The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The Lesbian Strangler: Jessica Ewing Murdered Friend Who Rejected Her

Posted on | June 3, 2015 | 45 Comments

Jessica Ewing (left) and her victim Samanata Shrestha (right).

Virginia Tech senior Samanata Shrestha was 21 when she was strangled to death in February 2014 by a fellow student, Jessica Ewing, 22. Police and prosecutors had not publicly discussed the motive, and it was not until a sentencing hearing this week that Ewing testified that she is a lesbian, and had been in love with Shrestha, who rejected her. Ada Calhoun at Cosmopolitan reports:

Shrestha had invited Ewing over for dinner. At the apartment, Ewing strangled Shrestha, then put the body in a sleeping bag and put it in the victim’s car. Her plans to burn the body were thwarted when a friend wouldn’t help her. She described this in a damning journal entry as: “Some friend. He fucking won’t even help me move a goddamn body . . . friendship test failed.” . . .
During her statement, pulled out of her bit by bit by her attorney, Ewing described a fragile mental state that made her “lose it” the night of the attack. She said she had been sexually abused by a friend’s father as a young girl, had been drugged and raped at a campus party by an unknown assailant in spring 2013, and had felt deep conflict around her sexual feelings for Shrestha. She said she had kept these secrets from everyone except for therapists at a local counseling center, whom she told about the rape. In fall 2013, she was depressed and failing classes, and that, too, she kept from her family. “The only thing I know how to do is hide things,” she said when explaining the steps she’d taken to conceal the murder. “The only thing I’ve ever done is hide what I don’t want people to know.” . . .
One of those in the courtroom was Shrestha’s boyfriend, Scott Masselli . . . They had talked, Masselli said, about getting married next year, and he’s haunted by a sense that he should have protected her . . .
Ewing said yesterday that she thought of Shrestha as a “golden child” or a “perfect person,” a derogatory descriptor she used for someone to whom things came easy. But Shrestha had overcome obstacles. She came to the United States at the age of 3 from Nepal and learned English at school while speaking Nepali at home. Shrestha eventually also became fluent in Spanish, Hindi, and American Sign Language. . . .
The week of Feb. 3, 2014, on one of their daily calls (Masselli graduated from Virginia Tech in 2012 and is now finishing up law school at William & Mary), Shrestha told Masselli that she was going to make dinner for Ewing on Friday. The girls had been around each other three or four times, Masselli said (Ewing said in court it was more like six).
The girls had also kissed once or twice. “Sam’s boyfriend was aware that Sam had some interest in finding out what it would be like to kiss another girl,” Commonwealth’s Attorney Mary Pettitt told Cosmopolitan.com. “There had been a kiss exchanged between the two girls, but he doesn’t like the characterization even of ‘experimenting.’ I don’t know how you describe that. It was curiosity or interest. He didn’t feel like she was bisexual or not interested in him or anything.”
“You would be greatly mistaken if you wrote that Sam had a romantic relationship with the defendant,” Masselli wrote in an email. . . .

Problem: One girl is “bi-curious” or “hetero-flexible,” and the other girl — well, it’s serious for her, you see? One girl is popular and successful and has a boyfriend in law school, and the other girl — well, she’s damaged, you see? We are expected to ignore the fact that damaged people are often dangerous people. We aren’t supposed to mention this, because we aren’t supposed to “stigmatize” the mentally ill. Certainly we cannot be permitted to “blame the victims,” and Jessica Ewing depicted herself as a victim twice-over, first of childhood molestation and then of campus rape, although (conveniently) this is an unverified narrative, a poor-pitiful-me story offered as an excuse for murder.

