Shannon Bussberg

Shannon Bussberg is a thief and psychopath who caused me great emotional, physical, and financial harm. The purpose of this site is to warn people about her.

I’m not trying to exact vengeance on her. The only thing I want from her is the money that she stole from me. A sincere and deep apology, of course, would be nice, but she would never do that; for all her apparent shyness, she is arrogant, and when I knew her she was sure she can get away with anything. (Ever see anyone else doodle their own name again and again?) The first part of the writing below largely comprises something that I sent to Bussberg recently, and the rest is addressed to you, the reader. Please keep an open mind.

(Note: I sent an earlier version of this writing to Shannon Bussberg, hoping that she would make restitution. She emailed back, saying that she wouldn’t, and that she came here originally to live with me to help me with my depression. Complete BS. Shouldered no blame at all.

Shannon Bussberg,

As you know, you stole, through forgeries, all the money I had, and you put me in deep trouble, not to mention throwing me into tons of debt from all the credit cards you took out in my name. I was in trouble with the IRS over the documents you forged, my credit was nonexistent, and I was psychologically destroyed. You put me in a space that I would never trust anyone ever again. You know all that you did to me, and you never tried anything to make it right.

Although you cost me so, so much pain and suffering, I’m willing to let most of that go financially. But I want recompense for the money you stole and the inflation on that money. Also the damage caused to my teeth when I was unable to afford repairs because of your thefts. Steve Bussberg might lend you the money–he bailed you out financially when you got in trouble for taking money from credit cards under my sister’s name. So maybe he’ll do that for you now. You told me after he bailed you out that he said he was washing his hands of you in the future. But one never knows.

(You know, you used to tell me that you’re going to Hell. I of course assumed that you were exaggerating. Now I wonder what all other things you’re done. An aside: you used to tell me that you would never pay back your student loans, and that as a result you’d have to go to school periodically for the rest of your life to avoid paying the loans back. That did bother me, because it basically meant that you’d be stealing from other students in the future. More recently I saw that you’d somehow got a master’s degree. That seemed strange, since you’re not a good student–having me do as much as your school and work stuff for you as possible when you were here. So I assumed that you got the degree from online courses, as part of your loan payback avoidance plan. Sure enough I see that your school has optional online coursework.)

If you don’t try to make things right, here’s what I will do. First off, I’ll tell the truth to your whole family. (It was so horrible to have to listen to your mother try to “explain” to me that you were living with me in order to try to “help” me–a lie you told your parents in order to cover the long period while you were not working, while living on the stolen money. You told me that you told her that you were my caretaker of some sort. I’m definitely going to set her straight on that.) My story will be a complete one, and you know that I don’t lie. Plus I have tons of documents to back me up—everything from police and post office documents, to the forensic document examination report (see it in the Forgeries Gallery), to copies of the actual documents that you forged. (Plus I became something of a document examiner myself, so that people could see with their own eyes that Shannon Bussberg is a forger and thief. For example, back in your school years, you changed the way you form the letter ‘f’–for example, in the forged signature for my name–in a way that is nearly completely unique in this day and age. And the documents you created have all the hallmarks of forgeries: halting stop-and-go writing, capital letters that are florid and large compared to regular letters, etc. Once I get into my storage, I’ll send to you and the world the analysis as proof.)

But I will use the internet as well. Social media of all kinds, of course. Forums, relevant sites. Anyplace I can find, with, as before, documents that back me up. People need to know what they’re dealing with in their lives.

To the reader: Shannon Marie Bussberg and I live in Indiana and Illinois, respectively, and met online through a kinky match site. For a long while, we communicated with email and text. Then she told me that she was entering summer school at a prestigious university near me. This was a total lie, as I later learned from them when I was contacting them for writing samples for the document examiner. She ended up living at my place while she pretended to go to school. Then she stayed here with me after school supposedly ended for the term, and lived here for years, meanwhile stealing everything I had (except for a half ownership in the family house). She worked for a little while, but soon stopped, preferring to bleed me while she destroyed me.

