Cold case resolved in dating app murder
When Shawn Arthur’s family asked the New Orleans Police Department to do a wellness check at his apartment on February 25, 2017, they did not expect NOPD to find a corpse.
Detectives told the family Shawn hosted a wild party where he overconsumed alcohol. They also described finding “a white powdery substance” and “a multitude” of liquor bottles.
Later, Shawn Arthur’s father got an email from Sheriff’s Detective Kurt Zeagler saying the death was accidental and the case was closed. At that time, no one suspected a prostitute’s pimp robbed and killed Shawn after she met him through a dating application.
A job opportunity brought Arthur to Louisiana in 2015.
Shawn, a certified water technician from Missouri, worked in New Orleans from 2015 until 2017. In February, he called his father, Bob Arthur, 69, saying he was ready to return home.
Days later, Bob called his son’s cell phone.
“A foreign-speaking person answered the phone,” Bob Arthur later told The Huffington Post. “I was able to get out of him that he found the phone in Lafayette Cemetery No. 2.” That’s when Bob called the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office and requested the wellness check.
Bob Arthur and his wife, Linda, were on their way to New Orleans when the sheriff’s office told them of their son’s death.
Inside Shawn’s apartment, Bob and Linda found their son’s wallet and television missing. Investigators obtained security video showing three men and a woman using Shawn’s bank card at a nearby Walmart.
Video from Shawn’s apartment recorded someone driving away in his pickup after his death. Weeks later, police found the truck abandoned on a New Orleans street with 2,500 miles more than expected on the odometer.
Detectives found a liquor bottle in Shawn’s apartment with the fingerprints of Dominique Berry, a 27-year-old woman with a lengthy criminal record for robbery and prostitution.
Three months later, Bob received an email from Sheriff’s Detective Kurt Zeagler saying they had determined Shawn’s death was accidental and that the sheriff’s office had closed the case.
Investigating the case, journalists from The Huffington Post found Dominique Berry in a Georgia jail, and she described what really happened to Shawn.
Berry described meeting Shawn through a dating app. She told reporters she spiked his drink with a potent cocktail of drugs that she and her partner used to knock out victims before robbing them but had left him alive.
“I didn’t know he was dead,” she said.
Berry said Shawn was one of an estimated 100 victims of a scam that spanned California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Georgia.
She said her cross-country partner was Randy “Ru Ru” Schenck, 36, who, like Berry, was also locked up in Georgia pending further proceedings on multiple charges that the two face related to alleged thefts and pimping.
Berry met Schenck in the New Orleans French Quarter in January 2013, she said, and within weeks, she quit her job as a hospice care nurse and moved in with him.
“I was proud at one point to be dating him,” Berry said. “I didn’t want to be with nobody else.”
She began working as a call girl for an escort agency and then in the streets of the French Quarter, where she was arrested multiple times and eventually banned from the area. However, she said, Schenck forced her to continue her sex work.
Berry said Schenck forced her to start drugging and robbing men in 2015.
“He spit in my face and hit me with a gun, dragged me out of cars, and beat me, but nobody would do anything,” she said.
On October 6, 2022, United States District Judge Barry W. Ashe sentenced New Orleans resident Randy Jonal “Ru-Ru” Schenck, 41, after he pleaded guilty to various charges, to 300 months in prison.
In sentencing Schenck, Judge Barry Ashe found that he utilized force, threats of force, fraud, and coercion to recruit Berry to work for him and keep her compliant and under his control.
The Court heard substantial evidence of numerous acts of violence that Schenck committed against Berry and her family members and threats to commit additional violent acts in the future, particularly after she attempted to leave his control or otherwise disobeyed his instructions. At least one of the instances resulted in Berry’s hospitalization.