GUILTY: Isaac Apodaca Convicted of First-Degree Murder in Grace Jennings's Sword Killing, Timothy Besaw Gets the Max .

0:03 Kalaroga Shark Media. Good morning, you're listening to Daily Crime Injustice. I'm Garrett Fisher and it is Friday, July seventeenth, twenty twenty six. Before we get to today, I want to tell you about next week because we are doing something different. Starting Monday, we are running a five part series. It is called Summer of Fear, New York nineteen seventy seven. Monday through Friday, five days. One story. Now you already know the name that is the problem. It is one of the most famous names in the history of American crime. And the man who earned it was a nobody. He was a postal worker. He lived in an apartment in Yonkers with the shades pulled down. He was not a mastermind, and he was not possessed, and there was no dog telling him to do anything. We know that because he admitted years later that he made the entire thing up.

1:00 He wanted to be a story. It worked, It has been working for fifty years. So we are going to spend five days taking it back. What we are actually going to tell you about is the city New York in nineteen seventy five, seventy six, seventy seven, a city that was flat broke, and came within a day of default, where whole blocks of the Bronx were burning and nobody was coming to put them out, where the cops were stretched to nothing, and the tabloids were in a circulation war over the story and started printing letters from him on the front page. And then in July of seventy seven, the lights went out on all of it at once. That is the summer, That is what the fear was actually made of. He was one part of it, and he was not the biggest part. And we are going to tell you about the people he shot, because they were sitting in parked cars, and they were walking home from the train, and they were young, the youngest of them eighteen years old. Of them died. They have names.

2:02 We are going to use them, and by Friday you are going to know them. Here is why now. July twenty ninth, nineteen seventy six, a little after one in the morning, on Beer Avenue in the Bronx, two young women sat in a parked car, talking the way you do when the night is not quite over yet. Donna Laio was eighteen. She was going to go inside in a minute. She had her hand on the door. That is where this starts. And Wednesday, July twenty ninth of this year is fifty years to the day. Summer of Fear, New York, nineteen seventy seven, five parts, starting Monday. Right here, before we get going a word about today, we are going to talk about the killing of a young woman, and we are going to talk about the deaths of two eighteen month old children. I am not going to be graphic about any of it, but I want you to know what is coming, and if that is not where you are today, skip this one and come back tomorrow.

3:02 If any of it lands close to home, I will have something for you at the end of the show. Look, I'm going to be honest with you. On Monday, I stood here and told you about a trial in Santa Fe that was asking a question I did not know how a jury would answer. If you never pick up the weapon, if you are not even in the room when it happens, can you still be the murderer? Twelve people in New Mexico answered that question this week, and they did not take long about it. Then we are going upstate to a Walmart parking lot outside Saratoga Springs, where a sixty nine year old man walked out to tell somebody he had to leave the property and never walked back in. His killer was sentenced this week, and I want to talk about what the word accident is doing in that story, because the answer is nothing. And then Idaho, where a mother charge was smothering her twins asked a judge to let her go home to the baby she gave birth to five days before her arrest.

3:58 That hearing did not go the way her lawyer's planned. And around that hearing, there is an entire industry that has already decided what killed those children without waiting for anybody to prove it. Here is where things stand. In Santa Fe, New Mexico, a jury has found Isaac Appadaca guilty of first degree murder and conspiracy to commit first degree murder in the twenty twenty two death of twenty one year old Grace Jennings. He was remanded into custody. Sentencing has not been scheduled yet. In Saratoga County, New York, thirty five year old Timothy Bissau was sentenced to twelve and a half to twenty five years in state prison for the death of sixty nine year old Walmart employee Michael Bushy, which is the maximum available under his plea.

4:42 And in Payet, Idaho, twenty three year old Andrea Shaw, charged with two counts of first degree murder in the deaths of her eighteen month old twins, had her two million dollar bond revoked entirely after asking for it to be reduced. She has not entered a plea and she is presumed innocent. A verdict for Grace Jennings. Grace Jennings was twenty one years old on the night of October twenty eighth, twenty twenty two. She was going through a breakup and she needed somewhere to sleep, so she took an invitation from people she had known for years, and she brought her cats and she went to a detached garage on the south side of Santa Fe. She never came out of it. If you were with us Monday, you know this case. You know the geometry of it.

