Indianian Admits Fathering, Then Killing Child to Get Back at Wife

FRANKLIN, Ind. â€”  On Father’s Day, Amy Shanabarger found her chubby-cheeked infant son, Tyler, face-down and dead in his crib.

Two days later, just hours after the tot’s funeral, Ronald L. Shanabarger told his wife he’d killed their son. The next day he told police that, not only did he kill the boy, he planned the crime even before the child was conceived as a way of exacting revenge against his wife.

Tyler didn’t die of sudden infant death syndrome, as the coroner had ruled, Shanabarger said. He confessed to suffocating the 7-month-old with plastic wrap.

He said it was revenge because Amy, before they were married, had refused to cut short a vacation trip to comfort him when his father died in 1996.

“Shanabarger said he planned to make Amy feel the way he did when his father died. He married her, got her pregnant, allowed time for her to bond with the child, and then took his life,� according to an affidavit prosecutors filed to support a murder charge.

Shanabarger, 30, who begged officers to shoot him after he confessed Wednesday, was charged with murder. He is being held without bail pending a court appearance today for an initial hearing. An attorney will be appointed for him at the hearing.

Johnson County Prosecutor Lance Hamner said he hasn’t decided whether to seek the death penalty.

Shanabarger said in his confession that, on the evening of June 19, he wrapped plastic wrap around his son’s head and face, then left the boy’s nursery to get something to eat and brush his teeth.

Twenty minutes later, he said, he returned, removed the plastic and placed Tyler face down in the crib before he went off to bed.

Amy Shanabarger, 29, had been working that night as a cashier at a grocery store. When she came home she went straight to bed, assuming that Tyler was asleep, and found the boy’s body the next morning.

Ronald Shanabarger, who worked at a tire-retreading center, told police he confessed because the image of his son’s face, flat and purplish from rigor mortis, haunted him.

Since then, he’s confessed at least three times, Police Chief Harry Furrer said in an interview Sunday. Each time, the story has been the same--that he hatched his plan because he was enraged by his then-girlfriend’s refusal to cut short a cruise and return home after his father’s death in October 1996.

The Shanabargers were married the following May.

Shanabarger’s father-in-law, Robert Parsons, wears a tiny gold cherub pin to remind him of his grandson. He won’t discuss his son-in-law but says his daughter, an only child, is devastated.