Shanna Daniels was a 43-year-old breast cancer survivor who was continuing recovery from her April 2020 diagnosis, chemotherapy and double mastectomy. She was strong and independent — and getting her life back on track at the time of her brutal murder, her family and friends said.

Daniels had found a new job and a new place to live, an apartment in North St. Paul. It was there when, in July 2022, she met Melvin Bilbro, who lived in an apartment building next door.

Shanna Renae Daniels, 43, of North St. Paul. (Courtesy of Daniels’ family)

“They started dating, and she set boundaries around their relationship,” Daniels’ friend, Tracey Wilson, told the court Tuesday. “He didn’t like her boundaries.”

Just over six weeks into the relationship, Bilbro, a convicted felon with a history of domestic violence against women, turned on Daniels — beating, strangling and stabbing her to death in her apartment. He set fire to her body and bedroom to try to conceal the Aug. 25 killing.

On Tuesday, Ramsey County District Judge David Brown sentenced the 42-year-old to life in prison without the possibility of parole, the mandatory sentence for premeditated murder.

“The pain and the brutality you inflicted was horrific,” Brown said. “To desecrate her body by burning it in a futile attempt to cover up the murder was awful to her, and endangered the lives of everyone else in that apartment building.”

A grand jury indicted Bilbro of first-degree murder, second-degree intentional murder and first-degree arson in September. He waived a jury trial, and Brown found him guilty of all three charges on Feb. 2 after an eight-day bench trial.

At the time of the murder, Bilbro was a four-time convicted felon on intensive supervised release after serving prison time for failing to fulfill his registration requirement as a predatory offender. He was released from prison five months before the murder.

Bilbro’s other past convictions in Minnesota were for attempted second-degree murder of his then-girlfriend and for second-degree criminal sexual conduct involving her 12-year-old daughter, both from a 2008 case; and for third-degree assault involving another girlfriend in 2019.

He declined to address the court Tuesday.

Bloody evidence

North St. Paul police officers and firefighters responded to the fire at Daniels’ apartment building in the 2200 block of South Avenue around 6:30 p.m. Firefighters put out the blaze in Daniels’ third-floor apartment, and found her partially burned body on her bedroom floor.

The Ramsey County medical examiner’s office concluded that Daniels died of homicide before the fire. She had multiple sharp-force injuries to her head, neck and pelvic area, as well as a perforated left eye and fractured nose.

Witnesses at the scene said they had heard Daniels and her boyfriend arguing at the apartment the night before the fire, the charges said. Another witness saw Bilbro in Daniels’ apartment at the time of the fire. Her landlord identified Daniels’ boyfriend as Bilbro, who lived in an adjacent apartment building.

In Daniels’ apartment, investigators found a bag with bloody items: a pack of Newport cigarettes, a pair of scissors and a folding knife with its tip broken off.

In Bilbro’s apartment, a bloody pair of shoes was found near the door. A phone with bloodstains and a set of Daniels’ keys to her apartment were in his bedroom. A pair of sweatpants, a neon yellow work vest and a piece of paper — all with blood on them — were also found. Daniels’ small dog — covered in soot — was in the bathroom. Blood was on the sink and at the edge of the bathtub.

Melvin Bilbro (Courtesy of Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office)

Agents with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and other law enforcement officers arrested Bilbro around 4:30 a.m. the next day near a trail that led away from his apartment building. He had been sleeping in grass, and had with him a piece of paper with blood on it and Daniels’ EBT card.

In an interview with investigators, Bilbro changed his story several times, the charges said. At first, he said he was just friends with Daniels, then said they had a sexual relationship. He acted surprised when told about the fire, then said he was at his apartment during the fire and walked away to smoke marijuana. He said he last saw Daniels on Aug. 23, then said Aug. 25.

“Bilbro could not explain the items in his apartment that had blood on them,” the complaint said.

Past cases

Bilbro has a pattern of assaulting women dating back to 2002 in Illinois, Assistant Ramsey County Attorney Erin Gustafson told the judge Tuesday. “He is and he will always be a grave danger to society,” she said.

According to court documents in the Hennepin County attempted murder charge filed in 2008, Bilbro threatened to kill the woman he was dating at the time and attacked her while she was asleep and her children slept in the room next door. He choked the woman and stabbed her in the eye, blinding her in that eye. He also sexually touched the woman’s daughter, court documents said.

Bilbro was sentenced to 13½ years in prison. He was out in 2019 and was dating another woman when he punched her in both eyes, knocking her out in St. Paul, according to a criminal complaint. He was convicted of third-degree assault and given a nearly two-year sentence.

Because of the 2008 conviction, Bilbro had to register as a Level 2 predatory offender and notify law enforcement of any changes to his primary residence. In March 2021, Minneapolis officers were told that Bilbro was no longer at a treatment facility and his whereabouts were not known, according to another criminal complaint.

Bilbro was charged with failing to fulfill his registration requirement as a predatory offender. He pleaded guilty, was sent back to prison in September 2021 and was placed on intensive supervised release in March 2022.

‘Chance after chance’

On Tuesday, Daniels’ mother, Carmencita Crowelle, said in her victim impact statement that Bilbro took her oldest child, leaving her family and friends “with many sleepless nights, heartache, heartbreak.”

“Shanna came from a loving family,” she said. “Shanna was loved, and Shanna is missed every single day. Shanna represented so much love in our family.”

She said her daughter “could have been anyone’s daughter, granddaughter, wife or sister.” She said she now tells parents of young women to look into the backgrounds of the “new names that have encounters with the ones that they love.”

“I’m extremely mad. I’m extremely sad, and at times at a loss for words,” she said.

Daniels, in the short time she knew Bilbro, helped him “get on his feet,” said Angela Young, her friend from middle school.

“He took her kindness for her weakness,” she told the judge. “He had chance after chance to be a law-abiding citizen, but that’s not what he chose to do. He took his chance to take a life.”

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