Excuse me for being unsympathetic to murderers. For every killer who tells this kind of tale of youthful woe, there are hundreds of other people who had worse childhoods and yet managed to grow up to be law-abiding responsible adults. Now we return to The Tale of The Lesbian Strangler:

At 3 in the morning the night before the dinner, Ewing texted a friend from her Bible study group: “Tomorrow night is worrisome. And I can’t stop this idea. It slowly creeped its way to consume my black heart. I want to … let someone else decide, but I’ve already etched it in history.”
Shrestha’s mother, Rajshree Shrestha, said in court yesterday that the family prides itself on being good hosts and believes it is the ultimate treachery to eat food someone has prepared for you knowing all the time that you plan to kill them. Ewing, however, said there was no plan, and that she and Shrestha had been secretly dating. Ewing said the “worrisome” text was about how she was expecting they would have sex that night, something she was excited for but also anxious about. For one thing, she said, she felt she would be cheating on her boyfriend. Also, she said growing up Baptist in the small town of Easton, Maryland, she was led to believe that homosexuality was wrong. . . .

(News flash: Lots of people grow up Baptist in small towns and don’t become lesbian murderers.)

“Jessica’s never been an aggressive person,” her mother, Donna Ewing, a band teacher, told the judge. . . . Answering a question about all the surprises her daughter introduced in court — shame around lesbian feelings, rape, childhood sexual abuse — Donna Ewing said through tears to the judge, “It just breaks my heart knowing what she’s had to endure.”

(Again: There are people who had worse childhoods, but did not grow up to become lesbian murderers.)

She said in court that she was ultimately kicked out of the [university’s] Corps [of Cadets] following an accusation around the same time made by someone “who had it in for me” that she had hazed new recruits by pouring water on their faces while they exercised. . . .
Once ostracized from her Corps friends, Ewing said, she spiraled into a depression. It was then that she met Shrestha. Both biology students, they’d met outside a classroom where they had back-to-back classes. They wound up talking about The Lion King, which Ewing said was her favorite movie and which Shrestha said she had never seen. They made a plan to watch the film together, and Ewing described that as their first date. . . .

(So “somebody had it in for” her, and she was ostracized and depressed and then she meets the girl she is destined to murder. Notice it’s always poor pitiful Jessica we are expected to feel sorry for? Not, y’know, the girl she strangled.)

About two months later, Ewing drove to Shrestha’s apartment with a large bottle of Yellowtail wine and a can of whipped cream. She spent a long time getting ready and was an hour late. When she arrived, she said, she was disappointed that Shrestha was wearing yoga pants and complained about it. Ewing said Shrestha then changed into a dress, the same dress found later with her naked body. They then bickered, Ewing recalled, over the proper way to chop bell peppers for the meal . . .
Shrestha texted with her boyfriend throughout the evening, and then after a lull, “She hid my phone, sorry. Ha ha. Love you.” . . .

(Notice Jessica was an aggressive pursuer? Notice she was “disappointed” and “complained”? Notice Samanata kept texting with her boyfriend — reassuring him — and this caused Jessica to hide her phone? This is what an obsessive, controlling personality is like.)

As they drank, Ewing said, they became playful, making a fort out of blankets and having a whipped cream fight. Ewing said they then both took all their clothes off and had sex in the fort. A fight followed, Ewing said, during which Ewing called Shrestha a “whore” and a “spoiled bitch” who had a paid-for apartment and a Mercedes. Ewing said Shrestha then told her she was only an “experiment,” and Ewing became “beyond mad. I was hurt and upset. I would say enraged . . . I loved Sam. I couldn’t believe she would be . . . that I could be just some experiment to her. It hit me where I was most vulnerable. It’s no excuse. But I couldn’t control it at the time.”
In a struggle, Ewing said, they knocked over a hamster cage. Ewing then overpowered Shrestha and strangled her to death.

You can read the rest. Jessica’s tale of sudden rage and loss of control, we understand, is intended to show that Samanata’s murder was not premeditated. But exactly why, after having sex with her, would Jessica call Samanata a “whore” and a “spoiled bitch”? If she harbored such resentments toward her, what was all that “playful” stuff about? Never mind. If this was a premeditated murder, Jessica’s plan for getting away for it was badly flawed. One interesting detail: Jessica asked “her best friend, Keifer Kyle Brown, to rid her apartment of ‘dark’ books — books about tarot cards and the occult and, inexplicably, a Shakespeare compilation — that she feared might make her look suspicious.”

Books about “tarot cards and the occult”? The lesbian murderer was dabbling in that stuff, huh? It makes sense.

