Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Mystery shrouds woman’s death
Hired as an assassin, she then turned up dead in Everglades
Brianne Slabaugh’s body lay face down in the swamp for three days before anyone found it.
How a 26-year-old woman from Boca Raton wound up rotting in the Everglades remains a mystery. But the gruesome discovery on Feb. 22, 2020, led FBI agents to what they now call a murder-for-hire plot — one carried out in part by the same woman found dead in the Everglades.
Slabaugh’s troubled life of drugs, strip joints, spying and secrecy emerged after federal prosecutors charged a father of three — Daniel Slater, 51, of Jupiter — with hiring her and others to follow and assassinate his former girlfriend.
Slater isn’t charged in Slabaugh’s murder, but it’s been just over a year since her body turned up, in the matted undergrowth of Everglades National Park, and nobody has given Michael Slabaugh, her father, a full accounting of his daughter’s last days.
Though the Miami-Dade County Medical Examiners ruled his daughter’s death an accidental drug overdose, he thinks she was murdered, and he wonders why her killer — or killers — haven’t been brought to justice.
Micheal Slabaugh says an FBI agent promised his daughter’s death wouldn’t be in vain. “It really pisses me off that they won’t prosecute.”
A spokeswoman from the Department of Justice declined to comment.
The would-be private eye
Breanna Slabaugh was born at Fairview Hospital in Berea, Ohio, just outside Cleveland, on March 20, 1993.
The way her father tells it, Breanna Slabaugh led a difficult life. She was an addict. She’d recently moved back in with him in December 2019 after a failed and abusive relationship. Her father, sober for 18 years, kept a strict house. She was unemployed.
At first, Michael Slabaugh said, his daughter tried to get a job as a barmaid at the Spearmint Rhino, a strip club, through a friend who was an exotic dancer.
But soon, the daughter started telling her father that she’d met a man at the Spearmint Rhino who was willing to teach her how to be a private investigator.
That was the first time Michael Slabaugh remembers hearing the name of Daniel Slater.
Despite his suspicions, Michael Slabaugh helped his daughter out with her attempts to become a private investigator.
At the end of January, his daughter asked him if she could rent a car in his name. Her own vehicle, a lime green Honda Civic, was too conspicuous for performing surveillance, he remembers her saying. So he rented a car for her for a week. That’s when his daughter disappeared for the first time.
“She was supposed to have it back the fourth of February.” When she didn’t show up, he reported the car stolen. “She got arrested the night of the fifth,” he said.
Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office records show that Breanne Slabaugh was arrested about 9 p.m. Feb. 5, 2020. She wasn’t driving the car her dad had rented for her. She was driving another vehicle — one stolen in Belle Glade on Jan. 16. And records show she had a gun on her when she was arrested.
Brianne Slabaugh was released from jail on the evening of the 6th. Her father says she was in an absolutely manic state.
“None of it made sense,” he said, of her explanations for what happened. “At one point, she mentioned to me that she might have to go into witness protection.”
On Feb. 14, Brianne Slabaugh was involuntarily committed to St. Mary’s for psychiatric care, her father says.
“When she got out of St. Mary’s, she was the person I remembered. She was acting the same. I told her, ‘You are acting like you used to.’ She got out the following Monday, that would be the 17th.”
Her father says that he wasn’t aware of the allegations prosecutors made about his daughter and that the FBI hasn’t spoken with him sine June. But he also said his daughter was on her way to meet Slater when she disappeared on Feb. 20, 2020.
“She said she was going out to lunch,” Michael Slabaugh said. “And that’s the last I saw of my daughter.”
A reluctant assassin
In a petition for a restraining order in early February 2020, Slater’s ex-girlfriend, Brianna Kane, wrote, “Daniel Slater has made many threats against my life and threats to my family and friends.”
According to the petition, Slater and the 22-year-old Kane broke up in September 2020. Despite repeated phone calls, she could not be reached for comment for this story.
The love between Slater and his ex was a violent one, and the violence apparently ran both ways. The ex had been arrested three times for felonies against Slater. Court records show that police hauled her into jail for going after him with a champagne bottle at a party, for stabbing him in the eye with a JUUL vaporizing pen in the parking lot of a tobacco shop and for breaking a bong across the back of his head in the living room of their shared home. All charges against her were later dropped.
“I’ve found two trackers on my car since we’ve been apart,” she wrote in the application for the restraining order, which was granted.
“I’ve noticed a heavyset girl following me around and taking videos of me,” she also wrote in the application.
According to prosecutors, the heavyset girl was Brianne Slabaugh.
Prosecutor Jessica Kahn Obenauf laid out the link between Slater and Brianne Slabaugh at Slater’s federal detention hearing on Nov. 4, 2020.
Brianne Slabaugh had “been tasked by the defendant to surveil his ex-girlfriend, kidnap and kill multiple individuals associated with his ex-girlfriend,” Obenauf said.
According to Obenauf, Brianne Slabaugh “did follow the defendant’s ex-girlfriend around and tracked her movements for the defendant.” But ultimately, the prosecutor said, she was “unable to go through with the murder.”
“That I can believe, as far as her not being able to carry it out,” Michael Slabaugh said when informed of his daughter’s activities.
FBI special agent Jessie Apaza would later tell the court during the detention hearing that various other witnesses had confirmed Slabaugh’s stalking of Slater’s ex.
Brianne Slabaugh also admitted as much to police, Apaza said from the stand.
“February 6, the victim, the female that was found in the Everglades, gave a statement to the police stating that Dan Slater had hired her to become — had hired her, in essence, to be an assassin, quote, unquote.” Apaza said.
Later, while under psychiatric care at St. Mary’s, she’d recanted her testimony, court records show, alleging that the current boyfriend of Slater’s ex had put her up to all of it.
And then Brianne Slabaugh ended up as a corpse in the swamp.
A trap
Daniel Slater’s detention hearing was held almost five months after his arrest. His attorney, Valentin Rodriguez, grilled FBI agent Apaza about informants who had set up Slater some four months after Brianne Slabaugh’s death.
The two other individuals — a couple who are not identified in court documents — recorded several conversations with Slater using a thumb drive microphone the FBI had given them.
During these conversations, Slater discussed in excruciating detail just how and when he wanted his ex girlfriend and her family killed, prosecutor Obenauf said.
Sometime in June 2020, Slater tried to employ the girlfriend and boyfriend as assassins against his ex-girlfriend, Obenauf told the court.
During an early meeting with the boyfriend, Slater gave him “$200 dollars and some drugs” as a down payment for the murder, Obenauf said.
Some days after that, she continued, Slater took the boyfriend on a scouting mission to the home of his ex-girlfriend’s sister and husband.
From his seat in the car, Slater told the boyfriend that he wanted the couple shot through their window, “and then to spray-paint the house with the words “Black Lives Matter” to make it appear as if members associated with the movement were responsible for the murders,” Obenauf said.
At the end of the hearing the magistrate ordered Slater detained pending trial, calling him a flight risk and a danger to the community.
If convicted, he faces up to 10 years in prison for the murder for hire and up to 20 years for the drug charges. Because of COVID-19, it’s not clear when his trial might start.
Michael Slabaugh, Brianne’s father, is waiting for answers.
He says FBI agents told him last June that they had “irrefutable evidence to convict” and that his daughter’s killer — or killers — would be indicted for first-degree murder.
He says he and his daughter had tickets to a monster truck rally for the weekend she disappeared.
“She loved that stuff,” he said, through tears. “I was texting and calling and no response — and then the FBI showed up,” he said.