Shanna Gardner: Innocent or the Mastermind Behind a Murder Plot?

A tire was deliberately placed in the middle of a dark road. When Jared Bridegan stopped to move it, he was shot while his two-year-old daughter waited inside his vehicle.

Four years later, his ex-wife, Shanna Gardner, is preparing to stand trial for allegedly conspiring with her second husband, Mario Fernandez Saldana, to have him killed. But the man prosecutors identified as the gunman has withdrawn his guilty plea and taken back his agreement to testify.

In this episode of GBRLIFE of Crimes, we examine the bitter custody battle, Shanna’s disturbing messages about her ex-husband, the “funeral potatoes” defense, the payments from her trust and the psychology behind both possible versions of this case.

Can prosecutors connect Shanna’s words to the money, and the money to the tire waiting on Sanctuary Boulevard?

Shanna Gardner has pleaded not guilty and has not been convicted of the charges against her.

Read the companion blog post, “The Only Thing Nobody Argues About”:
https://www.gbrlife.com/blog/shanna-gardner-is-she-innocent

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On the night of February 16th, 2022, Jared Bridegan made one decision. He decided to get out of his car because there was a tire laying on the road on Sanctuary Boulevard in Jacksonville Beach, Florida. Not a wreck and not a hazard, just a tire. The kind of debris that may fall off a truck and sit there until somebody deals with it. But this road was too narrow to go around it. And his two-year-old daughter, Bexley, was in the car, sitting right behind. Him in her car seat. and he was only seven minutes from home. So he put his car in park, and then he got out to move it, which is what many of us would do. But right where he stood is exactly where he was shot. Jared Bridegan was 33 years old, and he was a Microsoft executive, a father of four. And minutes earlier, he was dropping off his nine-year-old twins at their mother's house after a date night with their dad. But now he's lying on the road, and his daughter was still watching from the back seat, with nothing taken and no one going towards her, which meant that tire was not debris. And Jacksonville Police Department worked that out within hours. And it has driven every single day of the four and a half years since somebody put it there. Somebody knew he would stop. Welcome to GBRLIFE Transmissions. I'm your host, Kaitlyn, and you're listening to GBRLIFE of Crimes, where we explore not just what happened in crimes committed by women, but why they happened and the psychology behind them. Today, Shanna Gardner. Who hasn't been convicted of anything, and her trial hasn't started. Jury selection actually begins August 31st. Opening statements don't happen until September 8th, and she's pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder, conspiracy, solicitation, and child abuse. But she's been in custody since August of 2023 without bond. And added to the story, her second husband, Mario Fernandez Saldana. Well, he's facing the same charges, but he goes first. On August 17th, he will be put in front of a completely different jury. And the man prosecutors say pulled the trigger, Henry Tenon. And he pleaded guilty in 2023 after admitting that he was the shooter, agreeing to testify against both of them. But just recently, he took it all back. He withdrew his plea and he decided to re-plead not guilty. So he's going to trial himself in 2027, and that changed everything. It's why Shanna and Mario are being tried separately instead of together. And the entire architecture of the prosecution, it was built all around that cooperating shooter. But the shooter walked it all back. So what's left? And who is Shanna? Not much is documented about Shanna's childhood. That's worth saying out loud because in a case that's heavily covered, you'd expect there to be at least something. But there's no former classmate giving an interview, no coach, no neighbor, no childhood friend with a story. For a woman who's about to stand trial for first-degree murder, the public record of her life essentially begins when she's 22 years old. What we do know is this. We know that she was born March of 1987 and she grew up in Alpine, Utah, in a devout family in the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-day Saints. And her family was building something at exactly the same time that she was growing up. In 1988, when Shanna was one years old, her mother Shelly and her aunt LaVon started a company. But it was out of frustration. They wanted to sell rubber stamps, but independently, because they couldn't find a supplier that they liked. So they built their own. They borrowed the structure from Tupperware and Mary Kay, in which the direct sales model is where the product moves through a network of women selling to other women in their living rooms. And they called it Stampin' Up. It worked. And it worked enormously. This company moved to Boulder City, Nevada, then to Kanab, Utah in 1993, and then eventually to Riverton with hundreds of employees, tens of thousands of demonstrators, and sales