A Rural Oregon Identity Theft Case Took A Dark, Hard Turn

Police knew immediately that the situation in front of them was far more sinister than an allegedly stolen food benefit card.

On Jan. 20, 2014, officers in Jackson County, Oregon, went to the home of 65-year-old Susan Monica while following up on an investigation into misuse of a food benefits card. They had surveillance footage of her at a local store using a card that belonged to 56-year-old Robert Haney.

Haney had recently been reported missing, and his last known address was Monica’s 20-acre pig farm in the rural town of Wimer.

As an officer approached Monica’s door to discuss the food benefit card and the missing man, he spotted what appeared to be a human leg with other bones lying in the grass nearby.

Detectives questioned her about the farm and her pigs before confronting her with the news about the body parts found in the grass. She reportedly asked police if they would kill her pigs if it turned out they ate Haney.

Monica had a strange and twisted tale as she slowly opened up to detectives. She said she checked on Haney in late 2013 after his son called to ask if she’d seen him and discovered the pigs eating the man as he lay dying on the ground. Instead of calling for help, Monica told authorities that she had shot Haney in the head as a sort of mercy killing and then allowed the pigs to continue consuming his body.

“I do not value human life very much,” she said in a taped interview with police.

As detectives pressed Monica, she made another shocking revelation: Haney’s remains weren’t the only ones on the property. She asked for paper and drew a crude map with an X to mark the spot where authorities would later find the remains of Stephen Delicino, a handyman who had worked for Monica in 2012.

According to Monica, she confronted Delicino about stealing one of her guns and he became enraged and shot himself five times in the head — a story that detectives did not believe. She then allowed the pigs to eat his remains and then buried what was left.

Monica faced a jury for the murders, identity theft, and two counts of abuse of a corpse in April 2015 in a trial full of bizarre twists as she, herself, cross examined officers about what happened to her pigs and insisted on demonstrating how Delicino shot himself.

The prosecutors in the case pushed back on her narrative, presenting evidence that one of the bodies had been dismembered with an ax before pieces were either thrown to the pigs or stuffed into bags and stashed in the barn.

It took the jury just an hour to find Monica guilty on all counts. She is serving a life sentence at the Coffee Creek Correctional Facility in Wilsonville Oregon.

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