Become an Apple Subscriber or Patron to listen.
Tensions skyrocketed at an Oregon home on Tuesday, July 26, 2016 shortly before a 911 call came through when a woman indicated that shots had been fired. When investigators arrived, they found 63-year-old Shane Moore dead from a single gunshot wound to the chest, a shot that was fired by his 26-year-old niece, Tucker Reed. She claimed that she had shot her uncle because she believed that her mother’s life was at risk.
Tucker Reed was born Aisling Tucker Moore-Reed on October 15, 1989 in Los Gatos, California to parents & authors, Kelly Moore & Dan Reed. Before Kelly & her husband wrote Deadly Medicine, a best selling true crime book that was later turned into a made-for-TV-movie on NBC, she had worked as a California attorney.
Tucker was raised in Oregon & having two parents who were authors, she herself, was also a very creative person. During her teenage years, she was an active member of the theater community & she was also into music, performing with an alternative rock band. She also served as editor-in-chief for her school newspaper, The Rogue News.
Tucker began following in her parent’s footsteps when she decided that she wanted to write a novel, something she, her mom & her sister, Larkin, worked on together in 2009. In 2010, she was off to college where she attended the University of Southern California to pursue a broadcast journalism, cinema & theater degree.
During her time at USC, she participated in the college newspaper until she eventually took on the role of assistant editor. By 2011, she, her mom & her sister received a six-figure deal with Scholastic’s Arthur A. Levine Books for their novel, a young adult trilogy titled Amber House Trilogy. The first novel was released in 2012, followed by the second novel in January 2014. Tucker also narrated the audio books.
That same year in 2014, Tucker decided to withdraw from USC & two years later, in early 2016, she began working as a reporter for The Grants Pass Daily Courier before she quit the same year.
According to Tucker’s dad, Dan, his daughters were sadly raised in a very tumultuous household that he described as a psychological & emotional warzone while his marriage to Kelly unraveled until they eventually divorced.
While Tucker’s career began to fluctuate, she was also an outspoken advocate for feminism, speaking out against gender violence while advocating for women’s rights. In a blog post she wrote in 2013, Tucker discussed an alleged sexual assault while naming an ex-boyfriend that she’d dated for only a few weeks. She indicated that while they were intoxicated three years earlier in 2010, they had sex, but because she’d told her boyfriend no, the encounter had not been consensual.
According to Tucker, authorities had done nothing about the situation, something that left her both traumatized & suicidal. Since Tucker included pictures of the accused man on the blog post, readers could see who committed this crime against her.
Tucker also felt that USC had not been helpful in conducting a proper investigation & when they found no evidence of a sexual assault, she held a press conference. In response to the blog post, her ex-boyfriend counter-sued her for defamation. The situation was very confusing since although Tucker indicated they’d only been dating for several weeks before the alleged rape took place in 2010, they continued to date for an additional two years until they broke up in 2012. Tucker indicated that she continued dating this man because she was in denial about the assault & claimed to have a recording of him confessing to the crime.
In the end, Tucker was found liable for defamation, which is when she dropped out of college & moved back to Oregon.
Meanwhile, Shane Moore, Tucker’s maternal uncle, was also living in Oregon. After Kelly & Shane’s father passed away, Shane became a caretaker for their aging mother, Lore Moore, living at her rural home. It’s unclear what the state of Kelly & Shane’s relationship was prior to this happening, but as Shane began taking care of Lore, tensions began to rise in their sibling relationship.
One year after Tucker moved back to Oregon, she filed a restraining order against her uncle after an altercation took place in September 2015 for assault. Less than one year later, Shane lay dead on his mother’s porch at the hands of his niece.
After the restraining order, Shane was no longer staying at his mother’s house & instead, both Kelly & Tucker moved in.
With Shane now deceased, he was no longer able to speak for himself so Tucker was brought down to the police station to explain what led to his death. She told investigators that her uncle was a mentally unstable drug addict who had been trying to harass her grandmother into revising her will to give Shane control.
While they were at her grandmother’s house, Shane circled the premises until Kelly confronted him on the porch about the will. When he began charging at her mom, Tucker said she warned her uncle that she had a gun & she would shoot him. Since she was sure he was going to kill her mom, she fired it; she said that everything happened so fast & she wasn’t even sure how the gun worked when she fired it.
When police stepped out of the interrogation room, Tucker began gasping for breath, laying on the floor, basically hyperventilating. Right from the beginning, detectives felt something was off or missing from her story.
