By Bob Allen
A Baptist minister’s wife murdered in her Alabama home in July 2013 knew about her husband’s secret homosexual orientation and romantic relationships with out-of-state paramours, according to a court document filed May 6.
Prosecutors also claim Richard Shahan, former children and families pastor and facilities director at First Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., wrote emails saying in his career divorce and coming out as gay were not an option, and that he was praying for 52-year-old Karen Louise Shahan to die.
“There is only one way I could become legally ‘single,’ and I have to wait until God grants me that gift,” Shahan allegedly wrote in an email to a lover in February 2012. “It will come; the woman I live with is slowly killing herself — she is diabetic and refuses to take care of herself physically. Her mother died early with the same disease and did the same thing to her body. So I pray and wait. It will happen in God’s timing.”
More than a year before her death, Karen Shahan sent texts indicating she knew about her husband’s double life.
“I told him that he cannot keep both lives,” she told an undisclosed recipient in February 2012. “That he will have to lose one of them. I said that if he was having any interactions that were not right before God that he should go to God and be completely honest with him because he knows anyway. I told him that God will reveal it to me. I told him that any texting or Gmailing that does not bring glory to God has to go (which should give him a clue that I do know because I said Gmail and that is not a form of communication that is common for us).”
A month later she described telling her husband she did not want any of “those men” to be involved with her family. “He took it well and said that all involvements were over, that they were all gone out of his life,” she wrote.
Richard Shahan, 55, is charged with murder in the death of Karen Shahan, whose body was found inside the home they rented from First Baptist Church on the morning of July 23, 2013. Wednesday’s filing in Jefferson County, Ala., circuit court (which includes graphic sexual language) provides new details about circumstantial evidence leading up to his arrest on New Year’s Day 2014.
Prosecutors say Karen Shahan, an active member of First Baptist, Birmingham, who sang in the church choir, returned home after working a double shift at Hobby Lobby at approximately 9 p.m., on July 22. Her body was found the next morning, with multiple stab wounds to her neck and torso and some minor defensive wounds. She was sitting in a chair where she regularly watched TV, and appeared to be eating when she was attacked.
On the day she died, Richard Shahan traveled to Franklin, Tenn., for a purported vacation to visit their sons in Nashville and Kentucky.
During the day, he reserved a room at a hotel, stopped at multiple gas stations, ate at a restaurant, bought personal items at a Wal-Mart, sent messages on his phone, bought tickets to two movies, picked up the tickets to the movies, and ultimately turned his phone off at approximately 3:25 p.m. in Franklin, just south of Nashville.
Later he made a purchase at Wal-Mart, leaving “no further digital footprint” until he opened his hotel door with an electronic card key at about 2:30 a.m. on July 23.
Shahan originally told police he sat through two movies in Tennessee. Later he admitted to some of his extramarital affairs and said he left Franklin and returned home to Birmingham to pick up a breathing machine, returning immediately to Franklin in time to catch the end of the second movie.
Police say Shahan claimed he changed clothes after arriving at the hotel, went there in the afternoon after the movie and stayed throughout the night. The card reader at his room indicated he first entered the room at 2:30 in the morning, and surveillance video shows he never changed clothes. Shahan told police he bought gas with his credit card during his return trip to Birmingham, but no record of the purchase showed up on his credit card.
A window had been broken in a basement door to the Shahan home. Police suspect that is the loud noise reported by a neighbor between 11 and 11:30 p.m. on the night of July 22. The drive time between Franklin, Tenn., and Birmingham, Ala., is about three hours.
Shahan is expected to stand trial in spring 2016, nearly three years after his wife’s murder. Police say “it is probable” that Shahan personally killed his wife, but it is possible he had an accomplice. A pretrial hearing is scheduled Aug. 19.
Shahan was arrested while trying to board an international flight to Germany after telling acquaintances he was leaving the country to perform missionary work in Eastern Europe. An email quoted in the court document showed Shahan fantasizing about living with his boyfriend in Scotland. Another to a British attorney sought counsel regarding a male U.S. citizen marrying another man while in the country.
Shahan’s attorney, John Lentine, told local media the emails quoted by prosecutors are not relevant to the question of who killed Karen Shahan.
“This case is going to be tried on fact of proof — not on some sexual orientation, not on whether or not there was fidelity or infidelity in the marriage,” Lentine said after a pretrial hearing Thursday morning. “This case is tried on fact, and that’s what lawyers and people are supposed to do.”
Shahan, who is out of jail on bond but under house arrest, did not attend the hearing.
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Former children’s minister pleads not guilty to murder