Laurie Shaver and her defense team claim it was her 7-year-old daughter who fired the gun and wanted to detail prior bad acts allegedly committed by Michael Shaver to bolster their case.
A Florida woman who claims her husband physically abused her and even filed a police report detailing one alleged incident cannot introduce these prior bad acts during her murder trial.
A judge ruled that the defense team for Laurie Shaver cannot share details from a previous incident involving their client and her husband, whom she is charged with murdering, at trial.
Prosecutors argued that the details in that report were "inadmissable hearsay" while the defense said in their initial motion that the details of this incident are a crucial part of their case.
The judge is allowing the defense to intorduct a petition for a resrrsaining order filed by Shaver and her petiton to terminate that order a short time later during trial.
Shaver and her defense team claim it was her 7-year-old daughter who fired the gun and wanted to detail prior bad acts allegedly committed by Michael Shaver to bolster their case.
Now, the only way to introduce any of the details or claims from the police report would be for either Laurie or her daughter to take the stand and testify at trial, which is set to start in September.
Laurie allegedly had a tempestuous relationship with her husband, according to the affidavit, and court records show that in September 2014, a fight between the couple resulted in Michael being charged with battery. Those records also show that Michael agreed to a plea deal that allowed him to enter a 12-month pre-trial intervention program, which he successfully completed in just six months.
Both Michael and Laurie provided conflicting stories about the incident, with each accusing the other of brandishing a gun that they had to wrestle away during the skirmish.
Michael went to live in an airplane hangar at work after that incident and even began dating a co-worker, according to the affidavit. That relationship soured after Laurie began reporting the couple's actions to the human resources department at Disney World, according to the affidavit.
In May 2015, Michael and the co-worker split and he returned home to Laurie and their two children, according to the affidavit. Six months later, he was shot dead.
The minor child met with her own court-appointed attorney last year and "represented her desire to testify in this case," the defense said in previous motion.
That motion said that minor child had been "apprised of the rights she would be waving, and the possibility [sic] penalties she would be facing," according to the motion.
"In numerous court hearings defense counsel has stated that the defendant’s daughter, who would have been approximately eight years old at the time of the crime, was in fact the person who shot and killed the victim and that she did so in defense of her mother," wrote the prosecution.
The defense claims the child was 7 at the time.
Michael Shaver disappeared on Nov. 15, 2015, according to a probable cause affidavit filed in Lake County, Florida.
The affidavit says that three days later, the monorail technician at Disney World messaged his employer and suddenly quit his job. At the same time, his wife, Laurie, told friends and family that Michael had abandoned her and their children to start a new life with a new woman.
Two years later, a friend of Michael's alerted police to the situation, according to the affidavit, saying that no one had seen or heard from Michael since the day he went missing. That same friend also said that he believed Laurie may be impersonating her husband on Facebook and had built a giant concrete fire pit in the backyard shortly after Michael went missing.
On Feb.16, 2018, deputies with the Lake County Sheriff's Office say they arrived at the home of Michael and Laurie Shaver to perform a welfare check. Laurie welcomed the men in and cooperated with the search efforts according to the affidavit, until they inquired about checking the firepit with a cadaver dog.
Laurie instructed the deputies to leave her home, says the affidavit, and they stopped their search. Those deputies then returned on March 9 and found the body of Michael buried three feet below the fire pit.
The affidavit says he died as the result of a single bullet to the back of the head, fired from a .38 caliber gun.
The couple owned multiple firearms, according to the affidavit, and Laurie kept a pink .38 caliber handgun on her nightstand.
Laurie never once called her husband after Nov. 15, according to the affidavit, or ever once sought child support payments. She also never filed for divorce and began selling off Michael's guns and tools, according to the affidavit.
The affidavit also notes that Laurie married again less than a year after her husband's death, and had once allegedly told her new husband of Michael: "It's not that he's missing, it's that he's no longer walking this Earth."
She also told her new husband about a body buried on the property, suggesting to him that something bad happened, according to the affidavit.
Laurie did keep up the illusion of Michael being alive, according to the affidavit, sending sporadic messages on social media and allegedly telling stories about encounters between the two to her friends.
She allegedly sent texts to the wife of a man she dated for a few months after Michael's disappearance pretending to be her missing husband, according to deputies, who interviewed the man. He informed deputies that he broke things off when Laurie allegedly showed him that she had gotten his nickname tattooed on her vagina, according to the affidavit.
The affidavit says that Laurie responded by sending screengrabs from their conversations to his wife while claiming to be Michael, telling the wife that the conversations between the couple were obtained after installing a spyware app on his wife's phone.
On Sept. 17, 2020, deputies arrested Laurie Shaver and charged her with second-degree murder, domestic violence and accessory after the fact.
She entered a plea of not guilty to all three charges, posted $50,000 bail and returned home to her two children, according to court records.
The trial is scheduled to start in September.
