Some cases, like this one in Florida that was solved in just a few weeks, have so many troubling details that they can’t be real. But mentally ill people walk among us. They could snap at any time.
On April 3, 2013, 36-year-old James Sheaffer was last seen.
He was a known car driver who never came home from work. James often took people from Florida’s east and west sides to their destinations. There were often long drives and late hours.
Candy Medina, Sheaffer’s lover of 17 years, said he was missing. They had three children together, and James helped her raise her child from a past relationship.
Tyler, their 16-year-old son, got a text from his dad. Because he owed people money, James wrote that he had to be hard to find. The family had doubts about the text. His pay and unemployment checks took care of Candy and the kids.
The police questioned friends and neighbors. James and his family lived across the street from Angela Stoldt, 41, and her kids. The kids played together a lot. James and Angela both stayed up late and hung out a lot.
The Story of Angela
Angela had a lot of bad relationships in the past. Our family grew up in the military and moved to Florida when they retired when she was a young teen. She quit school in ninth grade and moved in with a boy who was three years older than her.
They got married, but it didn’t last.
She had a history of unstable marriages before she moved to a new neighborhood with her third husband and two children. She had trouble making friends, but she became friendly with her neighbor James.
In 2011, Angela’s husband left her, leaving her 39 years old, with the kids, and no money. Her family helped her, and she got money from Social Security to pay for her hospital bills. James hired her to do some simple accounting.
Because he was depressed, he too could get Social Security payments. He asked Angela to keep his money safe. She got his $1,200 monthly check into a joint account as his representative payee. Angela got $100 from James to help him keep track of his money.
And then, in April 2013, James went missing.
Searching for James
James’s girlfriend was questioned by investigators, but she didn’t know anything. She had no idea that James was in debt to his bookie, the water company, and his landlord due to his habit of gambling.
He consistently overdrew their account and bounced checks. James was supposedly on the run, according to friends.
His mobile phone data could not provide law enforcement with precise locations, but the fact that towers were receiving hits suggested that he might be hiding from “people who were following him.”
When the investigators went back to Angela’s house, they were met with additional denials concerning James’ whereabouts. Despite the horrible state of the house—”dirty, filthy, trash everywhere”—they could not find any sign that James was hiding.
Angela’s narrative gradually shifted.
Angela made many allegations about seeing James, another man, and his financial anxiety. She was certain that James needed to obtain money quickly since he was being sought after by the police and the public.
She said that she didn’t know anymore.
After James disappeared for two and a half weeks, Angela’s sister made an emergency call. She said that Angela was unstable and making suicide threats.
When the police arrived, Angela was prepared to discuss James’s case. And she wasn’t prepared in an instant. She was sent to a hospital for mental health.
Angela opened up back at the station.
The Horrible Reality
Angela said she picked up James around 3 a.m. after he got off work. Because her dad agreed to help, she told James she could get him the money he needed.
Angela told the police that she had never asked her father for help because she was tired of James’s money problems and didn’t want to help him. He spent too much money on the shared account, lied, and charged her bank fees too many times.
Ange told James they had a few hours to kill before they could see her dad when she picked him up. They had drinks at her place again.
The Orlando Sentinel said that Angela “gave Sheaffer a drink of vodka and peach schnapps that was spiked with Flexeril, her dad’s prescription drug.” He was sleepy and confused after taking the muscle relaxer.
She drove James to a graveyard on the edge of town at 5 a.m. instead of to her dad’s house. That’s where she told James there was no loan. That’s right, she lied to him to show James what it’s like to be lied to.
Even after her many self-defense stories, the fact that James had died in her car stayed the same. An ice pick was used to hit him, and a cord from the back floorboard was used to choke him.
The ice pick was still sticking out of his eye, so she put plastic wrap around his head and drove him home. Angela had to get rid of his body. She first put him in a small pool in her shed.
His arms, legs, and head went into one baby pool with the help of a knife. His body went into another. The next day, she tried to cremate his body. She cooked more “pieces” on the stove and put his leg in the oven.
According to papers that the Daytona Beach News-Journal got their hands on, Angela Stoldt said:
“Thursday is when I was cooking him. Friday is when I was dumping him.”
Angela’s daughter said the smell of the rotting food was awful as the oven heated up. The plan to get rid of the proof wasn’t working, so Angela put James’ body in a bag instead. She hit a deer and put the bags inside, which her teenage son heard. Her other children helped her throw the bags away.
To make it look like James really did hide, her last trick was to send text messages from different places.
Two and a half weeks after cutting up James, Angela told her family what she had done. Angela’s sister called the cops after she said goodbye to her kids.
A person who was looking into the case told “Snapped,” “She didn’t make us think she did anything bad to Jimmy until she told us she had killed and dismembered him.”
No one ever found James’s head.
Angela Stoldt’s testimony was essential to her claims of self-defense. The jurors rejected her inconsistent arguments.
At the trial, the prosecutor stated:
“She took him into the house piece by piece. … The very same house she shares with her two teenage children and she cooked him in her oven and stove. She started with the oven but when the smoke and smell became unbearable she realized that she might get caught.”
After just three hours of jury deliberations, on December 5, 2014, 42-year-old Angela Stoldt was found guilty of first-degree murder and given a life sentence.
Angela Stoldt was also given terms to be served consecutively: 15 years for abusing a body and 5 years for tampering with evidence.