north of $200 million in rubber stamps and paper and ribbon and little metal embellishments, which means it grew from more than just stamps. So the family that Shanna grew up in became one of the most visible in the Utah crafting industry, but also becoming prominent in the church. Two communities at once, and both of them run on one main thing, reputation. That's the most important thing about her upbringing because it comes from both sides. Direct sales is not just a business model, it's culture. It runs on optimism, on presentation, on the premise that anyone can build something beautiful, but only if they stay positive enough about it. The entire industry is women selling an image. Of life, basically, to another woman. Nothing in it is built to accommodate a person falling apart in public. And a tight LDS community in a town like Alpine, it has its own version of the same thing. Everyone knows everyone. Everyone knows whose family is whose. The name often arrives in the room before the person does. If you grow up inside both at once, you'll learn something very early about distance between how things are and how things must look. Multi-level marketing doesn't make murders. This is pretty clear because we have a lot of multi-level marketing programs and companies out there, and how many murderers really come from that? But if you grow up inside a structure where the way that you get something done is to find the right person and let it travel down a chain, and that becomes your grammar for how the world looks, the crime that Shanna is charged with has that exact grammar. And her parents were devout. So this wasn't just religion on the side. This was life. So much so that in 2015, Sterling and Shelly stepped down from running the company to serve a full-time mission for the church in Hawaii. Yes, I also think it's very interesting that they chose Hawaii as that main mission. But their daughter, Sarah, had taken over as CEO the year before. And that was also the same year that Shanna filed for divorce. Speaking of the divorce... Brings us to the marriage. Because right around 2010, this is where we start getting some true information about Shanna. We know that she met Jared on a blind date in Salt Lake City, but that's by her own account. She had given an interview in 2022, and his brother and his brother's wife had set them up. She called it a whirlwind fast relationship. And it was, and also not uncommon for the LDS religion, but they married in April of that same year in Salt Lake City, in the temple, which in that phase is not a wedding venue, but a ceiling, a covenant meant to hold past this life and into the next one. Jared was, by every account that has ever surfaced since, a genuinely liked man. He was a Microsoft senior design manager, a devoted father, the kind of person whose funeral fills a building. And the twins, Liam and Abby, were born in 2012. But it all came apart very fast. They separated in early 2015. Shanna filed in February asking for primary custody after Jared reportedly found messages between her and her trainer. So the marriage ended with her exposed. whatever else was wrong inside of it. The version that went out to the world was the one that she was the problem, that she broke it up. And in 18 months around that filing, this same woman who married in a temple. Suddenly became a regular at the Jacksonville area tattoo shop. She went in for piercings. She stayed to socialize. At a dinner with one of the staffers in 2015, she asked whether anyone knew someone who could shut her ex up. She has acknowledged saying this. She told the Florida Times Union that people say things like this during bitter divorces. And what you're seeing in that stretch is a person walking out of an entire structure at once. The faith, the marriage, the covenant, the family expectation, all of it. And the thing is that happens to people. It's not evidence of anything by itself. It's exactly the kind of detail that gets deployed, however, to make a woman look like... A certain kind of woman. The temple and the tattoo shop are 18 months apart. That's not hypocrisy. And sneering at it gets you nowhere. What that gap tells me is that Shanna can hold two completely different lives at once and be fully present in both. That's actually compartmentalization. And it's a skill. Most people can't do it. Not truly. The ones who can usually learned it early and a family where the outside version and the inside version were both real and both required. The prosecution's theory needs a woman who could go about her life normally while something is in motion. And in Shanna's case, she absolutely could. She learned it. It was who she was. And it brings about another aspect of this whole thing, a sequence. She files in 2015. The marriage ends with her as the one who blew it up. Then watch what happens to him. Jared remarries in 2017. He and his new wife, Kirsten, have two more children, Bexley and London. He becomes, in everyone's telling, the good man, well-liked, devoted father. His life reassembles into something clean and public and admirable. Hers doesn't reassemble. Hers goes to