'MISSY LIKES BAD BOYS': HOOKER IN BI-SEX HONOR KILLING SPRUNG FROM PRISON
MARISSA SHEPHARD TURNED TRICKS WITH BAYLEE WYLIE BUT KILLED HIM WITH TWO OTHER TEENS IN CRACK-FUELED CHRISTMAS FIGHT
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Marissa Shephard was Canada's Natural Born Killer chick. Or maybe she was just a party girl who got caught up in a gay-shame honor killing. Either way, now she’s on parole.
Shephard, then 19, pleaded guilty to helping Devin Morningstar and Tyler Noel, then both 18, beat and stab Baylee Wylie, also 18, to death on Dec. 17, 2015. The four-some were in the middle of a crack-and-sex binge when Wylie revealed he had sex with Noel and had sexually-explicit video on his mobile phone to prove it.
Shephard and Wylie were working together as prostitutes. They'd known each since they were kids and got along well. When Wylie became homeless, Shephard let him stay at the triplex apartment she rented in Moncton, New Brunswick. They shared expenses and even the same burner phone to arrange "dates" with clients. When she testified at her 2018 trial, she called it a “drug house.”
Morningstar and Noel joined them at the drug house for a night of partying on Dec. 16. Both were local drug dealers. Both competed for Shephard's affection.
"Missy likes bad boys," Morningstar told police later in a video-taped confession.
Morningstar won. He went upstairs with Shephard to her bedroom, leaving Noel and Wylie in the living room. That, Morningstar told police, made Noel "steaming mad." He was "trying so hard to be this big gangster."
Later, Wylie recorded video of him giving Noel a blow job with his mobile phone. During a break from having sex with Morningstar, Shephard saw Wylie and Noel spooning on a couch in the living room, she testified.
The next day, Wylie told Shephard about the porn. She deleted it from Wylie's phone and told him not to mention it because it would piss Noel off, she said.
The four passed some time smoking weed in her bedroom, but Wylie revealed his encounter with Noel—in front of Morningstar
Wylie "really didn't mean to but he started a lot of drama," Shephard said.
Noel started punching Wylie. Morningstar joined in the beating. Shephard threw a large, heavy glass water bong. It hit Wylie in the head. He started bleeding.
"Enough, shut up everybody," she yelled. The three stopped fighting and went downstairs, she claimed.
Shephard left the triplex to turn two tricks. When she returned, Noel and Morningstar were taken turns stabbing Wylie, she said. Wylie was still alive despite a sucking chest wound. Somehow he was smoking marijuana from a different water bong. Every time he took a hit from the bong, smoke escaped from his punctured lung.
"It was really gross," she said.
Instead of helping Wylie or summoning police, she claimed she feared for her life and retreated to her upstairs bedroom.
"They weren't going to let me go," she said.
Noel and Morningstar wrapped Wylie in plastic wrap, tied him to a chair, beat and repeatedly stabbed him. They stabbed him with screwdrivers, box cutters, a broken mirror, a curtain rod and a dagger with skull-and-crossbones on it. They stabbed him nearly 150 times. All together, it took them about an 1 1/2 hours to kill Wylie, prosecution witnesses testified.
Noel and Morningstar thought they could cover-up the murder by burning the house. Shephard admitted she "didn't disagree."
Morningstar told police Shephard stabbed Wylie too, but he refused to testify at her trial.
Fire-fighters found Wylie's body when they responded to the fire on Dec. 17. Morningstar was arrested the next day. Noel got busted a month later. Shephard stayed on the run for two more months.
While she was in the wind, Shephard mocked police on social media. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police said she had "an uncanny ability to change her appearance and could be anywhere," the National Post reported. They even distributed photographs of her different looks—including one capturing her kissing a black handgun.
At Shephard's trial, the primary evidence against her was Morningstar's video-taped police confession alleging she also stabbed Wylie.
Shephard took the stand and denied stabbing Wylie. She claimed she didn't intend to hit her friend with the bong. That she only threw it in the general direction of the three young men because she was angry they were fighting in the living room of her multi-purpose crack den/whore house outlaw space. They were fucking her shit up.
After the murder, she said she stayed one step ahead of the police by constantly moving. She existed in a drugged-out, glass-boxed Purgatory trapped between past and future. Before Noel was caught, she lived with him in a house "in the middle of nowhere." They "smoked so much crack I thought I was dead and thought I was in hell."
After Noel was collared, she moved on to another house with two men. One day she overheard them planning to sell her to a third man. She escaped and hitch-hiked backed to Moncton where she tried finding a lawyer. Police heard she was back, and arrested her Mar. 1, 2016.
Noel pleaded guilty to second degree murder and was sentenced to a 16 years-to-life. A jury convicted Morningstar of first-degree murder and he was sentenced to 25 years-to-life. Shephard was convicted after her trial and sentenced to 25 years-to-life.
In prison, the teen terror "demonstrated poor institutional behaviour," according to Canadian prison officials. She spit in a guard's eye, was "manipulative," used "intimidation" and was "aggressive against staff as well as other inmates." Rounding out her sociopathic skill set, she also "incited violence against other inmates."
Meanwhile in social media fantasyland—in her case the Canadian prison penpal website Canadian Inmates Connect—she was just a “a girly girl who adores makeup." She was "humble and easy to get along with" and “looking for nothing more than an intelligent conversation and meeting new friends."
She wasn't jailed for life for torturing and murdering her childhood friend, she was wrongly imprisoned: “taken advantage of by our poor justice system."
A reversal of fortune changed Shephard's future—and her behavior—in 2019. That's when a Canadian appeals court vacated Shephard's murder conviction.
"The issue at trial was not whether Ms. Shephard was a good person," the court said, "but whether she participated in the murder of Baylee Wylie." The actual evidence of that, the court found, was "shallow."
Because the trial judge allowed the prosecution to prove Shephard's guilt with Morningstar's video confession, she was denied a fair trial. She should have been allowed to cross-examine Morningstar live and in-person.
Instead of retrying Shephard for murder, the Crown allowed her to plead guilty to manslaughter in 2021. She was re-sentenced to 12 years, with credit for time-served. Counting that credit, she was paroled Feb. 27, CBC News reports.
"In assessing your case, and as you approach your legislated release date," the decision releasing her states, "the Board has not lost sight of the horrific and violent crimes you, along with your co-accused, committed against the victim; the pain, fear and suffering the victim endured leading up to a cruel and tragic death."
Now 28, Shephard is required to live in a half-way house for the remainder of her sentence—or a psychiatric facility.
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