5:27 Kiara McCully swung the sword. She has never disputed that she pleaded guilty back in February of twenty twenty five second degree murder and conspiracy thirty years on the condition that she get on the stand and tell the truth about the man she says put the weapon in her hands, and that man, Isaac Appadeka, spent this trial sitting there while the state made an argument that has failed in a lot of courtrooms before this one. The state said he was the architect, not the killer. The architect, prosecutors told the jury he did not need to be in that room because he had spent months building. The person who would be here is what they say he built.

6:10 They say he convinced Kiera McCully that he ran a secret vigilante organization called Ghosts that existed to kill sex traffickers. They say he convinced her she had a kill list and that Grace was on it, and that if she did this, she would rank up. They say he convinced her she had dissociative identity disorder, and then he helped her name the personalities and then he played along with them. Her own mother testified that Kiara was easily persuaded into things she otherwise would not do, and the state put a forensic psychiatrist on the stand to walk the jury through exactly what that kind of construction looks like from the inside. And then there were the texts hundreds of them, hours of them sent the night before Grace died. I'm just saying swing and don't regret the aim. I'm not playing games. I'm wanting to see you do this. I'm wanting you to kill her. That is not a mistake.

7:04 That is a choice typed out over and over with a person's name attached to it. The defense said the state had the wrong person. Attorney j Nyer told the jury that Kiara McCully was the one filled with rage, that she was the one who bought the sword, that she was the one who used it, and that his client was the gullible one, the manipulated one, the one who called his mother and called nine one one and then went and sat at a cell phone store waiting for police, which he argued is not the behavior of a killer. And he was right that there was no DNA putting Isaac Apadaca's hands on that weapon. There never was, The state never claimed there was. On Wednesday, the jury came back guilty first degree murder conspiracy to commit first degree murder. He was remanded into custody on the spot.

7:53 Sentencing gets scheduled later and in New Mexico, first degree murder carries a life sentence. I want to sit with something for a second because it is the part of this case that has not gotten enough air. The lie that got Grace Jennings killed was a lie about Grace Jennings. Prosecutors say Appadaca told Kiar that Grace had orchestrated her rape, had taken money for it, had recorded it, and let the video circulate. That is what put Grace on the list. That is the entire engine of this thing, and there is no evidence any of it was true. Police looked, they confirmed that a sexual assault had been reported, but not with the details attached to it. Grace's mother has disputed the whole framing of her daughter's life in this case, right down to whether she ever dated Apodaca at all.

8:41 So a young woman was murdered over a story somebody made up about her, and for almost four years, that made up story has been sitting in the public record next to her name, getting repeated. Because that is what happens. The accusation travels and the correction does not. No nobody was paying attention to her. They were paying attention to the sword and the secret society and the whole lurid architecture. Of it, and Grace Jennings became a set piece in a story about somebody else's fantasy world. She was a twenty one year old who needed a place to stay for the night. That is who she was when she died. That is the whole thing. The jury saw it. Sixteen witnesses, more than ninety exhibits, and twelve people who understood that a man who never touches a weapon can still be the reason it comes down. That is not a legal loophole closing. That is the law working the way it was always supposed to work, and it is worth saying out loud because it does not always. Michael Bushy was going home. Michael Bushy was sixty nine years old. He lived in Saratoga Springs, New York. He worked at the Walmart in Wilton, and on the night of October sixteenth, twenty twenty five, he was working the late ship because that is what he did. He was, by his daughter's account, healthy and active. He was somebody's father. People called him

