Before dawn on March 2, 2018, gunfire erupted inside the Austin, Texas, home of jeweler Ted Shaughnessy. Ted died at the scene, and his wife, Corey, survived.
A Predawn Attack
March 1, 2018, was an ordinary day for Ted and Corey Shaughnessy. Ted came home from work, the couple ate dinner, and they went to bed. In the early hours of March 2, one of the family’s dogs began to bark. Corey had barely settled back onto her pillow when she heard the first gunshot.
Two gunmen had entered the house and were moving quietly through it. Ted sat up in bed, picked up his gun and went to see what was happening. A barrage of gunfire followed, and one of the gunmen advanced toward the master bedroom, where Corey was.
She grabbed her .357 revolver and fired back until she ran out of ammunition, then retreated into a closet and called 911. While she was on the line, she heard loud moaning. When she came out of the closet, she saw Ted’s legs and could tell that he was dead. Corey was not injured.
Detectives Paul Salo and James Moore of the Travis County Sheriff’s Office responded to the home. To them, it first looked like a home invasion, possibly a robbery gone wrong.
Ted, 55, lay dead in a pool of blood near the kitchen table. He had been shot in the head, back, thigh and buttock. One of the family’s two Rottweilers had also been shot and killed.
Broken glass covered the floor, bullets were lodged in the walls, and shell casings were scattered throughout the rooms. The casings were of two types, .40 caliber and .380, which told detectives that two people had fired weapons. Corey told police that she and Ted kept about 20 guns in the home.
Investigators noticed a single ground-floor window standing wide open on the side of the house. Someone had removed the screen and set it on the ground outside.
The window led into an unoccupied bedroom, and in a drawer there police found an empty .40-caliber gun box. Because .40-caliber casings lay near Ted’s body, detectives considered that the box could have held a pistol used by one of the intruders.
Corey told officers she had not seen the attackers’ faces. She did have an idea about why they had come: as jewelers, she said, she and Ted might have been targeted by someone who expected to find a safe full of jewelry.
Investigators found that nothing had been stolen. The safe had not been touched, and no valuables were missing from the rest of the house.
Suspicions in the First Days
Corey telephoned her son, Nick, who was 19 and lived about two hours away in College Station, Texas, with his girlfriend, Jackie Edison. Nick and Jackie drove to Austin immediately and arrived at about 8 a.m. Nick was emotional and asked what had happened.
Corey, Nick and Jackie all agreed to help the investigation. Corey allowed police to search her phone. Nick, who said he had not been in Austin for about a month, and Jackie permitted the same, and all three agreed to answer questions at the station.
Around 11 a.m., Assistant District Attorney Amy Meredith, who was on call that day, arrived at the request of police to help process and preserve the scene. After looking around, she came to share the detectives’ belief that Ted had probably known whoever attacked him.
In her view, the house was too large and too dark for a pair of random robbers to find their way around. Meredith also said that within hours of the killing, Corey stated there would be no funeral and asked about having the house cleaned.
Salo said that when he told Nick that someone had come into the home and shot his father, one of Nick’s first questions was whether Ted had suffered.
As the morning went on, Nick and Jackie repeatedly tried to speak with reporters who had begun to arrive, and officers asked them to stop and remain at the scene. Nick then walked directly to the open window on the side of the house.
The bedroom it led to had once been his. Moore noted that the window cannot be seen from the front of the house and that Nick had not been told it was involved.
Police also noticed that Nick’s phone carried an app that gave him access to his parents’ alarm system. Corey told them the family often chose not to arm the system and that it had been switched off that night.
The account history nevertheless showed an activation for an open window at 4:27 a.m., followed by glass-break activations. Detectives believed these marked the moment bullets began breaking the home’s windows, which was also when Ted was killed.
Officers prepared to run gunshot residue tests on the hands of Nick and Jackie and separated the two. Jackie broke down hysterically. In questioning later that day, Nick and Jackie told police that they had been at their home in College Station when the shooting happened and that Nick worked from home.
Investigators had found no relevant unidentified fingerprints at the scene, so they had to consider that the only other person in the house was Corey, whose husband had been shot to death and who owned firearms.
They called her in for a series of interviews. Corey said that the more she was questioned, the less she felt she was being treated as a victim, and for the last session she brought a lawyer.
She said she knew from the start that she was a suspect. In the following weeks, needing money for the business, she tried to collect on Ted’s $1 million life insurance policy, on which she was the only beneficiary. She said the attempt did not help her cause and could only mean that investigators suspected her.
A few days after the shooting, investigators obtained a search warrant for Nick and Jackie’s apartment. Inside, they found ammunition of the same brand and caliber as that recovered at the crime scene, though such ammunition is common among gun owners.
