In her sixties, Susan Monica was a dedicated farmer who owned her property, nurturing chickens and pigs while skillfully crafting exquisite wrought iron fences.
In early 2014, a sheriff’s department in a little town in Oregon conducted a search of a huge 20-acre Farm tucked away inside of a forest. A local man had gone missing recently, and this Farm was one of the few places they knew he had been. Very quickly into this surge, a deputy was walking around the outside of the barn when he saw something strange on the ground. At first, he had no idea what it was, but as he got closer, it became very obvious.
Not only would this discovery become front page news all across the country, but it would also lead investigators to discover something much more sinister going on in that little town…
By most people’s standards, Susan Monica‘s life had been pretty good. She had a small but very close group of friends; she had a great job working as an engineer and she lived in one of the most exciting cities in the world, San Francisco, California.
But Susan was not happy. Moving to the big city was not so much a choice as it was a product of life and circumstance. Deep down, Susan had always been someone who preferred peace and quiet and being alone – things that were in rare supply in a big city like San Francisco.
Many nights after work, Susan Monica would come home to her apartment and she would sit there and dream about moving away from the city and living off the grid somewhere on a farm. You know, raise her own food and be totally self-sufficient, away from everybody else in the world.
And then one day in 1991 when Susan was 43 years old, she made that dream a reality. That year, she wound up purchasing a 20-acre farm located in a forest in a little town in Oregon called Weimer.
However, this Farm was really not a farm. There was nothing on it. There was no house for Susan to live in, there was no barn for her animals or tools, there was no running water, no electricity, no septic system. It was just pure Oregon wilderness.
But to Susan, it was perfect. The property kept her far away from other people, and she liked the idea of having to literally build her own farm. After all, she was an engineer by trade, so she actually knew how to build buildings efficiently and safely, and she was a big, strong, sturdy woman who was not afraid of manual labor.
So when Susan Monica finally arrived in Weimer and made her way up the winding dirt road through the forest and arrived in front of her property and looked out at the vast rugged landscape for the first time, she was filled with a rush of excitement.
Even though there was nothing on her 20 acres, it already felt like home. Over the next several months, Susan would transform these 20 acres into a neat little farm, complete with a big barn, a shack for her to live in, and a few animal pens for livestock.
However, after the farm was built, Susan Monica realized that building the farm was actually not the hard part. The hard part was maintaining the farm – going out there every day and doing all of her chores, feeding all the animals, and doing all the different projects she had in mind. It was exhausting.
And so, not long after the farm was complete, Susan realized that as much as she wanted to be totally alone out there, she had to set that aside and hire some help.
And so, Susan Monica printed out all of these help-wanted flyers and put them all over town in Weimer, and before long, people began making their way up to her property to inquire about the role.
Most of these applicants were people who struggled to find work elsewhere, either because they lived a sort of transient lifestyle, bouncing around from place to place, so no one was ready to hire them long-term, or because they had a criminal record and just straight up could not get a job.
But Susan didn’t care about either of those things. All she cared about was that the people she hired would work hard and they would respect the peaceful, calm atmosphere she was fostering on her farm – basically, do the work and leave her alone.
And over the next 20 years, Susan would find thousands of people who were able to do just that. Most of them would work for Susan only for a short period of time; others would stick around for a little bit longer. But eventually, all of Susan’s workers kind of rotated pretty quickly and moved on to other things.
And when that happened, Susan would simply put up more help-wanted flyers in town and hire more people. And in all the 20 years that Susan had been hiring these temporary workers at her farm, after they did move on and went somewhere else, Susan never heard about them again. However, that was about to change.
On January 1st, 2014, Susan, who was 66 years old by this point, was outside of her shack on her driveway when she happened to look up and see a car coming up her road. Now remember, she lives in the middle of nowhere. No one comes out to see her, so this is a very rare event.
And so, Susan is totally keyed in on this car. And this car, they pull into her driveway, and then out of the car popped three young people – it was two young men and one young woman.
Before Susan Monica could even ask them who they were or why they were here, they were telling her. They said they were looking for their father, Robert Haney, who at one point had told them he was working on Susan’s farm in exchange for a little cash.
And also, Susan Monica was letting him park his camper on her property, and he was living in that camper. The kids said their father always checked in with them at least once every couple of months, but they had just gone this really long stretch without hearing from him. And since he didn’t have a cell phone and no permanent address, they had no real way of getting in touch with him.