Kelly was also brought in for questioning & she accused her brother of growing cannabis & cooking meth on their mother’s property. Her version of events supported what her daughter had told investigators, that she was in the process of being assaulted when her brother died. She went on to say that he was screaming at her & trying to force himself into a house that he had no right to be in.
Detectives learned that Shane Moore had previously worked as an attorney in San Francisco before he started to struggle with drug addiction. In 2001, he moved onto his parent’s 150-acre ranch on Thompson Creek Road in Applegate, Oregon, taking care of both his parents & their land.
As his father’s health began to deteriorate to the point that he became wheelchair bound, it was Shane who took care of all of his needs which was a full-time job.
According to Ryan Moore, Kelly & Shane’s brother, Shane was a truly good person who was the kindest person in the family outside of their father.
After Kelly & Dan divorced, her parents bought a home for herself & her children to live in. The plan was that after both parents passed away, Kelly would keep the house & she & Shane would split ownership of their ranch 50/50. According to Ryan, after their father died, everything changed.
Kelly fully admitted to investigators that she had been struggling terribly financially. She admitted that her mother had mortgaged the ranch to help her out with her finances, a decision that diminished the value of Shane’s portion of the inheritance. This caused friction between Kelly & Shane, which escalated to the point that Kelly filed assault charges & took out a temporary restraining order against him. This meant that when Kelly was visiting their mother, Shane couldn’t be there.
When Shane got word that there were conversations about him being potentially disinheritted, he asked his mom to sign her property over to himself & Kelly. They would file a grant deed that would split everything 50/50, preventing Kelly from taking everything for herself alone.
On the very day of Shane’s death, he hired a notary, Carla Tryber, to notarize the deed, but when she arrived at the ranch, Shane was nowhere to be found. As Carla was escorted into Lore’s kitchen, she had absolutely no idea that she was walking into such chaos. From her place at the kitchen table, she was met with three highly agitated women; Tucker, her mom & her 91-year-old grandmother.
According to Carla, while she began arranging the paperwork for notarizing, Tucker stood silently in the corner of the kitchen. When Lore was unable to find her ID, they waited for a witness to verify her identity, a time when Carla spoke with Lore to be sure she understood what she was preparing to sign.
Carla indicated that when Kelly realized that they were dealing with a deed rather than a will, she angrily grabbed the paper away from her & tore it up. As Carla looked up, she could see Shane outside, a man she’d never met before, approaching the house toward the back.
Tucker, who was standing behind Carla, suddenly reached under a towel & grabbed a .38 revolver. In the meantime, Kelly went to the back door to confront him about the paperwork when Tucker charged toward the door with the gun & Carla suddenly heard the gun go off. As Shane shouted, You shot me!, Tucker ran to her bedroom while Carla tried to call 911, but the phone wasn’t working. When she asked Kelly for help with the phone, she refused & dropped the phone to the floor.
When Carla finally managed to get through to 911, she told the dispatcher that a gun went off, but fearing for her own safety, she handed the phone over to Lore, gathered her things & quickly left the house. When she dashed from the home, Kelly was holding the gun after taking it from her daughter.
As Carla stepped out onto the patio, she saw Shane’s body lying halfway off the porch, about 4 to 5 feet away from the door to the house. This immediately told her that Shane had not been trying to gain access to the house when he was shot as Tucker had claimed.
That same day, Tucker was arrested, charged with manslaughter & held on a $200,000 bail, but after posting 10% or $20,000, she was released less than a day later. On her release from prison, she began auditioning for acting gigs under the pseudonym, Wyn Reed.
One year after Shane’s death Wyn Reed auditioned for an independent horror film called From the Dark, about a tour guide’s last day at work in an isolated mountain area. She landed the lead role as Valerie Faust, who incidentally used a gun to protect herself, shooting someone to death in the process.
While the movie was filming from April to July 2018, the investigation into Shane’s death continued. It wasn’t until July 23, 2018, the day after Tucker wrapped filming, when the Oregon-based production company, Siskiyou Productions, found out about Tucker’s real-life murder case.
Since the budget for the movie’s filming had been so low, not only was Tucker not paid for her role in the film, but they had also been unable to afford conducting a background check on her.
When they initially learned about Tucker’s legal battles & her uncle’s death, they fully believed her claims of self-defense & felt that she was innocent. However, as more information began to emerge, their perspectives took a 180-degree change.
Only weeks before Tucker was set to go to trial, everyone familiar or involved with the case was stunned to learn that there was a video of Shane’s shooting that Tucker had recorded with her cell phone. This video came to light two years after Shane’s death when her lawyer gave it to the prosecutors as evidence. Police had previously taken her phone, but they never found the video because they didn’t have the passcode to open it.
