SHAWN ALLISON
My
brother, Shawn Joseph Allison, 29, was found dead of a gun shot
wound to the face in his cabin in LaPine, Oregon,
on November 20, 2000.
Shawn’s body was found by “Tad” (Leighton Keith Shirley II), a friend of Jessica
McEwen, a woman Shawn had been seeing, whose mother allegedly sent Tad to “check
on Shawn.” That was odd in itself, since Jessica came and went to the cabin
whenever she wished.
Tad phoned the Deschutes County Sheriff’s Department
at 11:36 a.m. Yet Shawn’s neighbors saw Tad
at the cabin at 9 a.m., sitting on the porch steps, making phone calls. When one
neighbor asked what was going on, Tad said, “Don’t go inside. Shawn’s shot
himself.” Why would he wait two and a half hours to call law enforcement after
finding a dead body? And, if Tad wasn’t phoning law enforcement, who was he
calling?
We do know that at 10 A.M., he called my brother’s friends, Buster and Niki
Tate. Niki is sure of the time because Regis and Kelly were on TV. Buster called
my mother’s boyfriend, and he and Mom arrived at the cabin minutes after the
Sheriff’s Department got there. They were met by Deputy Gary Decker, who asked
them who they were. When Mom said, "I'm Shawn's mother," Deputy Decker said,
"They weren’t supposed to tell you!" It is an Oregon statute that the next of
kin must be notified. Who was Decker referring to when he said “they”?
My mother watched in a state of shock as a mortician took away her son’s body.
(We’ve since learned that it was illegal
for Deputy Decker to permit that; under Oregon law, only the coroner, after an
autopsy, has the authority to release the body for burial.) Stunned and still
trusting the police, Mom agreed to have Shawn’s body cremated. Decker asked Mom
if Shawn had ever threatened suicide. She replied, “Yes. He threatened a lot of
things back when he was told he was dying of cancer.” Without allowing her to
explain that the cancer scare had been eight years ago, Decker declared Shawn’s
death a suicide.
Although the police took pictures, they conducted no investigation. No autopsy
was performed. No fingerprints were taken. There were no ballistics tests. The
cartridge and the bullet both “disappeared.” Captain Wight pointed out a spot in
the middle of the room and told my mom, “He stood there
when he shot himself.” Yet you can see from
police photos that Shawn’s body was found across
the room on a couch where he “bled out,” and the gun was
under his feet. How did Shawn get to that
couch unless somebody placed him there? And how could he shoot himself if his
feet were on top of the gun?
On Nov. 25, following Shawn’s memorial service, we were approached by a number
of people with information that indicated that Shawn’s death might not be a
suicide. Two men, who were Veteran’s Advocates, (Shawn had once been a marine),
and knew Shawn very well, told me, “There is no way your brother would have
killed himself.” Another friend told us that on Nov. 17, (three days before his
death), Shawn had expressed terror that people were “out to get him.” Others
told us that Shawn had been telling people, “I'm going to turn in every drug
dealer in LaPine!" (LaPine is the “drug hub” of Oregon, and certain friends of
Jessica were alleged drug dealers) For her part, Jessica was telling people that
Shawn was being investigated for the murder of a man whose body (minus his
hands, which was the sign of a Mob hit) had been found weeks earlier under a
bridge and that he was in trouble for "a woman dead in a field." We asked the
Sheriff about those two bodies and if Shawn was being investigated and were
told, “Absolutely not.” They had never even heard of the woman in the field.
Five months earlier, in June 2000, Jessica had given
birth to a baby that she alleged was Shawn’s,
and had convinced Shawn to sign the birth certificate. Shawn was court ordered
to pay child support. He wanted visitation, but Jessica refused to allow that.
The child was born meth-addicted with extreme medical problems. Shawn wanted
those problems addressed and repeatedly got Children’s Services involved. That
made Jessica’s live-in boyfriend, Alan Allwood (aka Roger Alan Taravella)
furious. He publicly threatened to “blow Shawn’s head off,” (which was how Shawn
died).
After Shawn’s death we found papers in his file to indicate that he was in the
process of applying for a paternity test.
Eight years before, at age 21, Shawn had received a medical discharge from the
Marine Corps after suffering testicular cancer. He lost a testicle, went through
chemo, and survived the cancer, but doctors told him he would never father
children.
