Inset: Nicholas Stanley (Elkhart County Sheriff’s Office). Background: The motel where Stanley killed a man last year (Google Maps).
A 36-year-old Indiana man will spend decades behind bars for enforcing vigilante justice when he fatally shot a man who had previously been convicted of sexually abusing one of his juvenile family members.
Elkhart Circuit Judge Michael A. Christofeno on Thursday sentenced Nicholas Stanley to 80 years in a state prison for killing Allen Cogswell last year, court records show. Christofeno handed down the sentence after a jury last week found Stanley guilty of murder. He also pleaded no contest to one count of using a firearm in the commission of a felony.
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Stanley killed Cogswell with two shotgun blasts at the Daylite Inn motel on Cassopolis Street in Elkhart in June 2025, South Bend CBS affiliate WSBT reported.
The central issue at trial was whether Stanley’s actions qualified for a voluntary-manslaughter instruction based on “sudden heat,” according to The Goshen News. Prosecutors argued against the sudden heat premise by asserting that Stanley had time to reconsider his plan before the shooting, noting how he saw the victim before walking back to his car and retrieving the shotgun he used to kill Cogswell.
Cogswell had pleaded guilty in 2018 to molesting a young female relative of Stanley’s, who was reportedly about 7 years old at the time. Stanley attended Cogswell’s sentencing and gave a victim impact statement.
Cogswell was released from prison in May 2025.
Stanley said that on the night of the killing, he had taken his relative home, and she appeared distressed. She reportedly told Stanley that she feared Cogswell would find her and retaliate. Stanley described his reaction in court.
“There wasn’t really much on my mind other than rage,” Stanley said, according to The Goshen News. “I was blinded by it.”
Stanley reportedly testified that he went to the motel with a shotgun and looked through a window into Cogswell’s room. He claimed the gun was in his car because he was going to sell it to a friend the next day. After returning to his vehicle, he took the weapon and went back to the room.
Stanley testified that seeing Cogswell inside the room triggered an intense reaction. “It was the first time I’d seen him since the sentencing and ‘my brain exploded like a tsunami,'” he said, according to The Goshen News.
“I decided that I had to do what I had to do to protect my family — I had to kill him,” he added.
Stanley said he knocked on the door, and shortly after Cogswell answered, he shot him in the head and chest.
Asked whether he intended to kill Cogswell, Stanley reportedly answered: “You don’t shoot somebody in the chest with the intent not to.”
After the shooting, Stanley fled from the motel and dumped the shotgun in a river before changing his clothes. The next morning, he gave police a false account of where he had been the previous night, telling them he had gone to a gas station and then to bed.
Stanley is required to serve at least 75% of the sentence before he is eligible for parole. Following the hearing, Stanley’s defense attorney said he planned to appeal the sentence, according to WSBT.
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