 

Category: Crime

Comments

45 Responses to “The Lesbian Strangler: Jessica Ewing Murdered Friend Who Rejected Her”

  1. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    June 3rd, 2015 @ 9:59 pm

    Katie Perry songs can kill

  2. robertstacymccain
    June 3rd, 2015 @ 10:07 pm

    “I Kissed a Girl and She Strangled Me to Death”

  3. M. Thompson
    June 3rd, 2015 @ 10:16 pm

    So a psycho chick killed over rejection.

    If it had been a man who rejected her, no body, but a plea of self defense from attemped rape.

  4. Durasim
    June 3rd, 2015 @ 10:22 pm

    Maybe she and Teah Wimberly can become prison pen pals.

    http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/2010-03-26/news/fl-dillard-shooting-sentencing-20100325_1_teah-wimberly-amanda-collette-larry-s-davis

  5. Zohydro
    June 3rd, 2015 @ 10:37 pm

    A friend will help you move… Only a good friend will help you move a body!

  6. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    June 3rd, 2015 @ 11:04 pm

    Crime 101: Don’t write something this stupid in your journal:

    http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-6Cc2v8xNJgw/VW9otkCcG6I/AAAAAAAAvfc/NAQj-maDFmo/s1600/Friendship.PNG

  7. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    June 3rd, 2015 @ 11:06 pm

    Hey Katy Perry was “friends” with Russell Wilson and look what happened to him in the Super Bowl…

  8. Lesbian Co-Ed Strangler: Jessica Ewing’s Murder of Samanata Shrestha (with bonus faces of criminal evil) | Batshit Crazy News
    June 3rd, 2015 @ 11:09 pm

    […] a dinner between two girls ended in murder TOM: The Lesbian Strangler THE LESBIAN STRANGLER should have had a plan to get rid of the body *before* she killed her […]

  9. Daniel Freeman
    June 4th, 2015 @ 12:25 am

    I pray for a future in which RSM looks for examples of a world gone mad, and finds only stories of kittens rescued from trees and old ladies helped across the street.

  10. Steve Skubinna
    June 4th, 2015 @ 12:38 am

    Joke from my Cub Scout days:

    Q: Did you do your good deed today?
    A: Yes, four other Scouts and I helped an old lady cross the street.
    Q: Why did it take five of you?
    A: She didn’t want to go.

  11. Steve Skubinna
    June 4th, 2015 @ 12:40 am

    “It just breaks my heart knowing what she’s had to endure.”

    Good God. No wonder the daughter is a vicious amoral psychopath.

  12. Steve Skubinna
    June 4th, 2015 @ 12:46 am

    I have one or two friends like that. Thing is, I would never ask for their help in that event because I’d rather they be able to say truthfully “No, I don’t know anything at all about the disappearance.”

    Anyway, I live on the shores of Puget Sound. It’s over six hundred feet deep where I am. One or two square yards of chicken wire, about twenty feet of chain, and nothing to see. Within two weeks not even a body, just crab poop.

    By the way, would you like some crab cakes? Made them myself.

  13. Fail Burton
    June 4th, 2015 @ 2:55 am

    It’s the usual doublethink built into an ideology of pathological liars. Don’t mention the very mental health issues they use at the drop of a hat as an excuse for acting mental. Trigger warning for ableism, except for when not. This ideology is stinking up America.

  14. trangbang68
    June 4th, 2015 @ 6:19 am

    As a society as we get further estranged from cohesive community and the knowledge of God these soul dead evil freaks become more commonplace.
    Paul the apostle came to preach Christ to a pagan, superstitious, murderous first century world. Now that the liberal idiocracy has done all they can to drive God from the public square we’re going, it seems, back there. God help us.

  15. Fail Burton
    June 4th, 2015 @ 6:26 am

    #NotAllLesbians

  16. Zohydro
    June 4th, 2015 @ 6:27 am

    I’ve read that actually strangling someone takes considerable effort and a bit of skill—it’s not at all like it’s depicted on the tube…

  17. Steve Skubinna
    June 4th, 2015 @ 6:34 am

    Oh yeah, absolutely true.

