Green Bay, Wisconsin, a small town with little noise on February 23, 2022, is where a mother’s everyday errand turned into a horror movie scene.
Upon descending the stairs to her son Shad Thyrion’s basement room, she stopped in horror.
There was a bucket on the floor with a lid that had been left slightly open, resting on top was his severed head, looking up at her.
Here was a young man, only 25 years old, dead not from coronavirus but from a life entwined with love and drugs and violence, his mother calling 911 in horror with her hands shaking.
Taylor Schabusiness, Shad’s 25-year-old girlfriend and the mother of his child, had fallen into the addiction trap as a girl in distress.
Left alone as a child because her mother was an alcoholic, she grew up in foster care before marrying Shad in 2020, calling herself “Shabusiness.”
Their marriage started with hope when they had a baby boy, but soon turned toxic, filled with drugs, fights, and police trouble.
On the night it all went wrong, after Shad had been drinking a lot, Taylor invited him downstairs for s*x fueled by paranoia.
She wrapped a chain around his neck like a dog leash and choked him until his face turned purple and blood bubbled from his mouth.
Drunk on that power, she stabbed him over and over, then defiled his body in grotesque displays of control, her brain scrambled by highs and hallucinations.
And bloody footprints led police to Taylor’s home next door, where Shad’s leg cooked inside a crockpot box, along with bleach and gloves.
She described in chilling detail when questioned, laughing about the “excitement” but denying blackouts.
Her cool recitation, the rational and the unhinged of it, stunned detectives, whose search turned up weapons, bags, and evidence she could not clean up.
Taylor was charged with first-degree homicide, mutilating a corpse, and third-degree sexual assault and had his $2 million bail stand.
She pleaded not guilty, her lawyer making a mental defect defense connected to childhood trauma.
But two court-appointed experts found her to be competent, and the dead-eyed detachment was damning evidence of calculation rather than chaos.
The 2023 trial brought that callousness to light, and jurors deliberated for just an hour before convicting on all counts.
Witnesses told of the bloodbath in the basement and of how her son’s toys were soaked with gore, dumped into rivers.
The rest of Shad’s family, his pleading father and outraged siblings, implored for no mercy: Their gentle son would be forever mute.
At Taycheedah prison, Judge Greg B. Conway sentenced her to life without parole plus 10 to 15 years each for mutilation and assault.
Taylor showed up in a spit mask after outbursts, her father taking the stand to show his pain, but not change any hearts. Her little boy, now with grandparents, is becoming an orphaned child, a silent victim abandoned by demons unchecked.
Shad’s family focuses their grief on meth awareness, the thief of reason that addiction can turn out to be.
Green Bay, haunted by the story, murmurs warnings: know the haze, get help soon as before shadows take another soul. Taylor’s cage proffers cold justice, but Shad’s empty chair begs for the dawn of prevention.