As the mother of a child who was legally registered as Shawn’s, Jessica was (and
still is) collecting Shawn’s Social Security and Veterans benefits. Our family
challenged this in court, requesting proof that the child was Shawn’s. Time
after time, Jessica would agree to DNA testing and then not show up with the
child. One time, Alan, her boyfriend, stood up in court and announced that he
was the child’s father. After that hearing, Jessica’s attorney told us that
Jessica would consent to DNA testing if we would agree not to use the results to
stop her financial benefits. We were caught between a rock and a hard place. We
wanted the truth exposed, yet we wanted the child to receive the medical help
she needed. We also had grown to care about that little girl and wanted to play
a part in her life. We let our emotions guide us and allowed Jessica to win
without getting the DNA test.
Although he had many good qualities, my brother was no angel. He was scheduled
to start alcohol rehab the weekend he died and had paid all his bills in advance
and stocked his refrigerator with food. He smoked marijuana, although, to the
best of my knowledge, he used no other illegal drugs. He also told tall tales
without considering the consequences. Tongue in cheek, he told Jessica’s friend,
Tad, that he had a $100,000 insurance policy and that his
dog, Nikki, was the beneficiary. (In truth, he
had a $25,000 policy and our mom was the beneficiary.) Tad believed that
ridiculous story and, when Shawn died, Tad took possession of the dog and had a
microchip implanted. He has twelve other dogs, and Nikki is the only one with a
microchip. That’s how valuable Tad considered him at that time. When Mom tried
to get Nikki back, Tad told her she would have to pay him thousands of dollars.
She never did get the dog.
Jessica also bought into the story about the insurance policy. After Shawn’s
death, that was all she could talk about. She insisted that she was entitled to
the non-existent $100,000 and to everything Shawn owned. She submitted a
handwritten list, itemizing Shawn’s possessions,
right down to his necklaces and sunglasses. High on that list is Shawn’s dog.
I am not accusing any particular individual of Shawn’s murder. However, our
family is convinced that he didn’t shoot himself. There are too many conflicting
stories, particularly those told by Tad and Jessica. Jessica first stated that
she last saw Shawn on Nov 17. Then, she changed that to Nov.15. Then,
Detective Eric Utter discovered that she had dinner with Shawn on Nov.18. That
would have made Jessica the last person to see Shawn alive. Since there was no
autopsy, there’s no way to know when Shawn died. He could have returned to his
cabin after his dinner with Jessica and found his killer(s) there waiting for
him.
There are also several viable motives for murder: (1) Tad, Jessica and Alan’s
belief in a big insurance policy with benefits to go to a dog that Tad
confiscated right after the shooting; (2) the fact that Shawn was going to have
a paternity test that might have relieved him of all responsibility to Jessica;
(3) Shawn’s outspoken threats to expose local drug activities.
The lack of investigation by the Sheriff’s Department -- no autopsy, no tests to
determine who fired the gun, no interest in how a man could blow half his head
off and then walk across the room to die on a sofa with his feet on top of the
gun – raise questions. Under Oregon Statute, if an unnatural death is not
witnessed or attended by a physician, it is to be considered a homicide until
such time as the evidence warrants other findings. That was not done in Shawn’s
case.
The LaPine Sheriff’s Department does not have a stellar reputation. In the years
since Shawn’s death, the (then)
sheriff, Greg Brown, has been arrested for embezzling a quarter of a million
dollars from the Sister's Fire District and later for selling rifles from the
Sheriff’s Department and pocketing the money.
Two of the deputies involved
in Shawn’s case, one of them the DARE officer at LaPine High School, were
arrested for having sex with teenage girls, giving them drugs and attempting to
put sex videos on the internet. As I write this, the DARE officer is
incarcerated.
There is no way we can get an outside agency involved in this investigation
unless we can get the finding of “suicide” removed from Shawn’s death
certificate. When we made an appointment to talk to the County Coroner, Dr. Ben
Chaffey, who signed the death certificate without viewing Shawn’s body, he kept
us waiting five hours and then charged us money to see him. The door to his
office was ajar, and we could hear him on the phone, nervously telling someone,
“They are here!” and asking, “What shall I tell them?”
It apparently never occurred to him just to tell us the truth.
Rita Allison (Shawn’s sister)