Warning: Graphic content, readers’ discretion advised. This story contains a recollection of crime and can be triggering to some readers discretion advised.
when travis county sheriff’s detectives paul salo and james moore (sunglasses)
arrived to investigate a shooting at ted and corey Shaughnessys’,Austin Texas home
early on march 2nd 2018,they first thought it might be a robbery.gone wrong.
it looked as though there was a home invasion and a homeowner was killed.
inside the sprawling surburban home
it looked like a battlefield.
55-year old ted Shaughnessys laid dead in a pool of blood
near the kitchen table.he was shot in the head,the back,the thigh and the buttock.
one of the family’s two pet rottweilers
spart, had been shot to death as well.
there was broken window glass everywhere.
and casings allover the floor.
authorities noticed they were not all the same type.40 caliber and 380.
that told detectives that they had two shooters.
corey would tell police ,she and ted kept 20 guns in the home.
and said she used her 357 revolver to shoot back at the attacker.
it was a hell of gunfire
Investigators had noticeda single wide open ground floor window around the side of the house.
and wondered if the intruders had used it to get in.
somebody took the screen off , set it next to the window outside.
that open window led into an unoccupied bedroom.
and there,inside a drawer police found what seemed like an unlikely coincidence.
a 40 caliber gun box in that drawer, it’s missing out of the box.
it meant that Shaughnessys empty gun box could have held a pistol that one ofthe intruders used and had ejected bullet casings near the victimthat information gets past detective moore while he’s outside.
outside near detective moore.
first responders were looking after corey .corey would tell police she had not seen the attackers faces.but she did but she did have a hunch about why they’d come.
when you hear they own a jewelery store what does that prompt in your minds? automatically a motive.someone figuring there was some safe with a bunch of jewelry .
cory broke the news by phone to the Shaughnessys son Nick then 19
who lived two hours away with his girlfriend jackie.
in college station, Texas. they immediately drove to Austin arriving about 8 a.m .
Nicks come over and he’s emotional,he ask what happened.
nick, jackie and corey ,all agreed to help the investigation in anyway possible
corey allowed police to search her phone
and though nick said he hadn’t been in austin for about a month ,he and jackie did the same.
jackie nick corey
all three also agreed to answer questions at the station.
investigators goal was to just try to get as much information as possible.
but corey says the more police questioned her inthe coming days. the more a traumatic situation went from bad to worse.
she says they were not treating her like a victim.she was extrermely angry at the sheriff’s departement.investigators still werent sure if the murder was part of a random attack a jewel Heist gone bad
or whether it was a targeted assassination
they weren’t finding any relevant unidentified prints at the scene.
so they had to wonder if their sole surviving victim corey Shaughnessys was actually a suspect.
she’s the only person in the house and her husband who has been shot to death.investigators know that she owns firearm, so it’s obviouslyan option for the investigators.
they called her in for a series of interviews for the last one she brought a lawyer who is seated on the left.
you got a distraught wife , you got a dead husband, you have to ask about the marriage.right?
corey and ted had met in the early 80s ay a video arcade in phoenix
the’d quickly discovered they had a lot in common
including of love of jewelry
and eventually of each other.they married
and opened Gallery jewelers as the jewelry buisness grew
Ted and corey had decided to grow their family too.
in 2000 they adopted Nick at 16 months old from an prhanage in Ucraine
corey says they all bonded even before bringing him home. corey says that ted had a knack for helping people express their love.
with a sparkle .
everybody loved ted ,didn’t have any enemies.
by the time of the murder the Shaughnessys’ were worth millions. but even more valuable to them, they counted some of their customers as close friends.
for corey being a parent was worth its waiting gold.
nicholas had everything a kid could want.
he liked animals.
and he loved cars especially fast ones
he’s father drove race cars for fun and often took him to the track.
in High school she says her son found another love.
her name was jackie edison. after her parents divorcejackie had moved from new jersey to Austin to live with her father.
nick brought her to meet his parents in 2016.
corey says jackie eventually won them over and before long she was spendign so much time in Shaughnessy’s house, they actually let her move in.
in august of 2017 nick and jackie moved out to start a new life in college station.she in school ,he as aday trader with his parents fiancial backing.
ted and cory would have less then a year
to enjoy their empty nest before that horrible night in march.
police stayed on the scene for hours
amy meredith was an assistant district attorney
and says police asked her to come help them process the scene. an unusual request.
she arrived around 11:00 a.m and after looking around began to believe as they did that ted Shaughnessys probably knew hwo ever had attacked him.
