Cell phone betrays fugitive accused in deadly love triangle

When the 21-year-old landscaper suspected of killing his boss in a suburban love triangle went on the lam Friday, he allegedly packed his getaway truck with clothes and maps.

Unfortunately for him, he also brought along his cell phone.

Police acknowledged Monday that they used the phone's signal to pinpoint Stephen M. Shappell in Denver over the weekend. Officers nabbed him as he walked from a motel late Sunday afternoon.

The arrest occurred a day after investigators found the body of Kevin Mengel Jr., 33, decomposing in a field near Marple Newtown High School.

And it came two nights after Morgan Mengel, Mengel's 34-year-old wife and the mother to his three children, allegedly admitted to West Goshen Township police that she and Shappell were lovers who plotted the June 17 slaying so they could be together.

Morgan Mengel told police that they spiked her husband's lemon Snapple with an unspecified drug, according to an affidavit filed after her arrest. She said Shappell then bludgeoned Mengel with a shovel at the garage where he ran his landscaping company.

As Chester County authorities awaited Shappell's extradition from Colorado, more details emerged Monday about his troubled life.

Public records and interviews with people who know Shappell portrayed him as a quiet young man, a loner who endured a tumultuous home life.

His father, Harry F. Shappell, shot himself to death in October 2005 in the Newtown Square home where Shappell lived with his parents and a younger brother.

The suicide followed years of domestic strife and financial and personal problems for Harry Shappell, an HVAC contractor, and his longtime girlfriend, Darlene Siter, according to a relative and a onetime neighbor of the Shappells'.

"They were not good for each other," said the relative, who asked not to be identified discussing family matters. For the boys, the relative said, "it was never good."

In the years after the suicide, Siter sold the house and moved with her sons several times, records show. At one point, the relative said, they lived near the Marple Newtown High School soccer field, not far from the spot where cadaver-sniffing dogs would later find Kevin Mengel's body in a makeshift grave.

Shappell attended the high school; his mother worked there as a hall monitor, quitting after his senior year in 2007, school records show.

Siter's most recent address, according to public records and the neighbor, was a second-floor apartment over a former gun shop on West Chester Pike a few blocks from the school.

No one answered a knock at the door Monday.

In August, police knocked there with a search warrant, after an acquaintance filed a complaint accusing Siter of stealing money, according to an affidavit filed in Delaware County Court. Officers found marijuana and drug paraphernalia in the apartment and charged both Siter and Shappell.

Siter pleaded guilty to drug possession and theft and was sentenced to three years' probation, records show. The charges against Shappell were dropped.

Meanwhile, the Mengels had their own familiarity with the court system.

Records show the couple married in August 1998, about seven months after the birth of their first child, but they soon split.

Three times over the next decade, they ended up back in family court. Twice, including as recently as 2008, Kevin Mengel accused his wife of taking their daughter and two sons and moving them to Pottstown. Once, in 2004, she filed for divorce, contending the marriage was irretrievably broken. All three times, the complaints were withdrawn.

Police credited both mothers with helping to crack the case. West Goshen Police Chief Michael Carroll called Siter "cooperative," but he would not elaborate.

And Carroll said Mengel's mother, Kathleen Barton, "certainly began the investigation" when she pressed detectives last week to look for her missing son.

In a brief and emotional phone interview Monday, Barton noted that this Friday would have been Kevin Mengel's 34th birthday. Instead of a celebration, she was talking about establishing a foundation to help his three children, ages 12, 10, and 6, and praising the work of the West Goshen Police Department.

It was Barton who contacted police on Father's Day, worried because she had not heard from her son in days. And it was Barton who later told officers someone had altered her son's Facebook page, and who discovered Morgan Mengel's affair with a worker named "Steve."

"Mothers need to know that they should follow their instincts," she said in the interview. "That's very important. . . . Mothers just know."