True Crime with Rachel Shannon
TWISTED "Mom" Shoots Her Children in the Face to "Shut Up" Their "Sassy Little Mouths"
Wed, 21 May 2025
"She was just too mouthy." Those are the words Julie Schenecker used when describing her motive behind murdering her young daughter and son. In this case, we will dive into the disturbed mind of the woman who meticulously planned the gruesome execution of her 2 children, all because they were too sassy. Go watch my other episodes on Spotify: The Disturbing Case of Stephanie ParzeShe Tried to Warn Them About her Son, Then he was MURDERED. THE CASE OF GUNNAR SCHUMACHER7 Year old’s Strange Death Reveals Mom’s DISGUSTING Secret: Did She Starve her for Attention?!Thank you guys for watching, hope to see you next time!
Chapter 1: What is the horrifying case of Julie Schenecker?
today we are going to be discussing the horrifying case of calyx and beau two young vibrant teenagers whose lives were tragically cut short by the one person who should have loved them the most their own mother julie and when you hear about how she planned these murders carried them out and then the reasoning she gave afterwards your jaw will be on the floor. I know mine was.
Julie Power Shinneker was married to Army Colonel Parker Shinneker, who she met in Germany in the late 1980s. Julie was there working as a Russian linguist, collecting intelligence for European agencies by interrogating refugees coming from Eastern European countries. Meanwhile, Parker was stationed there on active deployment, where he too was working for intelligence.
After meeting and beginning their relationship, as you can expect with a military couple, they moved around a lot for work. Now, all throughout her life, Julie was known as a high energy, high achiever who could always get the job done. She was a star athlete in high school who always achieved good grades. She went to a good college where her stellar academic performance continued.
Once starting work with the military, she stayed driven and motivated. At the same time, she was always known as having an easy time making friends and keeping up with anything and everything life threw at her. She and Parker were married by 1991, and by September 12, 1994, they gave birth to their first child in Rosenberg, Germany, a daughter who they named Calyx.
Three years later, on September 29, 1997, they went on to have their son, Powers, who went by his middle name Bo, in Honolulu, Hawaii. After having their children, Julie made the decision to stay home full-time to raise the kids while Parker continued working with the army. Growing up, Calix was known as a model student and an amazing artist.
She was known as having an energizing, uplifting spirit. She was a tenacious athlete, excelling at both cross country and track. She always just had this intense desire to learn and work hard towards her goals. She absolutely loved Harry Potter, which led her to establish a Harry Potter club in her high school in Tampa, Florida, where she was living at the time.
When she wasn't running for sport or reading Harry Potter, she worked hard to put her efforts towards making a positive impact on the world. She helped the school raise money for the American Cancer Society and often spoke of how badly she just wanted to help her fellow human. Beau was known as a very likable and easygoing person.
He made friends easily, making sure to maintain his relationships even with friends from overseas. He was very intelligent, with this unique ability to retain any information that came his way. He was known to be empathetic, intuitive, and funny. He loved video games, but you would most often find him outside playing soccer, street hockey, or football.
He was a natural born leader, always making a positive impact on his teammates over the years. Overall, both Calyx and Bo were known to have positive spirits with so many special and unique personality traits due to them growing up in all sorts of different places around the world. They were loved by so many people from all walks of life.
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Chapter 2: Who were Calyx and Bo Schenecker?
A husband and wife working hard to raise their children in a happy loving home while also getting to be a part of so many things in the world that other children will never get the chance to experience. But of course, with Parker's active military status, he would often be deployed for long stretches of time, leaving Juliet home alone to raise the kids on her own.
This was no easy task, but she always tried her best. By early January of 2011, that is exactly what happened once again. Parker received orders to head to Qatar in the Middle East, where he would be stationed for a few weeks. This, again, wasn't anything out of the norm for the family, but the timing wasn't ideal.
The family had been going to group counseling for a few weeks due to some growing tension within the family. Calyx and Bo were getting older and were growing into their own people with their own opinions and attitudes. Meanwhile, they were under a lot of stress while Parker was gone and Julie was left on her own to care for these growing teens.
So, before Parker left, he asked Julie if she needed help with watching the children while he was gone. He knew that she had been struggling a bit and wanted to offer support somehow, some way, but she said no. She said, I've got this. Little did he know, though, that she had other plans in mind, something that she couldn't do if there was anyone else around.
something that would get rid of all the stress she was facing once and for all. By the morning of January 28th, 2011, Julie's mother, who was living in Texas at the time, called the Tampa Police Department to request a welfare check for Julie and her kids. She said that Julie had been experiencing a very serious bout of depression and had been complaining non-stop about her children.