I loved her, which was a huge misjudgment on my part. In my defense, she hid her lies very well; she is a very skilled psychopath, and I never noticed any lies while she was here. After she used up all of my money and more, she stole from my sister, who was not in love and less gullible and vulnerable than I. That put the police on her tail, and Shannon, seeing a bleak future ahead for herself if she stayed, went back to Indianapolis. She, no doubt hoping that everything would blow over and she’d be able to return to continue parasitizing me further, perhaps taking the house (she had wanted to marry me, and I suspect that the house was her objective for that). I truly thought she was innocent, for way too long. But since she was now back in Indianapolis and no longer had access to my mail (though she wanted me to send my mail to her, for her to “sort”), a letter from the IRS, telling me about taxes that I knew I didn’t owe, was shocking. I still thought that, somehow, she was innocent, but before long I realized the truth. Looking back, I know that she only came to live with me for two reasons: my trusting vulnerability and her unusual sexual proclivities. She never loved me. The bottom line, for readers that encounter her, is that Shannon Bussberg is a psychopath, is a very convincing liar, and neither looks nor acts like a psychopath. You should skip first impressions, and observe her for a while. I’m particularly concerned for her son, and the effect her behavior has on him. Wow, if there was ever someone who should not reproduce…

On to a collection of tidbits about Shannon Bussberg that I had the misfortune to collect about her over the years I knew her.

But first I’d like to summarize and simplify for the reader Shannon’s crimes against me. First she opened a post office box in nearby Des Plaines under her name, my name, and my dead mother’s name. She then forged requests for withdrawals from my money funds, changing the address from my house to the post office box, so that I wouldn’t see any correspondence. That resulted in a flow of withdrawal checks to the box, which she then forged an endorsement for, and deposited in accounts that she controlled. That’s all it took. She also opened a ton of credit cards under my name, and took out as many cash advances on the cards as possible, again making the address point to the box. (I should have hoped that the Post Office would require identification for all people listed on the box, but they only require that for the primary box holder, not secondary users. That’s a SERIOUS flaw in the system. Another flaw is that credit card companies have no sense of justice. For one thing, they require no identification from applicants from the internet. And ALL companies involved in Shannon Bussberg’s crimes declined to press charges against her. They looked at the legal costs involved, and said No Thanks. That means she stole many 10s of thousands of dollars from credit card companies. Easy credit plus no consequences for criminals. I hate credit card companies.) You’ll see below that she did more than that, but these were her main crimes.

I strongly suggest that the reader look at the Forgeries Gallery on this website. The gallery contains as many of the Shannon Bussberg forgeries as I was able to find, by asking for documentation from the institutions involved. And if you’re familiar with Shannon’s handwriting, you’ll be even more convinced of her guilt when you’re done.

Feel free to total up the amounts on the forged checks, and run that sum through an inflation-adjusting calculator site. You’ll find around $92,000 in today’s dollars. (And that doesn’t include lots of relatively small amounts which that I haven’t included.) I have asked her for $105,000 dollars. That’s $13,000 more than than $92k, but I include that because of the damage to my teeth that I wasn’t able to repair because of the missing stolen money. And tooth destruction begets more tooth destruction, if not repaired in time, so $13,000 is actually less than I should have asked for: I spent well over $13,000 for those particular repairs.

Shannon Bussberg told the police—TWICE—that I sexually abused her. The irony, as she knows, is that our roles were exactly reversed. It’s interesting that, when I told the detective that I wanted to press charges against her, he predicted, matter-of-factly, that of course she’d make that claim against me. At the time I didn’t believe him, thinking that Shannon would never stoop so low, but he was right.

The reason, I think, that Shannon thought that it was a smart move to lie in that way is that I had mentioned that the dean at my nearly-all-male undergrad school had told an assembly about a time when a townie accused a student of rape. The dean, bragging, told us that he then gathered a lot of students together to lie and say that they had had sex with her. The idea was that he wanted to paint the girl as a slut, and hopefully vitiate her claim. That was jaw-droppingly wrong, on multiple grounds, and I told Shannon about that. She responded that her similar experience was completely opposite; her dean told the audience that men in the guy’s position are quite simply screwed, regardless of whether they are guilty or not. Thus, I think, is where Shannon Bussberg’s idea was hatched.

