FL v. Shannon Ryan

Shannon Ryan is set to stand trial in Broward County, Florida, for the 2020 disappearance and presumed death of Leila Cavett, a twenty-one-year-old mother last seen on gas station surveillance video sitting beside him the night she vanished. Her toddler son was found wandering alone in a nearby parking lot the next morning; her body has never been found. Ryan has pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder, the only remaining count after the State dropped the tampering with physical evidence and child neglect counts on September 14, 2026, and remains presumed innocent unless and until the State proves otherwise.

There is no confession, no established cause of death, and no recovered remains. Before a jury can decide whether Ryan killed Leila Cavett, it first has to decide whether the State has proven she is dead at all, and that whatever happened to her was a crime rather than an unexplained disappearance. That threshold, corpus delicti, is the quiet fight sitting underneath everything else this trial will litigate.

What the State does have is a chain of circumstantial evidence: surveillance footage, a pattern of purchases and discarded items in the days after Leila vanished, and a search history investigators say raises hard questions. Six years after Leila Cavett disappeared, we are not here to convict Shannon Ryan and we are not here to acquit him. We are here to watch whether that circumstantial chain holds together in front of a jury asked to decide the hardest kind of case the system can bring: one with no body at all. Start with the background report below, then follow every day of trial with us.