court. Seven years of near-continuous litigation. Custody, finances, schedules, back to court, back again, etc. Court documents begin to describe it as highly acrimonious, and an arrest warrant later used exactly that language about what investigators found. It was still going on the week he died. And in all of that time frame, she also remarried. She married Mario Fernandez Aldana, who she met in 2018 at her CrossFit gym, where he worked as a maintenance man. But he had a military background and owned rental property in Jacksonville. And if you were raised in a family and faith where the story that people tell you is the whole currency, seven years of any of that is not just a bad divorce. This becomes permanent, renewing, scheduled humiliation. Every custody exchange is a reminder that he came out of it looking better than her. That every court date is a record and it's all that she has of proof that her life is not falling apart. and turning into dust. I think that's the engine, whatever the verdict turns out to be. Not money, not custody exactly, but the arrhythmic of a man who kept looking better and better every year. But high conflict custody, that doesn't end because the children keep existing. They keep getting handed back and forth, which means the other person stays in your life as a permanent schedule that you didn't choose. This is what clinicians see as a slow narrowing. The dispute stops being about the schedule. and it becomes about the person. Every email gets read for subtext. The other parent stops being a difficult ex and becomes the source of everything wrong. And in that state, people say things. Ask any divorce attorney what's in their client's text messages. Watch their face. Which brings us to 2015 and a set of texts. Prosecutors say that in these messages between Shannon and her close friend Kimberly, the two of them spoke in code. Jared is called stupid. There are references to casserole and to funeral potatoes. There's talk about wanting someone who could shut the people up and someone, who does permanent disappearing acts and refer to as a magician. A detective testified at a 2024 bond hearing that these were coded requests for a hitman and that Kimberly reached out to a woman named Susan about finding one. The thing is, Kimberly also took the stand in August of 2024, and she said the messages were a long-running joke between friends. She acknowledged that they called Jared stupid. And on the phrase that the state built a theory around, she said funeral potatoes are just a side dish. It's a staple at Mormon funerals. It's a cheesy potato casserole served after somebody dies. She said she was part of the group that actually made that food for grieving families, and she had been asked to make them repeatedly around that time, which is why that phrase was in her vocabulary at all. And Susan, well, she also testified. She said that she told the detective directly on the phone that the hitman text was part of the joke, and Kimberly denied ever contacting Susan on Shanna's behalf to find anyone. These are two readings. Both are possible on the words alone, and the difference between them is a life sentence. Words alone prove a feeling. It takes something else though, to prove a plan. And after Jared was killed, nothing happened for almost a year. Police had said that within hours that tired had been placed deliberately. They knew it, they said this was an ambush. This is not a robbery. And the whole internet had a theory by the weekend. But then it went quiet. Most coverage skips over that stretch because that's the hard part for the police department. It feels like shame. But it's actually this part of the case that makes it even more interesting. Although, a theory's not a case. But what did finally break open wasn't a confession or an anonymous tip or anything cinematic. It was paperwork. About a man who nobody outside of Jacksonville had ever heard of. Investigators had been hunting a Ford F-150 since the night of the shooting. And in July of 2022, they sat down with a 61-year-old man named Henry Tannen, who told them that he had been renting a house from Mario, Shanna's new husband, in Jacksonville's Biltmore neighborhood for years. That was that. For a month. Then Henry got picked up on an unrelated felony charge. And while they had him sitting there anyway, they asked him about Jared, and that truck. Then they pulled his records, his phone, his bank accounts, and the car put him somewhere that mattered. 