When she stole the car (yes, OF COURSE I have documents about that as well—and I talked to the prosecutor later), she left a lot of my CDs in there. Then, when I got furious with law enforcement and the judicial system for picking on my poor, innocent (sarcastic), girlfriend, I persuaded her to go to Indiana with me so that I could try to straighten things out for her. I don’t know why she agreed to go there, because of course she wouldn’t ever let me talk to the prosecutor and thereby almost certainly learn the truth. (My theory is that, in her arrogance, Shannon initially thought she could talk the prosecutor into dropping charges. But she got afraid, and we ended up leaving without contacting anyone.) More important these days is that she wouldn’t “permit” me to go to the police to pick up my CDs from the car, obviously because she was afraid of my hearing the truth from them. The result is that I not only didn’t get the CDs, but I didn’t even remember all of the artists and titles, so that I couldn’t replace them. On first hearing, that might not seem like a big deal, but it is.

Of course, that’s just one of many messes Shannon left behind for me to try to straighten up, such as the reader she stole from the library, the tons of library fines over books she stole, all the services she secretly attached to my landline, and the bill that she ran up on the cell phone that was under my name but that she were the one that used.

When she decided to screw me over, she knew that any letters and such sent to my address increased her chance of being discovered. So she went to the nearby town of Des Plaines’s post office, and opened a post office box there. She even added my dead mother’s name to the box. I still have the forged federal application in her handwriting. Check in out in the Forgeries Gallery.

One of the writings Shannon Marie Bussberg left behind was a letter to my money fund, telling them to make her the beneficiary if I die. I still have it, in her handwriting, and you can see it in the Forgeries Gallery. The take-home message is that she was hoping for my death. Or maybe planning it? If she had played it straightforwardly, she could have just asked me to write it myself. Back in those innocent days, I would have done it for her eagerly.

When she knew that time was running out between her and the police because she also stole from my sister, she prepared, behind my back, for her departure. She hid all kinds of her stuff in the attic behind the costumes she and I had gathered. That’s how I got so many writing samples for the document examiner to use. Previously I had written to her employers for any scraps. Treasure trove, afterward.

When Shannon went home to Indianapolis, we stayed in contact for a while, before I knew the full truth of what she had done. She asked me to mail her sewing machine to her, while she encouraged me to drink a lot of vodka so she’d be sure that I’d finish the task. And she even had me send her money for food. She used me like a parasite does, knowing full well that I was going to have to go through total financial hell in the near future. What kind of human being does that to someone else? A psychopath. A Shannon Bussberg.

I noticed that she was looking for a car right after she left for Indianapolis. Which is really, really wrong, because I had no car at this point and she left me with no money for a car of my own. Which makes me wonder: there was a lot of money that we could have used to buy a car before, but instead she insisted on continually getting rental cars (supposedly paid for by her father George Bussberg, but really paid out of the money she stole from me). Why did she do that? Buying a car outright would have made my money last longer, so this makes no sense, even for a psychopath. Is it because it would be more obvious that I alone was paying for the car for the both of us?

I emailed with her former roommate or friend (was her name Elizabeth?—I can’t exactly remember, although I can dig it up if necessary). She said that Shannon Bussberg was the most deceptive person she’d ever met. I will give Shannon that—Shannon certainly don’t have the appearance of a psychopath, shy and quiet acting and all. It puts people off their guard.

In the same vein, she once told me that she would get together with friends and play a game in which she’d be in charge of the rest of the group, pretending that she’d was of royalty, and the others were lowly peasants to be abused and mistreated. It sounds like something that she’d fantasized about doing. But I’m not sure that she actually did it, because it’s hard to believe that she’s a leader type, or had many friends.

After she left for Indianapolis, in an email to Stacy she said that my sister and I were totally screwed up. But neither one of us hurt anyone, while she stole from both of us and destroyed one of us. That is screwed up.

I remember when we were first started off with emailing back and forth, I was online, both day and night. Later I asked whether it seemed strange that I was always available, and asked what she’d thought about that. She said that she’d assumed I was a genius child, keeping irregular school hours. I was shocked, because we were conducting some seriously kinky conversations. Didn’t she worry about damaging the kid psychologically? Nope, she said.

When we were first started off with emailing back and forth, I was online, both day and night. Later I asked whether it seemed strange that I was always available, and asked what she’d thought about that. She said that she’d assumed I was a genius child, keeping irregular school hours. I was shocked, because we were conducting some seriously kinky conversations. Didn’t she worry about damaging the kid psychologically? Nope, she said.

