FuriousNomad

by Mike Hudson
Det. Frank Coney is something of a legend in Western New York law enforcement circles, having cracked countless tough cases in his 30 years of investigating homicides in Niagara Falls.

But nothing he had seen prepared him for the gruesome carnage that met his eyes early on the morning of June 25, 1988. The grisly scene inside the neat and modest brick home in the cityís LaSalle section turned even Coney's cast iron stomach.

In a narrow hallway upstairs he found the body of a woman. The first cops on the scene thought she'd been decapitated, but her head hadn't been cut off so much as beaten to pieces. Blood and gore dripped from the walls and ceiling, spilling through the bedroom doors on either side. One of the dead woman's fingers lay several feet away, apparently knocked off as she raised her hand to defend herself from a vicious blow. Nearby was a baseball bat, drenched in blood, bits of skull and skin adhering to its barrel.

The corpse was that of Marge Shrubsall, a 56-year-old widow and single mother. Her clean cut, 17-year-old son Billy, the prime suspect in the brutal slaying, sat on a couch downstairs.

Wearing a torn and bloody T-shirt and jeans, the kid had already given police two different accounts of his mother's murder. In the first, Billy Shrubsall spun a yarn about two intruders who broke in and attacked his mother. In the second, he told a tale of child abuse and parental dysfunction on a horrific scale. He had killed his mother himself, he said, in self defense.

"She says 'I'll kill you, ya SOB,' and I -- I just turned and reached for the first thing and I hit her," he said. "I hit her the first time, the first few times or whatever, so many times, out of fear, and then after that, I don't know."

Later, at the police station, the athletic six footer ate a sub sandwich as his 15-year-old girlfriend sat sobbing beside him.

"Calm down," he said without looking at her. "This is no big thing."

Billy Shrubsall was still wearing the blood spattered T-shirt. Coney said the young killer's primary concern was the commencement speech he was scheduled to deliver later that afternoon as the valedictorian of his high school class.

Police had found a copy of the speech at the Shrubsall home, shortly after Marge's battered body was bagged and tagged and taken to the morgue.

"On a personal note, I would like to thank my mother, who taught me my reach should exceed my grasp," it ended. "Thank you, Mom."

The police questioning continued throughout the day, and Billy's justification for committing one of the most heinous crimes known to man became more and more detailed.

"It's no small threat that she could kill with her bare hands 'cause she's much stronger than I am," he told the cops. "I'm just a 17-year-old kid, you know. I mean she's...she's...she puts fear in me and her anger makes it all the worse."

When asked why he first said Marge was killed by intruders, Shrubsall stunned investigators by saying he was trying to protect his family's good reputation.

"I didn't want that to happen to her name, and I didn't want it to happen to my name. And, you know, I just didn't want it to happen," he said.

Coney said he had never seen a cooler customer under interrogation.

"For a kid whose mother had just been brutally killed, he showed no emotion at all," Coney said. "He was working on ways to take the system for a ride right from the start."

In his statement to police, Billy said heíd returned home from his girlfriendís house shortly before his midnight curfew to find his mother asleep in bed. His girlfriend then called to say heíd left his watch and some photographs behind, and he returned to get them

When he got home the second time, at around 1 a.m., Marge Shrubsall was sitting in her car in the driveway, about to go out looking for him.

She began screaming insanely, the young killer said.

"You slime! Your girlfriendís a whore! Her family are perverts!" Billy told the cops she ranted.

She made him clean the house, hurling insults all along, he said. Finally, at 3 a.m., she picked up the phone and said she was calling his girlfriendís parents to ìtell them their daughterís a slut. Billy said when he attempted to hang the phone up she beat him, first with the receiver and then with her elbows and fists. She said she would kill him, he said.

Coney wasnít buying any of it. The little bastard had smashed his motherís head to pieces with 20 blows of a 40-ounce Louisville Slugger, delivering 15 of them after she'd gone down and couldn't possibly have posed any threat.

"He was a murderer, not a mixed-up kid,' the veteran detective said.

After giving his statement, Billy Shrubsall was booked on charges of second degree murder and weapons possession. His savage act of matricide seemed like an open and shut case.

