In 2005, Shirley Reine was found dead in her garage in Falmouth, Massachusetts. The 51-year-old Cape Cod resident was shot just days before she was to go to court and face her stepsons, Todd and Melvin Jr. According to CNN they were fighting “over who would control the family’s lucrative trash-hauling business.” Shirley’s husband Melvin (who was a convicted arsonist, btw) wrote his sons out of his will before being institutionalized with Pick’s Disease, a mental illness. (Melvin Sr. died in 2013.)
A man named John Rams, Jr. went on trial for Shirley Reine’s death but was acquitted in 2014. Rams says Todd Reine asked him to kill Shirley. “He wanted it to look like a mob hit,” Rams tells CNN in their special report Who Shot Shirley Reine? According to The Cape Cod Times, police always suspected Todd as a suspect but he has never been charged with her murder. However, in 2007 he was convicted of stealing a safe from Shirley Reine’s bedroom back in 2002. After spending more than four years in prision for theft, Todd says he was wrongly accused. He is accusing the District Attorney’s office of withholding exculpatory evidence. CNN’s special report Who Shot Shirley Reine? will air July 7 at 9pm.
