Pastor Accused Of Killing Wife To Have Gay Affairs

Pastor Accused Of Killing Wife To Have Gay Affairs

Before she was killed in 2013, Karen Shahan sent an email saying she knew of her pastor husband’s sexual preferences and his attempts to carry on affairs with two men outside of Alabama, according to prosecutors.

Via AL reports:

Richard Shahan, formerly a pastor in Homewood, was charged last January in connection with his wife’s murder. He is set to appear in court for a pretrial hearing Thursday morning before Jefferson County Circuit Judge Laura Petro.

In a document filed Wednesday, prosecutors responded to a request from Shahan’s attorneys, Wendell Sheffield and John Lentine, seeking specific facts necessary to prepare the defense.

Witnesses, numerous emails and statements from Shahan himself demonstrate that he was involved in romantic relationships with a man in Nashville and another in Europe, Deputy District Attorney Patrick Lamb wrote.

In an email sent to an unidentified recipient in February 2012, Karen Shahan wrote that she told Richard that he had to choose between the two lives he was trying to maintain, according to the prosecution’s filing.

“I told him that he cannot keep both lives. That he will have to lose one of them. I said that if he was having any interactions that were not right before God that he should go to God and be completely honest with him because he knows anyway. I told him that God will reveal it to me. I told him that any texting or gmailing that does not bring glory to God has to go…”

Karen Louise Shahan’s body was discovered about 11:15 a.m. July 23, 2013, inside the family’s Hugh Circle home. She was stabbed to death and had several small defensive wounds, according to court filings.

In the document filed Wednesday, prosecutors say that email and text message conversations between Richard Shahan and his two “paramours” include explicit sexual statements, as well as a reference to Karen’s death:

“I’m in a legal marriage contract [sic]. There is not an acceptable way for me to dissolve that and continue with the things that are important to me (my job and children)…There is only one way I could become legally ‘single’ and I have to wait until God grants me that gift. It will come; the woman I live with is slowly killing herself – she is diabetic and refuses to take care of herself physically. Her mother died early with the same disease and did the same thing to her body. So I pray and wait. It will happen in God’s timing.”

The filing states that Shahan also wrote emails noting that, because of his job, his sexual preference had to be kept secret and he could not get divorced. In a November 2011 message to his European paramour, Shahan mentions his hopes for the future.

You going to jail today!