But Billy was no ordinary killer. He wasnít even an ordinary mother-killer. Like Michael Myers in the Halloween movies, he would return again and again, striking terror into the hearts of his victims.

It was no time at all before a veritable Greek chorus of the usual bleeding heart suspects were lined up at the jailhouse door, offering to defend Billy and even portraying him as the victim in the case.

There was Paul Cleary, an attorney best known for winning the acquittal of a battered wife who shot her husband to death.

"Nobody portrays Billy Shrubsall as an altar boy, but in 24 hours the kid went from being the smart kid, No. 1 in his class to being Jack the Ripper," he said. "I think that image has survived and I wonder what effect itís having on this case."

Cleary enlisted the aid of Dr. Charles Patrick Ewing, a forensic psychologist from the University of Buffalo whose pet theory held that no child would kill his parent unless he was the victim of horrible abuse.

Ewing said Marge Shrubsall's relationship with Billy was "pathological." He characterized the dead woman, who had spent the day before her murder preparing food for her son's graduation party, as an abusive harpy.

Based on a 4 1/2 - hour interview he used in preparing a book, Ewing flatly stated Billy posed no menace to society.

"The typical justification for jail time is just not there," he said. "He's not going to go out and hurt anybody.

"Is he a killer? Absolutely not. I believe he acted in self-defense, as the law defines it," Ewing added.
This stew received some added seasoning from the local papers. In one article, the "300-pound" Marge Shrubsall was "ranting" and "charging" and "bellowing a torrent of obscenities' at her terrified son.

"Her unrelenting insults hurled like balls of mud," the turgid prose continued. "The fleshy fist of the hulking woman hit like a cannonball."

Poor Billy had little choice but to bash his mother's head in, the article concluded.
"In an uncontrolled rage she attacks again... She steamrolls after him, cornering him in his bedroom."
    
Such was the treatment the murdered woman received. Billy must have laughed as he sat in his jail cell and read it.

Lost in the psychobabble was the recollection of one neighbor, who saw the boy leaving the house on the afternoon before the slaying.

"Marge was watering some plants with a garden hose and, when Billy came by, she playfully squirted him," the neighbor said. "He darted away, and they both laughed."

Another neighbor who knew the family also questioned the self-defense theory.

"Marge weighed about 300 pounds and had problems with her legs. Bill is an athletic kid, 17 years old," he said. "He had to beat her like that in self defense?"

The baby-faced killer was out on bail in no time. He moved in with his aunt, but his first order of business was to throw a party for 30 of his friends at the murder house.

The neighbors were sickened.

"He and his friends were sitting there, drinking beer and eating pizza, fifteen feet from the spot where he killed his mother," one reported. "Would you be able to do that, go back into that house after what happened there?"

But Billy had become a local celebrity. He was seen driving an Olds Cutlass equipped with a vanity license plate holder that read "THE LEGEND LIVES" and, when he stopped, the kids ran up to the car to talk to him.

"Everyone has seen it," one woman said. "What kind of a kid would run around in a car like that?"

Still, the newspapers took pains to paint the youthful killer in the best light possible. It wasnít Billy who was doing anything wrong, it was the nosy neighbors. Unsurprisingly, it was Shrubsall's attorney, Paul Cleary, who championed this view.

"They're small-minded gossips who are shooting their mouths off out of total ignorance," Cleary told the Buffalo News. "They don't know a damned thing about how the boy feels."

His legal problems prevented his accepting scholarship offers from a number of universities including Princeton and Penn, but he enrolled at Niagara University and began living the carefree life of a college freshman as his case plodded through the court.

In June, 1989, he pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of manslaughter. Cleary failed in his effort to convince Niagara County Judge Charles Hannigan that Billy should be given youthful offender status.

When Hannigan gave Billy an opportunity to speak, the young killer seemed tongue-tied.

"I just want to say that I loved my mother very much, your honor, and all the... She wasn't a witch, it was nothing. I loved her very much. She was a good mother but, for 17 years, Lord, your honor, I had... She told me to do things," he rambled.

While Cleary refrained from asking for mercy for his client on the grounds that Billy was an orphan, it wasn't by much.

