FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (Court TV) — A man who describes himself as a witch and practitioner of the occult is standing trial on charges he murdered a missing mother — but his attorney says there’s no proof the victim is even dead.
Shannon Ryan, 44, has pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder in the disappearance of Leila Cavett, 21. Cavett was last seen alive in 2020.
Shannon Ryan sits in court on Sept. 16, 2026. (Court TV)
Police were called when Cavett’s 2-year-old son was found wandering alone near an apartment complex. When a good Samaritan who found the child couldn’t find his mother, they called 911. When police released the child’s photo to the media, the family identified him and said that he had come to Florida with his mother from Alabama in a newly acquired white pickup truck.
Detectives tracked down Cavett’s vehicle and found the defendant cleaning it out. He told officers who approached him that he last saw Cavett at a RaceTrac gas station, where she got into a black car with two unknown men. When police reviewed surveillance video from the gas station, they found that Ryan’s timeline didn’t add up — and noticed that he was the last person seen with the missing woman while she was alive.
“Around this time in the surveillance footage of Leila last being alive, the defendant conducted Google searches,” Assistant State Attorney Elizabeth Lipella told the jury in her opening statement on Wednesday. “Google searching, ‘Does alcohol and bleach make chloroform?'” Lipella said Ryan made purchases immediately after leaving the gas station, buying duct tape, cleaners and carpet deodorizer.
After speaking to police, Lipella said that Ryan “books it out of here. He’s off like a bullet,” leaving for Texas. The FBI joined the investigation and said agents narrowed down the likely location of Cavett’s remains to a landfill in Broward County. Fifty-one days of searching in the summer heat yielded no evidence of the missing victim.
“Sometimes this system makes arrests because it jumps to conclusions,” Ryan’s attorney, Dameka Davis, told the jury in her opening statement. “My client, Shannon Ryan, was misunderstood and he was stereotyped in this case.”
Davis urged the jury to remember the rules regarding reasonable doubt, even questioning whether Cavett was dead. “I agree with the State of Florida; there are multiple ways you can prove a murder,” she said. “However, prove the murder. Prove it!”
Before his arrest, Ryan posted videos on social media talking about the case and describing the victim as a “manipulative thief who wasted his time and hustled him.” On the same website, Ryan says he practices witchcraft, “the occult arts and divination techniques and divine tools associated with Tarot, oracles, pendulums, crystal [scrying] and channeling.”
