Prosecution: Another Death Planned After Ex-Wife Killed, Shackelford Wanted Fiancee Dead, Witness Testifies

There could have been another murder.

So maintains the prosecution in the trial of Dale C. Shackelford, who is charged with murdering his ex-wife and her boyfriend.

Seven months after his ex-wife was shot to death, Shackelford asked his lover, Bernadette Lasater, to kill his fiancee, Sonja Abitz of Idaho, Lasater said in Latah County District Court on Thursday.

Shackelford is on trial for the May 1999 murders of his ex-wife Donna Fontaine and her boyfriend Fred Palahniuk of Newman Lake. He also is charged with preparing false evidence and setting fire to the building 20 miles outside Kendrick, Idaho, where the bodies were found.

This week at the trial, two of Shackelford’s past lovers have testified that, at his urging, they tried separately to kill Fontaine in 1998 and 1999. On Thursday, Lasater said that at the end of January of this year, as he was driving her from Salt Lake City to Idaho, Shackelford asked her to prove her love to him by eliminating Abitz, his fiancee with whom he lived when he was in Idaho.

“He asked me to meet Sonja where she works at Wal-Mart,” Lasater said. She added that Shackelford told her to take the gun she had with her, “and follow her a little ways and kill her.”

Lasater said, “I told him, no, I wouldn’t do that. If he wanted her dead, he would have to do it.”

During a jury recess, defense attorney Steve Mahaffy tried to keep that information from the jury. “I think it’s unfairly prejudicial,” he said.

Prosecutor Robyn Eckmann wouldn’t hear of it. “I’m not trying to show the defendant is a bad person, but that he killed Donna Fontaine,” she said, arguing that Shackelford likely asked Lasater to kill Abitz because “Sonja knew too much” about the murders of Fontaine and Palahniuk.

“This is very relevant to the defendant’s guilt and consciousness of guilt,” she said.

The judge allowed the testimony.

Also in her testimony, Lasater admitted that she lied to investigators and a grand jury when she said she had traded sex and drugs with a hit man so he would kill Fontaine. She lied “because Dale asked me to,” she said, adding that he promised nothing would happen to her if she said these things.

The question remains as to whether Sonja Abitz will take the stand. Both she and her mother, Mary Abitz, have been in the county jail since February. They are charged as coconspirators in the murders.