Confessed killer’s motive in Jenner beach murders remains shrouded in mystery

For 13 years, John Robles didn’t know who tried to kill him or why.

His wife was the one who walked out to his car that morning in 2004 in their Monte Rio neighborhood near the Russian River and saw a package left on the vehicle’s roof. Someone penned a note on the package that began with the greeting, “Dear friend,” and continued, “I’ve waited a long time for this,” Robles recalled.

His wife reached up to lift it off the car. Then it exploded.

More than a decade passed before Robles learned the suspected bomber was Shaun Michael Gallon, 40, a Forestville man he barely knew with a violent criminal past, a survivalist with extensive knowledge of the Sonoma Coast and Russian River area. They once exchanged blows at a Guerneville bar.

“Never once did his name cross my mind,” said Robles, 45.

Since Gallon’s arrest for his younger brother Shamus Gallon’s shooting death in 2017, he has confessed to trying to kill Robles with the makeshift bomb and three murders - his brother’s and the slaying of a Midwestern couple, Jason Allen and Lindsay Cutshall, shot to death as they slept on a Jenner beach.

That 2004 crime became one of the county’s most inscrutable cold cases, the millstone for a generation of Sonoma County sheriff’s detectives, many of them forever marked by the case.

Gallon’s trial would have provided the first public look into their 15-year investigation, unveiling evidence that authorities say they amassed against him, and possibly explaining what motivated Gallon to carry out the bizarre string of attacks.

But that step was averted this week when he signed a no-contest plea agreement with prosecutors, admitting to all charges against him to avoid a possible death sentence in favor of seven consecutive life prison terms.

The resolution brought great relief to the families of Cutshall and Allen, who said they did not want to see the grisly details of the case unearthed once more.

But it left prosecutors’ case against Gallon largely sealed and many questions about his motives unanswered.

Sonoma County Sheriff’s Detective Joey Horsman said he has spent hours questioning Gallon since he began cooperating from jail in 2017. While he has provided key information that corroborates his involvement in Allen’s and Cuthshall’s murders, he did not provide a clear explanation as to why he killed two people he’d never met.

“I can’t point to anything he said that explains it,” said Horsman in an interview Thursday outside Sonoma County courthouse after a judge approved the plea agreement. “He can be well spoken, intelligent, detailed. I still search for answers myself. What could lead him to do what he did?”

Allen’s mother, Delores Allen, said she is relieved to avoid a trial. Allen said she feels the detectives have done their best to explain to the family what they know about Gallon’s behavior and possible motives in killing her son and Cutshall, his fiancée. They were in Sonoma County to camp one night during a break from their jobs as camp counselors in the Sierra Nevada. She believes Gallon may have perceived them as invaders on his private beach.

“If it wasn’t for our faith, we would have a lot of questions that needed to be answered,” said Allen of Hamilton, Michigan. “We know where Jason and Lindsay are and we know we will be with them again. We know Shaun will answer for this, not only here on this Earth but in the future, too.”

The attack on Robles and his wife, Parvoneh Leval, was equally mysterious until Gallon was identified as a suspect 13 years later.

The bombing occurred on a morning in June 2004. Robles was watching cartoons with their daughters, ages 2 and 6, on a day off from his job as produce manager for Safeway in Guerneville. His wife was leaving for work and she was going to take Robles’ car, leaving hers behind because it had child seats.

She walked out the door. Moments later, an explosion rocked the house.

“I heard Parvoneh screaming my name,” Robles said. “I jumped up, and I remember telling the girls, ‘Stay in the room.’?”

When he opened the door he saw his wife collapse face first on the gravel driveway. She was covered in blood.

The explosion left Leval with scars and injuries that remain today. She cannot bend some of her fingers and can’t grip a baseball bat, her husband said. They moved to Washington state in 2005 after she had endured multiple surgeries and fought off infections. They wanted to get far away from Monte Rio.

Robles recalls trying to make lists for detectives of people who might want to harm him, although he never believed any would have tried to kill him. Detectives even considered Robles a suspect for a time, a line of inquiry he said was deeply painful given that his wife had been so badly hurt in an attack that appeared intended for him.

“I’ve been in a lot of fights in my life, and I’ve never been in a situation where it got so bad like someone would come after me,” Robles said. “Nothing ever added up. Still to this day it doesn’t add up.”

