The Schanda Handley kidnapping was a 2017 abduction-for-hire in Lafayette, Louisiana, in which millionaire businessman Lawrence Michael Handley paid two men to seize his estranged wife from her home at gunpoint. The plot collapsed within an hour when an off-duty sheriff’s deputy stopped the getaway van on Interstate 10. Both kidnappers drowned while fleeing, Schanda was rescued alive, and Michael Handley later pleaded guilty to second-degree kidnapping and was sentenced to 35 years without parole.
How the Abduction Happened
On the afternoon of August 6, 2017, at about 2:30 p.m., two men arrived at Schanda Handley’s home on Founders Street in Lafayette. They wore uniforms resembling those of an appliance store and posed as deliverymen. When the door opened, they forced their way inside with guns drawn.
Schanda’s 14-year-old daughter, Isabella, and a neighbor were also in the house. The men tried to take Isabella too, but she refused to go, and they left her and the neighbor behind. They handcuffed Schanda, hooded her, stripped her, and loaded her into a rented white van.
The abduction did not come out of nowhere. In the months before, Michael Handley had broken into the family home on June 8, 2017, and held Schanda and Isabella at gunpoint, threatening to kill them. He distributed intimate videos of Schanda to people in their community. Text messages he sent her included lines such as “You are facing Armageddon and no court or order will save you” and “If you ignore us like usual someone you love will suffer tomorrow.” Schanda had a restraining order in place. The threats continued anyway.
The Rescue on Interstate 10
About an hour after the abduction, Deputy Chad Martin of the Iberville Parish Sheriff’s Office was driving home for Sunday dinner when he spotted a white van being driven erratically near Baton Rouge on I-10. Martin was off duty. He initiated a traffic stop anyway. The driver pulled onto the shoulder, then sped away.
The van eventually turned onto a dead-end dirt road roughly 60 miles from Lafayette and became stuck in the mud. The two men abandoned it and fled on foot into the Intracoastal Waterway, where both drowned. Their bodies were recovered the next day, on August 7, by the West Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff’s Office after children on a wave board spotted one of them in the canal.
Martin approached the abandoned van and found Schanda inside, naked and handcuffed. “She looked at me and said, ‘Are you the real police? Or are you the one that’s gonna kill me?'” he later recalled. He told her she was safe. She immediately told police she believed her estranged husband was behind it.
The Evidence Against Michael Handley
Investigators moved quickly on Michael Handley. Surveillance footage showed him buying handcuffs from Barney’s Police Depot three days before the kidnapping. An Enterprise Rent-A-Car receipt from Baton Rouge, dated the day before the abduction, tied him to the white van.
The most damaging evidence came from a motion-activated Arlo security camera at a remote property the couple owned in Mississippi. It had captured hundreds of hours of footage. Prosecutor Kenny Hebert reviewed the recordings and found Michael plotting the abduction with one of the men he hired. Two weeks before the kidnapping, Michael was recorded saying, “It’s almost impossible for anyone to get in here.” The reply: “And it’ll be impossible for her to get out.” In another clip, the hired man said that if Schanda “gets outta line, I won’t hesitate to kill her.” Michael himself was recorded at least once saying his wife “needed to die.”
Michael fled after the kidnapping and stayed on the run for four days. On August 11, 2017, detectives found him at a Super 8 motel in Slidell, Louisiana. In his possession they recovered nearly $10,000 in cash, illegal drugs, burner phones, and a handwritten to-do list. The list ended with the entry: “Finish the job.” Investigators read that as an intent to murder Schanda.
Who the Kidnappers Were
The two men were Sylvester Henry Bracey and Arsenio Montrell Haynes, both 27, both of Jackson, Mississippi. Both had extensive criminal histories. Because they drowned the day of the kidnapping, neither was ever charged in the case.
Charges, Plea, and Sentence
A Lafayette Parish grand jury indicted Michael Handley on six counts: criminal conspiracy to commit second-degree murder, conspiracy to commit aggravated kidnapping, aggravated kidnapping, attempted second-degree kidnapping, second-degree kidnapping, and violation of a protective order.
He initially entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. Two court-appointed doctors found he suffered from bipolar disorder and drug addiction, but a judge ruled him mentally competent to stand trial in 2018. In a divorce deposition, Michael offered his own account of the abduction: he called it a staged “game” designed so he could “swoop in, save her, and be the hero” and win Schanda back. His attorney, Kevin Stockstill, echoed the explanation and said Michael had been using methamphetamine and cocaine at the time.
On July 30, 2021, Handley pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree kidnapping and one count of attempted second-degree kidnapping. Prosecutors dropped the conspiracy to commit second-degree murder charge, the conspiracy to commit aggravated kidnapping charge, and the protective-order violation. The aggravated kidnapping charge was reduced to second-degree kidnapping. Stockstill said the defense took the deal because a life sentence was on the table and the team “wanted to ensure Handley has a shot at life after prison.”
On March 24, 2022, in the 15th Judicial District Court in Lafayette Parish, Handley was sentenced to 35 years of hard labor without the possibility of parole. The judge credited him with five years of time already served. He will be about 79 when eligible for release. Handley has since filed an appeal challenging his plea and sentence.
At sentencing, Schanda told him, “You wrecked everything, and that you destroyed everything,” and said he had once been the person she “most admired.” She told reporters afterward she would prefer he never be released. Prosecutor Don Knecht said Michael continued to try to contact and harass Schanda through letters, phone calls, and intermediaries while the case was pending.
Where Schanda Handley Is Now
Schanda earned a Bachelor of Science in Substance Abuse Counseling and, in the spring of 2019, founded Surrender Experiment, LLC. Through it she opened Destiny Sober Living, which runs sober living homes for women and men in Lafayette. Its stated mission is “to provide an affordable, safe, sober living environment designed to encourage and support long term recovery from alcohol and drugs.”
“I’m able to show them firsthand that we get up, we keep goin’. We put one foot in front of the other and we will persevere,” she said on CBS’s 48 Hours. The episode, “The Kidnapping of Schanda Handley,” aired in October 2022 with correspondent David Begnaud and was her first television interview about the case. The program arranged a reunion with Deputy Chad Martin. “If not for Chad Martin, I would be dead,” she said.
Asked whether she is still afraid, even with her ex-husband in prison, she answered: “Oh, yeah.”