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Monica Morgan Left Her Shift to Drop Off Papers. Her GPS Outlived Her.
Published 2 months, 3 weeks ago
Description
For nineteen years, Monica Morgan drove the same road home at seven in the morning and watched the sunrise come up over the flats. On Saturdays she drove ninety minutes to Blythe with food and a paperback for her sister, who never had to be told she was coming. On April 9, 2011, a deputy found her white pickup on the shoulder of County Road Seven with the navigation screen still lit, holding a route to an address her family had never heard of. Monica had not chosen it.
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Monica Morgan, 62, had worked overnight as the bookkeeper at the Palo Prieto Travel Center for nineteen years. On the morning of Friday, April 8, 2011, she left her shift to deliver paperwork to a supplier, an errand arranged by an email sent to her work account at 5:47 that morning. She was found the next day in her pickup on County Road Seven, killed by a blunt-force injury to the back of the head. Keith Sheridan, 38, a maintenance contractor whose card opened the offices she worked in, was arrested in March 2012 and convicted of first-degree murder on September 19, 2013. He was sentenced to 25 years to life. He did not admit the killing at trial, and two appeals were denied, the second in 2017. In 2020, seven years after the verdict, he admitted it to a documentary interviewer in prison and said he had created the errand himself. The original navigation unit from Monica's truck was lost inside the evidence store before trial and was never recovered.
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This episode is fiction. The people, the workplace and the investigation are invented, and nothing here is drawn from a real case or a real person.
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Monica Morgan, 62, had worked overnight as the bookkeeper at the Palo Prieto Travel Center for nineteen years. On the morning of Friday, April 8, 2011, she left her shift to deliver paperwork to a supplier, an errand arranged by an email sent to her work account at 5:47 that morning. She was found the next day in her pickup on County Road Seven, killed by a blunt-force injury to the back of the head. Keith Sheridan, 38, a maintenance contractor whose card opened the offices she worked in, was arrested in March 2012 and convicted of first-degree murder on September 19, 2013. He was sentenced to 25 years to life. He did not admit the killing at trial, and two appeals were denied, the second in 2017. In 2020, seven years after the verdict, he admitted it to a documentary interviewer in prison and said he had created the errand himself. The original navigation unit from Monica's truck was lost inside the evidence store before trial and was never recovered.
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This episode is fiction. The people, the workplace and the investigation are invented, and nothing here is drawn from a real case or a real person.