It reminds me of a time that I was in the basement, crying over something. She came downstairs, and hovered over me. I asked, “Are you excited about me crying???” She said, “It’s who I am.”

An aside: In college, she ran away without telling anyone, leaving people thinking, for a long time, that she was dead. (Documentation is available in newspaper copies online. Just Google “Shannon Bussberg” and look at newspaper images) When she told me about it later, she showed me a picture of her father George Stephen Bussberg during the time George and Betty Bussberg spent searching for her. He was exhausted and depressed. But instead of that making her feel bad about what she had caused, Shannon was openly proud that she had evaded detection. At the time, I assumed that I was reading her emotions wrong. But I now know better. She was happy about her parents’ despair.

It reminds me of a time that I was in the basement, crying over something. She came downstairs, and hovered over me. I asked, “Are you excited about me crying???” She said, “It’s who I am.”

(I wonder about what kind of people George Bussberg and Betty Bussberg are. On the one hand, I’m sometimes of a mind that if they created a thing like Shannon Bussberg they must be guilty of something. And Shannon once told me that, after she was discovered in hiding and had to come home, her mom was willing to pay for psychological help for her, but Shannon just took the money and did nothing to help herself, with her mother’s acquiescence. So that sounds sucky about them. But I’ve also watched TED talks with parents of school shooters, and they didn’t seen like bad parents. And from things I’ve seen online about Shannon’s parents, they seem okay. So I really don’t know about that. And on the third hand, I sent them an earlier version of this writing. And while I think my writing is persuasive, they don’t seem to have try to persuade Shannon to do the right thing here. Yeah, I understand that parents are biased in favor of their offspring.

Now that I think about it, I think that they really should have known what a liar and messed up Shannon was. Yeah, she’s a good liar, but they’ve known her for her entire life, and I know she had displayed examples of her dishonesty before. And even if she fooled them throughout her life, I know that they read what I wrote to them, and that really should have got them thinking about what she is. Hiding from the truth.

I just remembered: Once she and I happened to be driving behind a strip mall after hours. A cop car started following us. Shannon was cool. She suggested to me that I should get out and pretend to be examining the tire tread for a stuck rock. That worked fine, and the cop moved on. I told her that I had been nervous. She told me that she hadn’t been, because she always assumes that she is smarter than the police. That seemed incredibly arrogant to me. True, she might be smarter than some individual cops. But she doesn’t have their training and experience, the capability to call other police on the radio for backup, and weaponry. Every once in a while she’d let such incredible arrogance show through.

I remembered this as well. Once she joked, about a woman whose child had been killed, that it was no big deal since she could always make another. After she left for Indianapolis, I read a lot of books about psychopaths, to try to figure her out. The author of one of the books told the exact same joke, as an example of how psychopaths have a lack of empathy. I always wondered whether she told the joke because she had read in the same book, while she was reading to try to understand her own self.

This part is about back in the days that she and I were emailing and chatting and phoning, but had not yet met in person. She had told me that she had a friend name Jennifer (and Jon Tyrone Snowden’s friend as well) who was an extreme sadist who liked to tie men up in irons and beat them nearly to death. According to Bussberg, Jennifer was in law school and had her sights on becoming a criminal judge, just so that she could see the fear in the eyes of men defendants as she sentenced them to prison. she was very convincing. I wanted to stop this from happening in that future, and, fortunately for me, Bussberg had given me enough small clues to figure out her identity. I found out she was named Jennifer Combs, from a certain school. I called legal organizations to warn them, but none of them cared. So I called her a few times, warning her to stay on the straight and narrow in her future, because I’d be watching her career, waiting to turn her in if she misbehaved. I did tell Shannon after a while that I made the calls, and I’ll forever remember how her voice instantaneously changed into something unhuman and creepy, as if I were talking to two different people, one sounding literally like an animal.

