How? How do you hear what Shannon and her sitting in your house, listening to your husband describe in a calm matter of fact way that he had followed woman, taken her from her children, beaten her, shot her. And then you still say you're in love with him? How does that coexist? And the answer is something you've probably heard many times before, trauma bonding. It is one of the most important concepts if you're trying to understand any relationship that's defined by prolonged mistreatment, not just in this case. And I see questions like this all the time, usually in context of like, why does a woman stay when they're treating them so badly, right? Well, it goes back to what I was talking about when I said feelings can be addictive. Trauma bonding is what happens when cycles of mistreatment and kindness are like back-to-back. It's between cruelty and care. And this can create this powerful psychological attachment between a victim and the person that's hurting them. This was first described by a researcher named Patrick Karnes. He used the term to explain why people in a toxic relationship often feel deeply attached to their partner, even more than they do to a person who's never hurt them. It sounds backwards, right? But learning all of this is going to help you understand true crime cases so much better. The reason it works this way is it does something to the brain chemistry. When someone hurts you and is then kind to you, your brain releases dopamine during the kind moments in a way that it simply doesn't during stable, consistent, safe relationships. I know that sounds crazy, but it's a boost because you're going from a low to a high. So you know that saying you can't appreciate the light if you haven't seen darkness or you can't appreciate the good days if you haven't experienced bad ones, it's similar. The relief of those painful moments stopping, it actually feels the same as love. It's almost like the victim waits for it. Your nervous system has been conditioned to associate the specific person with both their source of pain, but also their source of comfort simultaneously. And that creates a bond that is so genuinely difficult to break. Not because a person's weak, I want you to understand that they are not foolish. It is because their brain has been chemically rewired by this entire experience. Sharon have been living inside that cycle with Gerald for years. So to her, it truly felt like love that she was feeling. So when Sharon heard what Gerald had done and still felt love for him, that's on a failure of her character. That is not stupidity. That's the nervous system doing exactly what years of trauma had trained her to do. And the really remarkable thing is not that Sharon loved him anyway. The remarkable thing is that despite all of that, the fear, the love, everything her brain was telling her, she called in a tip, but that comes later. That same evening, the same day that Gerald had confessed to murdering this woman, he told Sharon, get in the car, we're going to go back to Sam's town casino to gamble because now he had even more money, more chances to win, but Sharon talked him out of it, but not fully, just not going back to that casino. They went to Harris instead, the four of them, Gerald Sharon and her two sons. As they were leaving a security car, pulled slowly past the bread on the parking lot and Gerald was freaked out. He told them to get in the car now and they quickly left. He could tell the walls were closing in. It was that night that Sharon saw the news report. And there was Shannon Sanderson's face right on the screen, the story of her abduction, who she was, her family and tears begging for her safe return, and her three precious children. And that fear that had already been sitting in Sharon's chest since that morning locked itself inside completely. And as if Gerald could sense it, he said he was leaving and she didn't stop him. She watched him pack clothes. While he reminded her, there was money buried in the backyard if she needed it. He told her if anyone asked, he was going to his mothers. And then he walked out. The moment he was gone, Sharon raced to her friend Margaret York's house and she immediately told Margaret everything, which is a smart move, because if anything were to happen to Sharon, somebody else could be a witness. Margaret lived near the couple. She knew them both and she listened to this whole thing and she told Sharon, you need to call the police. And that was when she made the initial call. She called in the tip saying, I think my husband might have been involved in the abduction of that woman in Memphis. The problem was, it became too real. When officers came out to her house and they needed to take that formal statement, I already explained to you, she pulled back. She went quiet. She couldn't bring herself to tell them everything. In her mind, she had done what she felt she was supposed to do. She was still his wife, she had made a vow. And part of her felt like she'd already