Dateline NBC: "Under a Full Moon" (NBC News, originally aired November 6, 2015)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

L:ast night at 10 I watched an intriguing rerun of an NBC Dateline true-crime episode originally aired in 2015, though based on a murder from three years earlier: September 29, 2012, to be exact. The victim’s name was Shauna Tiaffay (pronounced “Tee-Yah-Fay”), though she got that mouthful of a last name not by birth but by marriage. Shauna worked as a Las Vegas casino waitress even though she didn’t drink – she had to trust the bartenders to make her customers the correct cocktails and make sure she presented them the right ones. Her husband, George Tiaffay, was a Las Vegas firefighter and emergency medical technician (EMT) who had served in the Army as an engineer, taken a brief job in that field, but then quit and retrained as a firefighter because he hated being stuck in an office all day and wanted to be out helping people. George and Shauna had a daughter two years before they were officially and legally married – in fact, when they went to Hawai’i to get hitched, they brought along their two-year-old daughter with them – only day care was always a problem due to their conflicting schedules. With her working at night at the Palms casino and him frequently having to work 24 hours at a time at a fire station, they usually left tiehr daughter with one of the grandparents.

LA few weeks before Shauna was murdered, her apartment was broken into and the thief stole some of her underwear, suggesting that she was being targeted by a sexual predator. When Shauna was finally murdered, more of her underwear disappeared and so did her wallet and I.D., though enough of her stuff survived that it appeared robbery was not a motive. The police initially suspected Gordon Tiaffay – when a wife is found murdered the suspicion almost always turns to the husband – but he seemingly had an air-tight alibi: he’d been on a 24-hour call the night of the murder. After a string of investigatory dead ends the police got an anonymous tip call identifying the murderer as a homeless Black man called “Greyhound,” who lived at two different campsites in the desert and did itinerant work at a handyman when he wasn’t indulging in his alcohol and drug habits. “Greyhound”’s real name turned out to be Noel Stevens, and he had worked as a handyman for the Tiaffays, but George told he police he’d always called him “Neil Smith.” The cops got suspicious of George when he slipped up during a police investigation and started calling him “Noel” instead of “Neil.” Eventually the police decided that both George Tiaffay and Noel Stevens had been involved in Shauna’s murdeer, with George paying Noel to kill his wife and Noel carrying out the deed.

LThey had some objective evidence, notably a surveillance video showing the two men shopping together at a local Wal-Mart and purchasing dark clothing, knives, hammers – Shauna had been beaten to death with a blunt object that could have been a hammer – and gloves. Eventually Noel pleaded guilty and turned state’s evidence, giving the cpos a chilling confession in which he said he had overpowered Shauna nad kept hitting her on the head with the hammer until she stopped moving. The prosecutors got an indictment on the strength of Noel’s confession but worried about whether or not he’d be a good witness for them. Not only was Noel a long-time abuser of alcohol and drugs, his reputation for honesty was so low that when the authorities talked to the man who had alerted them to Noel’s existence in the first place, he said that on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being absolute honesty and 1 being total lying, Noel rated about 1 ½. Nonetheless, the prosecutor who wanted to put Noel on the stand won the argument and, despite the efforts of George’s attorney, Robert Langford, to impeach him on cross-examination (among other things, Langford pointed out that of the four hammers George and Noel had bought during their Wal-MNart run, none had been the murder weapon; his argument was that Hoel committed the murder on his own and implicated George as part of his deal with the police for leniency), they got their conviction. Both Noel and George were given life sentences, but Noel’s made him eligible for parole and George’s didn’t.

LLater George filed a handwritten appeal brief that ran over 100 pages of all-caps printing, during which he confessed to the murder but blamed it on his own drug use – particularly the Adderalll, estroogeh blockers and hormones, as a result of an injury on the job. He claimed that he had explained all this to Langford, but the attorney had never brought it up at trial. George’s appeal was denied and both he and Noel are still in prison. There are several striking aspects about this story, including the obvious one of what kind of trauma this is going to pu t their daughter through – she’s now just entering adulthood and various celebrities, including crime novelist James Ellroy and country singer Shelby Lynne, have spoken about the trauma of growing up with the knowledge that one of your parents murdered the other – and also the Jekyll-and-Hyde aspects of George’s character. At work George was known as an incredibly generous man, not only going out of his way to help others but reaching out to ex-convicts to try to give them a hand (which was how he hooked up with Noel in the first place; in my younger days I’d sometimes try to help homeless people and I’d refer to them as “my stray cats,” and apparently Noel came into the Tiaffays’ lives as one of George’s stray cats). At home it was a different story: George was, according to Shauna’s friends and family (including her two sisters) a domkineering, controlling, abusive husband. The two had already separated at the time of Shauna’s death, and though there didn’t seem to be any alternate partners for either of them, Shauna was committed to divorcing George and George was willing to let her go but only if he could have custody of their daughter. That seems to have been his motive for killing her. This was an unusually haunting Dateline episode and one all too evocative of Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase “the banality of evil.”