18 days before the murder, on January 29th of 2022, Henry's vehicle was parked outside the gymnastics gym where Jared's daughter took lessons. That's not just coincidence that you can talk your way out of. That's a man learning a family schedule, and after that it moves fast. Court records and Henry's original case put him in the conspiracy as of January 4th just over a month before Jared dies. In February of 2023, police served a federal search warrant on Shanna's home and car. But this time, it was in West Richland, Washington, where she had moved with the twins after the murder. And on January 25th, Henry was arrested. And the state attorney stood at a press conference, sealed the affidavit for 30 days, and said one thing clearly, which was that Henry had not acted alone. On March 16th, he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and admitted that he was a gunman. And that same day, Mario was arrested and charged with first-degree murder. And on August 17th, they took Shanna in Washington. The language at the last press conference was deliberate. Henry didn't act alone. Mario didn't plan alone. Investigators have said they once identified five people they believed were involved, but three of them are going to trial. And in that trial, all three of them, there's one person who's not going to be, well, she's not going to speak. But she was there, at two years old, Bexley, strapped into a car seat in the back of her father's SUV, and she was there for all of it. Her dad pulled over, he got out, but he didn't come back. The shooter, potentially Henry, fired four rounds. Two had hit Jared, but two hit the vehicle that Bexley was sitting in. Whoever pulled the trigger, whatever comes from the investigations and the trial, they did it with a toddler four feet away and put two rounds in the car that she was in. And the charges against Shanna include a count of child abuse alongside the murder counts, and this is why. Because Bexley wasn't physically unharmed per se. She was two, using language that a two-year-old uses in the best way that she could. All she could say was that there was a loud noise and daddy went outside and that was basically it. But today, she is six years old. And somewhere in Florida, there's a first grader with a baby sister and two half-siblings across the country. And she doesn't get to grow up understanding what happened even though she was there. She has to grow up wondering until the trial concludes, which is a hard place for a now six-year-old to be in, especially with her half-siblings, Liam and Abby. Shanna had to give up custody of her children when she got arrested. Liam and Abby went to go live with their grandparents on her side, her parents. But Jared's parents didn't like that. They spent nearly a year fighting for visitation before petitioning for guardianship themselves. Their lawsuit argued that her parents had helped her leave Florida after the murder, that they had blocked the twins from contact with Kirsten and their half-siblings, and had told the children that their mother wasn't responsible, which I think is a little odd to, argue because we don't know that she was responsible or not. That's in the courts right now. That's the point of the investigation. But in December of 2024, a court ruled that it was best that the twins stayed in Washington with her parents. And Kirsten has stated publicly that it wasn't what Jared would have wanted, and it wasn't what she wanted, and that some things were outside of her ability to influence. But remember, Kirsten is the second wife. She has very little say in this. So Liam and Abby are being raised by the parents of the woman who's currently charged with killing their father. The four kids have been separated since the murder. And Kirsten went from working as an account manager to a full-time parent running an account called Justice for Jared B. Because that essentially became a job. And her other job, and everyone else involved in this case, is to now sit in a courtroom and see how this goes. Right now, the state's case is that Shanna and Mario conspired to have Jared killed. And for Shanna, the indictment says that her involvement may reach back to May of 2015, a few months after she filed for divorce. We know why. We understand it was because of those texts. It was because of the things that she was saying. Prosecutors also say that Mario hired Henry, his own tenant, and that Henry was to be paid $150,000, moved through a pallet business in small amounts, not to raise suspicion. And there is a bit of evidence here, because there are checks written to Henry from Shanna's trust. But investigators say that the single link between Henry and Jared was Mario. And those checks were written by Mario, not by Shanna at all. And there's also a friend who told investigators about a dinner before the pandemic where Shanna complained about the custody battle and said Mario had a military background and could get people to break into Jared's house in the middle of the night and take care of him, and no one would ever know. The woman had found it to be a little odd, but Shanna laughed it off. It was casual, she said. And then there's also surveillance. Henry's car being seen at the gymnastics gym 18 days out. And the timing, Jared was killed minutes after dropping the twins at Shanna's house. And whoever placed that tire knew that he was going to be there and about when. So the state's case is not weak. It makes a lot of sense why they are looking at this group of people. But then there's the other side of this, Shanna's side. Her defense lawyer is someone that is well known in the United States. At least anybody who may know about Casey Anthony, because yes. It's her lawyer, Jose Baez, which tells you something about the resources and