been disloyal by calling in the tip to begin with. She assumed at this point, the cops could take it from there. But that's what's on the surface. There were a lot of reasons that she stayed quiet. And the truth is always going to be more complicated. We know Sharon had been living with Gerald's violence for years, cooperating fully with the police, meant sending the man that she's still in her words loved to prison for the rest of his life, possibly to death row. And the weight of that was not something that she could bear. And then to her surprise, Gerald comes back about a week later. And he's sitting there writing a note right in front of Sharon. And it said, "I'm leaving because I'm unhappy in our marriage." But she knew that wasn't it. She knew that note was for investigators. A paper trail pointing away from Gerald if they came knocking, which she suspected they would. Even without knowing, she called in a tip. Before he walked out the door, he told her the gold rings that he stole were still behind that lounge. They would be where something if she needed it. And he dug up the money, but she refused to take it. He tried to give it to her, and she said, "Take your blood money with you." He took the cash, and he left in her burrito. As days passed, the investigation actually took another crucial turn. Because out of nowhere, a local bus driver named Alonso Jeans came forward with a tip. And this caught investigators' attention. He told police he regularly drove down a route past a rural property, the same one that he found out Shannon had been discovered. And over the years, he had never ever seen anyone out there. He was a very isolated and quiet. However, he recalled something very unusual on the morning that Shannon disappeared. He'd been driving his regular route along Mississippi State Route 301, around 640 AM. When he saw a burgundy car parked in a driveway of an old rundown house, and there was a man standing near a shed. Then he got in the car and began backing out. And one detail stood out. The man was wearing a distinctive red baseball cap. The driver had never before seen anyone out there, so it made the significant and memorable. Now this was critical. It was an eyewitness statement, and it rekindled the detectives' attention towards the earlier tip that had been dismissed from Sharon. With this new information, her account suddenly takes on this urgent significance. The detectives quickly want to revisit all of the information in that initial call. And they realized their oversight might have cost them precious time. They did a deeper background check into Gerald Powers and revealed his terrifying history. And now detectives knew they were dealing with a dangerous repeat offender capable of horrific violence. They were desperate to confront him, so they rushed the powers household in Clark, Silma, Mississippi. Only to find out, he had vanished along with the Maroon Beretta. And immediately, the authorities issued a nationwide alert. But it wasn't until May 22nd, and almost 750 miles away, where Border Patrol agents spotted the Maroon Beretta attempting to evade a checkpoint. Now that's a red flag. Border Patrol agent Javier Gonzalez pulled it over, and the driver gets out of the car, and he pulls out a knife, so Gonzalez draws his weapon. He orders the man to the ground, and after a tense standoff, the man complied, and he was taken in a custody. When the agent searched him, they found about $1,500 in his pocket, and 14 of them were in $100 bills. The same denomination that Shannon had collected at the blackjack table the night that she was murdered. Authorities quickly confirmed this man's identity, Gerald Lee Powers, and just the day before. On May 21st, he actually approached the U.S. Customs inspection table. At another port, it was the port of entry in Laredo, and an agent stopped him, asked him for his ID, and walked away to run his license of by the time he came back. Gerald was gone. He got spooked, and he ran away. One day later, he's in handcuffs, thankfully. He was trying to leave the country. He was trying to go into Mexico. FBI agent Evan Rhea traveled to Laredo to take him in a custody and process the arrest. The Beretta was then secured at that checkpoint, and when Sharon, who owned a vehicle, came out to Texas to recover it, she gave the agent's permission to search it. And what followed was that kind of painstakingly methodical forensic work. The type that's the backbone of these cases. Investigators went over every surface of that car. Lint rollers across the seats of vacuum collection and across the floors. Tape lifting every surface they could reach, capturing hair and fibers from anywhere your person might have been. Everything that could be lifted was lifted and sent to the FBI laboratory. Every single particle, in meanwhile, detects us from Memphis, glutes Laredo, and questioned Gerald directly. They finally had this man face to face. But he denied everything. He said he didn't know Shannon. He