Jim Axelrod
Appearances
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
Police also saw something that seemed important in Jackie Edison's behavior.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
In questioning later that day, Nick and Jackie reminded police they'd been at their home in College Station when the shooting happened.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
Though common among gun owners, the ammunition was the same brand and caliber that was found at the crime scene. And investigators were about to find proof the couple was keeping secrets. We find a marriage certificate for Nick and Jacqueline.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
you discovered that nick and jackie were married by searching nick's apartment in all of the conversation you were having they never said that they were married a teenage friend of nick's named spencer patterson spencer patterson who'd been certified as a minister online had married them eight months earlier police weren't the only ones surprised you and ted never knew no
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
Corey Shaughnessy says Nick and Jackie didn't tell her about their clandestine marriage until after the murder.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
Trying to be a good mom, she says she promised to help them plan a proper wedding.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
Corey had ample opportunity to make sure it happened because over the next few days, Nick and Jackie moved back into her house.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
That's especially chilling because while police initially had looked at all three for the murder, they now suspected just two, and that Nick and Jackie had also targeted Corey. But it was still only a working theory. You can't say anything to Corey. No. That's a hard line to walk. If you have two people who planned her killing now living with her, are you worried about Corey's safety? Of course.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
Of course. But Corey Shaughnessy says what worried her was the possibility authorities were trying to frame her son, who by now was working in his father's place at the jewelry store.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
On March 10th, 2018, she hired her son the best defense attorney she could find.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
Corey Shaughnessy knew police were suspicious of Nick and Jackie, but she says she had no reason to think they were right. After all, she says, they've been wrong about her.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
But the closer police looked, the 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 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.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
Investigators wondered if he had been in town making final preparations. there were text messages on Nick and Jackie's phones that police say showed a suspicious conversation. How important was the text message that he sent out February 23, 24? Nick is saying he's working on it.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
In another exchange, Nick asks her to withdraw money from her account. Quote, so if it happens, cash in hand. They do make this withdrawal. Jackie withdrew $1,000 from the bank just days before the murder. Authorities suspected it was no coincidence. Then, in May of 2018, they talked to the man who had officiated Nick and Jackie's wedding. that high school friend, Spencer Patterson.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
At first, investigators believed 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 with Ted and Corey gone. Nick had put a dollar sign on the lives of his parents. Yes. That's chilling. It is. Patterson showed them text messages that were even more chilling.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
Just walk in and shoot a family, writes Nick. Steal all their . No mask needed, because they'll all be dead.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
Police cleared Patterson, and on May 29, 2018, they arrested Nick Shaughnessy and Jackie Edison for criminal solicitation. Corey couldn't believe it.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
For months, Corey had stood by Nick. But she told us when she read the arrest affidavits and saw the evidence, her rock solid belief in his innocence. began to crumble.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
But as a mother, she says she still couldn't convince herself they deliberately tried to kill anyone.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
Confident Nick and Jackie were behind the attack, Police hope some time in jail might make them come clean about who had actually pulled the trigger. For the moment, though, neither one was talking.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
The evidence trail had essentially run cold. So we kind of hit a stall point. When in early July, four months after the murder, Detective Moore decided to review some security video from Nick and Jackie's porch, recorded just two days before the attack.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
Moore says he noticed something about one of the men that made him freeze the video. Something he was wearing. A green Anderson T-shirt. Window company. A window company. This feels like a break and it only happens because you isolated a frame of the video from the security camera? Yeah. He and Salo drove to the window company where their hard work ran into more good luck.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
By sheer coincidence, an employee's daughter said she'd actually met the man in the freeze frame. Apparently, he'd only worked there for a few days, four years earlier.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
His name was Cameron Vozmek, and he wasn't home that day. But his wife answered the door. and quickly got their attention.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
Hang on. She doesn't know who you guys are. You identify yourselves as detectives and she says, I know why you're here? Yes. 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 Vosmec as a suspect, but Leon turned out to be the other person in the security video from Nick and Jackie's porch.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
When they brought him in for questioning, he told them he was no murderer, but he admitted Nick had tried to hire him.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
Leone 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 Arian Smith. They also discovered both men had arrest records. In fact, the two had been arrested together for drugs a year earlier.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
Smith opened up about the details of that night and broke down in the process.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
prosecutors were closer than ever to having everything they needed to make their case. We've got enough. Now let's go to trial. Something Nick Shaughnessy told us he'd wanted to avoid. Did you pay these two men to go kill your parents? After police arrested the last of their four suspects, Arian Smith, Detective Salo says Smith told them he wasn't just there for Ted's murder. Yes, I was there.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
He acknowledged firing the fatal shot and then made a stunning request.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
He also told police where to find the murder weapon. It was the .40 caliber pistol missing from that box they'd found in Nick's old bedroom. The .40 caliber gun that killed Ted was Ted's. Yes. For a mother who'd struggled for months to keep faith in her son, it felt like the last straw.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
And Corey was horrified to realize she'd spent months sheltering the very people who'd planned to have Ted and her murdered that night. What a chilling thought. Two people who tried to have you killed, and they're living in your home.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
But after their arrest, it took just a couple of weeks for Jackie to blame Nick. Did Nicholas hire somebody to kill his parents?
