A woman is murdered by her husband; her remains are never found In the winter of 1995, a 27-year-old Asian woman named Ann Marie Shaw vanished from her home in Manassas, Virginia, leaving behind a chilling mystery that would take years to unravel. Last seen on December 3, 1995, her sudden disappearance left her family and two young children in a state of desperate uncertainty. The initial explanation for her absence came from her former boyfriend and the father of her children, Walter Thomas Godbey, who claimed she had left to visit her mother in the
Philippines. However, this story quickly fell apart as her sister confirmed that their mother had passed away years prior and that Ann Marie did not possess a passport.
For years, Ann Marie's case remained cold, a painful and unanswered question for her loved ones. It wasn't until November 2001 that a significant break in the case emerged from a seemingly unrelated crime. Walter Godbey was arrested and charged with the murder of an AOL executive named Douglass Small in Washington D.C., a crime for which he was later convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison. This development cast a dark shadow of suspicion on Godbey regarding Ann Marie's disappearance. During the investigation into Small's murder, authorities discovered Ann Marie's personal belongings, including her birth certificate, social security card, and driver's license, hidden within Godbey's home.
The grim truth about what happened to Ann Marie Shaw finally began to surface. Godbey's then-wife, Carla, revealed to investigators that he had confessed to killing Ann Marie. She recounted a horrifying story of how he had shown her Ann Marie's body and threatened her into silence. She also told police that Ann Marie's body had been dismembered, with her torso buried in a wooded park in Fairfax. Despite this information, extensive searches of the area yielded no remains, and Ann Marie's body has never been found.
In the face of mounting evidence and his wife's testimony, Walter Godbey was indicted for Ann Marie's murder in November 2009. In a turn of events, he pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter in June 2010. He claimed that Ann Marie's death was an accident, the result of a gun discharging during an argument. For his role in her death, Godbey was sentenced to an additional 10 years in prison, to be served on top of his existing 30-year sentence. Before the court, he described his former wife's death as a 'terrible tragedy' and claimed that not a day went by that he didn't think of her.
