Shawn D’Brito, a male resident of Phoenix whose exact age and ethnicity are not reported in publicly available case records, was spending the evening of April 11, 1984 on a date with his girlfriend, 18-year-old Robin Lynn Cady. Late that night, the couple drove back to the mobile home where Robin rented a room from her landlord, Guy Snelling, in north Phoenix. Unbeknownst to them, the home had already been turned into the scene of a violent robbery.
Earlier, Snelling’s co-worker John Nabors had arrived at the trailer with a man he introduced as his friend “Rick,” later identified as Michael Emerson Correll. Once inside, Nabors produced a gun, demanded money, and he and Correll bound Snelling and his girlfriend, Debra Rosen, with duct tape while they searched the home for drugs and cash.
Shortly after the initial takeover, Shawn and Robin pulled up outside the trailer, returning from their evening out. As they stepped inside, they were confronted with the armed robbery already in progress. Nabors held the gun to Snelling’s head and warned the couple that they had “just walked into a whole bunch of shit.” Correll forced Shawn and Robin to the floor and taped their hands adding them to the group of restrained victims. Nabors and Correll continued to ransack the residence, taking marijuana and roughly $4,700 in cash from various locations, including the purses of Rosen and Cady, while the four captives lay bound and helpless inside the small mobile home.
After gathering what they could, Nabors and Correll escalated the crime from home invasion and robbery to kidnapping. They forced Shawn, Robin, and Snelling out of the trailer and into a car, with Correll driving and holding the gun while Nabors briefly returned to “secure” Rosen inside. The two assailants then drove in tandem—one in the victims’ car, the other in Nabors’ truck—to a remote desert area north of Phoenix. There, in the darkness and isolation of the desert, they ordered Shawn, Robin, and Snelling to lie face-down on the ground. Correll told Snelling he was going to “knock out” and shot him in the back of the head; miraculously, Snelling survived the wound and remained conscious, able to witness what happened next. Nabors took the gun and executed Shawn and Robin with shots to the head, killing both at the scene.
While Shawn and Robin lay dead in the desert, Rosen was left behind in the mobile home. After the assailants fled, Snelling managed to free himself and run for help, first alerting his parents, who lived nearby, and urging them to check on Rosen before Nabors and “Rick” could return. When they reached the trailer, however, she had already been killed by strangulation. Police responding to the desert location found Shawn D’Brito and Robin Cady dead from gunshot wounds, while Snelling, though gravely injured, was “extremely excited” but coherent and able to describe both attackers to investigators.
Snelling’s detailed account became the foundation of the case against the suspects. In the days that followed, detectives showed him photographic lineups; he identified John Nabors as the gunman he knew from work and later picked out Michael Emerson Correll as the man introduced to him as “Rick.” Even as police worked to track them down, Nabors was located first and died by suicide during an armed confrontation with officers in a hotel, ending any prospect of a criminal trial against him. Correll fled Arizona and was apprehended on April 20, 1984 at his father’s residence in Las Vegas, Nevada. He was returned to Arizona to face charges.
Prosecutors charged Correll with three counts of first-degree murder for the killing of Shawn D’Brito, Robin Cady, and Debra Rosen, along with attempted first-degree murder of Snelling, multiple counts of kidnapping, armed robbery, and first-degree burglary. A jury convicted him on all counts, and the trial court imposed death sentences for each of the three murders, plus lengthy prison terms on the remaining charges. On direct appeal, the Arizona Supreme Court upheld both the convictions and the death sentences, describing the shootings in the desert as execution-style killings carried out in the course of a robbery and kidnapping. Later federal appellate proceedings likewise noted that the state courts had affirmed the death sentences specifically for the murders of Robin Cady and Shawn D’Brito. No additional suspects beyond Nabors and Correll appear in the public record; the case is treated in legal and memorial sources as resolved through Correll’s conviction and Nabors’ death.
