The case against Jeremy Perrien changed after investigators found a hidden video on his dead wife’s phone that allegedly captured him attacking her weeks before she was killed. Perrien, 45, had told investigators that Shelby Perrien died by suicide inside the vehicle he was driving, saying she pulled a handgun from the console and shot herself in the head.
Shelby was pronounced dead at a hospital on June 29, 2025, after the incident was initially reported as a possible self-inflicted gunshot wound. Perrien told a highway patrol investigator that he and Shelby had been at a bar before an argument started because he was ready to leave and she was not. He said the argument was not physical.
According to court documents, he then said that Shelby began “drunk talking” in the vehicle and that he ignored her because he could not understand what she was saying. He claimed she told him, “I’m sorry that I’m a piece of [s—],” and then shot herself. Investigators later examining Shelby’s phone found a hidden video recorded in May 2025, roughly one month before her death. Court documents say that video allegedly showed Perrien striking Shelby in the face, choking her, punching her repeatedly and threatening to kill her.
The document says he punched her in the rib cage seven times at one point and then threw her onto the floor beside the bed. Investigators also accuse him of a pattern of abusive and threatening conduct that allegedly included physically assaulting Shelby, threatening to assault their child, telling Shelby to kill herself and saying he was going to kill her.
He is also accused of choking her more than a month before her death. Perrien was arrested Friday and charged with second-degree murder, harassment, domestic assault and tampering with physical evidence. His previous roles as an assistant fire chief, assistant coroner and reserve sheriff’s deputy also meant that the local sheriff’s office turned the investigation over to the Missouri State Highway Patrol Division of Drug and Crime Control.
Sheriff Derick Wheetley said the move was made because of personal and professional relationships involved in the case and to keep the investigation independent and transparent. What began as a report of a woman apparently taking her own life is now a murder case built around a conflicting account and a hidden recording that investigators say captured an alleged attack on Shelby only weeks before she died. The court documents now put those details side by side, leaving the account of what happened before her death at the center of the case. May Shelby Perrien rest in peace.
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