FL v. Shannon Ryan

Shannon Ryan was tried in Broward County, Florida, for the 2020 disappearance and presumed death of Leila Cavett, a twenty-one-year-old mother last seen on gas station surveillance video sitting beside him the night she vanished. Her toddler son was found wandering alone in a nearby parking lot the next morning; her body has never been found. Ryan pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder, the only count left after the State dropped the tampering with physical evidence and child neglect counts on September 14, 2026. On September 24 the jury found him guilty of second-degree murder. Sentencing, and a defense motion for a new trial, are set for October 23.

There was no confession, no established cause of death, and no recovered remains. Before the jury could reach the murder charge, it first had to decide whether the State had proven she is dead at all, and that whatever happened to her was a crime rather than an unexplained disappearance. That threshold, corpus delicti, was the quiet fight under everything else in this trial.

What the State had was a chain of circumstantial evidence: surveillance footage, a pattern of purchases and discarded items in the days after Leila vanished, and a search history investigators said raised hard questions. Six years after Leila Cavett disappeared, we were never here to convict Shannon Ryan or to acquit him. We came to watch whether that circumstantial chain would hold together in front of a jury asked to decide the hardest kind of case the system can bring: one with no body at all. The jury found that it did. Start with the background report below, then go through our coverage of the trial.