Seattle man charged with murder of woman whose body was found in suitcase

Shannon Reeder, a lifelong Seattle resident, was fatally attacked with an ax or a hatchet sometime between June and September but her homicide went undiscovered until her remains were found inside a suitcase during an encampment removal last month, according to King County prosecutors.

Reeder, 37, was identified from her fingerprints and suffered broken bones and sharp force injuries, says the second-degree murder charge filed Wednesday against Steven Nguyen. The 57-year-old Seattle man was arrested Oct. 3 on a state Department of Corrections felony warrant.

The suitcase containing Reeder’s remains was found Sept. 27 under Nguyen’s makeshift bed in a structure he built last year at an encampment near the Interstate 5 and Interstate 90 interchange, charging papers say.

Nguyen, who has prior felony convictions in Washington, Idaho and Oregon, most recently served a 9-month jail sentence for a 2022 attack on a 21-year-old woman in Seward Park after luring her into his truck with a promise of a shower and bed for the night, court records show. Charged with attempted indecent liberties with a deadly weapon, Nguyen ultimately pleaded guilty to second-degree assault and was released in March 2023.

Initially booked into the South Correctional Entity jail in Des Moines on the Department of Corrections warrant after his arrest this month in Seattle’s Chinatown International District, Nguyen was booked early Thursday into the King County Jail on the murder charge, where he is being held in lieu of $2 million bail.

Senior Deputy Prosecutor Thomas O’Ban II wrote in charging documents that the state is “very concerned” that if Nguyen isn’t held on high bail he will “continue to trade drugs for sex and use whatever violence he deems necessary against his unwilling victims.”

While Nguyen claimed he and Reeder were friends who occasionally had sex, the charges don’t say whether there is any evidence that Reeder was sexually assaulted.

Reeder was born in Seattle, lost her mother when she was 15, later lost custody of her three children and had drug addiction issues that led to her homelessness, according to previous court records.

Social service providers, working with the State Patrol and the state Department of Transportation, were clearing an unoccupied homeless encampment on Sept. 27 when one of the providers alerted a sergeant at the scene to an odor consistent with a decomposing body coming from one of the tent structures, say the charges against Nguyen.

The social worker went inside, pulled a suitcase from beneath the bed, opened it, cut through plastic packaging and saw what appeared to be human hair, the charges say. Detectives were called to the scene and later found mail addressed to Nguyen inside the structure, according to charging papers. A records search with the outreach agency that employs the social service providers also identified Nguyen as the person who lived there.

Based on the condition of Reeder’s remains, an associate medical examiner opined that the body had been in the suitcase for weeks or months, say the charges against Nguyen.

Detectives said Nguyen admitted to knowing Reeder in an interview after his arrest but claimed she had fallen on some rocks before fatally overdosing on fentanyl while the two smoked together in his tent, according to charging papers. He claimed he was too scared to call authorities to report her death and put her body in a suitcase under his bed, the charges say.

Five days later, the King County Medical Examiner’s Office ruled Reeder’s death a homicide and determined she died from multiple sharp and blunt force injuries, according to the charges. Injuries to her skull and neck were consistent with wounds from an ax or machete and were not the kind that would be suffered in a fall, the charges say.

Detectives learned Nguyen had been seen walking around the encampment with a hatchet in early May but the charges don’t provide any additional details.

Nguyen is scheduled to be arraigned on Oct. 30. Court records don’t indicate which defense attorney is representing him.