Last week’s conviction of a Laurie Shaver, who killed her husband and buried him under a concrete slab in the back yard was shocking but not a first for Lake County, Fla.
“Fast cars, ‘stash houses’ filled with marijuana and cocaine, thick wads of money, hired guns and bullet-riddled bodies were the hallmarks of one merciless drug g ang in the ‘90s.”
That’s a sentence from my book, “Vampires, Gators and Wackos.” It includes the story of the gang shooting supplier Eloy Benavides and burying him under a concrete slab disguised as a dog pen. The gang leader didn’t want to pay him $200,000 he owed for 250 pounds of pot.
The gang smuggled drugs through an airport on the Texas-Mexico border and Puerto Rico and shipped it northward.
The hapless 22-year-old Benavides was lured into an ambush at a mobile home in the woods where he was shot by a sniper. Gang members, including two brothers who weighed a combined 1,000 pounds, poured acid and lime on the body, then poured the six-inch slab with 3,000 pounds of concrete. The slab had a unique feature: a long, vertical pipe, built so the boss could probe the body with a steel rod to make sure his orders were carried out.
Miguel Diez also urinated on the slab for fun. A handful of gang members were convicted of murder and other charges. One victim’s body was never found.
Shaver, 41, was convicted of killing her husband, Michael, in 2015, who then pretended to him on social media and telling others that he left the state. Michael’s body was unearthed in his rural Clermont mobile three years later. Laurie said her 7-year-old daughter pulled the trigger. As the trial began, defense attorney Jeffrey Wiggs blamed her boyfriend.
The strategy did not work. She was convicted of second-degree murder. She will be sentenced in the coming months.