this was not a stranger , this was not a stranger killing
meredith was sure the home was just too big and too dark for a pair of random robbers or jewel thief wannabes to find their way around.
no valuables missing from the rest of the house. so everything pointed to inside job.
corey Shaughnessys frustration with investigators was growing.
she say she’d known from from the start she was a suspect in her husbands murder.
she says she needed money for the business in the following weeks and it didn’t help when she tried to cash in his million dollar life insurance policy.
she was the only beneficiary that could only mean that they suspected corey.
so did she had anything to do with this , corey says ” absolutely not”
but amy meredith says ,corey had started raising red flags immediately after leaving the scene.
within hours of the murder.she reportedly stated there would be no funeral
and inquired about having the house cleaned . but police had to make sure that she did not have any involvement.
but corey wasn’t the only member of ted’s family who was raising suspicion.
the Shaughnessys’ son nick had meen more than a 100 miles away at the time of the murder.
at the scene that morning he’d been emotional but what struck detective salo was one of nick’s first questions.
detective salo tells him that somebody came into the home and shot his dad to death. and nick asked did he suffer.
it definitely struck dettective salo as odd
even more so , police say,because as the morning wore on , nick became much less interested in speaking with police then with the reporters who had stared showing up.
nick and jackie continuously tried to talk to the mediate , investigators asked him to stop and stay in the scene.
and then nick did something really odd says detective moore , he walked directly over to examine that ground floor wide open side window.
the room it led to had once been his. him going to that side of the house to look
specifically at that window..which you can’t see from just the front of the house, so for him
to know that , was even involved ,he did not have that information.
how does he know the entry point unless he was involved in creating the entry point?
sometimes people will get information from ” cross talk ” with detectives or law enforcement and detetctive moore didn’t automatically get super suspicious but it was catching his attention.
something on nick’s phone had caught their atenton as well.
an app that gave him access to his parent’s alarm
corey told them the family often chose not to arm the system and that it had been switched off that night.
but authorities noticed something in the account history .
there was activation for an open window the time of the being opened was 4 :27 that morning
following that was glas break activations . detective believes that’s ehen the bullets started breaking the glass in the house.
thats when ted died ,that’s when the shots were being fired.
police also saw something that seemed important in jackie adison’s behavior.
detective’s were going to do gunshot residue tests on their hands.they separated them and at that time jackie broke down hysterically.
that was a najor red flag for the detectives .they knew there was something more to this at that point.
in question later that day nick and jackie reminded police they’d been at their home in college station when the shooting happened.
a few days later investigators got a search warrant.
once they get in the apartment.they going through it they were finding
ammunition . though common among gun owners.
the ammunition was the same brand in caliber that was found at the crime scene. and investigators were about to find proof.
the couple was keeping secrets…..
they find a marriage certificate.detectives discovered that nick and jackie were married by searching nick’s apartment.
in all conversation detectives were having they never said that they were married.
a teenage friend of nicks named spencer patterson who’d been certified as a minister online
had married them 8 months earlier.
police weren’t the only ones suprised. corey and ted never knew.
corey says nick and jackie didn’t tell her about heir clandestine marriage until after the murder.
trying to be a good mom ,she says, she promised to help them plan a proper wedding.
corey had ample opportunity to make sure it happened.
because over the next few days nick and jacky moved back into her house.
they were planning the engagement party ,they had the guest list jackie was picking out invitations.
that’s especially chilling.because while police initially had looked at all three for the murder they nowsuspected just too and that nick and jackie had also targeted corey.
but it was still only a working theory. they can’t say anything to corey. that’s a hard line to walk.
if you have to people who planned her killing,now living with her , are detectives worried about corey’s safety?
detectives answer is ” of course. of course”
but corey Shaughnessys says what worried her was the possibility
authorities was trying to fram her son.who by now was working in his father’s place at the jewelry store.
on march 10 th 2018 corey hired her son the best defense attorney she could find.
corey Shaughnessys knew police was suspicious of nick and jackie.
and she says she had no reason to think they were right.
after all she said says . ” i dont know “.they been wrong about her.
but the closer police locked,he more incriminating evidence they seemed to find
that nick and jackie had planned to have both Shaughnessys killed.
while phone records showed nick had been more than a 100 miles away at the time of the murder, they also showed he was lying.when he said he hadn’t been to Austin for a month.
detectives ultimately see cellphone usage in Austin on february 28th whitch is just two days before Teds ends up getting killed.
investigators wondered if he had been in town making final preparations,there were text messages on nick and jackies phones that police say showed a suspicious conversation.
and jackies respond to the text message was :” do they want 50k or not ?”