But Shannon did not tell me that so much of what she’d told me had been a lie, nor ask me to stop pestering Jennifer. Until after Shannon’s friends had figured out that she were, somehow, involved, that is. Then she strongly asked me to stop. (Only because it was finally becoming a big problem for Shannon Bussberg personally.) I remembered that she revealed all the lies that she had apparently, up to that point, told me. She really sounded repentant, and answered anything that I would ask that night, and I asked the questions for a really long time. What she said seemed honest, and I believe, up to this day, that it was. She said that the reason she hadn’t tried to cut my calls off earlier is that she had envied Jennifer for her life, her appearance, smarts, etc., and she wanted to punish her for that, to bring her down to Shannon’s level. Strangely, previously she had assumed an almost worshipful attitude toward Jennifer’s abilities and status. (Even if seeming somehow superior, as in the one time she looked down on Jennifer because she wouldn’t send out an email unless it were grammatically perfect.) Shannon had mailed me a sort of liquid collage with Jennifer’s picture in it, and I wondered what the point of that was. (Was I supposed to worship her as well??) And she seemed in awe of her supposedly wearing a pair of handcuffs on her clothes while in public. Didn’t seem so impressive to me.

I asked later whether Shannon had feared that I would cut off contact forever after the reveal. She said no, because she was sure I was really into her, which seems arrogant, even if true. In any case, once the truth was revealed, I did right away stop the calls to Jennifer, and continued contact with Bussberg.

Note: Jennifer Combs (there are a lot of Jennifer Combs out there so I’m not sure who you are, or if you’ll see this), if you’re the one I’m describing and are reading this, please accept my sincere apology, and feel free to contact me at petrichor@shannonbussberg.com . If I had it to do over, I would probably still believe what Shannon Bussberg told me, because she’s really that good at lying, but I wouldn’t assume that it was up to me personally fix the world over it. There would have been other people later in your life who were closer to you who would be able to notice whether your behavior was dangerously off or not. I should have trusted them about that.

Strangely, I very quickly forgot about all that, and went on to start trusting Shannon completely. Truly my bad about that. But like I said, she’s a good, convincing liar.

I see that I’m not the only person whom Shannon stiffed. I found online that she was sued successfully for $950.00 (inflation adjusted). I also found that she had wages of $44,983 in 2019 as a teacher at Emma Donnan Elementary & Middle School in Indianapolis, which is higher than average for teachers in her position. (Looking at the ratings and comments for the school, it’s clear that it’s a very bad place to send your kids for learning, getting 2.5 stars out of 5, and it recently shut down for a time for not being up to standards. To be fair, Shannon didn’t earn those ratings all on her own, of course.) So, while she’s not exactly rich, she’s not exactly poor either.

When I first knew Shannon Bussberg on the internet, she caused a multicar pileup. I remember that she wrote to me that at the time that one of the passengers was a child and had a lot of blood on its face. She also said that the judge told her that she wouldn’t be in danger of being sued, because she had no money. I’m a little confused about that, since one of the documents about the incident (see Forgeries Gallery) says that she had to pay a relatively small amount of restitution to multiple victims. (I wonder whether her brother gave her the money for that.) Anyway, she got in trouble for driving without insurance, got a suspended sentence and a suspended license.

Now about the sexual stuff. Shannon was into domination and sadism, to an extreme degree. For example, she once tried to drown me in the bathtub, and used to time the seconds I could stay underwater while swimming. But this part will address 00. To anyone other than Shannon Bussberg and myself, the code 00 is probably cryptic, and deliberately so. The 0’s represent the two eyes in a human head. Or the removal thereof.

It needs to be emphasized that she tried to deliberately fucking blind me. And it wasn’t just a fantasy: she actually tried to do it for real, and she also said that she would like to take my hearing as well. I had assumed that all that she was doing was roleplaying, and I played along, because she liked it. Borrowing the Braille machine from the Mount Prospect library, etc. Kissing my eyes all the time in a soothing gesture, and caressing my eyelids. The strange thing is, even after we went well past the point where a regular person would have realized that she were playing for real, I didn’t. Partly that’s because she had extensively brainwashed me. But also I never fully believed that any actual human being, even a horrible one, would be sick enough to truly want to do something like that to another.

