The FBI Spent Fifty Days Searching a Landfill for Leila Cavett. They Never Found Her.

Day 1 of Shannon Ryan's murder trial ended on a missing pair of floor mats. Day 2 opened with a friend from the racetrack circle and ended, an hour and ten minutes later, with an FBI search leader telling the jury flatly that a fifty-day, hundreds-of-thousands-of-dollars search of a South Florida landfill never recovered the one thing this entire case has been missing since July 2020: Leila Cavett's body.

Before any of that testimony, a correction is owed to anyone who watched Day 1. This is not new information breaking mid-story, it is the record catching up to what the docket already shows. Shannon Ryan does not face three charges anymore. He faces one.

The Charges, Corrected

Ryan was originally charged with second-degree murder, tampering with physical evidence, and child neglect. On September 14, 2026, mid-trial, the State entered a nolle prosequi, a formal decision to drop the charge, on both the tampering and the child neglect counts. Neither has been refiled. The only count in front of this jury, now and for the rest of this trial, is second-degree murder. Everything in this article, and everything the State argued on Day 2, is aimed at proving that one charge, and that charge alone. Shannon Ryan is presumed innocent of it unless and until the State proves otherwise, beyond a reasonable doubt.

That correction matters for a case built the way this one is. With only a murder charge left, the State does not get to lean on a tampering count to explain away the missing body, or a neglect count to color the jury's view of Ryan as a caretaker. It has exactly one job for the rest of this trial: prove Leila Cavett is dead, and prove Ryan killed her. Day 2 morning was the State spending its first real stretch of testimony trying to do both at once, through a chain of ordinary-looking facts that only mean something once you see where they connect.

A Friend, a Racetrack, and a Truck Deal That Fell Through

The State's first witness was Joshua Meggett, a friend of Ryan's from the racetrack circle. Shown a surveillance still from the track, Meggett agreed the gold Lexus in frame was one he associated with Ryan, corroborating the same car Detective Susan Smith tied to the night Leila Cavett's toddler was found alone, back in Day 1 testimony. That was the whole of what mattered about the Lexus from this witness. It is an association, not an eyewitness account of who was driving it that night, and the defense will keep making that distinction every time the State's own witnesses blur it.

Separately, Meggett described a truck deal with Ryan that went nowhere. Ryan tried to sell him a white dually truck for about $12,500, a price Meggett testified he found unusually high for that kind of vehicle. The sale collapsed over the title. Meggett also confirmed he had shared a coworker's phone number with Ryan, and, on direct, denied recognizing two other names put to him by the State. None of that is dramatic on its own. What it does is put Ryan back in frame, socially and financially, in the weeks around July 2020, through a witness with no obvious motive to help either side.

The Dummy Buy

FBI Special Agent Brian Scott took the stand next, and his entire testimony was built around a single idea: if you cannot recover the actual evidence, you recreate it. Two Walmart receipts from July 26, 2020, one day after the racetrack meetup already established at trial, showed purchases of extra-large trash bags, carpet deodorizer, and duct tape. Scott testified he personally went back to that same Walmart and bought the identical items, "pretty much the exact same objects," so the jury would have something physical to look at instead of a grainy still frame.

Item by item, the prosecutor walked him back through the surveillance video against his own recreated purchase, and item by item, Scott confirmed the match: "Yes, ma'am." On cross, the defense narrowed his role rather than attacking the substance of it, having him clarify that his assignment was specifically the evidence-recovery piece, not a broader investigative canvas. On redirect, the State had him state the plain purpose of the exercise out loud: because the actual purchased items would never be recovered, the dummy buy exists so a jury, years later, can see exactly what was bought.

Fifty Days Inside Monarch Landfill

Then the case turned to the ground itself. FBI Special Agent Alejandro "Alex" F. Galeano, senior team leader of the Miami Field Office's Evidence Response Team, walked the jury through what it actually takes to search a landfill for a body. Respirator clearance. Tyvek suits. Composite-toe boots with steel shells. Crews rotating in twenty-to-thirty-minute shifts because the off-gassing from decomposing waste made longer stretches unsafe. An eighteen-wheeler of personal protective equipment. Five separate gas meters just to monitor what the search teams were breathing.