"Our system mandates that if you commit a crime, you have to pay a price," he said. "Billy's already paid a big price, heís going to have to pay a much bigger price. But in this particular instance that price should not be the total destruction of his life.

"This is the strangest, most unique case, factually, I've ever seen in my years of practicing law," he added.

Dr. Ewing argued that Billy's exemplary academic record should be taken into account.

"I've evaluated hundreds of adolescents," he said. "He's the brightest one I've seen."

But Hannigan was a no-nonsense jurist of the law and order school and the pleadings of the lawyer and the psychologist didn't sway him.

"Don't we as a society have a right to expect more from him because of the intellectual advantages he's been given?" Hannigan asked.

He was equally dismissive of the abuse excuse.

"Show me a kid that hasnít been spanked, hit, walloped, and I'll show you a spoiled kid," he said.

With that, he sentenced Billy to five to 15 years in the state penitentiary.

The appeal process began immediately, with Cleary arguing that Judge Hannigan erred in not granting youthful offender status to the killer.

In November, 1990, the appeals court judges agreed, by a 4-1 vote.

"Defendant had an excellent reputation in the community, having been first in his high school class academically, as well as editor of the yearbook and a member of the chorus, drama club, math league and student government," the judges wrote. "Prospects for the defendant's rehabilitation are good."

Billy ended up serving just 16 months for his mother's vicious murder. Moreover, because of the youthful offender status, his criminal record was ordered sealed from public view.

Det. Frank Coney remains outraged.

"I believe the system let the public down," Coney said. "He was quickly put back on the street after a hideous, violent murder, and more women had to suffer because of it."

Billy entered an Ivy League School, the University of Pennsylvania, in 1992. He completed his courses there in 1994, one exam short of a degree, and moved out into the working world. He came back to Niagara Falls, where he worked briefly at a used car lot and a restaurant.

A job as a stock analyst at a Wall Street firm led to a move to New York City in 1995 but, like a moth to the flame, Billy would be drawn back to Niagara Falls, and more trouble still.

In January, 1995, an attractive young woman was driving on the New York State Thruway near Rochester when she was motioned to pull over by a man in a car that pulled alongside her. When she stopped, the man told her he was an undercover police officer.

She'd been speeding, he said, and he'd have to write her a ticket. Unless she gave him oral sex, that is.

She stepped on the gas and sped away, but not before getting the license plate number on the man's car.

Shrubsall was arrested and charged with felony criminal impersonation of a police officer. The charge was subsequently dropped when the woman refused to testify in the case.

In August, 1995, Billy was arrested in the Town of Niagara on charges he had sexually abused a drunk 17-year old girl who had fallen asleep at a house party. Witnesses said Billy forced the girl to perform oral sex on him.

He was released on bail but, in April, 1996, he was arrested again, this time in Niagara Falls. A woman said she had been walking down the street listening to music on headphones when Billy accosted her, grabbing her buttocks and trying to embrace her.

He was convicted of sexual abuse and sentenced to 60 days in the county jail.

His trial on the sexual abuse and sodomy charges began in May, 1996. Ironically, Judge Charles Hannigan was again presiding. Lawyers for both sides had delivered their final arguments and Hannigan was planning to have the jurors begin their deliberations the next day when, on May 15, Billy dropped a bombshell.

June Epp, Billy's aunt, who had mortgaged her home to pay her nephew's $20,000 bail, found a neat, handwritten four-page suicide note in his room.

"Let's face it, losing means the next 8 1/3 to 25 years are spoken for," he wrote. "Years filled with rapes at the hands of HIV-infested inmates and frequent stabbings (probable) death as an accused sex offender.

"It's all my fault. I lost for two reasons. 1) because I allowed myself to set foot in this awful county again after graduation, and 2) because I agreed not to testify. I was a liar and a deceiver and a 'sexual predator' because I could not prove otherwise having stood mute.

"I have nothing: no family (except for you), no friends, no girlfriend or wife, no money, no job, no prospects, meaningless education ... and mountains of debt. Most of all, no hope. I meant to do this earlier, but I haven't had the guts. So tonight I ... got drunk and walked down to the falls. To my knowledge, no one has ever survived the American falls. I don't think I will either."

