Former Everett woman's arrest rekindles interest in other cases

In December, Shawna Forde's estranged husband was shot three times in his Everett home by a stranger. A week later, Forde claimed on her Web site that she had been beaten with a bat, cut with a knife and raped by three attackers who spoke Spanish and wrote the number 13 on her floor.

A few weeks later, Forde, a self-styled anti-immigration crusader, was found by police in an Everett alleyway, suffering from what she claimed was a gunshot wound to her right forearm.

No one was ever arrested in the incidents.

But now that Forde is sitting in an Arizona jail, charged with killing a man and his 9-year-old daughter during a botched home-invasion robbery May 30 in the small town of Arivaca, Everett police say they are taking another look at two of the earlier incidents.

"The lead detective is looking to see if there is any information that might be helpful in solving our cases," Everett Police Department spokesman Sgt. Robert Goetz said Tuesday.

Forde's recent arrest has not only rekindled interest in the Everett cases. Police in California also are looking into whether Forde and two men charged in the Pima case — Jason Eugene Bush, 34, and Albert Robert Gaxiola, 42 — are connected to another home-invasion robbery on June 8 in Shasta Lake, Calif.

According to the Redding Record Searchlight newspaper, friends of Forde's biological mother, who lives in nearby Redding, were robbed at gunpoint by two men in U.S. Marshals uniforms who bound their wrists with cable ties and took a large amount of cash.

The couple said that Forde had cut the hair of one of the victims, a woman. They said Forde knew that the woman had just received an inheritance and was keeping the cash at home because she didn't trust the banks, the Record Searchlight reported.

Shasta County sheriff's Sgt. John Hubbard said the person who drove the robbers away from the home could have been Forde. "Shawna [Forde] has been to the house and knows them and knows they have money," he told the newspaper.

But the timing of the Shasta Lake home invasion — eight days after the Arivaca incident — could cast doubt on a connection.

Bush was arrested Thursday in Kingman, Ariz., just three days after the Shasta Lake robbery. He is in a Kingman hospital recovering from a bullet wound after he was shot in the calf during the Arivaca home invasion.

Bush, who has ties to white-supremacist groups, was charged last week in Chelan County Superior Court with the 1997 killing of a Hispanic transient in Wenatchee. An informant told Wenatchee police that Bush had bragged about killing "a Mexican" behind a store, according to court documents. Prosecutors say he was linked to the death through DNA evidence.

Forde, 41, Bush and Gaxiola were charged last week with first-degree murder in the May 30 slayings of a father and his 9-year-old daughter.

According to the Pima County, Ariz., sheriff's office, three people dressed as law-enforcement officers forced their way into the victims' home and shot the father, mother and child.

The mother survived and shot and wounded Bush, the sheriff's office said. The Pima County Sheriff's Department has said Forde was the founder of the Minutemen American Defense organization, an anti-illegal-immigration splinter group, and had been trying to fund a border-watch campaign with the fatal home-invasion robbery.

According to Everett police, Forde's former husband was home alone at the couple's house in the 2200 block of Rockefeller Avenue on Dec. 22 when he was shot several times by a "narrow-faced" stranger.

A week later, in the same house, Forde claimed on her Minutemen American Defense Web site that she had been "brutally attacked," beaten with something like a bat, cut and raped by as many as three assailants. She claimed they talked about drowning her, one of them spoke Spanish and they left a sign linking them to a gang or Mexican drug cartel.

On Jan. 15, she claimed she was walking alone to a friend's house when she saw two cars that she'd seen circling her house two weeks earlier, ducked into an alley in the 1800 block of 24th Street and was allegedly shot in the arm, according to a report in The Herald newspaper of Everett.

Forde claimed in a February interview with the newspaper that the shooting of her husband and the two reported attacks on her were connected to her work near the border, where she said she conducted "desert surveillance and undercover investigations aimed at curbing illegal immigration and drug smuggling."

In the same newspaper story, however, she also implicated friends of her son in the attacks. At the time, her son was in prison on unrelated weapons charges.

Everett police said Tuesday they continue to investigate the shooting of Forde's former husband and the alleged attack on her in the alley. Goetz said Everett police are waiting for the state crime lab to analyze evidence collected during the investigations.

The Dec. 29 case, in which Forde claimed to have been attacked and raped, has been closed.

"We just don't have any evidence to follow in that case," Goetz said.

Information from The Associated Press and Seattle Times archives is included in this report.

Christine Clarridge: 206-464-8983 or cclarridge@seattletimes.com.