had nothing to do with what happened to her. But he didn't admit, when pressed, that he had been at Sam's town because he know that night. When they asked him what he did after he left, he said he went to visit a sick friend in Clarksdale, which was 50 miles from the casino. And when the investigator followed up on that alibi, the friend said he was there visiting. But it didn't account for his full timeline. And it didn't explain the money. It didn't explain why a man on parole pulled a knife on a federal agent at a checkpoint instead of stopping. Gerald was held in Texas awaiting extradition. And in late September of 1996, while he was being transported to the medical ward, he tried to escape classic. They always used that as a way out. But this was just one more data point in his pattern. A pattern that had been consistent his entire life. Gerald powers did not stop. And back in Mississippi, investigators were working on Sharon because they believe correctly that she knew far more than she had told them in that initial conversation. The question was, how are we going to get her to speak? And that is when they brought in special agent Jennifer Aiken. She was assigned to the case in June. She went to speak to Sharon and to hopefully build rapport with her. And that first meeting lasted four hours. But she didn't go in there with a lot of pressure, ultimatums and things like that. She just listened calmly. And then she came back and she kept building trust slowly over multiple conversations. She told Sharon, keeping the secret is going to put you in greater danger from Gerald not less danger. He's not going to hurt you from a jail cell in Texas. And that what she knew mattered more than she could even understand. And eventually Sharon opened up completely. She told Aiken about the jewelry. The five gold and diamond rings that Gerald told her were hidden inside an old couch behind the BMW lounge and Clarksdale wrapped in pink plastic and foil. This was important because this was a link between Shannon and Gerald not just words alone. That same afternoon Aiken sharing and three other officers drove to that lounge and behind the bar push against the wall was an old abandoned couch. They opened it up and inside exactly where Sharon said they would find it were the rings, bundled in that pink plastic wrap and wrapped in foil. Shannon's sister Jennifer and her husband Robert identified them immediately as belonging to Shannon. Great. They were finally getting somewhere. Investigators had a witness to what Gerald had confessed. They had rings that they recovered exactly in the location he described. But they needed physical evidence from the car to make sure everything could be corroborated independently. And a month later in July of 1996, the forensic result started coming back from the FBI lab. The first significant result was also the most frustrating. Remember how a pink fake nail had been recovered at the abduction scene on Gerald Street the morning that Shannon was taking? Well, pieces of a fake fingernail with pink polish, similar to that nail that was found on the ground, was found inside the trunk of the vereta. And investigators believed it had been torn from Shannon's hand during a struggle. But just to confirm, prosecutors had to get a court order to a gzum Shannon's body, which is pretty extreme. I actually could not believe it when I heard it, especially after what they found, or I should say what they didn't find. Her remains were reexamined and it was confirmed. Shannon had been wearing fake nails that were glued on her fingernails at the time of her death. And one had been collected from that driveway and it matched her nail. But the nail fragment recovered from the trunk of the vereta, the shapes to the match, the colors were not right, it was not Shannon's nail. All of that for nothing, but they kept going because there was something else, something in those lint rolls, one fiber. We're talking about a small single black wool fiber pulled from the rear of that vereta. When made it stand out, wasn't just the color, it was the die pattern. The fiber had an uneven irregular coloring with a distinctive mocha brown tone running through the strands. That kind of detail makes this fiber way more identifiable than a standard sample. It wasn't just black, it was black in a specific traceable way. An FBI trace evidence expert Christopher Hopkins compared that fiber to the clothing that Shannon had been wearing the night she was murdered, specifically her black dress. And under microscopic examination, the fibers were consistent. Using a micro spectrophotometer, analysts measured the die composition and precise details and found no differences between the fiber from the car and the fibers from her dress. The conclusion was clear, Gerald had put her in the trunk and a fiber from her dress remained there. And then there was the pink plastic wrap that the rings had been bundled inside when analyzed and compared to a roll of pink plastic