Pastor Told Secret Boyfriend That He 'Dreamed' About Killing His Wife

A pastor in Homewood, Alabama wrote emails to his secret boyfriend, detailing dreams he had of killing his wife. Naturally, this specific sort of love letter isn’t working out so well in hindsight, now that his wife is dead and the pastor is the main suspect.

Richard Shahan, according to Alabama.com, bitched about not being able to live his best life without losing his children and his job as the head of Birmingham’s First Baptist Church.

“I’m in a legal marriage contract [sic]. There is not an acceptable way for me to dissolve that and continue with the things that are important to me (my job and children)…There is only one way I could become legally ‘single’ and I have to wait until God grants me that gift. It will come; the woman I live with is slowly killing herself – she is diabetic and refuses to take care of herself physically. Her mother died early with the same disease and did the same thing to her body. So I pray and wait. It will happen in God’s timing.”

Prosecutors say that Shahan stabbed his wife Louise Shahan two years ago and planned to run off to Europe to marry his boyfriend. He wrote emails to his boyfriend about that too.

“And then I find myself thinking about and picturing myself packing up and leaving my life and moving to Scotland and the two of us living together for the rest of our lives. (I actually was standing in my closet the other night thinking, now which clothes would I pack up to move to Scotland). Or I find myself picturing you living with me in the house here and us living our lives day to day in Birmingham.”

Mrs. Shahan learned about her husband’s affair in 2012 and was not into polyamory according to her emails.

“I told him that he cannot keep both lives. That he will have to lose one of them,” Karen Louise Shahan wrote, according to the documents obtained by Al.com. “I said that if he was having any interactions that were not right before God that he should go to God and be completely honest with him because he knows anyway. I told him that God will reveal it to me. I told him that any texting or gmailing that does not bring glory to God has to go…”

After her death in 2013 just before New Year’s Eve, Shahan was questioned about his wife’s fatal stabbing and then released. But as he tried to board a flight to Germany soon after, the Department of Homeland Security picked him up at the gate.