    Um, or so I have heard.

  18. Gunga
    June 4th, 2015 @ 6:35 am

    ..and it takes a very…long…time to accomplish (I have two older brothers).

  19. Critical Eye
    June 4th, 2015 @ 6:59 am

    I’ve invented a jumbo slingshot. It’s perfect for placing kittens in trees.

  20. PeterP
    June 4th, 2015 @ 7:54 am

    Liberalism kills:

    1) “Invite a “damaged” mentally ill homeless person” into your home so he can kidnap and rape your child a la the uber-liberal, caring, tolerant, warm & fuzzy parents of Elizabeth Smart.

    2) Live with Grizzly bears ala Timothy Treadwell until one eats you for breakfast because “animals need love, too.”

    3) Move to the Middle East and provide assistance to and support for insane radical Muslims who want to kill Jews ala Kayla Mueller until one of them beheads you.

    The unwillingness or inability to call “evil” by its real name is a tried and true way to get killed by that evil.

  21. Finrod Felagund
    June 4th, 2015 @ 8:21 am

    There’s actually a show on Animal Planet now called Treetop Cat Rescue.

  22. Scoob
    June 4th, 2015 @ 8:59 am

    Maybe if the murderer followed “affirmative consent” as mandated by California on its colleges, Samanata would still be alive. NOT. You can’t legislate fixes to crazy.

  23. Steve Skubinna
    June 4th, 2015 @ 9:25 am

    That’s also true. Ticks me off when on TV or in a film somebody grabs a person’s throat and after a ten second struggle the victim expires. It takes at least two minutes of oxygen starvation for the brain to shut down. Not just lose consciousness, actually die.

    Of course, you don’t need to actually close the windpipe, just clamp down on the carotid artery and shut down blood flow to the brain. It takes strength and technique to crush the larynx, but an amateur could use a makeshift garrote or perhaps smother the victim with a pillow.

  24. Steve Skubinna
    June 4th, 2015 @ 9:35 am

    Can’t seem to face up to the facts,
    Tense and nervous, can’t relax.
    Can’t sleep, my bed’s on fire.
    Don’t touch me, I’m a real live wire…

  25. Hell Hath No Fury Like Lesbian Scorned | Constantinople (Not Istanbul)
    June 4th, 2015 @ 10:30 am

    […] From Robert Stacy McCain’s blog […]

  26. Jim R
    June 4th, 2015 @ 10:41 am

    She described this in a damning journal entry as: “Some friend. He fucking won’t even help me move a goddamn body . . . friendship test failed.” . . .

    This is as far as I got.

    Some people have… um… rather different ideas of friendship than I do.

    Ewing described a fragile mental state that made her “lose it” the night of the attack. She said she had been sexually abused by a friend’s father as a young girl, had been drugged and raped at a campus party by an unknown assailant in spring 2013, and had felt deep conflict around her sexual feelings for Shrestha.

    So, committing murder was how she coped with this??? Why couldn’t she carry a mattress around campus or make a critically-acclaimed (snort!) series for HBO like normal crazy women???

    One of those in the courtroom was Shrestha’s boyfriend, Scott Masselli . . . They had talked, Masselli said, about getting married next year, and he’s haunted by a sense that he should have protected her . . .

    Oh, that’s just the voice of cisheterocryptofascist patriarchy talking! Shrestha is better off dead than being raped by him for the rest of her life!

    — Sally Kohn

    Shrestha’s mother, Rajshree Shrestha, said in court yesterday that the family prides itself on being good hosts and believes it is the ultimate treachery to eat food someone has prepared for you knowing all the time that you plan to kill them.

    My, what a quaint custom! My family, too, has a similar custom: we don’t plan to murder people.

    “Jessica’s never been an aggressive person,” her mother, Donna Ewing, a band teacher, told the judge. . . . Answering a question about all the surprises her daughter introduced in court — shame around lesbian feelings, rape, childhood sexual abuse — Donna Ewing said through tears to the judge, “It just breaks my heart knowing what she’s had to endure.”

