Appalling new details of a young man’s anatomical disassembly were shared with Wisconsin jurors during the second day of Taylor Schabusiness’ murder and necrophilia trial on Tuesday morning.
Shad Thyrion, 25, was killed and dismembered in his mother’s basement in February 2022. The state alleges the 25-year-old defendant took advantage of him during rough sex and choked him to death with a chain before later having sex with his corpse, otherwise violating the dead man’s body, and then cutting it into several pieces.
Dane County Deputy Medical Examiner Dr. Vincent Tranchida explained the details of how Thyrion’s body was systematically cut in shockingly detailed terms that have never before been publicized.
Content warning: The following details are exceedingly graphic.
“This body was essentially bloodless,” the state’s witness explained.
A prosecutor asked the witness if he had any concerns, from a toxicological perspective, about the blood that he was able to collect from the scene of the crime in the basement on Stony Brook Lane.
Tranchida said he did have such concerns because “this was hemorrhagic fluid that was collected” from “the bucket where a portion of the decedent’s remains were recovered” and that there were potentially additional substances in the bucket other than Thyrion’s blood, like spinal fluid, water, or another person’s blood.
The medical examiner also explained the arduous and lengthy, hourslong, in his opinion, process of the victim’s literal bloodletting.
“The back has been largely flayed and de-fleshed,” Tranchida said, directing jurors’ attention to a detailed black-and-white diagram of Thyrion’s body – post-mutilation – that made up part of his autopsy notes. “In other words: the skin of the back has been removed. Also, the muscles of the back have been removed so that we have [an] exposed rib cage and spine. The torso, so extending from about the neck and to the groin, has been bisected, or cut in half.”
The way the man’s body was cut in half, the witness explained, provided “access” to the inside of his chest, pelvis, and abdomen.
Thyrion’s killer took advantage of that access to do something particularly grim, bizarre, and morbid to the point of obscure.
“The left foot was recovered from within the lower chest cavity,” Tranchida explained – meaning the dead man’s foot was cut off and stuffed into his chest at the time it was found by law enforcement.
Taylor Schabusiness smiles in court on July 25, 2023; autopsy notes shown to the jury and judge appear inset, in Dane County, Wisc. (Law&Crime Network)
“Where we get to the right thigh, all of the soft tissue has been removed, so we’re down to the bone,” he added, accounting for the other leg. “We had the right knee to the right foot still intact.”
Asked for, in his medical opinion, how long the process took, the medical examiner answered over a defense objection: “This would be quite a few hours. We have decapitation. We have dismemberment. We have transection of the torso. Subsequently, internally, the body has been eviscerated. In other words: we have entered inside the body through various cuts; both at the abdomen and between the ribs. Where the victim’s organs have been removed – largely one by one. We have castration of the decedent.”
Police have previously referred to the discovery of a “male organ” inside the same bucket where the victim’s mother and boyfriend made the sad and macabre discovery of his severed head.
Also on Tuesday, Green Bay Police Department Detective Philip Scanlan, for the first time publicly, referred to “a penis and testicles” that were found underneath the head in the aforementioned bucket.
“Schabusiness stated she sucked the victim’s penis, that she had a dildo that she put in the victim’s mouth, and then in the victim’s a––,” the criminal complaint filed in the case alleges.
Prosecutors have charged her with murder in the first degree, mutilating a corpse, and sexual assault in the third degree. Prior to the start of her trial, Schabusiness had a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity entered by her former attorney – who was eventually allowed to quit the case after she attacked him in an infamous courtroom contretemps caught on camera.
In a defense motion, Schabusiness’ attorney argued that the sexual assault charge should be dropped because such a crime was factually and legally impossible due to Thyrion already being dead.
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