In the city of Red Oak, Texas, located south of Dallas, a distressing scene unfolded when the mother of Wade Reese discovered something startling at the mobile home where he resided with his wife, Amy Reese, and their three children. Wade’s deceased body was found inside a trash bin, where it had been decomposing for weeks, while Amy and the children were nowhere to be found.

Wade, aged 36, had been fatally shot twice in October 2012, roughly four years after meeting Amy through an online dating site. It wasn’t until December that his mother, Suzanna Azbill, along with her husband, Terry, visited his home due to their unsuccessful attempts to contact him for weeks. By the time they arrived, the mobile home was deserted, and there were no signs of his wife and children, as featured in a new episode of Snapped, airing Sundays at 6/5c on Oxygen.

The murder of Wade Reese

The grisly scene was jarring even to Red Oak law enforcement.

Ellis County Sheriff’s Investigator Katie Cheek recounted to the Snapped producers, “I came upon a deceased male lying face down, his head and torso inside a large green trash can. His feet were protruding from the trash can, extending into the doorway.”

“The feet are bound; the hands have been tied,” added fellow Ellis County Sheriff’s Investigator Joe Fitzgerald. “There’s a bag over his head. I’ve worked multiple homicides before this one, but this one was unique. It was shocking. It was apparent that their actions were to get the body completely in the trash can like they were going to take the trash out.”

Investigators determined that Wade had been dead for a long time, and that the perpetrator had apparent difficulty in carrying out their plan to dispose of his body. Knowing that he was married to Amy and that neither she nor the couple’s children had been heard from for several weeks, they were concerned for the rest of the family’s welfare, unsure whether Amy herself was in danger or actually a suspect.

Acting on a search warrant at a local storage facility rented by the Reeses, investigators found that Amy and the children had been seen there alive and safe shortly after the approximate time of Wade’s death.

“When we executed that search warrant and met with the storage facility personnel, we learned that Amy had come to the storage facility with the children,” Fitzgerald told Snapped. They didn’t know what Amy was doing, but they watched the children while Amy was in and out of her storage unit. Once we were able to put our eyes on Amy and the children, we no longer believed Amy had been abducted.”

How was Amy Reese caught?

Police caught an early break at the crime scene, where the contents of a second trash bin had remained preserved since the approximate time of Wade’s murder.

“Inside the trash can, we found several plastic or rubber gloves,” said Cheek. “We found the boxes for Borax laundry detergent and carpet deodorizer. I was able to develop fingerprints on the packaging for a 3M respirator mask, which would have been used to block out any sort of decomposition odor, and I was able to find a fingerprint on a box of contractor trash bags.”

At the storage facility, additional clues appeared to complement those found at the crime scene.

“We found several trash bags that contained bedding that had been stripped from the bed at the house,” said Cheek. “We found several articles of clothing that had apparent blood on them. We found several firearms and things of that nature. One of the articles of clothing was a pair of camouflage cargo shorts that had bloodstains on both sides and within the waistband of the shorts. We were actually shocked that these trash bags were in the storage unit. We did not think it was going to be that easy.”

A records check revealed that Amy Reese had pulled the children from local school on October 15, citing a family emergency. With almost two months’ distance between the October time of Wade’s murder and the recently-launched December investigation, local law enforcement conducted a nationwide DMV search in the hope of learning the current whereabouts of Amy and the children.

The DMV check revealed that Amy had obtained a driver’s license in the Denver area of Colorado.

“When we found out that Amy was in Colorado, it told us a couple of things,” Ellis County Sheriff’s Investigator Shane Thompson told Snapped. “It told us, one, she was OK — we didn’t have any reason to believe that she fell victim to anybody. Two, we got pretty excited, because we had a general area where we could look for her.”

Through enrollment records at Denver-area schools, Denver police were able to locate the Reeses’ children, and it wasn’t long before they also found Amy and brought her in for questioning.

Why did Amy Reese kill her husband, Wade?

“Amy was very responsive to my questions. She was cooperative,” recalled Denver Police Detective Jaime Castro. “She didn’t seem like the typical homicide suspect. What I learned from Amy during our interview was that she left Texas to get away from her husband.”

Amy’s interview, captured on closed circuit video and shown on Snapped, suggested Wade had behaved violently with their children and created an abusive domestic atmosphere; one she claimed had become untenable.

Amy told police she took the children and left their home on October 14, 2012, after she and Wade had fought over an incident in which he allegedly threw their daughter to the floor. But other evidence persuaded investigators that Amy had fabricated that account, as well as her entire portrayal of Wade as an abusive husband and father.

“When we had forensics go through her computers and phones, we found that she lived a life of deviant sexual acts,” said Fitzgerald. “… She was tired of Wade. She was ready to start a new life with somebody else.”

“Within days of Wade being dead, she was already on sexually explicit websites and chat rooms,” added journalist Christina Hughes Babb, who followed the Reese case, on Snapped.

Amy requested a defense attorney and declined to answer more questions before police could obtain a murder confession. But additional evidence — particularly her financial records, linked with on-camera purchases that tied her to objects found at the crime scene — eventually compelled Amy to seek a plea agreement at trial, in the hope of obtaining a more lenient sentence.

In 2015, an Ellis County jury returned a verdict sentencing Amy Reese to life in prison for the murder of her husband. She will be eligible for parole after serving for 30 years. 

“I would never have thought something like this would happen to our family,” reflected Chrystal Reese, Wade’s sister. “She’s a monster. The only thing I could ask her is, ‘Why? Why didn’t you just walk away?’”