When she woke up that morning, she found some very concerning emails sent to her by Julie. By around 9pm on the night of January 27th, she sent an email to her parents, brother, and sister with the subject of, I love you all. The message was pretty incoherent and full of typos, but from what Julie's mother could make out,
julie was thanking her family members for their support and guidance but there were also undertones of something more sinister in part she wrote you've always been there for me giving me support and guidance that i've needed and couldn't have lived 50 years without going on to say it's really difficult because i'm so sick mentally i do the jobs to do i minimally take care of the kids sadly to say
If some of this email didn't make total sense, it's because I was reading directly from the email, which was relatively incoherent and kind of hard to read. But obviously, this immediately set off red flags when her mother read it, so by 7.39am, shortly after receiving the call from Julie's mother, officers arrived at the Schoenecker home.
As soon as they arrived, they found Julie lying unconscious on the back porch. She was wearing a white bathrobe, which appeared to be covered in dried blood. Officers managed to wake her up, helping her up to her feet before asking where the children were. She replied, they're inside. She then apparently asked one of the officers for their gun or to go get hers so that she could finish the job.
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Chapter 3: What were Julie Schenecker's mental health struggles?
She said, when I get out of here, I'm never going to come back and see you. Okay. She changed for the last two years.
She really upset you? Yeah. Kids do that when they get older. They break your heart sometimes. What happened... What happened when you got back to the house after track? What happened?
I came up behind her.
What was she doing?
Homework.
She was doing homework on the computer? Yeah. You came up behind her with what?
With a .38.
Okay. And what happened?
I shot her in the back of the head.
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Chapter 4: What led to the tragic events on January 28, 2011?
Chapter 5: How did Julie describe her actions to the police?
I shot her in the back of the head.
Because she was running her mouth at you?
Yeah. And then I shot her, I think, in the mouth.
Okay.
That's what I wanted to do.
Why did you want to shoot her in the mouth?
Because it angers me so much.
Her mouth angers you?
Yeah.
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Chapter 6: What justification did Julie give for her children's murders?
Do you know where they're at right now? Tell me where.
Both in the van on the right side.
Okay, and where is your daughter?
In the bedroom.
They're a mess.
They're a mess? Are they alive or dead? I don't know. What do you think?
I hope so.
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Chapter 7: What were the immediate consequences of Julie's actions?
You hope what?
I hope they're dead.
You hope they're dead? Yeah.
Chapter 8: How did Julie's relationship with her children change over time?
What do you think?
They're dead.
When the officer asked what happened with her suicide attempt, basically why it didn't work, Julie said that she kept hearing noises from the kids, like gurgling noises. So she went back to their bodies to cover both of them in blankets and to apologize for her behavior. She also mentioned at one point that she tried manipulating Calyx's face into a smile, but obviously it didn't stay that way.
She said that she was going to shoot herself too, but she fell asleep instead, being rudely awoken by the officers who found her. She mentioned that in the weeks before the murders, she had been writing a journal about how she was feeling and what she was planning to do. The last entry she wrote was shortly after she had shot them.
Then, as we know, she had taken some of her medication, including Oxycontin, and fell asleep on the back porch where she had gone to smoke. After this interview, of course, officers charged Julie with two counts of first-degree murder. It was clear that she was not mentally well. She had been suffering with some sort of mental illness.
But the question was just how much of a role did it play in what she did? And was it so bad to the point where she didn't realize what she was doing? That is what psychiatrists work to figure out as she awaited her trial in jail. Also after finding the bodies of the children, officers did contact Parker in Qatar telling him that he needs to come home immediately.
He did just that and of course he was met with his new reality. His wife murdered their two children who he loved so very much. He had always known that Julie was struggling with life, struggling with her children, but there was no way that he could have known just how far she would take it. He was obviously devastated and wanted to do anything he could to understand what happened
and to help investigators get a deeper look into the disturbed mind of his wife. Of course, as all of this was going on, officers went back to the home to continue their investigation, and there, they found a lot that gave them much more insight into Julie's state of mind leading to shooting her children. Upon entering the home, investigators first found two sticky notes that Julie left behind.
They were addressed to friends, and the other was addressed to carpool. After moving to Tampa, Calix and Bo started carpooling with their neighbors, who would take turns driving the kids to practices and events. In the weeks after the accident, the neighbor was the one driving them around most of the time.
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