“His leather jacket was there. His dog was still running around and all his tools were there… It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up,” Jesse said.
A trans-identified male convicted of murdering and dismembering two handymen and then feeding them to his pigs has been serving his 50-year sentence in a women’s correctional facility in Oregon.
Susan Monica, born Steven Buchanan, was sentenced to serve at least 50 years in prison in 2015 after being found guilty of murder and abusing the corpses of two handymen, 59-year-old Stephen Delicino in 2012 and 56-year-old Robert Haney in 2013, according to an Oregon Live report from that time.
According to the Willamette Week, Monica is serving the sentence out at the Coffee Creek Correctional Facility, located around 16 miles south of Portland, Ore. The facility accommodates all State of Oregon female adults in custody.
The Oregon Department of Corrections lists Monica under the female name, and he is described as being "female" in official documents, according to the Daily Mail.
Monica, who previously served in the Vietnam war and is a US Navy veteran, bought the 20-acre farm in Oregon where the gruesome murders took place in 1991.
Delicino was hired by Monica to work on the farm in 2012. There was allegedly a confrontation between the two after the handyman was said to have been found with Monica’s gun.
Monica claimed that during the altercation, the gun misfired and hit Delicino in the back of the head, killing him. Monica also claimed that he shot Delicino in self defense, with senior assistant deputy district attorney Allan Smith telling the jury in closing arguments that Monica’s changing stories never matched the forensic evidence.
Monica told investigators that Delicino was eaten by his pigs before being buried on the farm.
Just one year later, Monica hired Haney to work as a handyman on the farm. The man’s children became worried when they hadn’t heard from their father in over two months and filed a missing persons report with the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office.
Haney’s son, Jesse, visited Monica’s farm on January 1, 2014 to ask for his father’s items back and ask where he was.
"We hadn't seen or heard from my dad for two months. We just all started to panic," Jesse said in a documentary about the murders.
"His leather jacket was there. His dog was still running around and all his tools were there… It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up," Jesse said.
When officers questioned Monica about Haney, he said Haney had quit working on the farm and left. Monica told investigators that Haney was being disemboweled by the pigs, and Monica shot him to ease his suffering. Some of Haney’s remains were found in plastic bags in the barn. Police were prompted to search the property after Haney's EBT card was found being used at a Walmart the day after Monica said he disappeared.
According to a Daily Mail report from the time of the trial, "A State Police forensic anthropologist, Veronica Vance, testified that Haney's legs had been chopped off with an ax, and the thigh bones showed signs of being gnawed by an animal."
It took jurors just an hour to deliberate the case, finding Monica guilty.
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