Law & Order

Dixie Shanahan at her trial (left), a photo from the trial showing Dixie Shanahan's abuse (center) and Scott Shanahan (right).

A couple of years ago, I covered a murder trial. That sounds
pretty exciting, but truth be told, even the best murder
trials are incredibly boring procedures that lend themselves
more to dry moralization than high drama. The murder trial
I covered was that of Dixie Shanahan and it was like a "Law & Order"
episode written by William Faulkner.

The basic facts of the Shanahan murder case are that
Dixie was married to a reprobate named Scott Shanahan who
beat her seriously and regularly. One day, Scott disappeared
and was never heard from again. At first, no one was concerned.
Over a year later, it started to look really suspicious. It turns
out that Dixie had shot her husband while he was asleep in their
bed, covered him over, blocked off the room and never went back
inside. Scott Shanahan's corpse weighed under 50 pounds when
it was found by the Shelby County Sheriff's department.

Now, I was at the trial and there was not one person who came
forward to say that Scott Shanahan didn't get exactly what he
deserved. In fact, there were a couple of people who made it fairly
clear that he was a piece of shit and if ANYBODY deserved to get
put out of his and our collective misery, it was wife beater and all-
around asshole, Scott Shanahan.

But this is where things get complicated.

Laws don't exist jut to make things easy for us. Laws exist to give
us some incentive to do what's right when doing what's wrong seems
preferable or easier. Laws exist primarily for cases just like this one.
The law is meant to prevent us from acting on our feelings. It exists
so we DON'T think it's OK to kill someone just because they are bad.
Was Scott a prick? Yes. Was he asking for it? Certainly. Would I have
like to have beat his balls off with a baseball bat my damn self? Hell
yeah. But the question isn't did Dixie feel the same way, the question
is did Dixie have a choice? You better believe it.

If you've got an abusive sleeping asshole in one room and a door to
freedom on the other side, you better take the door every single time.
And know this: had there been one single excuse I could have used to
give Dixie a moral walk, I'd've done it. If she had killed him during
any of his actual attacks on her, I would have said, let's throw her
a parade and dump this asshole in the creek. Dixie waited until her
husband was asleep, shot him, hid his body for over a year, continued
to live in the same house as the corpse and, perhaps most suspiciously,
continued to spend the rest of the dead guys $150,000 inheritance.

No one said life or the law would be easy to put up with.