They also found a marriage certificate for Nick and Jackie. Spencer Patterson, a teenage friend of Nick’s who had been certified as a minister online, had married the couple eight months earlier.
Neither Nick nor Jackie had mentioned the marriage to police, and Ted and Corey had never known of it. Corey said the couple told her only after the killing.
She told them they were too young and should not have done it that way, and she promised to help them plan a proper wedding. Over the next few days, Nick and Jackie moved back into her house, where they began planning an engagement party.
Police had initially considered all three as suspects, but they now suspected only Nick and Jackie and believed that the pair had also targeted Corey. This remained a working theory, and detectives could not share it with her.
They said they were concerned for her safety with the couple living in her home. Corey did not share the suspicion.
She worried that authorities were trying to make a set of circumstances fit in the easiest way available, and Nick was by then working in his father’s place at the jewelry store. On March 10, 2018, she hired the best defense attorney she could find for her son.
Messages, a Witness and Two Arrests
Phone records showed that Nick had been more than 100 miles from the house when the shooting took place.
Detectives also found every door and window locked except the open one, and records showed Nick’s phone had switched off the security system that morning. They also contradicted his statement that he had not been in Austin for a month: his phone had been used in Austin on February 28, two days before Ted was killed.
Text messages on Nick’s and Jackie’s phones also drew attention. On February 23 or 24, Nick told Jackie he was working on it, and she replied by asking whether “they” wanted $50,000 or not, adding that the couple could not afford to pay half beforehand.
In another exchange, Nick asked her to withdraw money from her account so that cash would be on hand if it happened. Jackie withdrew $1,000 from the bank days before the killing.
In May 2018, investigators spoke with Patterson. Detectives first believed he might be a suspect, but he proved to be a critical witness. He told them that just before the killing, Nick had talked about coming into $8 million with Ted and Corey gone.
Patterson also showed them text messages in which Nick tried to hire him to kill a family. Nick wrote that Patterson could simply walk in, shoot the family and steal from them, and that no mask would be needed because everyone would be dead. Patterson did not want to take part, but Nick continued to pitch the idea.
Police cleared Patterson, and on May 29, 2018, they arrested Nick and Jackie on charges of criminal solicitation. Corey, who had stood by her son for months, could not believe it and said she still thought he was being wrongly accused.
When she read the arrest affidavits and saw the evidence, however, her rock-solid belief in his innocence began to crumble. She came to understand that the couple had been involved in some way, but she said she could not convince herself, as a mother, that they had deliberately tried to have anyone killed.
She hoped they had become caught up in something in College Station, perhaps a debt Nick owed someone or a drug matter.
Police hoped time in jail might lead the pair to reveal who had actually pulled the trigger, but neither would talk. The trail of evidence had run cold, and the investigation stalled.
Identifying the Gunmen
In early July, four months after the killing, Moore reviewed security video from Nick and Jackie’s porch that had been recorded two days before the attack.
Two men appeared at the front door. One wore a green T-shirt bearing the name Anderson, a window company. Moore isolated a frame from the footage.
Salo and Moore took the image to the company. An employee’s daughter said she had met the man in the frame. He had worked there for only a few days four years earlier, and she still remembered his name: Cameron Vosmek.
Vosmek was not home when the detectives went to his house, but his wife answered the door and said she knew why they had come. She referred to the young man who had hired someone to kill his parents.
She said that a few months earlier, a man named Johnny Leon had asked her husband to commit murder for money and that he had turned Leon down. Police ruled Vosmek out as a suspect.
Leon turned out to be the other man on Nick and Jackie’s porch. Brought in for questioning, he said he was no murderer but admitted that Nick had tried to hire him, adding that anyone offered $100,000 would consider it.
Police were convinced that Leon had taken the offer, and he was arrested for capital murder in July 2018.
Leon’s phone showed a flurry of contacts around the time of the killing with a Fort Worth man named Arieon Smith. Both men had arrest records, and they had been arrested together on drug charges a year earlier. Smith was arrested in late 2018.
Salo and Moore interviewed him, and he admitted that he had met Nick and provided a great deal of information. He described that night and broke down as he did, saying he could not sleep at night.
Smith acknowledged that he had fired the fatal shot, and he asked for the death penalty, saying he had killed someone and deserved to die.
He also told police where to find the murder weapon: the .40-caliber pistol missing from the gun box in the bedroom the open window led to. It was Ted’s own gun.
Corey said that too much now pointed to Nick and Jackie’s involvement. She was horrified to realize that she had spent months sheltering the two people who had planned to have her and Ted killed. She had bought the groceries, paid the bills and purchased clothing for Jackie.
Charges, Pleas and Sentences
Within a couple of weeks of the arrests, Jackie began blaming Nick. She said that Nick had hired the men and that he was in desperate financial straits, with a failing day-trading business and thousands of dollars in overdue loans.