and she said
in another exchange nick ask her to withdraw money from her account , quote:
they do make this withdraw
jackie withdrew a 1000.dollar from the bank just days before the murder.
authorities suspected it was no coincidence
then in may of 2018.
they ralked to the man who had officiated nick and jackie’s wedding.
that high school friend, spencer patterson.
trying to get a hold of spencer was kind of difficult.
at first investigators believed that patterson might be a suspect. but when they finally reached him, he proved to be a critical witness instead.
he told them just before the murder , nick had talked about coming into 8 million dollars with ted and corey gone.
nick put a dollar sign on the lives of his parents.that’s chilling.
patterson showed them text messages that were even more chilling.
nick was trying to hire him to kill a family
spencer didn’t wanted go along with it but nick still pitched the idea.
police clared patterson
and may 29th 2018 . they arrested nick Shaughnessy and jackie edison for criminal solicitation .
corey couldn’t believe it.
corey says she still under the assumption that he’s being wrongely accused.
for months corey had stood by nick. but when she read the arrest affidavits and saw the evidence ,her rocksolid belief in his innocence began to crumble.
she got to where she understood that yes they were involved in some way.
but as a mother she says she still couldn’t convince herself they deliberately tried to kill anyone.
nick and jackie were behind the attack. police hope sometime in jail might make them come clean who had actualy pulled the trigger.
for the moment though neither one weas talking. the next step was who were the actual shooters and how do investigators figure this out.
the evidence trail had essentially run cold.investigators kind of hit a stall point.
when in early july,4 months after the murder.detective moore decided to
review .some security video from nick and jacki’s porch
recorded just 2 days before the attack .
two individual show up to his front door. moore says he noticed something about one of the men that made him freeze.
he was wearing a green anderson t- shirt a window company
this feels like a break and it only happemns because detective moore isolated a frame of the video from the security cam.
moore and salo drove to the window company where their hard ran into more good luck by sheer coincidence .
an employees daughter said she actually met the man in the freeze frame apparently he’d only worked there for a few days.4 years earlier.
and this women still remembered his name.
what are the odds of a hit like this?on the identity it was crazy , detective got that break
his name was cameron wosbeck and he wasn’t home that day.
but his wife answered the door.and quickly gut their attention
his wife says i know why you here , that kid who hired somebody to kill his ‘ jewelry store parents.
hang on ! she doesn’t know how the detectives are.they identify themselves as detectives, and she says” i know why you here”?
she said a few months earlier a man named johnny leon had asked her husband to commit murder for money. but he turned him down.
police ruled out wosbeck as a suspect.
but leon turned out to be the other person in the security video from nick and jackie’s porch.
when they brought him in for question, he told them he was no murderer but he admitted nick had tried to hire him. olice were convinced that leon had teaken the bait.
leon was arrested for a capital murder and on his phone police found evidence he may not have acted alone.there was a flurry of contacts around the time of the killing.
with a fort worth man named arieon smith, they also discovered both men had arrest records. in fact the two had been arrested together for drugs a year earlier.
he did admit that he had met nick,he gave detectives a lot of good information smith opened up about the details of that night. and broke down in the process.
prosecutors were closer then ever to having they needed to make their case. lets go to the trial!!
something Nick Shaughnessy told 48 hours he’d wanted to avoid.
” did you pay these two men to go kill your parents”
nick doesnt’ answer the question.
after police arrested the last of their four suspedcts.
aftrer they arrrested arieon smith detective salo says , smith told them he wasn’t just there for ted’s murder.
he acknowledge firing the fatal shot and then made the stunning request.
” i request death penalty i killed somebody ,i deserve to die”
he also told polic where to find the murder wepon.
it was the 40 caliber pistol…
missing frome that box. they found in nicks old bedroom.
the 40 caliber gun that killed ted was Ted’s.
for mom who’d had struggled for months ro keep faith in his son
it felt like the last straw.
to much happened that pointed to nicholas and jackie having involvement.
and corey was horrified to realized she’d spent months sheltering,the very people who planned to have ted and her murdered that nigh.
what a chilling thought ,two people who tried to have you killed and they’re living in your home.
but after there arrest , it took just a couple of weeks for jackie to blame nick. and jackie seemed to know wht he’d don it .
she says nick was in desperate financial straits. with a failing day trading buisness and and thousands oerdue loans.
including at least one from corey.
after her cooperation authorities reliease jackie on a reducedbond.and prosecutor amy meredith resolve to go after nick for the maxium,
attorney amy meredith is going to try nicholas Shaughnessys for captial murder.