10:14 Michael Bushy Senior, which tells you there is a junior out there somewhere carrying that name around today. A little after eleven that night, a man named Timothy Bisaw tried to walk out of that store without paying. Employees stopped him. They found the merchandise he was carrying and they got it back, but he was also wearing clothes he had not paid for, and instead of leaving, he stayed out in that parking lot and argued with them. Three employees went out there. Michael Bushy, according to his daughter Britney Sanders, told the man he had to leave the property. That is it. That is the sum total of what Michael Bushy did to Timothy Bisaw. He told a man to leave a parking lot. Bisaw got into a car and then he accelerated, and he swerved, and he drove into two men standing near the entrance of a wall. Then he left. He crashed the car in a secluded part of Wilton, and when state police found him, he was visibly impaired, with open containers of alcohol in the vehicle and controlled substances in there with them. He refused a breath test, he refused a blood test. The other employee he hit survived with serious injuries. Michael Bushy was airlifted to Albany Medical Center. Broken hip, broken pelvis, broken wrist, several broken ribs. He went through multiple surgeries to put himself back together, and he did the work and it worked.

11:33 And on November third, twenty twenty five, he was days from being discharged. His daughter wrote about it afterward. He was about to go to rehabilitation and then home where he belonged, that is her phrase, where he belonged, And then he took a sudden turn cardiac arrest. Doctors worked on him for two hours. There was a massive blood clot in an artery, and Michael Bushy died in a hospital bed three weeks after a man ran him over for telling him to leave. Now, I know what some of you are already thinking, because I have heard it every time one of these cases comes up. He died of a blood clot. He died three weeks later. He died of a heart problem. That is not really murder, is it? Yes? It is. A sixty nine year old man does not develop a fatal clot in his artery out of nowhere. He develops it because his pelvis has been shattered and he has been lying in a hospital bed through surgery after surgery, immobilized for three weeks because somebody drove a car into him. There is a straight line from that parking lot to that artery, and the law can see it. And prosecutors added the homicide count for exactly that reason. His daughter put it plainer than I can. If it wasn't for the coward who decided to hit him with his vehicle, he would still be here.

12:53 Basaw pleaded guilty back on the first of April to aggravated vehicular homicide and first degree vehicular assault. On Wednesday, Saratoga County District Attorney Brett Ebee got him sentenced to twelve and a half to twenty five years, with a second term of three and a half to seven running alongside it. That is the maximum available. He was sentenced as a second felony offender, which is its own sentence if you think about it. This was not his first time in front of a judge. The DA said the sentence reflects the devastating consequences of the defendant's actions and that no sentence can restore the life that was taken. Both of those things are true, and I want to add one more. There's a playbook for this. Somebody gets caught stealing and rather than accept the smallest possible consequence in the world, a shoplifting charge, a misdemeanor, a bad night.

13:44 They escalate until somebody is dead. Michael Bushy was not killed over merchandise. The merchandise was recovered. It was in the store's hands before he ever hit the pavement. Michael Bushy was killed because a man decided that being told to leave was intolerable and that a human being standing between him and the exit was a thing he could drive through to twenty five years On the outside, Michael Bushy was sixty nine. He had years left. He was three days from rehab. Do the math on who actually got the maximum here. Accountability doesn't have a legal department, but it also does not have a resurrection clause. This is the best the system could do, and the best the system can do is not enough, and I am glad they did it anyway. Payette, Idaho. Two children and an argument about what killed them. This one is hard and I am going to be careful with it because there are two dead children at the center of it, and almost nothing about this case is settled in court records.

14:57 They are ds and ts boy one girl, twins, eighteen months old. They spent time in the NICU when they were born and then they went home. On May fifth, twenty twenty five, they were found dead in their bed in the same room on the same night. I want to stop right there and say the thing I always say, except I cannot say it because I do not have their names. The court has them under initials. So we are talking about two people who lived eighteen months on this earth, and I cannot even tell you what they were called. Hold that thought because it matters to the rest of this. More than a year after they died, a grand jury indicted their mother, Andrea Shaw, twenty three, is charged with two counts of first degree murder. Prosecutors say she suffocated both children as they slept. She has not entered a plea. Her attorney told the court this week that the defense is waiting to see a transcript of the grand jury proceedings first, and I want to be as clear as I know how to be here.