The site had a name: Monarch landfill, in Pompano Beach, a Waste Management facility on the scale of the ones serving Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties. The search ran roughly fifty days, from around September 30 through early December 2020, secured twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, with more than 325 FBI personnel and task force officers involved and Galeano himself present for forty of those fifty-some days. Florida Gulf Coast anthropologists were on site every day the search ran, because Galeano's own team was not trained to make the call on what was human versus animal bone. Waste Management's own equipment had to clear roughly 80,000 cubic feet of already-compacted garbage before searchers could even begin screening it across four separate pads. He told the jury the crews had recovered "over 12,600 bones during that search." He put the cost at well in excess of $400,000, not counting salaries, hotel rooms, or equipment flown in from Washington.

The Question the Whole Case Turns On

Direct examination of Galeano closed on the one question this entire trial exists to answer. Asked whether Leila Cavett's body was ever recovered from that search, Galeano's answer was one word: no. It is worth sitting with what that means. This is not a defense witness. This is the State's own FBI search leader, describing the State's own fifty-day, $400,000 effort to find physical proof that Leila Cavett is dead, and telling the jury under oath that the effort came up empty. The State is not hiding that fact. It is choosing to put it in front of the jury itself, on direct, before the defense ever gets the chance.

What the Defense Did With 12,000 Bones

Cross-examination did not attack the search. It agreed with almost every detail of it, then used the agreement to make its own point. Defense counsel had Galeano reconfirm the September 30 start date, the round-the-clock security, the more than 325 personnel, the anthropologists present every single day, even a small aside that the crews took Thanksgiving off. None of that was contested because none of it needed to be. The number the defense wanted on the record, confirmed twice, was this: more than 12,000 bones recovered from that landfill, and every single one of them determined by the on-site anthropologists to be non-human. Chicken bone. Rib bone. Cattle bone. Not one human bone, anywhere, after fifty days of searching.

Then came the sentence the defense will likely return to in closing arguments, months from now: after a search this size, this expensive, and this thorough, there was still no proof of Leila Cavett's remains. Whatever the State's theory of what happened to her, the physical search built specifically to confirm it turned up nothing to confirm.

A Second Agent, the Same Landfill, the Same Answer

The morning's fourth and final witness was FBI Supervisory Special Agent Austin M. Steelman, an associate division counsel in the FBI's legal unit who worked this case in 2020 as a special agent on financial crimes and as an assistant team leader on the Evidence Response Team. His first role was processing the gold Lexus a second time, in late August 2020, and identifying two items of clothing recovered from it, a black tank top and a pair of navy shorts, both bearing evidence markings he confirmed his own team never applied. His second role put him back at the same landfill Galeano had just described. Asked about it, he confirmed the same negative finding, in his own words: no remains tied to this case were recovered there either.

Two FBI agents, two separate roles in the same landfill search, one identical answer under oath. That is not a coincidence a jury will overlook, and it is not one the State is trying to hide from them.

Where Day 2 Leaves It

The court intended to sit through the afternoon. Our own coverage did not follow it there. The outlet feed this channel records from switched away from this trial during the lunch recess to cover a different case, and no afternoon footage from Day 2 has surfaced since. Everything in this article, and every video linked below, covers the morning session only, gavel to lunch recess, and that distinction matters enough to repeat: this is not the day the trial ended, it is the point where our own camera looked away.

What the morning did establish is the shape the rest of this trial is likely to take. The State is building its case exactly the way it told the jury it would on Day 1, brick by brick, through records and recreated evidence and expert testimony, because it has no body, no cause of death, and no confession to fall back on. Day 2 added a friend who places Ryan near a car on video, an FBI agent who matched a receipt to a purchase, and two more FBI agents who confirmed, without being asked to soften it, that the most expensive physical search in this case's history found nothing. The defense did not have to build an alternative theory of what happened to Leila Cavett on Day 2. It only had to let the State's own witnesses say, on the record, twice, that the body the State insists exists has never once been found.

For the full, unedited arc of the morning session, watch the No Breaks Edition below, every minute of court with every recess cut out, and the Top Moments compilation that follows it.

Court resumes Friday, September 18, 2026, at 9:30 a.m., with the State's case-in-chief still building toward the purchases and search-history evidence its opening statement promised but has not yet put in front of this jury. I will be watching all of it, and so should you. If you want to follow this case the way I do, gavel to gavel, the Case Story Trial Podcast playlist carries every part in order as they release.