wrap that was recovered from inside Gerald's home. They used infrared spectroscopy, which is essentially a way of reading the precise chemicals that something is made from. The composition and the die in both of samples were identical. The plastic used to wrap up Shannon's stolen rings had come from Gerald's kitchen. There were no usable fingerprints found on the rings, the plastic, the foil, or even the car because Gerald had been careful. Be careful, wasn't the same as invisible. And then there was the casino footage. The detectives went back to Sam's town in July of 1996 and they sat down with Tom Scott. He was the director of surveillance and the agents told him they needed them to look for a specific man and they gave them the description of what Gerald had been wearing that night. The red baseball cap, the blue jean jacket, dark pants, and white tennis shoes. And this was based on what Sharon, his wife, had told them he was wearing when he left. The agents also gave them a laser copy of Gerald's driver's license photo and they asked them to go back through all those tapes that I mentioned. They had 512 cameras and Tom Scott went through between 15 and 20 VHS tapes. Remember 1996, no digital database. This was just a man sitting in a room watching tape after tape after tape with his own eyes. And what he eventually compiled was a chronological sequence of footage that told the story with such clarity. The reason though was totally by chance, which is why sometimes I don't get mad when I'm feeling frustrated about something not going my way. I think maybe there's a reason I'm running late. Maybe there's a reason I drop something. Maybe there's a reason that one of the cameras in this casino had been left misaligned that evening. Listen to this. I explained to you that casinos care about money and they care about what's happening to that money. So those cameras are always facing a cashier, a slot machine, a card table, especially when they do what's called a drop. That means when the money gets collected at certain times throughout the day or night with guards they're monitoring. This is when the security team actually moves the cameras to an exact table and records the drop. Well, that early morning at Sam's town casino, one of the cameras was moved to a specific table in front of the second story balcony around three o'clock in the morning. At the same time that Shannon was about to gather her chips and collect her cash and walk from that table to cash out. She was sitting in the downstairs area. Well, that camera upstairs was just a little misaligned upward just enough to capture the legs of a man standing in front of the balcony looking down, looking right down to the area where Shannon was sitting. They had a dark pants and white shoes. Actually, that's all you could see in this video. But now they had a time. They had a location and they had a person. And they used other cameras to catch his movements. They see him taking the escalator to the first floor and walking right past where Shannon was sitting. Because of the video, they could make out pants, white shoes, a jacket, and most of all a baseball cap. The same person was moving through that casino, staying within proximity of Shannon throughout the next few minutes. He passed the exact location she had cashed out with those cameras getting a clear view of his baseball cap, even though it wasn't black and white. It happened to be one section of cameras that had color footage and he just happened to walk across that area and there was no mistaking it. He had on the Jane jacket and the red baseball cap. It's Gerald Lee Powers note out about it. Finally, and Sharon was shown a still photograph taken from this footage and she identified that person as her husband without hesitation. And then, corroborated it every turn by physical evidence that Gerald had no explanation for so a Shelby County grand jury formally indicted him on charges of first degree murder and aggravated robbery. But before any of this could go in front of a jury, Gerald had one more move to make. He was going to try to make sure Sharon never got a chance to say anything out loud in a courtroom. Two words, marital privilege, and I'm sure you've heard of before. It's pretty simple. What you tell your spouse in private stays private. The law has recognized that marriage requires a certain kind of honesty and intimacy. And if you can't say everything to your partner and you're going to end up having to say in a courtroom later as evidence, people are going to stop talking to each other. So private conversations between spouses are generally protected. That's the idea anyway. And Gerald's attorneys knew this and they stood in front of a judge and argued that when Gerald confessed to kidnapping, beating, robbing, and murdering Shannon, that was in private. It was a marital conversation, confidential and protected and therefore Sharon shouldn't be allowed to share a word of it in front of a jury. The defense even