Shawnie Vel Young was in a brief relationship with her Mississippi boyfriend, but investigators report that their short time together was enough for her to become obsessively jealous after the breakup—a jealousy that ultimately led to murder.

Approximately 30 minutes north of Tupelo, in Baldwyn, Mississippi, Pamela Britt’s colleagues became worried when she failed to answer their calls one day in February 2020, according to Snapped, which airs Sundays at 6/5c on Oxygen. When they went to check on her at home, they found an unfamiliar woman dressed in black acting erratically. As police arrived to investigate, the woman ran off into a nearby field.

Inside Britt’s home, police found her lifeless body. Britt, a 63-year-old beloved grandmother, was a well-respected member of the tight-knit southern community, as depicted on Snapped.

Taking the woman in black into custody for questioning posed little challenge for the local police … but getting her to reveal her secrets initially seemed all but impossible.

The murder of Pamela Britt

Found inside her garage, Britt’s body showed no signs of wounds or trauma — only some bondage markings on her wrists and a bluish facial hue that suggested she had been asphyxiated.

Although she’d quickly been apprehended, the woman in black wouldn’t reveal her identity — or her reason for being at Britt’s home — to police. But a search of her handbag revealed incriminating evidence, including zip ties, a Taser, plastic wrap, and a dark pillowcase that investigators believe had been used to immobilize and suffocate the murder victim, according to Snapped.

With the mysterious woman in custody but unwilling to talk, investigators began reaching out to local residents who might have information about both the victim and the suspect.

They soon learned that Britt had recently dated a local man named David. A woman named Yvonne, David’s previous girlfriend, didn’t match the description of the woman they had in custody and was quickly ruled out as a suspect. But Yvonne’s account of a long and messy breakup with David, along with the protracted aftermath of custody battles and subsequent romantic partners, yielded a new name from David’s more recent past: an ex-girlfriend named Shawnie Vel Young, according to Snapped.

Who is Shawnie Vel Young?

Shawnie Vel Young was, in fact, the woman in black whom police had taken into custody in the immediate wake of Britt’s death. Shawnie hadn’t dated David for very long before their brief relationship ended in 2019. But as David himself confirmed to investigators, Young had been staying at the home of a woman named Leeann Mann at the time of Britt’s murder — and Mann, as it turned out, was Britt’s cousin.

David had begun dating Pamela Britt in 2018, after putting his short relationship with Young behind him. It wasn’t long before Leeann Mann, as well as Britt’s two adult daughters, began to notice strange and disturbing incidents that seemed to follow Britt around in her routine comings and goings — including an odd moment, captured on video, that showed a woman in black approaching Britt’s parked vehicle and placing rocks in the back floorboard while Britt was parked at David’s home.

Police eventually deduced that Young was the woman in the video, and that she was doing more with Britt’s car than simply leaving rocks inside.

“She said that she put a tracker made out of a cell phone that she had taped up on Pam’s car,” said Britt’s cousin Leeann on Snapped, “so she would know where Pam was at all times.”

Additional police inquiries led to greater insight into Young’s apparent preoccupation with David and Pamela, despite the fact that her own relationship with David had lasted only a few short days.

“At the moment, I thought Shawnee and David dated for months. After knowing the case, it came to 10 to 12 days — maybe at the most — that Shawnee and David ever spent time together,” said Baldwyn police officer Anthony Buse on Snapped, alluding to the depth of Young’s evident fixation.

“By 2019, she was fixated on David and David and Pam’s relationship,” added former Baldwyn police detective Shane Young. “All day, every day — David. He was not interested in her.”

People who knew Young personally reported something similar, according to Snapped.

“From the very second I first met [Young], she was obsessed,” recalled Beth Reed, Leeann’s friend, on Snapped. “She never spoke of her children. She never spoke of her husband. She never spoke of anything outside of David and Pam … Leeann had kind of told her that I read Tarot cards and did things like that. She had asked me several times if I would do something to break Pam and David up — and it was love spells. It was darker type magic …  And I would not do it.”

“She wanted [David] to think about her 24/7,” added Shane Young. “And that was what she was trying to do. You can’t have a murder in the State of Mississippi without a little voodoo or hoodoo in it.”

While police had enough evidence to charge Young with capital murder, she remained steadfast in her refusal to talk. But as the COVID-19 pandemic set in early in 2020, Young finally agreed to speak with investigators while awaiting trial from inside the Lee County, Mississippi Correctional Center.

Video footage from Young’s prison interview featured on Snapped shows her crying and emotional as she attempts to persuade investigators that it was Britt who had attacked her, and that she had simply acted to defend herself. Police, however, weren’t persuaded.

“She tried to claim self defense and that sort of thing,” said Shane Young. “But there was absolutely zero evidence — on any of the four phones that Shawnie had; there was zero evidence on the phone that Pam had — that they had ever had any kind of conversation at all.”

Before Shawnie’s case could come up for trial, she struck an agreement with prosecutors; one that prevented her from becoming eligible for Mississippi’s death penalty in exchange for a guilty plea to second degree murder.

“Anybody that goes nine months planning somebody’s murder is not sorry,” reflected Pamela’s daughter Robin Martinez on Snapped. “She’s sorry she got caught. She wasn’t sorry for what she’d done. Second-degree murder felt like a slap in my face.”

Shawnie Vel Young is presently serving her sentence at the Mississippi Delta Correctional Facility, with a scheduled release date set for 2046. At the time of her release from prison, she will be 73 years old.