Nicolas Shaughnessy and his then wife Jaclyn Edison hired two hit men to kill his parents in 2018, then moved in with his mother — who survived the shooting — for three months before police nailed down the truth of what happened that night.
Barking dogs alerted wealthy Austin jewelry Ted Shaughnessy, 55, to intruders in his Texas home on March 2, 2018, so he grabbed his gun and stepped out of his bedroom, the Austin American-Statesman said. He never fired a shot.
“Ted sits up in bed … and he grabbed his gun … to go see what it was,” his wife, Corey Shaughnessy, told CBS News 48 Hours for its “Shootout at the Shaughnessys” episode, which aired Friday. “I hadn’t even gotten my head back on the pillow … before I heard the first gunshot … And then there was a barrage of gunfire.”
Ted Shaughnessy was gunned down in the hallway, and one of the family dogs, a Rottweiler named Bart, was also killed. Corey grabbed her own gun and fired at the intruders.
“I do not remember the sound of my gun,” she told NBC Dateline for their episode, “Ghosts Can’t Talk,” that aired Friday night. “I remember seeing the muzzle from the opposite gun. He’s shooting at me, and I’m shooting at him.”
Corey Shaughnessy wasn’t hit. She retreated to a closet when she ran out of ammunition and called 911.
The Shaughnessys’ adopted son, Nicolas, and his new wife — both 19 — moved into the house with his mother. Soon Nicolas took over the family business, Gallerie Jewelers, according to the American-Statesman. And then investigators arrested him and Edison, along with the two gunmen they hired, Johnny Leon III and Arieon Smith.
As it turns out, the newlyweds were broke, Nicolas owed his mother $30,000, and he owned other people money too. But he stood to inherit $8 million if his parents were dead.
Leon later told investigators Nicolas Shaughnessy offered him $100,000 to kill his parents. They later brought Smith into deal, and in the early morning of March 2, 2018, the two killers went into the house through Nicolas’s old bedroom window after he deactivated the alarms via his phone.
The three men were ultimate sentenced to 35 years in prison in April 2021, as CrimeOnline reported. But after she was indicted by a grand jury, Edison pleaded guilty two years later to a conspiracy charge cooperated with investigators, and was sentenced to 10 years probation.
Corey Shaughnessy was angry with her sentence.
“You could have saved Ted with one phone call. That’s all it would have taken, just one,” she said in a taped statement played in court. “We opened our home and our hearts to you. And you and Nicolas took everything from us. How long will it take for you to find another family to destroy? How long will it be before Bonnie finds her next Clyde? You are a monster. You are evil and everyone needs to know it.”
For his part, Nicolas Shaughnessy has expressed regret for what he did and said he hopes to repair his relationship with his mother.
“It’s something that I can never undo and I will live with every day for the rest of my life,” he told KTBC in September. “It’s not something that I’m proud of.”
He is now divorced from Edison, who, he said, got the “deal of the century.”
Dateline’s “Ghosts Can’t Talk” is now streaming on Peacock and 48 Hours’ “Shootout at the Shaughnessys” is streaming on Paramount.
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[Featured image: Jaclyn Edison and Nicolas Shaughnessy/Travis County Sheriff’s Office]
