Angela Spenshawe: Whose Shoe Prints Did Not Match the Convicted Killer?

A Running Hairdryer in an Empty House (0:00)

A hairdryer was running in an empty house. Inside the tub, half-submerged in still-filling water, a woman lay beaten almost beyond recognition. A friend followed the whirring sound up the stairs and found her on a Sunday morning in late May of nineteen ninety-nine. Five hundred dollars in cash had been left untouched on the bedroom dresser. That detail told the first officers on scene that this was not a robbery gone wrong.

It was something else, and the something else was the case. The homeowner was sixty-six years old. Her name was Angela Spenshawe, also recorded in later court documents as Angela Spence-Shaw. She had lived in this small, gray, two-story house in Little Compton, Rhode Island, for twenty years. She was English-born, raised across the Atlantic, and had moved here long before her husband died eight years ago.

After that loss she filled her days with the small things that made the town feel like hers. She rode horses at the local stable. She belonged to a garden club. She worked part-time at a greenhouse, and she loved the work enough to start a renovation on her home about two months before she was killed. She was adding a wrap-around sunroom, partly for her plants and partly to give her grandchildren room to run.

The construction was still underway, the noise constant, the workers coming and going. She could not wait for her privacy back. Angela had two sons. Gerard lived about thirty minutes away and she saw him and his family at least once a week. Justin lived in Washington, D.C.

The rest of her family was in England. Friends said she sometimes left her front door unlocked at night. That habit would later look ominous. It would also, investigators would eventually decide, be a red herring. A stranger could not have known her routine.

On the Saturday night before she died, Angela had dinner with Gerard and his family. She drove home, washed up, and was in bed within about thirty minutes. The house was quiet. The Memorial Day weekend had started. The construction crew was off the site.

The next morning, around ten-thirty, Angela's friend Sally Craig was at home drinking coffee when her phone rang.

The Wrap-Around Sunroom Renovation (2:30)

A greenhouse coworker said Angela was ninety minutes late for her shift and unreachable. Sally offered to drive over. It would not be a small errand for long. When Sally turned into Angela's driveway, she saw something odd. A thin stream of water was running down the gravel, though there had been no rain.

She parked and knocked. No answer. She tried the handle. The front door was unlocked. She stepped inside.

The first floor looked normal. Tidy rooms. Intact windows. But from above her, a steady mechanical whirring, like a small motor running, came down the stairwell. Sally climbed the stairs.

The sound grew louder. She followed the sound to the master bathroom. What she saw made her scream. A woman was on the floor beside the tub, wearing only a nightshirt. The tub was full.

The faucet was still running. A hairdryer floated in the water. Within hours, Lieutenant Steven Lynch of the Rhode Island State Police was in the driveway. Detective Sergeant Steven Bannon met him and gave a fast summary. A woman had been found dead upstairs.

They believed it was Angela Spence-Shaw. Lynch caught the word probably. In his experience, a body in a known home is usually identified by sight. The word probably meant the face was no longer the face anyone recognized. Inside, the front door showed no forced entry.

The first floor was orderly. Then Lynch stepped into the master bedroom. Blood had soaked the carpet and baseboards. A pillow and pillowcase lay on the floor, both bloody. The mattress had been stripped.

Lynch followed the blood trail into the attached bathroom. The woman on the floor was in a nightshirt. Her face and visible body were brutally beaten. The tub beside her was full, the faucet still running, a hairdryer floating. The water was what had leaked down through the floor and out into the driveway.

By afternoon, the medical examiner confirmed the body was Angela's. Semen had been recovered. Angela had been beaten. She had been electrocuted in the running water. She had been sexually assaulted.

Sally Craig Climbs the Stairs (5:00)

The classic reading of a hairdryer in a filled tub is accident or suicide. Lynch saw the bedroom and the stripped mattress. He knew neither reading was right. Whoever did this had tried to make it look like Angela had done it to herself. By evening, Lynch was back at the house with one question he had not answered.

How had the killer gotten in? The front door was unlocked, but the family said Angela only sometimes left it that way. A stranger could not have known. So Lynch walked to the back of the property. The wrap-around sunroom was almost finished, but not quite.

Several of its new window frames were still empty, no glass fitted. Lynch pulled himself through one and stepped into the unfinished space. Piles of lumber. Sawdust. Debris.

Along the back wall, a plastic tarp hung across something. Lynch pulled the tarp aside. Behind it was a cut doorframe, no door hung yet. Anyone who knew that could simply step inside. Now Lynch had a structural map.

Twenty-three construction workers had been identified as having worked on the property. Two of them had worked on or near that open doorway. The sunroom vulnerability, the violence, the sexual assault, all of it fit a profile. Lynch asked the local cops for anyone in or around Little Compton with a history of violent assault or violence against women. Little Compton is a quiet town.

