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The Dateline episode titled Lone Star Obsession chronicled the harrowing 2012 case of Dr. Joseph Sonnier's murder. As the Dateline episode revealed, Dr. Joseph Sonnier was a native of Texas and a respected Pathologist who worked as the head of the pathology lab at a local hospital in Lubbock.
When he was found dead, brutally stabbed and shot, in his garage back in 2012, authorities were initially at a loss. Sonnier's family and friends had confirmed that they were at a loss to decipher who would ever want to hurt the kind-hearted doctor. Eventually, an unexpected tip helped the law enforcement agencies crack the case.
Here's everything we know about the case of Dr. Joseph Sonnier from the Dateline episode.
Dateline: What happened to Joseph Sonnier?
Correspondent Andrea Canning aptly summed up the tragedy of the case when he stated on Dateline: Unforgettable:
"Beyond the headlines, what I’ll always remember is the man at the heart of this case, Joe Sonnier. He was an impressive guy. A self-made man, a brilliant yet humble doctor who dedicated his life to helping others. Sometimes the victim gets lost in the bright glare of the spotlight, but that wasn’t the case with Joe.”
Sonnier was a reputed doctor and a loving family man who cared for his family members to the utmost degree. A traumatic event from his past occurred back in 2001 when his wife parted ways with him, resulting in the breakdown of their marriage. He then decided to bounce back and started efforts to better himself. He soon began taking ballroom dancing lessons, and this was when he met his new love in 2011 at the dance studio, a woman named Shetina.
When Sonnier's colleague and two other landscapers found him to be unresponsive at his home on that morning on July 10, 2012, they let themselves in and soon found to their horror that the doctor lay dead in his garage. He had been shot and stabbed multiple times.
How did the police apprehend the murderer of Joseph Sonnier?
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Upon taking into account all the evidence found inside Sonnier's premises, the police deduced that Sonnier's killing, and especially the stabbing, was quite a personal crime.
An unexpected tip from a man named Paul Reynolds revealed that his friend David Shepard, a conman, had killed Sonnier at the insistence of a Dr. Thomas Michael Dixon, who was a plastic surgeon. Shepard had been given three bars of silver by Dixon for carrying out the hit on Sonnier. Both Shepard and Dixon were soon arrested and brought to justice.
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