The Bad Nurse (3 page)

CHAPTER 8

A
fter she was indicted, turned herself in, and was arrested and jailed for capital murder, a very public uproar began between Karri's large number of supporters and a much smaller number of others in the community who were just as firmly convinced of her guilt. Arguments broke out between the two groups everywhere they met, from Internet message boards to grocery store aisles, with the two sides loudly proclaiming her guilt or innocence.

Friends and relatives became bitter adversaries because of their differing opinions on Karri's situation. People who swore that they “knew for a fact” that Karri was innocent made long, fervent comments in letters to the editors of local newspapers. Other vocal writers challenged these opinionated believers, asking them what those facts were and where the information had come from. They demanded to know why this knowledge had not been presented to the authorities, if such facts actually existed.

One very dedicated group of supporters created a Facebook page, “Truth for Karri,” which was devoted to Karri's innocence. It quickly gained in popularity with over thirteen hundred “likes” for the page, a number of followers that was much greater than the entire population of the town of Ider. Karri wrote poems and letters and sent them to her husband and friends, who then posted them on the Facebook site on an almost daily basis, keeping the page very active.

Karri wrote about her usual favorite topics, the same ones she had addressed in her blog, writing about everything from her undying devotion and abiding love for her husband, to items about her religious faith and belief that her innocence would be proved soon, to simple poems to her children professing her love for them. And above all, there were always constant and continual requests for prayer, and descriptions of her personal prayers, which seemed to be offered up on a perpetual basis.

All these postings, written with her customary manipulative skill, were interspersed with items from her many supporters rallying the troops to call for Karri's freedom. A huge campaign was begun with the widespread placement of yard signs, so popular in the South during election season. But instead of promoting the candidacy of one public official or another, these signs, which sprouted up by the hundreds all over yards and roadsides throughout the area, proclaimed,
TRUTH FOR KARRI
.

Fund-raisers were held in the community to aid her husband, a teacher, and their two small children, and to assist with her legal defense. The war to prove Karri Willoughby's innocence had begun in earnest. When one looked at Karri's earlier Internet activity, it was evident that she had been preparing to use her faithful followers to provide public relations and support for herself for quite some time. Now that she had been charged and jailed, she was continuing to do so.

The main thing that all Karri's support did, however, was to show the prosecutors and law enforcement working on the case that the easy part of their jobs would be proving Karri was guilty. The difficult task would be presenting the overwhelming amount of hard evidence against her that it would take to convince her fanatical followers that she was, indeed, guilty as charged.

CHAPTER 9

T
he defense attorney who was retained for Karri Willoughby was named Bruce Gardner. He was a very experienced criminal defense attorney from Huntsville and had served for eight years as assistant district attorney (ADA) in Madison County, Alabama. During that time, he prosecuted cases ranging from capital murder to misdemeanors. When he entered into private practice in 1989, he specialized in criminal defense.

His most high-profile case, prior to defending Willoughby, was that of Heather McGill, a young mother who was tried for murdering her three children by setting their home on fire. McGill was reviled by many and defended by few, almost the exact opposite of Karri's situation. Gardner won a highly controversial acquittal for her, as well as for another of his clients, Walter Lamont Perry, who had also been accused of capital murder.

Gardner was assisted in Willoughby's case by Robin Clem. Clem was a criminal defense attorney who, at the time, was working on several other high-profile cases with Gardner. Together, the two attorneys made up a strong team with an impressive record of success.

The defense was being met by a prosecution that was just as experienced and successful. Mike O'Dell, DeKalb County's district attorney, had served as a prosecutor in the county since 1981 and had been district attorney since 1996. He had worked on a large number of capital murder cases and won many convictions in some of the most sensational cases tried in the area.

O'Dell was assisted by Deputy District Attorney Bob Johnston, who became an attorney in 1994 and served as ADA for ten years, starting in 1997. He became deputy district attorney (DDA) in 2007, and had assisted with three capital murder cases prior to the Willoughby case, all three of which had resulted in convictions.

