A 42-year-old woman from Missouri will be spending the next ten years behind bars for shooting her husband while he was sleeping—all because she couldn’t afford a divorce.
On Monday, Judge Jalilah Otto from Missouri’s Sixteenth Circuit Court sentenced Melanie Biggins to a decade in a state prison for killing her husband, Etienne L. McEwan, in 2022. Court records confirm that Biggins pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter as part of a deal with prosecutors. In exchange, her other charges, including first-degree murder and armed criminal action, were dropped. Initially, she was facing the possibility of life in prison.
The Night of the Crime
The tragic incident took place on August 31, 2022, in Kansas City, Missouri. Around 1 a.m., police officers rushed to a home on Gillespie Place after reports of a shooting. When they arrived, they were met by the couple’s two young daughters, ages 10 and 11, who were outside frantically waving their arms to get help.
Inside the home, officers found Biggins performing CPR on her husband, who was lying in bed, covered in blood. Despite her efforts, when paramedics arrived, they pronounced McEwan dead at the scene.
At first, Biggins claimed she woke up to a gunshot and found her husband bleeding next to her. She told police she didn’t know who shot him and that she noticed the front door of their home was open.
Investigators Uncover the Truth
However, detectives quickly ruled out suicide and found no evidence of forced entry. What they did find was suspicious:
- A pillow on the floor with bloodstains and a bullet hole.
- A bullet found inside the pillow stuffing.
- A blanket on the floor with a hole and burn marks from gunpowder.
- An empty handgun case for a Charter Arms .38 Special in the bedroom closet.
- A purple and black Charter Arms .38 Special revolver hidden under a bunk bed in another room.
- The gun had one spent shell casing, indicating it had been fired recently.
Biggins initially told officers that the only gun in the house was her husband’s rifle, which was stored in the closet. But when police confronted her with purchase records, she admitted that she had bought the .38 Special herself just a month before the shooting, in July 2022.
Her own daughters’ statements also contradicted her story. The children said they woke up to the gunshot, went downstairs, and found their mother sitting on the couch, looking as if she had seen a ghost. Then, when they went upstairs and turned on the bedroom light, they saw their father bleeding. One of them immediately ran to call 911 and handed the phone to their mother.
A Motive for Murder
Eventually, Biggins admitted that she wanted to leave her husband for another man. She told detectives that she had been in a relationship with someone else for over a year and a half. However, because of financial struggles, getting a divorce wasn’t an option—so she decided to take a much more drastic and deadly way out.
Despite originally facing a life sentence, her plea deal led to a reduced charge of voluntary manslaughter, and she was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
While Biggins now faces a decade behind bars, the real victims in this tragedy are her two young daughters, who not only lost their father in a horrific way but now have to grow up without their mother as well.