She said she believed Corey had lent him $30,000 and expected to be repaid, but he was not paying. Search warrants confirmed the debt and named Nick sole beneficiary of $2 million if his parents died. After her cooperation, authorities released Jackie on a reduced bond.
Nick, Leon and Smith were charged with capital murder, and Meredith resolved to try Nick for the maximum punishment. By the spring of 2021, however, Meredith had left her post, and Jose Garza had become the new district attorney.
His office offered the men a deal: to avoid a possible death sentence, they could plead guilty to a reduced charge of murder and serve 35 years, with the possibility of parole. Leon and Smith agreed.
Corey wrote to Nick to suggest he accept the same terms, saying she believed that would have been Ted’s choice. Nick took the deal as well. He and Smith pleaded guilty on April 7, 2021, and Garza said both would be eligible for parole in a little less than 20 years.
In the summer of 2023, Nick was interviewed at a prison near Houston. Asked whether he had hired people to kill his parents and whether he had paid them, he answered yes, and he said that he and Jackie had participated in multiple aspects of the plan.
He said he was truly sorry for what he had done, not only that he had been caught. He called his relationship with Jackie toxic and said he would not have done it without her.
Although he stood to inherit his parents’ money eventually, he said he was not prepared to wait. He said doubts were always in the back of his mind, but that he wanted Jackie’s approval.
He said he hoped Corey would one day agree to speak with him and that he wished to tell her how sorry he was and that he had failed her as a son. He also said that he and Jackie first went to Austin intending to kill his parents themselves, but could not go through with it.
Jackie also took a deal, pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit capital murder and receiving 120 days in jail and 10 years of probation. Her probation requires two days in jail each year on the anniversary of Ted’s death and no contact with the victim’s family.
When prosecutors asked Corey to attend the 2023 plea hearing, she refused and recorded a video at home to be played in court instead.
In it, she told Jackie that she was alive only because the plan to have her murdered had failed, called her a monster, and said that Jackie had known what was about to happen and had done nothing because she wanted it to happen.
Jackie began serving her sentence in June 2023 and walked out of an Austin-area jail on October 17, 2023. Asked about the gap between her sentence and the others’ 35 years, she said it was fair and accurately reflected her level of involvement.
She said Nick was saying whatever he had to say to clear his name and that Corey was in denial about what had really happened. She denied having been part of the plot and said she had tried to stop Nick.
Investigators said there was no evidence that she had ever tried to stop the killing. Nick told authorities that Jackie had been making plans to spend the Shaughnessys’ money, including picking out a car to buy for her mother.
A spokesperson for Garza’s office said in a statement that the office takes acts of violence seriously and is committed to holding violent offenders accountable, adding that if Jackie violates her probation she could face 20 years in prison.
Salo and Moore said the plea deals were not their decision, and Meredith said she had no involvement in Jackie’s case once she left the district attorney’s office.
Corey said no one had ever explained why Jackie received 120 days when the others received 35 years, calling the disparity a slap in the face. She has not spoken directly with Nick since his 2018 arrest.
She said there was no point in responding to an apology she was never meant to hear, and that Nick and Jackie took her husband, her business and everything she cared about. She now lives out of state under a different name.
She said she still loves the person she knew as her son before the killing, and that she intends to make the most of the life she has been given.
Remembering Ted Shaughnessy
Theodore “Ted” Shaughnessy met Corey in the early 1980s at a video arcade in Phoenix. The two soon discovered that they shared many interests, including a love of jewelry and, eventually, of each other. They married and opened Gallerie Jewelers in Austin.
Corey said that selling jewelry, especially engagement rings, to people marking special occasions made the business fun. Ted loved colored gemstones, and she said the store could have been called Ted’s Jewelers because it was really all about him.
As the business grew, the couple decided to grow their family. In 2000, they adopted Nick, then 16 months old, from an orphanage in Ukraine. Corey said the bonding was immediate and that by the time they left they were a family.
Nick liked animals and loved cars, especially fast ones. Ted drove race cars for fun and often took his son to the track, where Nick loved putting on his father’s helmet and racing gloves.
In high school, Nick met Jackie, who had moved to Austin from New Jersey to live with her father after her parents’ divorce. He brought her to meet his parents in 2016. Jackie gradually won them over and soon was spending so much time at the house that Ted and Corey let her move in.
In August 2017, she and Nick moved out to start a new life in College Station, where she attended school and he worked with his parents’ financial backing. Ted and Corey had less than a year to enjoy their empty nest.
Ted was the people person of the business, with a knack for helping customers express their love through jewelry.
Everyone loved him, and investigators found no one who held ill feelings toward either him or Corey. By the time of his death, the couple were worth millions, yet they valued even more the customers they counted as close friends.
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