15:59 Andreash Shaw is charged, she is not convicted. She is presumed innocent, and everything that follows is an argument, not a finding. Her defense and her family's position is that no crime happened at all. Their position is that the vaccines killed the twins. Here is that timeline, as her family tells it. On April twenty third, twenty twenty five, Andrea Shaw took the twins to their eighteen month well visit. They got several vaccines that day, including hepatitis A DTaP and a flu shot. Her mother in law, Wendy Shaw, filed an affidavit saying she was at that appointment and raised concerns about the flu shot because she and her son, the twins father, had both reacted badly to it before.

16:43 The affidavit says that in the days after, Andrea repeatedly sought medical care for the children, that they were lethargic and had diarrhea and were generally unwell. Twelve days later, they were dead. Wendy Shaw's affidavit calls Andrea a victim alongside her chill. She wrote that the family trusted the advice of medical professionals and the general consensus that vaccines are safe, and that since the twins died, it is her belief that police have been trying to find a crime in what was a tragic loss from something entirely outside their control. Defense attorney Joseph Philichetti said the same thing in court, and more bluntly, he called it a case in search of a crime. He said, he is not a doctor, but the doctors he has consulted call it a vaccine related death. He said the coroner has a different opinion as to cause of death than the prosecutor's office does, and he was careful to say that is what he has gleaned, not what he has confirmed.

17:39 And he asked a question I am not going to pretend is a stupid one. If a mother was intending to kill her children, why would she keep taking them to the doctor? The States answer from prosecutor Michael Duke was four words, this is not a vaccine case. Duke told the judge that three medical doctors have gone through the file and every one of them ruled vaccines out as a contributor. And he said suffocation is the only reasonable explanation for why both of them would die at the same time, on the same night, in the same room, in the same bed. So that is the fight, and it is a real fight with a real evidentiary dispute at the middle of it. And I am not going to stand here and tell you I know how it comes out. A jury is going to have to sort out what those doctors actually say when they are under oath and subject to cross examination. And if the coroner really does disagree with the prosecutor's office about cause of death, that is not a small thing. That is the kind of thing cases come apart on. I want you to hear me say that. But here's what I keep circling back to. In the days after her children died, before any charge, before any indictment, Andrea Shaw went on a podcast run by an anti vaccine activist organization to tell the story, and in the time since, there has been a fun fundraiser online asking the public for money, partly to pay for an independent autopsy. I'm not going to say a word against a grieving mother wanting an answer.

19:10 If my children died in their sleep on the same night, I would want every test on earth run twice. That is human, That is not suspicious. That is what love does when it has nowhere to go. What I have a problem with is the machinery that was waiting for her, Because there is an industry out there that needs stories exactly like this one. It needs dead children with a needle in the timeline, and it does not need those children to have names or personalities or a favorite blanket or a laugh. It needs them to be evidence. Two toddlers died, and within days there was a media apparatus ready to put a devastated twenty three year old on camera and build a fundraising campaign around the worst thing that ever happened to her. And if her defense is right and she is completely innocent, then and that apparatus used her too. It did not protect her. It got her on the record fast, telling a story before anybody knew what the story was. And that recording is now sitting in a prosecutor's file. That is not advocacy, that is harvesting. As for the hearing itself, Andrea Shaw's team was not asking for much. Philichetti asked for the two million dollar bond to come down to one hundred thousand with restrictions, and he told the judge he thought he could have asked for release on her own recognizance and had a case for it, but he was not going to the reason for the ask was straightforward and it was sympathetic. She gave birth by caesarean section on June

20:40 twenty fifth, three weeks early. The baby spent a night in the NICU. She was breastfeeding when they arrested her five days later. Her lawyers argued the newborn needs her and that jail after a C section carries its own risk of infection or hemorrhage. Prosecutors said that when they filed the arrest warrant, they had no idea there was a newborn at all. And then they said the part that decided this hearing, that baby is not a reason to reduce her bond. That baby is a reason to revoke it. Judge Kylie Stutchlick agreed. She said she had concerns, and she named the newborn specifically, and she found that Andrea Shaw poses a risk to the safety of that other child. Bond revoked entirely, and the judge noted that there was no presumption of bond available here in the first place, because Shaw is charged with a capital crime.