While Karri's legion of supporters loudly proclaimed her innocence, the prosecution was at work compiling the evidence against her. Meanwhile, the defense scrambled to present their client as a veritable angel, falsely accused by jealous and spiteful detractors. In various motions and at her bond hearing, her attorney Bruce Gardner had told the court that his client had “an outstanding reputation for personal integrity, honesty, and truthfulness.” He said his client had taken the propofol from the Chattanooga Surgery Center because Shaw had asked her to do so. Gardner claimed Shaw told his stepdaughter that he needed her help in subduing a bull that he was planning to sell, and claimed he had told her he wanted to use the drug to sedate it.

The prosecution contended that Karri had been taking money from her mother's account and had stolen her identity, and that she had also written numerous large checks on the Shaw Saddlery account. After the thefts were discovered, steps were taken by both her mother and Billy Junior Shaw to prohibit Karri from having any further access to the accounts.

“After being denied further access to the victim's money,” the prosecution said in its motion for bond denial, “the defendant procured lethal drugs illegally from her place of business in Tennessee. The victim died of an illegal injection of those drugs.”

The cause of the death had been lethal injection, and the manner of death was homicide, the prosecution said.

The state also said that Karri should continue to be held in jail without bond, since Alabama state law required that defendants in capital cases were not entitled to receive bond. Judge David Rains knew the law well and agreed with the prosecution; Karri Willoughby continued her stay in the DeKalb County Jail.

CHAPTER 10

A
t her arraignment hearing, Karri Willoughby entered a not guilty plea, as expected, and a discussion took place at that time between the defense, the prosecution, and the judge about the details of a trial. Since the court's docket had already been set for the remainder of 2010, it would be the following year before the case could come to trial and Karri would continue to spend her time in the jail.

This upset the “Truth for Karri” legion and they sprang into frenzied action, with letters urging Judge Rains to grant Karri's bail pouring into his office. Almost four hundred people signed an online petition asking that bail be granted in the case. There was this outpouring, despite the highly publicized fact that, in Alabama, the law required that bond was refused for anyone who was charged in a capital crime.

The Karri supporters were relentless, however; they demanded that an exception to the law must be made in her case. They claimed that there was absolutely no doubt in anyone's mind that she was totally innocent, and so she should therefore be at home with her husband and two small children.

Start praying and writing letters to get her released on bond,
ordered one supporter on a newspaper message board, adding,
She has family that needs her at home, not locked away.

The writer again instructed Karri's fans to write letters to the court asking for her to be released until her trial, when a jury “will have their say.” The writer also said there were others with motives and means, and that Shaw's death could have been something other than a murder.

Don't let her spend one more day in jail over accusations,
the writer said, adding that someone had pushed for Karri to be arrested, and her supporters wanted to know how she became the suspect:
[There was] so much more information out there that has not been looked at. Why yell murder when it could have so easily have been something else entirely?

The writer then pointed out that Shaw's wife had recently died, and asked if anyone had spoken to family and friends to ask how he was dealing with her loss. The supporter also said that it had been mentioned that someone in Billy Shaw's neighborhood had been seen running in a pasture and chasing a bull. Had the bull been checked for the drug? they wondered. Also, had Shaw said anything to anyone to give a hint of what was on his mind? People needed to speak up, said the writer, and get what they knew on record, calling or writing Karri's lawyers if they had valuable information of any kind that might exonerate her.

For goodness sake, SPEAK UP NOW,
the writer said,
before this goes any further!

Despite all the entreaties for her release on bond, Judge Rains could not and did not waver in his rulings, and Karri remained in jail. Her trial was scheduled to take place in August 2011.

In the meantime, she was spending her time in jail writing to her supporters and getting better acquainted with some of the other inmates. Foremost among them was a man named Nathan Wilder, who was in jail while awaiting trial for the murder of his wife. The letters they exchanged during their incarceration would provide some of the most shocking materials in Karri's case files.

