The wife of a 27-year-old truck driver who was found fatally shot this month at a Westminster cement-hauling company was charged yesterday with hiring a Taneytown man to kill her husband, police said.
Melissa Lynn Baumgardner Shipley, 32, was arrested yesterday at her home in the northern Carroll County community of Silver Run, state police said. Also arrested without incident was Butchie Junior Stemple, whom police described as a friend of the woman.
Stemple, 28, was arrested at the Westminster-area lawn care business where he worked.
Stemple is accused of being the gunman in the killing of Scott E. Shipley on Nov. 15, said police, who added that they do not believe Melissa Shipley was present when her husband was shot. A gun recovered yesterday from Stemple's toolbox at the lawn care business was sent to the state police crime laboratory for ballistic testing, police said.
Both were charged with first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder, and the use of a handgun in the commission of a felony, after a review of the case by the Carroll County state's attorney, authorities said. They were to be processed last night at the Carroll County Detention Center's central booking unit.
Scott Shipley, who lived with his wife in the 1900 block of Blacks Schoolhouse Road in Silver Run, was found lying by his tractor-trailer at Gross Trucking near Westminster by the company's owner. He died from several gunshot wounds to the upper body, police said.
Police believe he was shot between 2:30 a.m. and 5 a.m., but investigators had not determined a motive for the killing, said Major Greg Shipley, a state police spokesman. The spokesman is not related to the victim.
Melissa Shipley agreed to pay Stemple $5,000 to kill her husband, said police, who did not know if Stemple, of the first block of Baltimore St., knew Scott Shipley.
The arrests occurred a week after Shipley's funeral, as the state police homicide unit and the Westminster barracks sought information from the public.
Several people at other businesses in the park and at Gross Trucking expressed fear after the homicide, the fifth in Carroll this year.
During their investigation, authorities learned that a handgun had been stolen in a break-in during the past month at the lawn care business, said police. Investigators obtained search warrants yesterday morning for the suspects' homes. Later yesterday, investigators recovered what they say is the stolen gun from Stemple's toolbox.
Scott Shipley married Melissa Lynn Baumgardner on Dec. 18 last year, and the couple was expecting a child in February. He was a stepfather to her two sons, Sirus and Dakota Miller, ages 11 and 8.
Melissa Shipley received a suspended one-year sentence and two years' probation in August 2000 after being convicted of a fourth-degree sex offense, according to Carroll County Circuit Court records. According to charging documents, Shipley, then 29 and going by the name of Melissa Miller, performed sexual acts on a 15-year-old boy at a Carroll County residence and in the back seat of her car while someone else drove.
Scott Shipley had been driving cement tanker trucks for Gross since April, after having worked for five or six years as a diesel mechanic at Alban Engine Power Systems in Elkridge. He was to have begun driving trucks at the family's Shipley Transport business in Sykesville the Monday after he was killed, said his father, Raymond E. Shipley of Westminster.