And so, they were out there looking for him to make sure he was okay. And so they asked Susan, “Do you remember our dad, Robert, and if so, do you know where he is?”
Even though this whole situation was totally surprising for Susan Monica because she almost never got visitors, so that alone was kind of jarring for her, but when she heard the kids say their dad’s name, Robert Haney, she immediately knew who that was.
Susan told them that she had hired their father the previous spring to help build a structure on her farm, and initially, Robert was really nice to have around the farm. He worked really hard, he kept to himself, he was quiet, and he had a dog that was really friendly and loving.
But in August of the previous year, so five months into Robert’s employment on Susan’s farm, Susan would tell them that their dad totally changed. He started drinking really heavily and not really working very much, spending a lot of the day just kind of ranting and raving outside of his camper about how he wanted to exact his revenge on someone.
Susan Monica would eventually find out that what Robert was talking about is apparently one of his kids had been assaulted, and he felt very guilty that he had not been there to protect his child. And so, the way Robert was handling this guilt was by drinking and thinking about getting his revenge on the attacker.
Now, while Susan Monica did understand why Robert felt the way he did and why he was kind of acting the way he was, it didn’t change the fact that Robert’s behavior had become very disruptive on her farm. And the one thing Susan really wanted was peace and quiet. And so she decided she would have to go confront Robert about his behavior and potentially fire him if he couldn’t find a way to calm down.
But before Susan Monica ever had to do that, Robert one day just walked right up to her shack. He handed her an envelope filled with cash, and he asked Susan if she wouldn’t mind looking after his dog for a while.
Susan Monica was so taken aback by his complete change in behavior and this request that she just took the envelope and said, “Okay, I’ll look after your dog.” And then Robert nodded as thank you, he turned around and he walked away from her.
And then a few moments later, Susan’s standing there with the envelope in hand, watching as Robert is climbing into some white car that had just pulled up in front of the property. She didn’t know who was in the car with him. And then the car turned around and drove out of sight.
Susan Monica told the kids that that had happened back in September, so about four months ago. And since he left, she had not heard from him, despite the fact she still had his dog. And she told the kids that a lot of Robert’s stuff was still in his camper. Susan brought the kids over to the side of her property where Robert’s camper was.
And when they went inside, sure enough, all their father’s things were all over the place. But the one item that immediately stood out to them was their father’s tool belt. They knew their father was a traveling handyman; that was how he made his living. And so, it begged the question, why would he leave his tool belt here if he knew he was going to be gone for several months potentially? It didn’t make any sense.
After leaving Robert’s camper, the kids thanked Susan Monica and asked her to please be in touch if she learned anything else about their dad. And she said she would. And then the kids got back in their car, and they began driving South towards the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office.
When they got there, they asked to file a missing person report for their dad. However, they learned very quickly that it was going to be very challenging to locate their dad because their dad lived this transient lifestyle with no cell phone, no permanent address, nothing that could really be traced.
But the investigators agreed with Robert’s children that their dad’s absence was a big concern, given the fact that his last interactions with Susan Monica had consisted of him drinking very heavily and talking about going and getting his revenge on his child’s attacker.
And so, the sheriff and the deputies were very concerned that that was exactly what Robert had done – he had gone out and potentially murdered someone and now was in hiding. So they asked Robert’s kids if they could think of absolutely anything that could possibly allow investigators to track down Robert.
At some point, one of the kids said, “Oh, what about my dad’s EBT card?” EBT cards, or Electronic Benefit Transfer cards, are like debit cards for state welfare services. You can use the cards to buy things like groceries, and the cards are definitely traceable.
A few days later, when Robert’s EBT card trace came back, investigators saw the card had been used just one month earlier in a Walmart located about 30 minutes Southwest of Susan’s farm.
Now, this trace obviously didn’t tell investigators where Robert was right now or what kind of condition Robert was in, but they had no other leads to operate on. So they decided they would go to the Walmart and see what they could find.
When they got there, the investigators were led to the back room of the building, where they were able to review the security footage from the previous month when Robert was supposedly there with his EBT card. But after reviewing hours and hours and hours of footage, the investigators never saw Robert on camera.