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
And Jackie seemed to know why he'd done it. She says Nick was in desperate financial straits with a failing day trading business and thousands in overdue loans, including at least one from Corey.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
After her cooperation, authorities released Jackie on a reduced bond, and prosecutor Amy Meredith resolved to go after Nick for the maximum.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
At this point, were you prepared to testify against Nick? Yes. Nick Shaughnessy and the two alleged hitmen 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, whose office made the men an offer.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
Avoid a possible death sentence by pleading guilty to a reduced charge of murder and serve 35 years with the possibility of parole. Leone and Smith agreed, and Corey wrote to Nick to suggest he do the same.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
Nick Shaughnessy accepted the deal. He could be released when he's 36. In the summer of 2023, we visited him in prison near Houston. Did you hire people to go kill your parents?
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
Never mind participated in multiple aspects, did you pay these two men to go kill your parents?
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
Nick, at the end of the day, are you sorry for what you did, or are you sorry that you got caught?
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
And Nick told us he never would have done it if not for Jackie. It was a very toxic relationship. Although he stood to inherit his parents' money eventually, he told us he wasn't prepared to wait. Were you at all thinking, what am I doing?
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
It is hard to know how much Jackie Edison should be blamed or what punishment 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 sentence of 120 days and 10 years probation.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
Three are doing 35 years. One is doing 120 days. Corey says that's outrageous. What are your thoughts?
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
Amy Meredith was working elsewhere before prosecutors offered the plea deals. Corey's feelings aren't lost on her. Do you understand her rage?
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
Corey is so upset that when the new prosecutors asked her to appear at Jackie's 2023 plea hearing, she refused, instead recording this video at home to be played in court.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
We wanted to ask Jackie Edison about that and other things, but she declined our request for an interview. On the day she was released from jail, our producer, Jenna Jackson, approached her.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
Corey and Nick Shaughnessy haven't spoken directly since his 2018 arrest.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
This is a 50-50 thing? Most definitely. Did Jacqueline Edison get away with murder?
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
On October 17th, 2023, Jackie Edison walked out of an Austin-area jail after serving her four-month sentence.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
But our producer, Jenna Jackson, had some questions for her anyway.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
But investigators say there is no evidence Jackie ever tried to stop the murder. She's no princess in this. And according to what Nick told authorities, Jackie had been making plans for spending the Shaughnessy's money.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
Though she did eventually help them make their case against the person they identified as the key culprit.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
Still happens. Do you understand Corey's frustration? I do. Absolutely. We empathize with her. But Moore and Salo say Jackie's plea deal wasn't their call.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
We wanted to ask DA Jose Garza exactly why Jackie Edison got 120 days after the other three got 35 years. But he wouldn't agree to an interview. A district attorney's spokesperson sent us a statement saying, quote, our office takes acts of violence seriously and is committed to holding people who commit violent crimes accountable. The statement also said Edison is on 10 years probation.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
And if she violates the terms, she could face 20 years in prison. Corey Shaughnessy says a full explanation from authorities would have helped her make sense of something that has always struck her as impossibly wrong. So no one's ever explained to you why this enormous disparity in sentence?
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
True or not, Nick Shaughnessy told us he hopes someday Corey will agree to speak with him. What would you say to her?
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
And Corey says there is no point responding to an apology. She was never meant to hear.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
But even after a betrayal no mother should ever have to see, Corey still can't bring herself to condemn her son altogether. Do you still love your son?
