An Alabama pastor accused of killing his wife wrote emails to his secret boyfriend, fantasizing about her death, court records revealed.
Richard Shahan griped he couldn’t leave his spouse without losing his job and kids.
“There is only one way I could become legally ‘single’ and I have to wait until God grants me that gift,” Shahan wrote. “It will come; the woman I live with is slowly killing herself — she is diabetic and refuses to take care of herself physically.”
He noted her mother had died early of diabetes.
“So I pray and wait.” Shahan wrote. “It will happen in God’s timing.”
The email excerpts were part of a cache of documents Jefferson County prosecutors turned over to Shahan’s attorneys, Al.com reported.
Shahan stabbed wife Karen Louise Shahan in 2013, and planned to flee to Europe to marry his male lover, prosecutors claimed.
The pastor’s spouse had discovered his double life and issued him an ultimatum, according to emails she wrote to an unknown recipient.
“I told him that he cannot keep both lives. That he will have to lose one of them,” Karen Louise Shahan wrote, according to the documents obtained by Al.com. “I said that if he was having any interactions that were not right before God that he should go to God and be completely honest with him because he knows anyway. I told him that God will reveal it to me. I told him that any texting or gmailing that does not bring glory to God has to go…”
Police questioned the minister after the stunning killing but was later released and remained free until New Year’s Eve 2013. Department of Homeland Security agents nabbed Shahan as he prepared to board a flight to Germany.
Authorities claimed he was off to marry his boyfriend, but Shahan’s lawyers said it was just a mission trip, planned months in advance.
He was charged with murder following the failed flight.
Birmingham’s First Baptist Church has cut ties with the pastor since his arrest.
Shahan’s lawyers appeared without him on Thursday at a pre-trial hearing, Al.com reported.
They claimed prosecutors are trying to “slander” the preacher with sordid tales of infidelity.
“This case is going to be tried on fact and proof — not on some sexual orientation, not on whether there was fidelity or infidelity in the marriage,” defense attorney John Lentine told Al.com.
Shahan’s trial is expected to begin in 2016.