She knew that I was on disability for depression, and could not give meaningful consent. So if you think that she did what she did was for my benefit, that’s pathetic. I haven’t heard anything from her about her feeling guilty. Guilt is not in her psychopathic vocabulary is it? The whole concept of blinding me was to drive me deeper into misery, depression, and especially powerlessness. She told me, mysteriously, that the real excitement for her would come after 00. If not for her physical weakness, I would be blind today. If not for her having to skip town, which she knew, near the end, as the money ran out, was coming. The most intense 00 session happened when we had driven to Indiana, supposedly to help with her legal issue. She didn’t want to run the risk of missing out on the culmination of 00. She tied me down, even binding my fingers together with duct tape, and worked on suffocating (to ensure that I couldn’t escape) and rear choke holding me. She told me, when I said I was afraid, trying to get me to calm down and not struggle, that it’s okay to be afraid. It’s not. I would have been blind, and she would have left town for good, leaving me blind (and maybe deaf), penniless, and alone. Probably killing myself afterwards, if even able to do so. So don’t ever tell me or anyone else that she was trying to help me.

A random 00 flash from the past: She and I watched Minority Report together in a theater. There is a scene where Tom Cruise has his eyes removed and replaced by new ones, since his old eyes could identify him. In the process he’s blind for a few days. I asked her when we left what she thought about the movie. All that she remarked about is that that particular scene was “erotic.” That’s the word she used: “erotic.” It’s not supposed to be erotic. It’s supposed to be scary and disgusting. Which leads me to another 00 memory. She put some bandages on my eyes to simulating her having removed them. Then she put her fingers under the bandages and ran them around my lids. She told me, in an excited voice, that it felt like she was raping my eyes. Yes, this actually happened.

Eventually the police went to Indianapolis to question Bussberg. On returning, they filed a report about their trip. I suggest that the reader look at that report in the Forgeries Gallery with caption “She admits guilt.”

The Park Ridge police treated me horribly. Lying, avoiding helping me, acting with complete incompetence. But don’t get me started. They agreed to go to Indianapolis to talk to her. But that was a joke, because the State’s Attorney’s office said that they wouldn’t press charges unless Shannon confessed. I have no idea why they had that constraint, because they had plenty of evidence against her, including a state police forensic document examiner saying that she had forged the documents. But since Shannon had already lawyered up, there was going to be no chance that she was going to confess. So that, when the police drove to Indianapolis, there was no way at all that charges would be brought. The only way that the trip would be totally worthless is that if Shannon’s lawyer didn’t know about the confession restriction, which might put pressure on Shannon to agree to a restitution agreement. And that’s what happened.

The only problem is that the idea of restitution had come up before, and more than one officer had agreed that the idea that she would stick to a restitution agreement was literally laughable. As in laughing out loud laughable.
Summarizing: no charges would be brought, and no workable restitution agreement would happen. The idea of going to Indianapolis was a joke, just going through the motions. Par for the course for the Park Ridge police.

But they went to talk to her nevertheless, and the result, as you can read, was infuriating. So much Shannon lies. First of all, as I mention elsewhere, she had already told the lie that I had sexually abused her. Here, she had told the psychopathic lie that I had stalked her in the past. Next, she said that me, my sister, and Shannon “were all using the trust fund money to live.” No. My sister had a job as a college tutor, and I had disability income. It was only Shannon that had no income–my sister and I didn’t touch the trust fund money. Shannon said that “Bussberg does not know who signed/endorsed the disbursement checks,” but that the money went into Netbank and Citibank. Which is a strange thing to say, since she claimed to not even know who endorsed the checks. She, of course, forged the endorsements herself.

Bottom line is that Bussberg agreed to a restitution agreement. That means that she was admitting guilt, because no innocent person would agree to restoration of tens of thousands of dollars.

In the end, I didn’t approve the restitution. Partly because it was written up by her lawyer. Partly because the police laughed at the idea, so I assumed that she wouldn’t pay, at least for long, and of course I wouldn’t be able to press charges when she stopped paying. And also because signing the agreement would mean that I wouldn’t be able to sue, which seemed like a better route to take. And I was really upset that signing would meant that Shannon got away with her crimes without punishment. Unfortunately, the police pushed me to sign within a day or so (after their putting off doing anything about the case for literally years). And because of her thefts, I didn’t have the money to pay for a lawyer. It turns out that, while the lawyer would take the case on contingency, there were fees that I’d have to pay for upfront, and I couldn’t afford them. So Shannon got away with it, for the time being. If I had it to do over, I probably should have signed; at least I might have gotten a few hundred dollars. But now I want to get ALL the money she stole.