First-date horror
Did a jilted woman choose murder as revenge?
On 12 October 2012, stunning beauty queen Audrey Bolte was waiting for her date. The Miss Ohio winner, and runner-up Miss USA 2012, was due to meet promising lawyer, the dashing Ryan Poston, 29, for the first time.
They’d recently connected on Facebook, and planned to go to a bar in Greater Cincinnati, Ohio, to have
a few drinks and play pool. Only, Ryan didn’t show. As Audrey gave up waiting, a young woman at the other side of the city was making a call to the police.
‘I killed my boyfriend in self-defence,’ Shayna Hubers, 21, stuttered to the operator.
She was calling from Ryan Poston’s upmarket apartment in Highland Heights. And when officers arrived, they found Ryan dead on the dining room floor.
He’d been shot six times.
Shayna Hubers was quickly taken into custody.
Investigators established Ryan had been shot with his own handgun.
The weapon was nowhere to be found – but there was no doubt who had pulled the trigger.
Yet as officers investigated, a conflicting picture emerged.
It seemed that, like Audrey, Hubers had initially met Ryan online, before their first date at a bar, on her 20th birthday in April 2011.
After graduating in 2008, Ryan had recently opened his own legal practice, specialising in personal injury cases.
Hubers was a promising graduate student. Together, they made a smart, beautiful couple.
Only, friends said the 18-month on/off relationship could be ‘tumultuous’. Under questioning, Hubers claimed Ryan was violent and abusive. Her defence lawyer Wil Zevely said it was a clear ‘self-defence case’.
‘The only thing she did wrong was having bad taste in men,’ he told the media. ‘She is a very young and kind person. She’d never do anything violent – never has, never would.’ But Ryan’s family disagreed. They claimed Ryan was trying to end the relationship. Please keep in mind that the real victim in this tragedy is Ryan Poston. Anyone who ever knew Ryan knows her claims of selfdefence are absurd, they said in a statement. Ryan was trying to end this relationship, he was trying to move on with his life. The battle lines had been drawn.
And in April 2015, Shayna Hubers went on trial for Ryan’s murder.
With her pretty face and big blue eyes, she may not have looked how you’d expect a stereotypical cold-blooded killer to look.
But, opening their case, the prosecution continued to claim that’s just what she was.
They told the court that Ryan had been trying to break up with Hubers.
He was ready to move on – with Miss Ohio.
‘Ryan Poston wanted to stop dating Shayna Hubers. But Shayna Hubers did not want to stop dating Ryan Poston. She would not accept “no” as an answer,’ prosecuting lawyer Sheryl Heeter told the jury.
A medical examiner testified Poston was shot six times. Twice in the head, once in the back, once under his arm and twice in the chest.
And it was revealed Hubers had called her mother before the emergency services.
Yet the defence maintained it was self-defence.
Defence lawyer David Mejia’s said, ‘Shayna Hubers has never said anything to anybody in this case other than, “I had to do it to save myself”.’
Hubers told officers she’d gone to the apartment to collect her things.
‘I didn’t go over there intending to shoot Ryan. I went
He’d been shot with his own handgun
over there with the best of intentions: “I love you, let’s work this relationship out”. And he was screaming and hitting me – [he] resorted to violence,’ she told officers.
She claimed Ryan had verbally and physically attacked her – and, in fear of her life, she’d shot him.
In the end, Hubers was found guilty of murder and jailed for 40 years.
Yet she maintained her innocence.
Finally, after several appeals, it was revealed that one of the jurors had a criminal conviction.
Under state law, criminals aren’t allowed to serve on juries, so a judge overturned Hubers’ conviction and ordered a retrial.
In August 2018, she faced the murder charge for a second time.
The prosecution’s case didn’t waver.
They alleged Hubers had refused to accept Ryan was breaking up with her for another woman.
And her jealousy of Miss Ohio led her to pull the trigger.
Prosecution lawyer Kyle Burns said, ‘There were only two ways he was leaving his condo that night – either Shayna’s boyfriend or in a body bag.’
‘Shayna Hubers herself told the police that she kept shooting Ryan Poston as he lay twitching, and made noise until she, in her own words, finished him off, “put him out of his misery” with one final blow,’ Mr Burns added.
Miss Ohio Audrey Bolte took the stand.
She testified that, on the evening of the shooting, she and Ryan had plans to meet.
‘At a local low-key place, grab a drink, maybe shoot pool,’ she said. ‘He didn’t show up.’
A bizarre video of Hubers’ interview with investigators was shown to the jury.
In it, Hubers is seen pointing at her nose, saying, ‘He talked about getting a nose job and I shot him right here. I gave him his nose job.’
She also claimed Ryan was ‘whacked on drugs’ and threw her ‘out of the room like a rag doll’. Yet, left alone in the interrogation room, Hubers could be seen pacing, dancing, singing Amazing Grace, before saying, ‘Yep, I did it. I can’t believe I did it.’
It also emerged she’d previously texted a friend that she fantasised about shooting Ryan during a planned trip to a shooting range. Turn around, shoot and kill him and play like it’s an accident, she had written. Yet her legal team refused to accept this as proof, painting Ryan as the aggressor.
‘He bursts out the door,’ lawyer David Eldridge told the court. ‘First, slams her into the door, physically attacks her... This is an attack with him throwing her around to a couch and a carpeted floor.’
They painted Ryan as gun-obsessed, with several firearms around the flat.
That night, there’d been a handgun on the dining-room table.
It was their case that, thinking Ryan was reaching for it, Hubers picked it up and fired six shots.
This time, though, Hubers testified in detail about her sexual history.
She claimed that childhood sexual abuse had left her unable to orgasm.
A source of tension and frustration for Ryan.
‘There was a perfect-looking couple on the outside that was deeply flawed on the inside. Their deeply troubled relationship came to a tragic end,’ Mr Eldridge told jurors.
‘I feared him,’ Hubers still insisted.
As both sides rested their cases, it was down to the jury to decide.
Was Ryan Poston a gunobsessed, abusive boyfriend whose ex-girlfriend was scared for her life?
Or was Shayna Hubers a love-crazed, scorned woman who couldn’t let her boyfriend go?
A bizarre video was shown to the jury
GUILTY
Once again, the jury found Shayna Hubers, then 27, guilty of Ryan Poston’s murder.
This time, though, she was jailed for life.
Asking for the life sentence, commonwealth lawyer Michelle Snodgrass said Hubers’ admission that she fired four shots at Ryan, then two more to finish him off, was like ‘an execution’.
‘How callous is that? That’s how you treat roadkill,’ Snodgrass said.
During the sentencing hearing, Jay Poston, Ryan’s father, said, ‘Evil, for reasons only evil knows, took it upon herself to take from us that which she could never possess.’