Logan Staheli was only 10 years old when he found his father dead and his mother struggling to breathe in their blood-soaked bed.
His sister Wesley Staheli was only 13 years old when Brazilian police publicly named her and Logan as suspects just after their parents’ slayings, implying a small toy hatchet found in her bedroom had been used to kill them.
Both children were newly orphaned when a judge ordered them to stay in Brazil instead of returning home to Utah.
Their trauma is one of the reasons that the now-adult Staheli siblings — along with two other sisters — filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court last month against a Brazilian government-controlled oil and gas corporation, according to the federal complaint.
Another reason is to uncover the truth of what really happened to their parents, Todd and Michelle Staheli, almost 20 years ago, attorney Keith Woodwell told The Salt Lake Tribune. He said this lawsuit against Petróleo Brasileiro, known as Petrobras, is the “culmination” of almost three years of investigation and legal action.
In the complaint, the siblings say their father, an executive for Shell Oil Company, uncovered a “corruption scheme involving hundreds of millions of dollars in kickbacks and bribes involving Petrobras,” and that the oil giant had him and his wife killed in order to conceal it.
They also allege that Petrobras, Brazilian law enforcement officials and others intentionally caused them “severe emotional distress” and sought to cover up the killings.
Attempts to reach attorneys for Petrobras were not immediately successful.
Wesley (Staheli) Gillies, Logan Staheli, Madison (Staheli) Jones and Carly Staheli — who all now live in southern Utah County — seek compensatory and punitive damages.
A deadly mystery
In 2003, Shell sent Todd Staheli to Brazil to figure out why the oil company’s joint-venture pipeline projects with Petrobras in South America had been hemorrhaging millions of dollars for years. Michelle Staheli and the couple’s four young children joined him in Rio de Janeiro later that summer.
According to the lawsuit, just before Todd and Michelle Staheli were bludgeoned to death on Nov. 30, 2003, he had discovered that Shell had been losing money because Petrobras was paying and receiving kickbacks and bribes to “rig” the awarding of pipeline construction contracts.
“A public disclosure of the payoffs, bribes and kickbacks would be devastating to the company, its officials and government officials,” the lawsuit stated, and Petrobras stood to lose millions of dollars.
So, Todd Staheli was killed to “keep him quiet and to send a message to other would-be whistleblowers,” Woodwell said, referencing the allegations outlined in the lawsuit.
The savagery of the slayings, the lack of a clear motive, the mystery of how the assailant entered the high-security condominium and killed the Stahelis as their children slept — without leaving any sign of forced entry — made international headlines.
Associated Press footage of a 2003 news conference in Brazil shows an investigator holding up the toy hatchet found in Wesley’s bedroom to reporters. The Los Angeles Times reported in 2004 that tests for blood on the hatchet came back negative, but Wesley and Logan were still interrogated at length by police without a guardian or attorney present, the lawsuit alleges.
The two children were kept in Brazil for 11 days before being allowed to leave with relatives, the complaint states.
New documents
A handyman was convicted in connection to the Staheli killings in 2006, but that year, Todd Staheli’s father, Zera Staheli, told The Tribune that he didn’t believe the 22-year-old had done it. Zera Staheli died a few months ago, Woodwell said.
In 2021, the Staheli siblings brought a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the U.S. Department of State, suing for documents related to the case.
Since then, they have received several dozen documents from the State Department, Woodwell said, and some of them are referenced in the February complaint.
The Staheli siblings believe that the confidential cables and other records they received through the 2021 lawsuit show that U.S. government officials in Brazil didn’t trust the investigation that Rio de Janeiro police had conducted into the slayings, the lawsuit states.
One of the new documents is a cable from the American Consulate in Rio de Janeiro to the U.S. secretary of state dated Jan. 5, 2005. The message questioned the belief of Brazilian police that a crowbar seized from the handyman connected him to the killings because, the cable read, no blood was found on it, and the wounds the Stahelis had suffered weren’t consistent with ones that a crowbar would inflict.
In another cable, sent on March 9, 2006 — not long after the handyman had been convicted — the American Consulate told the U.S. secretary of state that “[w]e are not convinced that the Staheli assassin has been convicted.”
The Staheli siblings and their attorneys believe that there are still documents out there that have not been shared publicly, and accuse Petrobras, Brazilian police and others of trying to cover up information related to the slayings.
But the newly acquired records are “better than what we had before,” Woodwell said.
As of Thursday, the family is still in the process of serving Petrobras with the complaint. The company hasn’t officially responded to the allegations.
After their parents were killed, the Staheli children were raised by their grandparents on a ranch in Spanish Fork. The siblings grew up to be “very solid people,” Woodwell said. However, he added, “that burden still comes out.”