showed a letter to the judge that Sharon had written to Gerald after he was arrested in a jail where she called him baby and she signed it with sealed with a kiss. They used it as evidence that they were still in a loving marriage. It was worth protecting what they didn't tell the judge was that Sharon wrote that letter because she was terrified and Gerald. And was trying to hide the fact she had gone to police. It wasn't love. It was survival. She was waking up now. Now that she was free from him. The prosecution, though, introduced one of their letters, a letter that Gerald had written himself saying the both of them were better off apart. Gerald also admitted he had been violent with Sharon and with her children. Judge Joseph daily heard all of it and he ruled that the marriage did not meet the standard required for privilege to apply. Sharon was going to testify that fiber was going in front of the jury, the casino footage going in front of the jury, the rings, the plastic wrap, the confession, all of it. A jury of 12 people was about to hear every single detail of what Gerald Lee powers did to Shannon on that street that shared his same name. December 1998, two and a half years after Shannon was taken from that driveway, the trial began. Now this is not a deep dive. I'm not going to go into every detail this trial, but I'm going to have to do the highlights because they're so important. The first day of trial, Shannon's three children were in that courtroom. It wasn't for a dramatic moment or manipulation. It was because those three kids were the truth of what had been taken the jury needed to see them before they heard a single word of testimony. Dr. Torney Amy Wyridge opened for the state and she was precise. She laid out the timeline without drama because she didn't need to add any drama. The facts were dramatic enough on their own and the jury heard every detail I told you about and they listened to every witness and then Sharon took the stand. She told the jury about the morning Gerald came home and everything. the man she thought she loved, confessed her. On cross examination, though, the defense did what they could do. They pointed out Sharon's initial statements to police had been incomplete. That she had written, Gerald, a love letter after the arrest. That the FBI had paid her $4,000, what was technically for damages to her car and relocation expenses. But the implication was clear. They were suggesting that Sharon had a reason to say what she said, and it had nothing to do with the truth. But Sharon held strong. The defense also tried to introduce evidence that the other men who were actually in Shannon's life and had been investigated, Robert, Michael, and Brett, each had a motive to kill her. But the judge actually ruled all of that admissible. None of it directly connected to anything in this crime. Motive alone is not evidence. The jury had celebrated for just over one hour. Guilty, first degree murder, guilty, aggravated robbery. And as the verdict was being read, Gerald showed nothing, no reaction, no response. Just a man sitting in a chair while the weight of what he had done was finally spoken out loud in a room that he's not going to just get up and walk away from this time. Now, the sentencing phase took a little longer because now the jury had to decide not just that Gerald Lee Powers was guilty. They knew that now, but what the rest of his life was going to look like, life or death. And for that, they were going to need a full picture. Emily Dodson bravely took the stand. The 17-year-old who had been followed home one night after graduating high school, who had fought Gerald off with his own wrench and ran for her front door. She was a grown woman now sitting in a courtroom describing that night that he held a knife to her throat and told her to drive. Karen Cannon had the courage to come forward as well and testify. The 18-year-old who had given a stranger a ride from a restaurant had her nose broken with the handle of a knife before she drove herself to a county jail with him in the car and leaned on the horn until someone came out. And the jury also heard about cryo-gryphon 74 years old, beaten in her own home with a skillet, her jewelry, her gun stolen. They heard about the escape attempt in Texas. Gerald Lee Powers never stopped. He never would. And then Carolyn Holland took the stand. Shannon's former mother-in-law, the woman who watched Shannon drop off her three grandchildren that April evening and had spent years since then helping raise those same three children who didn't understand why their mom never came home. She told the jury that Michael Jr. Amber and Chance, who were now 10, 8, and 6 years old, had never stopped missing their mother. That Shannon's disappearance had been traumatic in ways that showed up in every single thing they did every single day. That their children had developed a devastating fear of people getting lost, that they had trouble sleeping alone, that they still cried for their