CHAPTER 11

O
n one of her social media pages, Karri had described herself as a “richly blessed child of God” who fulfilled many roles in her day-to-day life. She said that she had been married to her highschool sweetheart for almost fourteen years and they had two children, a four-year-old daughter and a five-year-old son. She worked as a nurse by day, she said, but loved to sew and make hair bows.

I love the Lord and my family more than anything in this world and beyond,
she wrote. Court papers would show, however, that Karri's family, despite her professed love for them, had been the victims of her identity theft and forgery schemes for quite some time, until they learned of her activities and cut off her access to their funds.

In the prosecution's motion to deny bond, they pointed out that Karri had stolen her mother's identity and had taken money from the saddlery—plus she stood to inherit a share of Shaw's estate, which was estimated at around $300,000. At the bond hearing, the testimony of Karri's husband, Jason, had confirmed that he and his wife had filed for bankruptcy in 2002. At the time of the hearing, they had been under Chapter 11 for three years because of their continuing financial problems.

Ongoing money troubles seemed to have been a constant for the couple for many years despite their careers, Jason as a teacher and Karri as a surgical nurse. Their debt was listed in court records as being in excess of $500,000 at the time of their second bankruptcy filing. No information was given, however, to explain how they had accumulated so much debt.

The supporters quickly addressed the money situation in their postings and letters to the editors of the local papers.

What is this about financial gain?
one person asked, referring to the prosecution's mention of the inheritance willed to Karri.
It certainly isn't in Karri's hands, is it?
Karri needed everyone's prayers, and the writer pointed out: [
S
]
o does her family. They will lose what little they have left trying to get the best legal defense they can; lawyers aren't cheap.

CHAPTER 12

M
any of those who were involved in Karri Willoughby's case—the prosecutors, members of the media, and investigators—were amazed at the online attention that was being generated touting Karri's innocence. If one looked back at her blog and Facebook activity, however, it became easy to see how that unconditional support had occurred.

Karri was a competent writer, and a master manipulator, who spent a great deal of time online, both before Shaw's death, during the time prior to her arrest, and then later, by having friends post writings she had mailed to them from her jail cell. She knew exactly how to portray herself as a devoted mother, wife, and friend, and how to make other young mothers identify with her by telling them what they most wanted to hear. She wrote about birthdays, church dinners, youth group activities, her marriage and home life, and her children's daily escapades. Her request for prayers was a constant and ongoing plea.

Karri had also written a great deal about her work as a nurse, but after she left her job at the Chattanooga Surgery Center in 2009, she began to write about her ensuing job search and at one point she believed that she was going to be hired at Baptist Medical Center DeKalb in Fort Payne, Alabama.

In mid-July 2009, after writing several times about how excited she was to be starting her new job, Karri wrote that she had just received a call from human resources at the hospital saying that she would not, after all, be going to work there because the economy had forced their CEO to put a freeze on hiring. Karri wrote that she had already been through her background check, drug test, and other employment preliminaries, and said she was utterly crushed to get the news only three days prior to the time she was due to be starting work.

After her arrest, there was some speculation that the hospital had somehow gotten wind during her background check that she had, for some time, been a person of interest in Shaw's murder. That fact could have accounted for the sudden and unexpected last-minute hiring freeze.

Karri blogged that she had decided her bad luck was the Devil's work, trying to kick her while she was down. She stated that she was immediately going to put in applications “all over Northeast Alabama and Chattanooga.” If none of those panned out, she would try Lowe's and Walmart. The hospital job, she said, was evidently “not part of God's plan” for her at the time and she believed that the situation would ultimately give her even more opportunities to prove her “love and devotion to Him.”

This particular post ended with a highly ironic sentence pointing out that Karri had almost forgotten that it was her thirty-second birthday that day:

An odd statement for her to make, as she had most likely put an end to any further birthdays her stepfather might have had.