21:30 Prosecutors have not said yet whether they will seek the death penalty. Think about the shape of that for a second. She walked into that courtroom asking for less and walked out with nothing. She went in asking to hold her baby, And the fact of the baby is what closed the door. And underneath all of it still are two eighteen month olds who died in the same bed on the same night, and whose names I am not allowed to say to you. Somebody is going to have to answer for how that happened, and right now nobody has, not the state, not the defense, not the podcast that got there first. That is Daily Crime and Justice for Friday, July seventeenth, twenty twenty six.

22:15 Isaac Appadaca convicted in Santa fe a first degree murder and conspiracy to commit first degree murder. He never touched the sword he built the hand that held it, and a jury said that is the same thing. Sentencing is coming and he is in custody until it does. Timothy Bissaw sentenced in Saratoga County to twelve and a half to twenty five years the maximum for driving a car into a man who asked him to leave a parking lot. And Andrea Shaw held without bond in Payette, Idaho, charged with two counts of first degree murder, presumed innocent, awaiting a plea and a fight over what actually killed her children. Grace Jennings was twenty one. She needed a couch for one night, and she brought her cats, and she trusted the people she wanted. She was killed over a story.

23:02 Somebody invented about her, and four years later a jury finally called that story what it was. Michael Bushy was sixty nine years old and he was three days from going home, not to rehab home where he belonged. And two children in Idaho were eighteen months old, and one was a boy and one was a girl, and they died on the same night in the same bed, and I still cannot tell you their names. If today's episode hit close to home, if you have lost a child, or you are sitting with a grief that does not have anywhere to go, please talk to someone about it, not a comment section, a person you're doctor, a counselor a friend who will pick up. It is out there and you are allowed to ask for it. If this one meant something to you, share it, text it to one person who would want to hear it. That is genuinely how this show grows. One person telling one person.

23:56 And if you're listening on Spotify, drop a comment and tell me this. Isaac Appadaca never picked up that sword. Kiara McCully did, and she is serving thirty years. He is looking at life. Did the jury get the proportion right? I want to hear it. Do better. I'm Garrett Fisher. This is Daily Crime and Justice. Disclaimer. Daily Crime and Justice is produced by Calaroga Shark Media for informational and entertainment purposes and is not legal advice. Andrea Shaw is charged and has not entered a plea. She is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty. Kiara mccully's account of Isaac Appadaca's conduct was given under a plea agreement requiring her testimony and should be weighed accordingly. Claims that Grace Jennings orchestrated or profited from an assault are unproven, allegations described by prosecutors as the false premise used to justify her killing. Police confirmed an assault was reported, but not with the details alleged, and Jennings's family has disputed accounts of her relationship with the defendant. Reported ages differ across outlets.

25:05 Isaac Appadaka has been reported as both twenty nine and thirty and Kiara McCully as both twenty three and twenty four. The First Judicial District Attorney's news release describes the Appadaca trial as both six days and seven days in the same statement, so we have not stated a length in the Basaw case. One national outlet reported that three victims were struck and that sentencing came six months after the crime. Local reporting and the district attorney's office indicate two people were struck of three employees who confronted him, and the incident was in October twenty twenty five, roughly nine months before sentencing. That outlet also list besawes age as thirty five, while court reporting at the time of his plea listed thirty four. Defense council statement that the coroner's opinion on cause of death differs from the prosecutor's office was described by council as his own understanding and has not been independently confirmed. The children in the Idaho case are identified in court records only by initials. Garrett's commentary on anti vaccine advocacy organizations is opinion and is directed at those organizations, not at the defendant, whose defense has not yet been tested at trial. Nothing in this episode should be taken as medical guidance. Vaccine questions belong with your doctor. Research for this episode was assisted by AI tools