the aggression to expect throughout this trial. And his central point is simple, but it's a real one. There is not a single text message between Shanna and Henry, not one phone call. And the checks, as I stated, were signed by Mario. And Jose argues that Mario controlled the finances in that marriage. And the texts that everyone's arguing about are from 2015. Jared died in 2022. There are no 2021 messages about hiring anybody. Jose has also accused the lead detective of lying on the stand, calling it a pattern rather than a mistake. And then he asked the judge to dismiss the entire case outright. But a judge found that there's no prosecutorial misconduct. But it was decided in that moment that some evidence was not going forward. He couldn't get it dismissed, but he may have been able to get rid of some of the big things. And the biggest one, the state's cooperating gunman recanted. The man who said he did it and said that he was hired under a plea agreement, he took it all back. He took back that plea agreement, which changes everything for Shanna, for Mario, and for Henry himself. Which makes you wonder about Shanna at all in this. If she did it, if she didn't do it. It's not so cut and dry. And now while nobody has actually evaluated Shanna in the sense that it's been public, there likely is two possibilities here with the psychology attached to it in which she's guilty or she's innocent. But that changes exactly what the psychology is behind it. Starting with the side of she did it. This is the harder one. because the thing that people expect from a woman who kills in rage is something hot, fast, and close with a weapon and falling down the stairs and some sort of moment that got away from her. But this is not that. So if Shanna did do this, she did it the way that you plan a renovation over months, years, quite some time, and through other people with a budget. And the distance is the whole psychology. She isn't accused of shooting anyone. She's accused of wanting something and telling her husband, and her husband knowing a man who rented from him, and that man being handed $150,000 in pieces, small enough to look like nothing. Three layers between her and the road, which means at no point does she ever have to picture herself doing it. And that is precisely how ordinary people get linked to unthinkable things, not by becoming monsters, but never once having to be in the room for it. She grew up inside a business built on that exact principle, though. So this isn't outside the box. You don't sell the thing. You find the right person. You let it travel down the chain and value arrives without anybody in particular having touched it. That was the family trade. That was the water. But rubber stamps don't make killers. And the shape of the crime she's charged with is the shape of the world that she was raised inside. So it's not necessarily the business, but more of how she was raised. And underneath the distance, there's seven years of a slow narrowing. That's the high conflict custody. It stops being a person at all. Every exchange is another reminder that he came out clean and she didn't. He remarried. He had more children. He became, and everyone's telling, the good man. And she went to court about it for seven years. That's an engine. Not money or some sort of financial gain, but humiliation on a schedule. And then there's one thing in this version that I can't get past. The thing that turns it from being cold to something else entirely. Because Bexley was in that car. Four rounds fired, two in the vehicle, at a two-year-old that was strapped into it. So either Shannon knew a child would be in that car or she never thought to ask, and I don't know which is worse. One is a woman who would accept it and the other is a woman so far inside her grievance that a toddler didn't occur to her as viable. But then there's this whole other side of it, the side where she's innocent. And that's a specific kind of hell that she would be going through right now. She's been in custody since August of 2023 with no bond. And her trial is only starting now, which means three years of life spent waiting to be allowed to answer, innocent or not, that happened. But the psychology of the innocent version isn't about the cell. It's about being disbelieved by everyone at once, which does something particular to a person. You over-explain, you over-perform, you get on television and cry and it looks staged because grief always looks staged when the room has already decided for them. You hire a crisis management firm and when you do that, now you're being destroyed in public because you have no idea what else to do and everyone reads it as the move of a guilty woman. Every instinct that you have is to defend yourself, but that becomes evidence. And in this version, her own worst years get read back to her as a confession. Everything ugly that she's ever said about him, about Jared. When she was at war with him because they were going through a divorce. Every joke that went too far with a best friend is now for everyone to know and see everywhere. If you went through any of your phones during