FL Man Pretends To Be His Own Wife For Nearly A Year After Killing Her
Jamie Ivancic was unusually silent for about a year. The young mother from Florida was last seen when she attended a Facetime call with her sister Karma Stewart, telling her that she was going to leave her husband and take their two kids with her. Jamie never told her where she was going to go, but that was the last time her sister spoke to her. That was on January 25, 2018. No one heard a peep from Jamie after that.
But her husband Shelby Svensen told friends and family that the young mother of two was usually busy. Jamie’s sister used to get an occasional text from her sister, but that was it. No one actually received a call from Jamie, nor did they get a video call. But pictures of her children came frequently, which made people believe that she was okay, albeit a little too busy to spare a moment for a chat.
A month ago, Jamie’s parents and brother also mysteriously went silent, which prompted a relative to launch an investigation. On New Year’s Day, the Tarpon Springs police were requested to make a wellness check on the silent family. What officers found was the decomposing bodies of Richard Ivancic, 71, Laura Ivancic, 59, and Nicholas Ivancic, 25, as well as the bodies of three dogs in their home, in a quiet retirement community not far from Tampa.
That’s when police zeroed-down on Shelby Svenson as the prime suspect. They managed to nab the perpetrator when they spotted him in his mother-in-law’s stolen SUV. Shelby’s two young children, aged 2 and 3, were with him. Currently, the children are in the care of child welfare authorities
When he was apprehended, Shelby confessed to killing his in-laws. The confession prompted Florida police to look into his wife Jamie’s strange case as she was reported missing under mysterious conditions. When they investigated her missing person case, the police were able to recover her body from the backyard of a home the couple shared, roughly 10 miles from her parents’ home. Pasco County Sheriff’s Col. Jeff Harrington spoke to the press about the ongoing investigation. He revealed that Jamie had died of ‘violent blunt force trauma’.
The officer also revealed that no one recalls having a conversation with Jamie since January, last year. Her sister said that she intended to leave her husband and take the kids with her, and that was the last time anyone had seen or heard from her. People would often receive picture updates of the kids from Jamie’s phone, leading them to believe that she was still alive and kicking. However, she could never be reached over video call or the phone because Shelby would tell people that his wife was busy and couldn’t answer the phone, or that she was out and couldn’t be reached.
“I feel betrayed and that I was played,” Jamie’s sister Karma Stewart told the Tampa Bay Times. “I didn’t expect the worst when I probably should have.”
Investigators on the case are looking into how exactly Shelby managed to keep the lies up for nearly a year. “It would appear that he was able to just trick them into thinking that she was unavailable, she was somewhere else and she was unavailable for a phone call,” said Harrington. “They vacated the residence, he and his kids, close to a year ago and he’s been in various places, in the area and elsewhere.”
The Sherrif’s Office is pushing towards charging Svensen with the murder of his wife as well as that of her parents and brother.