The video depicted Shane pacing outside the back of the house as Kelly & Tucker explained to Carla that Lore was under the impression that she was signing an addendum to her will rather than a grant deed. Tucker suddenly yelled out that Shane was coming into the house as she picked up the gun.
However, while Kelly stood with the patio door open, telling Shane that their mother would not be signing a grant deed, it was clear that Shane had not been trying to get into the house. In the video, the gun could briefly be seen in Tucker’s hand just before she fired the deadly shot without warning.
After her uncle was dead, Tucker could be heard saying, He’s not dead? While her mom responded, No, he’s not dead. Tucker then reacted with an obscenity.
Detectives were stunned watching the video that was in stark contrast to both Kelly & Tucker’s versions of events. During the investigation, detectives learned that only two hours before his death, Shane contacted the sheriff’s department to report that he feared for his life. He explained that Tucker had fired a gun at his mother’s house, something that contradicted what she said in her interview, that she didn’t know how the gun worked.
When she was confronted with this information, she acted confused & said that after she test-fired it, her mom had taken it, placed it on the kitchen table & put a napkin over it. She said they wanted to keep it close because Shane had threatened Kelly earlier that day.
After Shane was shot, a witness overheard Tucker say to her mom, You told me to do it. This was something that Tucker denied ever saying & there was never enough evidence to connect Kelly to any crime. She maintained that she was simply afraid for her life, her daughter had acted in self-defense & she was happy that her brother was dead.
After detectives watched the video that proved that Shane had not been shot in self-defense, Tucker’s charges were upgraded to murder & she was held without bail. They suspected that his death was related to their desire to claim Shane’s portion of the property.
In January 2019, Tucker asked for a hearing to request the judge to grant bail while she awaited trial. During the hearing, Tucker’s video was shown & the phone call that Shane had made earlier that day to the sheriff’s department was played. When detectives examined the gun after Shane’s death, they realized that it contained only one empty shell casing which proved that it had been reloaded before Shane was shot.
Kelly denied being the one to reload the gun after the test fire which would have suggested that Tucker had been the person responsible. The judge denied Tucker the chance for release from prison before her trial & she immediately began hyperventilating & asked to leave the courtroom because she was either going to pass out or throw up. Her shrieks could be heard from all the way down the hall as she was led away.
Prison monitored phone calls proved to detectives that Tucker was not the wilting flower that she presented herself in front of certain people. Instead, she had a far stronger personality than that of her mom. This reinforced that much of Tucker’s behavior was more of a performance than it was genuine.
Kelly & Shane’s brother, Ryan, feared that jury members might judge Shane for his past choices, while on the other hand, they were very aware of the fact that Tucker, being an actress, could play it up for the jury.
In January 2020, Tucker faced charges of supplying contraband & unlawfully possessing heroin in prison while she was at Jackson County Jail.
On May 27, 2020, the DA allowed Tucker to plead guilty to a lesser charge of second-degree manslaughter, indicating that the jury might not have any way of knowing if Tucker had been acting or if she had truly been afraid for her & her family’s lives. Shane’s brother, Ryan, believed that it was just the DA’s way of getting the case done & out of the way.
Tucker was sentenced to six years & three months in prison, the minimum under Oregon law. With credit for time served before her trial, she was released in November 2024 when she was 40-years-old.
Meanwhile, the film that Tucker starred in, From the Dark, was released in 2020 & has a 2.5/10 star rating on IMDB.
Sadly, what led to Shane Moore’s violent & untimely death at the hands of his own niece, all stemmed from years of family conflict with an inheritance as the root cause. Greed often brings out the worst in people even when family is involved. Some might believe that the hardest part of losing a parent would be the grieving, but in many cases, it’s the family disputes regarding the separation of assets that come later.
References:
- Oxygen True Crime: Actress who played killer in movie fatally shot her uncle in real life amid family financial dispute
- IMDB: From the Dark
- Medium: The author who murdered her uncle – Tucker Reed
- Peacock: Dateline: Killer Role (Season 29, Episode 44)
- ABC News: Actress playing murderer in film charged in real life killing of uncle
- Soapcentral: Who is Tucker Moore-Reed? Horrifying details about the actress turned killer on Dateline episode Killer Rose, explored
- The Washington Post: An actress shot an attacker in a horror flick. Then, the crew discovered she’s charged in her uncle’s real-life killing
- The Cinemaholic: Tucker AKA Wyn Reed: Where is the killer niece now?