Billy had said goodbye cruel world to the sad sound of violins. But there was just one problem: Nobody believed him.

"I knew he didn't do it,' one neighbor said. 'He loved himself too much."
Det. Coney said he knew the mother-killer and sexual predator would turn up again.

"We heard many times that one person or another saw him in bars in Niagara Falls, or in other places, but we were never able to catch him," Coney said.

Less than a month after his phony suicide, Billy Shrubsall turned up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, a city of a quarter million people on the Atlantic Ocean, not far removed from its fishing village roots. To those who love it, Halifax is Boston or San Francisco without the urban decay or suburban sprawl.

Introducing himself as Ian Thor Greene, Shrubsall took up residence at a fraternity house and passed himself off as a 19-year-old college student despite a receding hairline. His father had been killed in a car accident near Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, driving to see young Ian play in a youth hockey tournament, he said, while his mother had died in a house fire resulting from her habit of smoking in bed. His only brother had been killed in Belfast by the IRA, he added.

His friends in Halifax knew him as a bright, charming guy who made friends easily and pursued women relentlessly.

"He's the best con man I've ever met in my life. Or that I've seen on TV or heard about," said Troy Blair, who lived in the fraternity house with Billy.

"He was sexually aggressive," added another member of the fraternity, Jason MacDonald. "He had a lot of girls over."

The charade continued for two years. Then, early in the morning of June 22, 1998, fraternity member Mike McKeigan heard what sounded like a fight going on in Ian Greene's room downstairs. In the dimly lit hallway outside that room, McKeigan saw Greene sitting on top of a struggling, screaming young woman dressed only in panties.

"Help me, help me," the woman cried. 'He's trying to kill me!"

Frozen and speechless, McKeigan watched as Greene savagely pounded the victim with his fists, grabbed her by the ankles and dragged her into his room.

"He was choking her with both hands," McKeigan said. "It was like something out of the movies."

Greene emerged from the room, shut the door and locked it.

"Everything's under control," he said with a smile.

Halifax police called to the scene quickly linked Greene to a series of sexual assaults that had occurred in their city over the past two years. In one case, a woman had been beaten with a baseball bat. In another he was identified as the man who robbed a teenage girl and forced her to perform oral sex on him.

But just as quickly, police realized that no such person as Ian Thor Greene really existed. They pressed the suspect for his real identity but he remained uncooperative.

Det. Frank Coney was working the graveyard shift on the night of July 24, 1998, when he got a call from a Niagara Falls resident who had just seen a Canadian newscast on television. There had been a story about a sexual predator who had been captured in Nova Scotia.
"It was Billy Shrubsall, Frank," the caller said.
Coney had a set of Shrubsall's fingerprints sent to the Halifax police and Billy's identity was quickly confirmed.

Earlier this year, Shrubsall was sentenced to a lengthy prison term in Nova Scotia following conviction on a wide array of charges. Trials for additional crimes are scheduled for later this year and, when he gets out, he will be returned to Niagara Falls to face sentencing on the sodomy and sexual abuse charges he fled from in 1996.

"Hopefully, he'll be in jail for a long time up there and, if he ever gets out, we'll put him back in jail for a long time here," Niagara County District Attorney Matthew Murphy said.

Charles P. Ewing, the psychologist and "expert witness" who predicted Billy would pose no threat to society after he murdered his mother now routinely declines comment on the case.

But Billy's lawyer, Paul Cleary, still defends the system that set the killer free.

"It wasn't the system's fault, it was Bill Shrubsall who failed the system," he told a reporter. "Four judges who never met this kid stuck their necks out for him, showed some compassion, gave him a chance to start a whole new life.

"He was a brilliant kid. He had great opportunities. He had an Ivy League education. He should be on Wall Street somewhere, making millions of dollars. He threw all that away. Don't blame the system. It's the most disappointing thing I've seen in all my years as a lawyer."

Det. Frank Coney takes a harsher view.

"This is a truly diabolical individual," he said. "He's been laughing at the system all along, starting with the day he killed his mother. But now he's in jail up there in Canada, I don't think he's laughing anymore."