Robles and Gallon had run into each other from time to time. Robles said he knew Gallon as a quiet but personable man who had a close group of friends. Several months before the explosion, they were both at a bar where a group was celebrating a birthday party. A drunken woman was arguing with Robles’ friend and he tried to intervene. That’s when Gallon stepped in - apparently in defense of the woman.

“The first thing he did was do a roundhouse kick on me,” said Robles.

Robles said he was taken aback by what seemed like an expert move by an unassuming man, and they continued the fight outside. Robles said he felt that he walked away with the upper hand.

Several days later, Gallon showed up at Safeway where Robles worked and they talked about the fight, agreeing to let it go.

“I’d seen him multiple times, many, many times after that,” Robles said. “Head nod, handshake, we were always friendly with each other.”

At no time before Gallon’s 2017 arrest did he think the car bomb was placed by him.

Robles said he thought the Sheriff’s Office investigation into the bombing was short-lived. The department tapped experts with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, but sheriff’s officials said they never had much to go on.

Robles said he thought the case went cold in part because of the intense pressure brought on the department two months later, when Allen and Cutshall were killed.

Their deaths - discovered when a sheriff’s helicopter team rescuing a stranded hiker spotted the bodies in the sand of a remote cove - drew national attention. The ensuing investigation dragged on with no evidence suggesting a likely killer or motive. Nothing appeared taken from their campsite at Fish Head Beach.

“Many people in our community can put themselves in the position of Allen and Cutshall. They did this totally innocuous thing young people do: They went out on the beach and camped on the beach,” said Sheriff Mark Essick, a property crimes detective at the time. “It was this senseless extinguishment of two young lives who had so much potential.”

Essick’s role in the earliest days of the case was to work with trained volunteers who sifted through the sand in the days after the bodies were found to search for evidence. It was a painstaking task, digging at least 18 inches into the sand in about 100 square feet of the beach.

“We found nothing,” Essick said.

With no weapon or even spent shell casings, detectives had only bullets from the bodies to go on, said Sheriff’s Lt. Tim Duke, a lead detective at the outset of the case. They tested a discarded beer can on the beach for DNA. They asked the public for information about a car with a quirky back window decal spotted in the area. They visited homes of residents with registered guns similar to the .45-caliber rifle they suspected was the murder weapon.

Helicopter crews used thermal imaging and night vision technology to scan the coastline for possible hideouts or encampments. Detectives chased leads on suspects from Fort Bragg in Mendocino County to Canada and Mexico.

They brought in a specialist to develop behavior profiles of likely killers based on the scant evidence and facts of the crime - victims who were visitors and the remote location where they were slain.

About a week after the bodies were found, Gallon was arrested with what deputies suspected was a stolen gun. That was when his name was added to the suspect list, Duke said. But the weapon case was dismissed when a judge found prosecutors didn’t have enough evidence for a trial, records show.

Over the years, Duke said, Gallon’s behavior began to match some of the traits sketched out by the expert they tapped to crack the case: - territorial, a survivalist and active at night.

Sheriff’s personnel kept an eye on Gallon as his “misbehaviors” accumulated, Duke said. He was arrested repeatedly over the past two decades and convicted in cases involving assault, weapons charges and theft.

He was known in Guerneville for walking around with a handmade bow and arrow. He used weapons he made to feed himself, Duke said.

“At times when we go out to purchase things at a store, he’d go out to hunt things, shoot and poach animals,” he said. “He was a survivalist-type person.”

He landed behind bars for a 2009 attack when he shot an arrow at a man in a car, then fled, prompting a 29-hour standoff with law enforcement at and around his family’s forested home, where they believed Gallon had barricaded himself.

But Gallon had eluded deputies before they surrounded the home, fleeing to a nearby grove where he hid out for five weeks using self-taught survival skills before turning himself in.

He was convicted in 2010 and paroled sometime in the next year.

Six years passed and in March 2017 Gallon was arrested and jailed in the shooting death of his brother, in the home they shared with their mother. From jail, he sent deputies a note saying he wanted to talk, and the cold cases began to thaw.

What he told detectives, including Horsman, matched up with evidence gathered over all those years - including things that no one but the killer would know, authorities said.

Alone, the evidence wasn’t enough for an arrest, Duke said. The same threshold applied to his eventual confession. But together they led to the long-sought break in the case.

Still, why did he do it?

“I think the only person you’re going to get that from is Shaun,” Duke said.

“He was very candid about the crimes he committed,” Horsman said. “Does it make sense to me? No, it never will.”

You can reach Staff Writer Julie Johnson at 707-521-5220 or julie.johnson@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @jjpressdem.