 PLAYING WITH FIRE
On a freezing Saturday afternoon in late January 2009, I arrived at the Lakin Correctional Center, where convicted murderess Shelly Michael is incarcerated for the gruesome murder of her husband Jimmy and then burning her house down. Located on the West Virginia border with Ohio, Lakin is home to some of the most dangerous female prisoners in the state.
Heavily made up and wearing a short-sleeved cream-colored prison uniform, with her inmate #45996 embroidered on the breast pocket, Shelly was brought into the visitors room. There I was waiting at a table with her parents Michael and Kathy Goots and her friend Mary Childers.
After shaking her tiny hand, I asked what had happened to bring the one-time respected pediatric nurse here. “It’s been hell on earth,” she replied sadly. “I survive by keeping busy and praying a lot. This has strengthened my faith … I read the bible every night."
She still declares her undying love for Jimmy, claiming that she’s an innocent victim and the real killer is still out there.
“All of a sudden my husband was ripped away from me,” she said, using her hands to emphasize her point. “It was so horrible. I was a mess. I just wanted to be buried with Jimmy. Then I was arrested and put in jail. It was such a shock. Life couldn’t get worse.”
When asked how she survives with the prospect of spending the rest of her life behind bars, the 35-year-old former cheerleader stares blankly into space.
“What keeps me going,” she replied, “is that I know that if I had been the one that had been killed, Jimmy world be there fighting for me tooth and nail.” Although Shelly spent two hours with me, later making her parents, sister Jennifer and lifelong best friend Renee DelViscio available for interviews for this book, she later waged a campaign from Lakin to stop publication. Even though she has exhausted all her appeals in state court, Shelly believes she will eventually be granted a new trial by a federal court. She has hired a private investigator, who she now claims has uncovered information that proves her innocence beyond a shadow of a doubt. But when asked for details, she refuses to divulge it.
In the months following my prison visit, Shelly Michael sent a flood of letters to me and the Executive editor at St. Martin’s Press, Charles Spicer, demanding we halt publication. “The book will only serve to interfere with the investigation,” she wrote me in her final letter in early September 2009. “Hinder our ability to find the truth, and further undermine my innocence.”
Playing With Fire is published on March 2, 2010.
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