CRIME HUNTER: Sinister bloodbath at Hollywood Video Store
· Toronto Sun
Inside the video store that Sunday morning, you could have heard a pin drop.
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Then, around 9:30 a.m. on March 3, 1996, a blood-curdling scream emerged from the Hollywood Video store in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Employees starting work were greeted by the macabre sight of three fellow workers lying dead on the ground.
The slain were 19-year-old Zachary Blacklock, 30-year-old Mylinh Daothi, and 18-year-old Jowanda Castillo.
Low-rent robbery
Each had been shot three times in the back of the head – execution style.
Detectives suspected robbery but the killers could not have gotten away with much in the way of dough. Yet, the crime scene greeting detectives had the angry crimson hue of an abattoir.
Three dead – so far.
There was more horror the following day when cops found the bodies of Pauline and George McDougall in the Sandia Mountains east of Albuquerque, and close to their car.
The elderly couple were Zachary’s grandparents and they too had died of multiple gunshot wounds.
‘Thirst for blood’
Shane Harrison was a 28-year-old loser who lived in Las Cruces, near the Mexican border. But on that March night in 1996, a Satanic demon emerged from the depths of hell.
Harrison was out on early release.
One prosecutor alleged Harrison was “living his own sick Hollywood movie” and desperate to quench his “thirst for blood.”
Harrison, prosecutors said, “made all the choices – for himself, (girlfriend accomplice Esther) Beckley and for these five victims. It was his guns, his ammunition, his car, his plans, his murders.”
Harrison and his sometime bedmate, Esther Beckley, were both on an early release program. One of the two Mensa members decided to rob the video store just after 2 a.m.
Beckley told cops the pair went to Hollywood Video where she forced Mylinh Daothi into the office. The terrified manager had no idea she was being threatened by a BB gun that resembled a Colt .45. Daothi was ordered to retrieve the security tape. At that point, Zachary walked in and was also held at gunpoint. Finally, Harrison marched Jowanda in.
Zachary’s grandparents pulled in to give him a lift. Harrison spotted the newcomers and ordered Beckley outside to distract the elderly couple.
‘Executed the couple’
Beckley told the seniors her car wasn’t working and climbed in. Then came the gunshots from inside the store – nine in all.
The elderly couple was forced to drive to the mountains at gunpoint. Esther said she begged Harrison to spare their lives but no sauce. He executed the couple with shotgun blasts, then Harrison squeezed off more rounds with a .9 mm handgun.
Esther Beckley was a wreck and when she returned home to her sometime boyfriend John Lausell several hours later, she blabbed about the heist and the murders. She claimed responsibility for icing the McDougalls. Beckley wanted to impress her boyfriend.
She sure showed him. He dropped a dime on Esther and Harrison – and collected the $35,000 reward.
Beckley ratted Harrison out
Prosecutors wanted to put the killer couple on the happy trail to oblivion. Realizing the death penalty or at the very least decades in prison were on the horizon, Beckley made a deal and flipped on Harrison.
She got her deal – 95 years in the slammer was just about as good as it was going to get.
The trial was moved from Albuquerque to Las Cruces because of the sensational news coverage.
Harrison’s trial began on Dec. 1, 1998. His lawyers argued that he was the victim of an elaborate set up by Beckley and her on-again, off-again beau John Lausell.
Not so, prosecutors countered.
“Shane Harrison did this – no one else.”
‘They’re dead, they’re dead’
Of course, the killer and his legal eagles again pointed to Beckley. She did it by herself, came home drenched in blood and was frantic, which was all somewhat laughable. The jury thought so, too.
Shane was sentenced to 258 years in prison. He is serving his sentence at the Southern New Mexico Correctional Facility in Las Cruces, Dona Ana County, New Mexico.
Esther was sentenced to 95-and-a-half years behind bars.
She testified against her bloodthirsty beau, telling the court when it came to killing the elderly couple, Esther testified Shane fired the shotgun “as fast as he could cock the gun” before finishing off the elderly couple with a pistol.
“He said something about, ‘They’re still making noises.’ I said, ‘Leave them alone, they’re dead. They’re dead,'” Beckley testified.
‘Thrilled’ by murders
Harrison “was thrilled by his own executions,” prosecutor Mary Altwies told the jury, adding that Harrison “never counted on her spilling her guts to her on-again, off-again lover John Lausell” or that Lausell would turn both of them into the police.
The prosecutor neatly summed up Shane Harrison – mass killer.
“(Shane Harrison) is self-centered, self-absorbed … basically a loser. He is not stupid, but he is not quite as smart as he thinks he is,” Altwies said.
“He had a perverse goal, his dream, was to do an armed robbery and kill the witnesses … when his fantasies and dreams spun out of control in the early morning hours of March 3, 1996, he took a whole community with him.”