A Warrant to Kill: A True Story of Obsession, Lies and a Killer Cop by Kathryn Casey Read Free Book Online Page B

‘You’re crazy.’ He’d walk up to girls and say, ‘Hey, baby, what’s up?’”
    It would be months before Michael Shaffer’s role inthe events leading to Susan White’s death would become clear. Yet, looking back, his mother would remember her youngest son’s childhood and speculate on why he so readily capitulated to a cop and betrayed his best friend: “In the final divorce decree, his dad got the house, but I was fighting him. He got a court order, forcing me to vacate the property. I refused. It was my house and I wasn’t leaving. But the police pulled up in a squad car and threw our stuff on the curb. I screamed at them and they handcuffed me and dragged me off to jail. I’ll never forget the look on Mike’s face. He’d watched the whole thing. He was just a little kid, and he looked like he was in shock. After that, Michael was always uncomfortable around cops, really anyone in authority. You could just see it in his eyes. Whenever he talked to a cop, he just froze up, went back into his little-boy world. He was scared to death of them.”
    Just weeks after Mike Shaffer took up residence in Susan’s world, a brown envelope arrived at her office at First Union Mortgage, marked “Personal” and postmarked January 28, 1992. Inside, someone had tucked seventeen photos of her husband’s car in a hotel parking lot and a letter typed all in caps:
    DEAR SUSAN:
    ENCLOSED ARE SOME PICTURES TAKEN LAST WEEK OF RON’SCAR AND [SHERRI’S] CAR PARKED AT THE HILTON ON THE KATY FREEWAY … IN CASE YOU DON’T KNOW IT RON IS PLANNING TO FILE FOR DIVORCE SO HIM AND SHERRI CAN BE MARRIED. THEY ARE PLANNING TO GO TO SAUDI ARABIA TOGETHER. RON IS SHOWING UP AT THE OFFICE EARLY SO THAT HE CAN BE ALONE WITH HER FOR MORNING COFFEE. SHE RECENTLY ASKED HER HUSBAND FOR A DIVORCE, BUT
    HER HUSBAND DOESN’T KNOW ABOUT RON … THIS OFFICE ROMANCE HAS BEEN GOING ON SINCE OCTOBER. THE NIGHT YOU SHOWED UP AT THE RESTAURANT, YOU JUST MISSED THEM TOGETHER. THE REASON SHE AND RON WERE THERE WAS FOR RON TO MEET HER SISTER AND MOTHER. DON’T YOU THINK THAT IS A PRETTY SERIOUS RELATIONSHIP?
    THE AVENGER
    “Susan literally screamed,” remembers one coworker. “I didn’t know what could have happened. She ran out of her office, threw the letter on my desk, and started shaking and crying. She kept saying over and over, ‘I can’t believe he’s doing this to me. I can’t believe he’s doing this to me.’ After that, she spent hours staring at the letter and the photos.”
    Ron’s office romance had begun the previous October. “He was the typical flirt, very charming,” says Sherri Brandt, tall, auburn-haired, ten years younger than Susan, and the mother of a young daughter. “I resisted and resisted. Finally, I guess it was a month or so after we met, I gave in.”
    Giving in meant lunchtime liaisons at the Hilton, stolen hours when their respective spouses believed they were at work. To Sherri, Ron was an ardent suitor. He brought flowers, catered to her. “He was still living with Susan, but he’d call me all the time,” she recalls. “He’d check on me constantly, driving by my house and, after I moved out, my apartment. People at the office picked up on it pretty quickly. And once the gossip starts, it’s like cancer. It spreads.”
    Friends say Susan confronted Ron about the affair and he denied it, blaming the letter on someone’s overactive imagination. But from that day on, Susan became a different person. Looking back on her life, she must haveviewed Ron’s possible infidelity as her final betrayal, the last in a series of deceptions perpetrated by those she loved. Her first marriage had ended in disappointment and violence. Again she’d staked her future on a man who turned his back on her.
Why me?
she must have wondered.
Why is this happening to me?
    “Susan became obsessed with finding out whether or not Ron was telling the truth and what the other woman was like,” says Cindy Doerre, one of her