    And the Mother of the Year award goes to….

    They wound up talking about The Lion King, which Ewing said was her favorite movie and which Shrestha said she had never seen. They made a plan to watch the film together, and Ewing described that as their first date. . . .

    Um, watching a movie with somebody isn’t a “date” unless both sides think of it as such. Just saying.

    What a huge ball of crazy. Maybe that’s the plan: the insanity defense. I’d certainly buy it.

  27. HouseofSuffering
    June 4th, 2015 @ 10:54 am

    Better run run run run, run run run awaaaaaaaay.

  28. HouseofSuffering
    June 4th, 2015 @ 10:55 am

    How many did you originally have?

  29. Art Deco
    June 4th, 2015 @ 11:33 am

    1) “Invite a “damaged” mentally ill homeless person” into your home so
    he can kidnap and rape your child a la the uber-liberal, caring,
    tolerant, warm & fuzzy parents of Elizabeth Smart.

    He’d done some odd jobs at the Smart home for one day about seven months earlier. You are a vicious piece of work aren’t you?

  30. Matt_SE
    June 4th, 2015 @ 11:46 am

    Don’t be silly. There’s no such thing as affirmative consent for lesbians.

  31. ConstantineX1
    June 4th, 2015 @ 12:00 pm

    Really. Parents of Fluke’d up monsters like this should be in the dock with them.

  32. ConstantineX1
    June 4th, 2015 @ 12:01 pm

    I’m surprised the dead girl isn’t being prosecuted in abstention for the obvious “Hate Crime” of imposing her hetero-normality on a lesbian by rejecting her advances.

  33. Matt_SE
    June 4th, 2015 @ 12:04 pm

    Yes, I hear it’s become compulsory now.

  34. Gunga
    June 4th, 2015 @ 12:05 pm

    One more than I have currently, why do you ask? Can I get a rimshot?

  35. G Joubert
    June 4th, 2015 @ 12:41 pm

    And while we’re at it, the grizzly bears who ate Treadwell and his girlfriend were not evil, they just did what grizzly bears do, which is be predatory on their turf.

  36. Gunga
    June 4th, 2015 @ 12:47 pm

    I know that a little bit of me has died every time I’ve been exposed to one…

  37. Gunga
    June 4th, 2015 @ 12:52 pm

    A guy broke my hyoid bone when I was a teenager…(football ain’t fer sissies)…so thanks for the flashback! Also, I’m a little bit concerned about the amount of thought you put into that…do you write for CSI?

  38. PCachu
    June 4th, 2015 @ 1:11 pm

    That’s why we have an Internet. http://instantrimshot.com/

  39. Daniel O'Brien
    June 4th, 2015 @ 2:30 pm

    So she knows the old saying: Friends help you move. Good friends help you move bodies.

  40. The Lesbian Strangler: Jessica Ewing Murdered Friend Who Rejected Her | Living in Anglo-America
    June 4th, 2015 @ 6:08 pm

    […] http://theothermccain.com/2015/06/03/the-lesbian-strangler-jessica-ewing-murdered-friend-who-rejecte… […]

  41. Daniel Freeman
    June 5th, 2015 @ 12:27 am

    Considering the range of things that even relatively normal people are willing to do to get laid, I can see “What are you, prejudiced?” becoming the new “Don’t knock it ’til you’ve tried it!”

  42. Steve Skubinna
    June 5th, 2015 @ 12:51 am

    Ah, no, I just heard about it… from, uh, some guy.

  43. Steve Skubinna
    June 5th, 2015 @ 12:53 am

    Yeah, apex predators don’t care how much you grok the oneness of life and nature ‘n’ stuff.

  44. Steve Skubinna
    June 5th, 2015 @ 12:56 am

    Well, she says she was abused, she says she was raped. Because she’s a victim, most recently of that bitch Shrestha’s cisheteronormative oppression.

  45. PeterP
    June 5th, 2015 @ 8:47 am

    They sacrificed the safety of their own children to help an insane homeless man. It gave them the warm and fuzzy “aren’t-we-wonderful-people” goosebumps. They should have been thrown in jail for child neglect.