the worst 18 months of your lives with a theory already in hand, you would find something, and it would sound exactly as bad out loud. And keeping up with the innocent version here, she's married to Mario. A lot of evidence that's really difficult to pull him away from. So if she didn't order this, it's quite possible that he did. Which means that somewhere in the last four years, she has had to sit with the possibility that a man heard her say she wanted her ex-husband gone and then actually did go and make it happen, but never told her. And her words were the cause of that happening. And something like that, there's no real word for what that could do to a person because you're going to spend the entire rest of your life going back through everything you ever said in anger, looking for the sentence, the one that caused him to actually be killed. And she lost anyway. No matter what the outcome is, she's absolutely lost because she spent seven years fighting for those twins. And when she was arrested, she signed guardianship of them to her parents. And a court in 2024 said they get to stay in Washington. So whatever happens in September, the custody war is over, and she doesn't get to be in the house with them. Which brings me to something that happened in April of 2024. From jail, she wrote a letter to her sister about a relationship she started with another inmate. She said she saw good in him. She described him as damaged. And then she wrote that her sister knows her and her broken things, plural, ongoing, said casually to somebody who already understood the reference. That's a woman naming a pattern in herself she's known about for a long time. And it fits either version, which is what makes it interesting instead of decisive. In the guilty version, it's a woman drawn to damaged men, one of whom she married, one of whom she found in jail. In the innocent version, it's a woman who has always attached to people who need saving, sitting in a cell and doing it again, because it's the only thing she knows how to do with a person. And where I land with all of this is that the texts don't bother me as much. Six years is a long time, and Kimberly and Susan both got on the stand and said this was a joke, and the funeral potatoes were really a casserole. The vacation five weeks after the murder doesn't bother me either. Unlikable is not the same as guilty. And I have watched way too many women get convicted in public for grieving wrong. Although some women do actually grieve wrong because likely they may have been part of things. But that's not this case. It's the checks that bothers me. In this case, those checks show that money moved. It went from her trust to Henry. And Jose's answer is that Mario signed them and Mario ran the finances in that marriage. And that may be true. It may be enough. But it could also be a real defense that might work. I just can't get past where it came from. And that's not a reading of anybody's words. That's a bank record. Bank records don't have two meanings. What I'll be watching for when all of this goes to trial is coming down to one sentence. Whether the state can connect the words to the money and the money to the tire on that road. Because that's the case. Everything else is noise. And both sides have a version of this trial where they never actually have to make that connection at all. Because remember, the defense is that ugly words are just ugly words. And the prosecution is that words tell you what she wanted, and the rest tells you what she got. The rest is not vague. Checks from her trust, a tenant with no connection to Jared except for her husband, and $150,000 moved in pieces, and a car outside a child's gymnasium 18 days before, and the biggest one, a tire on a dark road minutes before drop-off. None of those are feelings. Those are acts. And an act leaves a trail. and a trail can be followed or it can fall apart under cross-examination. So Shanna may have said some monstrous things about her ex-husband. Well, she did. We know she did. She admitted it. We've seen it. But there's clearly so much more to this story and it's going to unfold in this trial. And we're about to find out if this woman is as innocent as it can get or a true monster behind the scenes. Because whatever that jury decides, that four children have to live without their dad, and one of them almost lost her life along with him. This has been GBRLIFE of Crimes, part of GBRLIFE Transmissions, and I'm your host, Kaitlyn, reminding you that understanding the darkness helps us appreciate the light. Join me next time as we uncover another case that challenges everything we thought we knew about the criminal mind. Hey, it's Kaitlyn, and if you saved the song, a big thank you. And if you could do one more thing, and like and subscribe every time you listen to GBRLIFEtransmissions, that would mean the world. And more importantly, it would help GBRLIFE grow. Also, don't forget to check out the reviews, the blogs, and wow, there's so much more on gbrlife.com. Check it out, and you'll find out. Can't wait to see you there. Choose stories in the spaces we don't feel soft and.