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
She knows that boy is gone forever, and so is the life she and Ted tried to build around him.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
But now, living out of state under a different name, Corey is determined to make the most of every day.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
When Travis County Sheriff's detectives Paul Salo and James Moore arrived to investigate a shooting at Ted and Corey Shaughnessy's Austin, Texas home, early on March 2nd, 2018, they first thought it might be a robbery gone wrong.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
Inside the sprawling suburban home, it looked like a battlefield. 55-year-old Ted Shaughnessy lay dead in a pool of blood near the kitchen table.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
One of the family's two pet Rottweilers, Bart, had been shot to death as well. There was broken window glass everywhere, bullets lodged in the walls, casings all over the floor. Authorities noticed they were not all the same type. We had .40 caliber and .380.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
Corey would tell police she and Ted kept about 20 guns in the home and said she'd used her .357 revolver to shoot back at the attacker.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
Investigators had noticed a single wide open ground floor window around the side of the house and wondered if the intruders had used it to get in.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
That open window led into an unoccupied bedroom. And there, inside a drawer, police found what seemed like an unlikely coincidence.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
Well, hang on. .40 caliber is one of the caliber that you were just describing. Yes. It meant that Shaughnessy's empty gun box could have held a pistol that one of the intruders used and had ejected bullet casings near the victim.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
Outside, near Detective Moore, first responders were looking after Corey Shaughnessy. Corey's hysterical. Corey would tell police she had not seen the attacker's faces, but she did have a hunch about why they'd come.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
When you hear they own a jewelry store, what does that prompt in your minds? Automatically a motive. Someone figuring there was some safe with a bunch of jewelry. Absolutely. Yes, that's right. Corey broke the news by phone to the Shaughnessy's son, Nick, then 19, who lived two hours away with his girlfriend, Jackie, in College Station, Texas.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
He asks me what happened. Nick, Jackie, and Corey all agreed to help the investigation in any way 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. All three also agreed to answer questions at the station.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
But Corey says the more police questioned her in the coming days, the more a traumatic situation went from bad to worse.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
Investigators still weren't 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 Shaughnessy, was actually a suspect.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
They called her in for a series of interviews. For the last one, she brought a lawyer who is seated on the left.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
You got a distraught wife. You got a dead husband. You have to ask about the marriage, don't you? Yes.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
Investigators learned Corey and Ted had met in the early 80s at a video arcade in Phoenix. They'd quickly discovered they had a lot in common, including a love of jewelry and eventually of each other. They married and opened gallery jewelers.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
As the jewelry business grew, Ted and Corey had decided to grow their family too. In 2000, they adopted Nick at 16 months old from an orphanage in Ukraine. It was just instant love. It was. Yeah, instant. Corey says they all bonded even before bringing him home.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
She says 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 maybe even more valuable to them, they counted some of their customers as close friends.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
For Corey, being a parent was worth its weight in gold. Nicholas had everything a kid could want.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
Especially fast ones. His father drove race cars for fun and often took him to the track.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
In high school, she says, her son found another love. Her name was Jackie Edison. After her parents' divorce, Jackie had moved from New Jersey to Austin to live with her father. Nick brought her to meet his parents in 2016.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
But Corey says Jackie eventually won them over. And before long, she was spending so much time in the Shaughnessy's house, they actually let her move in. Did you settle into a, okay, a serious girlfriend seems to be part of Nick's life, and she's okay?
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
In August of 2017, Nick and Jackie moved out to start a new life in College Station. She in school, he as a day trader with his parents' financial backing. Ted and Corey would have less than a year to enjoy their empty nest, before that horrible night in March. Police stayed on the scene for hours trying to process all the evidence.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
Amy Meredith was an assistant district attorney. and says police asked her to come help them process and preserve the scene, an unusual request. She arrived around 11 a.m. and, after looking around, began to believe, as they did, that Ted Shaughnessy probably knew whoever had attacked him.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
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. Maybe even more importantly... There was nothing stolen. Nothing from that safe. No valuables missing from the rest of the house. So everything for you pointed to inside jobs. Yes, without a doubt.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
Corey Shaughnessy's frustration with investigators was growing. Thank you. All right. Well, again, I appreciate you guys coming in. She says she'd known from the start that she was a suspect in her husband's 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.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
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. We 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.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
The Shaughnessy son, Nick, had been more than 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.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
Even more so, police say, because as the morning wore on, Nick became much less interested in speaking with police than with the reporters who had started showing up.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
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.
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
How does he know the entry point unless he was involved in creating the entry point?
48 Hours
Crossfire at the Shaughnessys'
get super suspicious but it was catching my attention something on nick's phone had caught their attention as well an app that gave him access to his parents 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 an activation for an open window