mother, that the bond between Shannon and those three kids have been one of the strongest things Caroline had ever witnessed. And that losing it had reshaped all of them in ways that were still unfolding. All of that was a very emotionally compelling. But then it was the defense's turn to present any mitigating testimony. And this was indeed a shocking moment, because Gerald's first wife Pamela walked through the courtroom doors. The first woman who truly ever loved him, the mother of his only children, the girl that he had started dating in high school. She was there for him, Pamela stood before the jury and through tears. She asked them to spare his life. She told them she remembered a different version of Gerald, shy, quiet, a good father to their children, a man who had respected her mother. She said she still saw something in him that was worth preserving. And she begged the jury not to take that from his children or his grandchildren. It was a very difficult moment to sit through, because Pamela wasn't lying. She was remembering something that was real to her. The boy she fell in love with, he had existed. But whatever happened to him between then and the night he followed Shannon out of that casino and drove her to that shed in Mississippi. Pamela hadn't been there for that. She was mourning a version of Gerald that the rest of this evidence suggested had been gone for a very long time. The jury deliberated for 40 minutes. Death, they chose death. They found three aggravating circumstances. The Gerald had prior convictions for violent felonies that he had committed the murder to avoid arrest and prosecution because every woman that survived had identified him. And that he committed the murder while in an act of kidnapping Shannon. The judge sentenced Gerald to death and then sentenced him to an additional 20 years for robbery to be served consecutively. Gerald Lee Powers was sent to death row. And in 2003 the Tennessee Supreme Court reviewed his entire case on an appeal and they upheld everything. The conviction, the sentence, all of it was affirmed. And Gerald sat on death row for years, for decades, filing appeal after appeal, exhausting every legal process. Existing in a system that had said clearly what it believed his life was worth and kept him alive anyway. Shannon's children grew up. They graduated, they built lives, they became adults and then parents themselves. And Gerald was still there. Still in death row, still breathing. And here's why even found this case to begin with. Because just last year around the same time, April 25th of 2025, nearly 29 years after he followed Shannon out of that casino and changed lives forever, Gerald Lee Powers died on death row at the age of 70. Not by execution, just by time. His body gave out before the state ever got around to ending things officially. He never confessed, he never even expressed any remorse. He never gave Shannon's family the one thing that would have cost him nothing. An acknowledgement of what he had done. The only person he ever told was the woman sleeping in his bed. But I want to come back to Shannon. Because we've spent a lot of time in the story inside Gerald's violence, Sharon's fears, the mechanics of the entire investigation and the trial, and all that needed to be said. Because it does matter. But I don't want the last image in your mind to be Gerald Powers and him dying in prison. I don't want the story to end with him because this story has been about Shannon. She was only 25 years old when she was taken from that driveway. She had three children who needed her, adored her. She was a daughter, a sister, a mother, a friend. She was so many things to so many people and a monster reduced her to a target in less than an hour. Her children lost so much. Shannon wasn't there for the first day of school anymore. She wasn't there for graduations. She wasn't there for the moments that were small enough. You don't even think about them until they're gone. The ordinary Tuesday afternoons, the phone calls the dinners. She wasn't there when her children needed their mom. Shannon never got a chance to become a grandmother. But Shannon's grandchildren know who she is. They ask about her. They know about her through stories and through the love that her family still feels for her. And I think about that a lot. And I just want to say to Shannon's family and loved ones, I am so sorry that she was taken from you. I'm so sorry that monsters with evil minds exist among us. And Shannon's family, they did feel a deep and lasting gratitude toward Sharon. The one who called in the tip. She did the right thing. She later said that if she couldn't say anything else good about her life, she knew she had done one thing that mattered. She made that call. She told the truth. And she helped make sure the monster was caught. Shannon deserved so much more. So at least we can do as remember her. I want to thank you all for being here for her story. I will see you in my next video. Bye.