However, they did see Susan Monica on camera. And unbelievably, she was the one using Robert’s EBT card. Obviously, this was very suspicious. And right away, the investigators left the Walmart, went back to their office, and began the process of getting a search warrant to search Susan’s farm.
A few days later, on January 10th, the sheriff and his deputies arrived at Susan’s property. And when they pulled onto her driveway, Susan Monica came outside to greet them. When she asked them what’s going on, they told her, “Hey, we’re here to search your property in connection with Robert Haney’s disappearance.”
And before Susan Monica could ask any more questions, the sheriff said to her, “Hold on, just turn around. Let’s go back inside. I need to talk to you privately.”
And so, Susan Monica , who was very shocked by this, just said okay and she turned around and led the sheriff into her house while the other deputies fanned out across the property to begin this big search.
Once inside of Susan’s house, they sat down in her kitchen and right away the sheriff says to Susan, “Okay, I have you on camera using Robert’s EBT card. I know you stole it, so you need to tell me where Robert is right now or it’s going to get a whole lot worse for you.”
And as soon as he said this, Susan’s look of shock on her face quickly turned into a look of kind of relief. It was like suddenly she understood what was going on here, and she says to the sheriff, “No, no, I didn’t steal his EBT card. He gave it to me along with an envelope full of cash when he left four months ago, and he told me to use it to buy dog food for his dog that I’m looking after.”
Since Robert had been gone for all these months, she had run out of cash to pay for the dog food, and now was using the EBT card. Susan also added that if she had just stolen the card from Robert, she wouldn’t be able to use it because it requires a PIN number, and Robert gave her the PIN number, that’s how she was able to use it.
The sheriff was not totally sold on Susan’s story, and so he continued to ask more questions, trying to trip Susan up about how she came to acquire this card. But Susan Monica was very firm that Robert had given her the card, and that was it. After several minutes, the sheriff realized that Susan was likely telling the truth, which meant the EBT card angle was likely a dead end, and they would have to call off the search.
But as the sheriff was standing up to leave the kitchen and leave the property altogether, a deputy from outside came running into the kitchen and without saying a word just bent down and whispered something into the sheriff’s ear. As the sheriff is listening to this deputy, his face is contorting in disgust; he can’t believe what is being told. After the deputy stands up and leaves the kitchen, the sheriff takes a deep breath and then looks at Susan and says, “Ma’am, you’re going to have to come with us back at the station.”
A now very flustered Susan Monica was led into a small interrogation room where she sat down looking totally anxious. She’s looking around wondering what’s going on, and then the sheriff walked into the room, immediately hit record on the camera, and then looked at Susan and says, “Has anyone died on your property?”
The story that Susan Monica would tell the sheriff that day in the interrogation room was so completely unexpected and horrific it would make headlines all across the country. Before Susan began this story, she told the sheriff that everything she had said about Robert Haney’s disappearance had been the truth.
However, she had left one little detail out: after Robert had handed Susan that envelope full of cash and the EBT card and then climbed into that stranger’s car and driven away, after that, Robert had actually come back to her farm, and recently, Susan said she discovered his return.
When one morning she got up and she went outside to go feed her animals, when she looked over at the pig pen and saw all the pigs who would normally be laying down and lounging around at that time of the day, they were all up and converged in one portion of the pig pen, and they had kind of formed a circle around something on the ground, as if they were all trying to look at something on the ground.
Now Susan Monica said this was totally uncharacteristic, so obviously something weird was going on. So Susan dropped her food and rushed over to the fence, she climbed into the pig pen, and as she got closer and closer to all these pigs, she realized they weren’t just looking at something on the ground, they were eating something on the ground.
So Susan Monica goes right up to this ring of pigs and she begins pulling them aside, and then right in the middle on the ground is Robert. He was laying on his back and his insides had all been torn out; it was like the pigs were disemboweling him.
And the most shocking thing is Robert was still alive; he was moving his arm and groaning. Susan tried to pull the pigs off of Robert, but she said they kept coming back and really aggressively continued to eat Robert. It was like they were in this feeding frenzy.
So Susan Monica said, “You know, I thought about lifting him up and moving him, but Robert was practically split in two, and she felt like if she tried to move him, that would kill him anyways.”
And so Susan said she did the thing that she thought was right at the time. She left the pig pen, went into the barn, got a shotgun, ran back to the pig pen, raised the weapon, and fired it into Robert. Susan told the sheriff that this was purely an act of mercy; she was ending his suffering.