Nick Shaughnessy and the two alleged hitman were charged with capital murder.
but by the spring of 2021 amy meredith had left her job as assistant district attorney
and there was a new DA.Jose Garza whos office made the men an offer
avoid a possible death sentence.
by pleading guilty to a reduced charge of capital murder and served 35 years with the possibility of parole.
Leon and smith agreed .
and corey wrote to nick to suggest he do the same thing.
Nick accepted the deal.
he could be released when he’s 36. in the summer of 2023 .
48 hours visited him in prison near houston.
when he ask if Nick did hire people to go kill his parents nick’s answers was ” yes”. and he and jackie participated in multiple aspects.
and nick says he’s sorry for all of it .
he knows that his in prison because of those actions.
at the end of the day is nick sorry wor what he did or is he sorry for that he got caught?
nicke says he most truly passionately sorry for what he did. he never would it done it if not for jackie.nick says it was a very toxic relationship
although he stood to inherit his parents money eventually,
he told 48 hours ,he wasn’t prepared to wait.
It is hard to know how much jackie edison schould be blamed or what punisment she deserves
and jurors won’t get to decide. she too got a deal from the office of the new DA.for pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit capital murder by terror threat or other felony .
a jail sentenc of 120 days.and 10 years probation
she began serving her time in june 2023
three of them are doing 35 years , one is doing 120 days .
corey say’s that’s outrageous . and what was amy meredith’s thoughs .
amy meredith says she had no involvement once she left the district attorney’s office on jackies case.
amy was working elsewhere before prosecutors offered the plea deals.
corey’s feeling arent’ lost on her. and amy understand corey is upset.
corey is so upset that when the new prosecutors asked her to appear at jackies 2023 plea hearing, she refused.
instead recording this video at home to played in court.
“i’m alive because your plan to have me murdered didn’t succeed.you are a monster.you are evil and everyone needs to know it.you knew what was about to happen and yet you sat home and did nothing. because you wanted it to happen”
48 hours wanted to ask jackie edison about that and other things but she declained their request for an interview.
corey and nick haven’t spoken directly since his 2018 arrest.
nick says his mom stated that he was being evil. nick says he dont see evil in him.
and in these days its safe to say they dont see eye to eye
infact there may be only one thing they do agree on.
jackie is not a victim, this is a 50/ 50 thing. did jackie edison get away murder ? absolutely!
on october 17th 2023 , jackie edison walked out of an Austin area jail serving her 4 month sentence.
is she innocent, absolutely not , no, she knew what he was trying to to do,she could have stopped this at any time.
but investigators say there is no evidence jackie ever tried to stop the murder . she’s no printice in this .
and according to what nick told authorities , jackie had been making plans for spending Shaughnessys money.
corey found out that jackie already picked out the car she was going to buy her mother with the money that they made .
( off the murder of corey and ted)
though she did eventually help them make their case against the person they identfied as the key culprint.
detectives Moore and Salo
moore: “they’re both to blame , who took more action,it’s nick.”
Salo:“you take nick out of this you dont have the incident.
moore and salo understand corey’s frustration, they empathize with her. but moore and salo say ,jackie’s plea deal wasn’t their call
their job ended at the arrest and it’s not a single step further they can take it.
exactly why jose Garcia got jackie edison 120 days and the other three got 35 years. we will never know . cuz he wouldn’t agree an interview by 48 hours.
a district attorney spokeperson sent 48 hours a statement saying quote:our office takes actts of violence seriously and is committed to holding people who commit violent crimes accountablethe statement also said edison is on 10 year probation and if she violates the terms she could face 20 years in prison .
corey says a full explanation from authorities would helped her makes sense of something that has always struck her as impossible wrong.
so no one’s ever ecplained to corey why this enormous disparity in sentence.
true or not . nick hopes someday corey will agree to speak with him.
nick wish he could tell his mom how truly sorry he is, that this is not something i’m proud of and i failed her as a son.
corey say it means nothing to me.i dont know that person .i have no idea who nicholas Shaughnessys is.
and coreys says there is no point responding to a an apology she was never ment to hear. corey says in my mind i am supposed to be dead.and so i’ m a ghost and ghost’s cant’ speak.
but even after a betrayle no mother have to see,corey still can’t bring herself to condemn her son alltoghether.
but does corey love her son ?
corey says she love the person she knew to be her son before this happened.
what she meant was she love the 8- years old boy racing cars with his dad
corey knows that boy is gone forever
and so is the life she and ted tried build around .
corey says nick and jackie destroyed her entire world, they took her husband.they took memories , they took my buisness. they took everything i had that i cared about.
but now , living out of state under a different name corey is determined to make the most of every day.
