From 700WLW Cincinnati:
Jury selection was under way Monday in the trial of Texas man accused of slaying a woman and cooking her dismembered body on barbecue grills, prosecutors said.
Timothy Wayne Shepherd, 28, of Houston, has been charged with choking his former girlfriend, Texas A&M engineering student Tynesha Stewart, to death, cutting up her body and burning it in grills on his apartment patio, The Houston Chronicle reported.
The challenge for Shepherd’s defense attorneys was to find jurors who could “compartmentalize” the facts of Stewart’s slaying as separate from the bizarre story of what happened to her body, the newspaper said.
“The details are the details, we can’t change them, but the details are irrelevant as to whether Tim Shepherd is guilty of murder,” said Chip Lewis, Shepherd’s defense attorney. “Nothing that happened after Ms. Stewart’s death changed the facts about how she died.”
Authorities say Shepherd has confessed to many aspects of the slaying. Court records show police recovered 30 pieces of charred bone and hair from Shepherd’s apartment, but Lewis contends there’s no DNA evidence proving they belonged to Stewart, making it a case without a body, the Chronicle reported.
Tynesha Stewart was a 19-year old American college student murdered on or about March 15, 2007 by her former boyfriend, Timothy Wayne Shepherd. Stewart was a freshman civil engineering major at Texas A&M University and Shepherd allegedly killed her when she came home for spring break because she had started a new relationship. Shepherd was 27 years old at the time.
Prosecutors believe that Shepherd disposed of Stewart’s body by burning it on his two barbecue grills on the balcony of his second floor apartment, taking several days to complete the job.
It takes a special level of evil to strangle your girlfriend just because she breaks up with you, dismember her, and take several days cooking her remains until she’s nothing more than dust.
This special level of evil is present in this world. It exists and lives around us. It may stand near us while waiting in line at the grocery store. It may be in the car behind us as the gas station. It may be employed by our employer. It may already be looking hungrily at our loved ones.
This is why I carry a handgun every day, everywhere I go.
Timothy Wayne Shepherd, Tynesha Stewart, evil
1 response so far ↓
1 Linz // Oct 12, 2008 at 7:02 pm
That’s terrible. It’s so much worse when it’s someone you know. It makes it that much harder to use a gun on your attacker.