Drexel, Mo. – A rural Missouri man who told police he dismembered and burned the bodies of seven men in his bedroom fireplace was charged Sunday with one count of murder.
Michael Lee Shaver Jr., 33, was charged with first-degree murder and armed criminal action related to a killing that occurred around the fall of 2001.
Officials say Shaver told investigators he had killed seven people on a property where he lives, all of whom he met through narcotics transactions.
Authorities did not know when he would be arraigned.
Cass County sheriff’s Capt. Chuck Stocking didn’t rule out the possibility that Shaver, who was arrested Friday after a failed carjacking, might have been exaggerating about the killings.
“He can say that he killed 50, but we have to prove that he actually did,” Stocking said.
Shaver and another man, Nathan Wasmer, 27, of Peculiar, were in a speeding vehicle Friday morning that went off the side of the road and wrecked, Stocking said. He said the two men tried to carjack a witness but fled after they couldn’t get into the woman’s vehicle.
The witness told a 911 dispatcher that the two men were armed with guns. The men were tracked down to a residential area, where Wasmer surrendered after an hour-long standoff and Shaver was found about a half-hour later hiding in a nearby yard, officials said.
Stocking said Shaver told deputies as he was being placed into a patrol car that he had knowledge of human remains on the wooded rural Drexel property where he lives and that he wanted to talk to someone about it.
“It was a spontaneous statement he made while he was being interviewed for the carjacking,” said Stocking, who added that he was skeptical of the claims at first.
While being interviewed later Friday, Shaver told investigators he had shot and killed seven people at his residence during drug transactions so he could take money and drugs from the victims.
Shaver claimed that after he killed the men – all between the ages of 20 and 40 and from the Kansas City area – he dismembered the bodies, burned the remains in a fireplace, then used a hammer to crush large bones and skulls, authorities said.
Shaver said he then spread the bone fragments around his backyard.
A search warrant was issued Friday evening, and the first human bone fragments were found that night on the 3- to 5-acre rural property near Drexel, which is south of Kansas City and near the Kansas border.