The answer was almost immediate. The first name was Stanley Gendron. Stanley had committed the last murder in Little Compton, thirty-four years before, by beating a young woman with a rock. He had been paroled in nineteen eighty. His parents lived almost across the street from Angela's house.

Officers went to the parents' home. The parents said Stanley had been in town recently but had since disappeared. He had not contacted them. A violent-fugitives unit was brought in to find him. The second name was Ben Farrow.

He was on the local sex-offender registry, with a record that included violence. Lynch knew exactly where to find him. When Lynch knocked, Farrow stiffened, glanced up and down the street, and admitted who he was. Farrow cut Lynch off before Lynch could explain. He said he had not done anything, did not know Angela, and was worried his wife would see police at the house.

He agreed right away to come in and give a blood sample. He seemed almost eager to give one up.

Lieutenant Lynch Arrives at the Scene (7:45)

His blood did not match the crime scene evidence. That was as far as the public reporting reviewed for this episode goes on Farrow. Then Lynch moved to the construction crew. The first worker was Craig Reicher, who had specifically worked on the cut doorway. Reicher said his crew had not been at the house since Friday, May twenty-eighth, because of the Memorial Day weekend.

He could not point to anything that timestamped his alibi for Saturday night. He gave Lynch his girlfriend's name and number. Lynch looked at his hands. There were no fresh cuts. There were no bruises.

The second worker was Jeremy Motyka, also spelled Motika in some records. He had helped cut the same doorway. Motyka said he had been home alone in the early evening, then gone to a neighbor's house around nine p.m. for a few drinks. He had come back home around midnight, called a friend, and talked on the phone until he fell asleep.

The next morning he had driven about an hour and a half to Cape Cod to spend the day with his girlfriend, Patricia, and her family. Patricia lived with him in Fall River, Massachusetts. Her parents lived on Cape Cod. The neighbor and Patricia corroborated parts of the timeline. The hours in between, including the early morning of the murder, were not pinned down.

By the first week of June, the rest of the twenty-three workers had been interviewed. Most had strong alibis. Forensic examiners had also taken distinctive shoe-print impressions near the property. None of the workers' shoes matched those prints. The violent-fugitives unit tracked Stanley Gendron down.

Lynch sat across from him in an interrogation room. Stanley was calm. He leaned back, legs crossed, and said he had been at his apartment reading a book the night Angela was killed. He answered every question without appearing rattled. He said he had learned his lesson.

He agreed to give a blood sample and take a polygraph. Lynch got up to order the tests. His phone rang. That someone was Patricia. Before Lynch took that call, investigators had begun to assemble a working theory of the night.

It is what investigators believe, not what was directly witnessed, and it is worth saying that out loud. Investigators believe the killer approached the back of the house in the early morning hours, climbed through an empty sunroom window, crossed the unfinished space, and pushed past the tarp through the cut doorway.

Beaten, Electrocuted, Staged (10:15)

Inside, the house was dark. Angela was upstairs in bed. The killer went up, found her sleeping, and attacked. She was beaten. She was throttled.

She was sexually assaulted. He then tried to disguise the scene, dragging her body to the tub, lifting her in, turning on the water, and dropping in a running hairdryer. He went back to the bedroom, stripped the sheets from the mattress, and took them out the same way he came in. Several hours later, he drove to Cape Cod. The forensic evidence supports the staging, the route, and the timing.

What got Jeremy caught was not the shoe prints. The prints at the scene did not match his. They belonged to someone not publicly identified. What caught him was a small request he made to Patricia a few days after the murder. He asked Patricia to take a pair of his work shoes from their home in Fall River and drive them to her parents' house in Cape Cod.

Patricia had told police Jeremy had looked hung over when she first saw him there. Now she was starting to wonder if he had been sick with something other than alcohol. She took the shoes to Cape Cod as he asked. Then, on her own, she took them to the police. Investigators also learned that Jeremy had been seen watching officers take the shoe-print impressions at the property.

He had tried, quietly, to move evidence far away. But the forensic break was simpler than that. Jeremy had freely given a blood sample. His DNA matched the semen recovered from Angela's body. That match, not the shoes, is what prosecutors documented at trial.

Jeremy Motyka was convicted of first-degree murder and first-degree sexual assault. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Court records and contemporary news coverage document that outcome. Stanley Gendron's final status in this case, whether he was ever charged, cleared, or remains uncharged, is not established in the public reporting reviewed here. The same is true of the registered sex offender whose blood did not match.

So the case closes with two knowns and two open threads. A grandmother was killed by a man who knew the open door into her home. He was caught not by the prints in the dirt, but by his own blood. The prints on the property, the ones that did not match his shoes, still belong to someone the public record does not name.

The Cut Doorway Behind the Tarp (12:45)

That is the case's earned open question, the one that has not closed. If you want the next case reconstructed the same way, with the evidence laid out in the order it actually arrived, the next episode goes up soon. Subscribe so you do not miss it.