MrBallen Podcast: Strange, Dark & Mysterious Stories
Ice and Fire (PODCAST EXCLUSIVE EPISODE)
Mon, 07 Apr 2025
On a night in March of 2017, a bonfire lit up the yard at a house party in Youngstown, Ohio. A group of friends in their 20s and 30s sat around the fire, drinking beer, talking, and having a good time. And as the night went on and they kept partying, they couldn’t imagine that this bonfire would soon help police solve one of the most horrific crimes the city of Youngstown had ever witnessed.For 100s more stories like these, check out our main YouTube channel just called "MrBallen" -- https://www.youtube.com/c/MrBallenIf you want to reach out to me, contact me on Instagram, Twitter or any other major social media platform, my username on all of them is @mrballenSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Chapter 1: What happened at the Youngstown house party in March 2017?
Hey Prime members, you can binge eight new episodes of the Mr. Ballin podcast one month early and all episodes ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. On a night in March of 2017, a huge bonfire lit up the yard at a house party in Youngstown, Ohio. A group of friends in their 20s and 30s sat around the fire, drinking beer, talking, and having a great time.
And as the night went on and these friends kept on partying, none of them could have imagined that this bonfire would soon help police solve one of the most horrific crimes the city of Youngstown had ever witnessed.
But before we get into that story, if you're a fan of the Strange, Dark, and Mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right podcast because that's all we do and we upload twice a week, once on Monday and once on Thursday. So if that's of interest to you, please invite the follow button to a costume party, but don't tell them it's actually a wake.
Okay, let's get into today's story. On February 24th, 2017, 28-year-old Shannon Graves sat on the couch watching TV with her boyfriend in her apartment in Youngstown, Ohio. Shannon changed the channel, and right away she could see that her boyfriend, who was a man in his early 30s named Arturo Nevoa, looked annoyed by what she wanted to watch. So she flipped the channel to something else.
Then Shannon glanced over at Arturo, but he still looked annoyed. Shannon sighed, trying her best to keep her cool. It was not that long ago that sitting on the couch with Arturo would have made for a relaxing evening at home. But now, every time the two were around each other, they just seemed to argue about everything, even meaningless stuff like what to watch on TV.
Shannon put the remote down and then leaned back on the couch and didn't say anything. She hoped that maybe if she just sat there in silence, they could avoid a fight. But in reality, Shannon knew that this TV show she chose or whatever little thing they ended up arguing about next was actually just a symptom of a much bigger problem. Her and Arturo's relationship was clearly falling apart.
The two of them met almost a year earlier at the club where Shannon had been working nights as a dancer while she went to classes during the day to earn her cosmetology degree. And despite their obvious differences, at first they had gotten along great. Shannon was outgoing and always seemed to be on the move, while Arturo was quiet and more reserved.
But they thought their differences actually complemented each other really well. So after dating for only a few months, Shannon and Arturo moved into an apartment together. And that's when things started to go bad. It was like right away, they just both stopped trusting each other.
Arturo accused Shannon of still being into her ex-boyfriend, a guy she'd actually been living with before she met Arturo, and Shannon was convinced that Arturo had a thing for this woman who was always hanging around him when he would come to see Shannon at the club.
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Chapter 2: Who are Shannon Graves and Arturo Nevoa?
He passed by their washer and dryer and walked over to a white, rectangle-shaped chest freezer that was standing up against the wall. Now, this woman knew there was meat inside this freezer and she could use it to make her meatballs. But there was a problem. The freezer had a padlock on it. But the woman was undeterred.
She grabbed a nearby screwdriver off a work table and used it to pry the entire metal latch that the lock was connected to off the freezer. And so now with the freezer unlocked, the woman opened it up and immediately she began to scream.
At about 5.30 that afternoon, two hours after that woman had looked inside the freezer, crime scene investigator Tony Marzullo walked down the stairs into the married couple's basement. Marzullo worked out of Youngstown, but he helped in the surrounding smaller towns when he was needed.
And today, he'd gotten one of the strangest calls he'd ever received from police dispatch in one of those smaller towns. Marzullo put on his gloves and approached the freezer. The freezer door was still open and he could see inside of the freezer was an orange plastic bucket with trash bags sticking out of it. Marzullo got closer and leaned over the freezer and looked inside of that bucket.
And the instant he did, he reflexively put his hand over his mouth and tried to collect himself. Even the call from dispatch had not prepared him for this. Because in the bucket, Marzullo was looking at the top half of a frozen severed human head. Marzullo looked down deeper into the freezer, and he saw the entire thing was basically filled with trash bags.
And as he pulled out each of these bags and looked inside of them, he found human legs, human arms, and human hands. Marzullo had no idea who the victim was, but instinctively, he grabbed his phone and called Detective Lambert. Later that evening, Detective Lambert stood in the basement with Marzullo and a group of police officers and forensic technicians.
Like Lambert had expected, the psychic vision and the objects found at that bridge had not given him any new leads in Shannon's case, and neither had any of the interviews Lambert had conducted to this point. Basically, the case had stalled. He had no idea where Shannon was or what happened to her.
But now, as he stood over the freezer, he had a sinking feeling that the body he was looking at could be hers. Now, they would need to run some tests to officially identify the body, but Marzullo was very confident they could do that quickly. Forensic techs would allow the severed hands they'd found to defrost.
Then they would use a saline solution to rehydrate the fingers on those hands, which would allow them to pull clean fingerprints. While Lambert waited for those results, he interviewed the married couple who lived at the house to try to figure out how a dismembered body had wound up in their basement. The couple proved to be extremely cooperative. They said that freezer was not theirs.
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