After Robert was dead, Susan Monica said she just left the pig pen, and then three days later she went back into the pig pen with bags and collected the little bits of rubber that had not been eaten by her pigs, and then she took those bags of remains and chucked them into her barn on top of the trash pile.
But clearly, Robert’s remains had not remained in the barn because the thing that deputy had whispered into the sheriff’s ear when the sheriff was talking to Susan in the kitchen was, “Sir, we found a leg outside, it was Robert’s leg, and it was found not inside of the barn in the trash pile but out in the middle of her property, just out in the open.”
Susan Monica, when confronted with that information, suggested that, “You know, maybe a wild animal had gone into the barn, got a hold of it, and dragged it off.” The sheriff didn’t even know what follow-up questions to ask, and so he just said, “Well, why didn’t you call 9-1-1 when you first saw Robert? I mean, maybe we could have saved him or at least after he was dead, why didn’t you tell someone?”
Susan Monica would say that the reason she didn’t tell anyone is she was afraid that if word got out about what her pigs had done, then her pigs would be euthanized, and she would lose a major revenue stream because she sold her pig’s meat in town.
And she said even if her pigs were not euthanized, she was worried people in town would not want to buy her pig’s meat after they learned her pigs were attacking and eating humans.
Susan Monica would tell the sheriff exactly where they could find the bags that contained Robert’s remains, and she even said she would take a polygraph test to show she was now telling the whole truth. But when she actually sat down to take the polygraph test, she kept fidgeting and coughing and doing these really dramatic sighs, and it was causing the test operator to get really inaccurate readings.
And so when this first polygraph test was over, the results were inconclusive. And so the investigators made Susan take another test, but again, she continued to fidget and yawn.
So finally, the investigators in the room watching this happen just called off the test, and when they did, they said to Susan, “You know, hey, we’re gonna search your farm, and if there is anything on your farm that you have not told us about, you’re going to be in serious trouble because we’re going to find it.”
At this point, Susan Monica kind of stopped fidgeting, and she looked up at the investigators, and after a long pause, she reached out across the table and grabbed a piece of paper and a pen. She pulled it back and she began drawing something, and after a few seconds, it became pretty clear she was drawing a map of her farm.
After the map was all drawn out, she drew a big X in the middle of it and then slid the map back across the table to the investigators and she said, “If you go to that X, you’ll find Steven.” The investigators are like, “Who’s Steven? We’re talking about Robert, what are you talking about?”
Well, it would turn out Robert was not the only farmhand to die on Susan’s property. In 2012, about a year before Susan Monica hired Robert, she hired another man named Stephen Delicino.
According to Susan, Stephen was a lot like Robert. He was really easy to get along with, he was quiet, he worked hard, but at some point, Susan said they had a big falling out. Susan said she started to suspect that Stephen was stealing her guns in her barn, and so she went to confront him.
During this confrontation, they got into this big fight, and Susan Monica said she didn’t really remember all the details of what happened next, but at some point during this fight, a gun went off, and then Stephen fell to the ground in the middle of the pigpen with his head bleeding, and all of Susan’s pigs suddenly swarmed him and began eating him. These stunned investigators again asked Susan, “Okay, if that really happened the way you said it did, why didn’t you call 9-1-1 if this was like an accident?”
And Susan Monica would say again that her big fear was her pigs would either be euthanized, or word would get out that her pigs were eating people, and the people in town would not want to buy her pig’s meat because of that. In the end, as far-fetched as Susan’s stories were about what happened to Robert Haney and Stephen Delicino, there was never any evidence that actually contradicted her claims.
And so as a result, when Susan Monica went on trial for murdering Robert and Stephen, it came down to whether or not the jury believed Susan, and they didn’t, not at all.
They believed that Susan Monica was completely lying and that in reality, Susan, who was known to have a very quick temper, shot Stephen and shot Robert very much on purpose and then threw them into her pigpen. We can only hope they were dead before her pigs began eating them.
On April 21st, 2015, more than a year after Robert’s children had reported him missing, Susan Monica was convicted of two counts of murder for Robert and for Stephen and two counts of abusing a corpse. She was sentenced to a minimum of 50 years in prison.
While in custody, Susan Monica would be overheard saying there were 17 other bodies buried on her property. However, when the police went out there and searched again very extensively, they never found any other remains….
