48 Hours - Shootout at the Shaughnessys'

Episode Date: January 15, 2024

A gunfight in the dead of night. The targets fire back. Their son in the crosshairs of suspicion. "48 Hours" contributor Jim Axelrod reports.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Now I'm someone else. No warning, no premonition, nothing. My name is Corrie Shaughnessy, and I used to own Gallery Jewelers in Austin, Texas. The thing that made the jewelry business really fun is selling engagement rings, selling jewelry to people because they're marking special occasions. Ted kind of had the same passion. He loved colored gemstones.

We called ourselves gallery jewelers. It should have been called Ted's Jewelers because it really was all about him. March 1st was just a boring day. He came home from work, we had dinner. I basically rolled over to go to sleep. And the next thing I know, one of the dogs barks. This was early morning hours.

Two shooters enter the Shaughnessy home. They quietly move through the home. Ted sits up in bed, and he grabbed his gun to go see what it was. I hadn't even gotten my head back on the pillow, I don't think, before I heard the first gunshot. And then there was a barrage of gunfire. One of the shooters advances towards the master bedroom where Corey is.

I grabbed my gun. I started shooting back. And I ran out of ammo. I just bailed into the closet. Travis County 911. Do you need police fire? You're a paramedic. I don't know.

I'm in the closet. There were shots fired. Help me. OK, we're helping you, ma'am. Help me. I heard this horrible, horrible moaning. And when I came out of the closet, I saw Ted's legs, and I could tell that he was dead.

Okay. Oh my God. Take a deep breath. You're doing awesome, Corey, okay? Oh God. Theodore Shaughnessy was shot dead in his Austin area home by an intruder. Corey Shaughnessy shot back at the intruder and wasn't hurt. I was under the impression that this was a robbery that had gone bad. There was nothing stolen. We weren't finding anybody that had any ill feelings towards either one of them.

We didn't have any idea who committed this murder. Anybody that can do this is a sociopath. It's just absolutely crazy. I don't even know why. I don't even know why. I really don't know why. A. When Travis County Sheriff's detectives Paul Salo and James Moore 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 2, 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. It looked as though there was a home invasion and a homeowner was killed. 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. He was shot in the head, the back, the thigh, and the buttocks. 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. So that told us that we had two shooters. 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. It was a hell of a gunfire. 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. 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. There's a.40 caliber gun box in that drawer.

It's missing out of the box. 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. That information gets past me while I'm outside. 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. Being a jeweler, you might someday be a target. 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. 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. They immediately drove to Austin, arriving about 8 a.m.

Nick comes over, and he's emotional. 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.

I'm finding of anything that could be helpful. Our goal was to just try to get as much information as possible. But Corey says the more police questioned her in the coming days, the more a traumatic situation went from bad to worse. went from bad to worse. I'm trying to do anything I can to... to help. She says they were not treating her like a victim. I was extremely angry at the sheriff's department.

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. She's the only person in the house, and we have

her husband who has been shot to death. We know that she owns firearms, so it's obviously an option for us. They called her in for a series of interviews. For the last one, she brought a lawyer, who is seated on the left.

I didn't know to come out right. Somebody killed him. No, it's not. And I want to find him. Me too. He got a distraught wife. He got a dead husband. You have to ask about the marriage, don't you?

Yes. Ted was the people person. He was the front part of the story. 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. Everything seemed to be just about perfect. 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. There were animal crackers involved. Skillful distribution of animal crackers? Yes, yes. And by the time we left, we were a family.

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. We were very happy. For Corey, being a parent was worth its weight in gold. Nichols had everything a kid could want.

Yes. What was he into? He liked animals and he loved cars. Especially fast ones. His father drove race cars for fun and often took him to the track. He loved putting on Ted's helmet and his racing gloves and all of those things. 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. It was an awkward dinner. 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? I did. She was all right.

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. I was actually on call when the murder occurred. 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. This was not a stranger. This was not a stranger killing. 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. Maybe, even more importantly... There was nothing stolen. Nothing from that safe.

No valuables missing from the rest of the house. Nothing from that safe. No valuables missing from the rest of the house. So everything for you pointed to inside job. Yes, without a doubt. In 2014, Laura Heavlin was in her home in Tennessee when she received a call from California. Her daughter, Erin Corwin, was missing. The young wife of a Marine had moved to the California desert to a remote base near Joshua Tree National Park.

They have to alert the military, and when they do, the NCIS gets involved. From CBS Studios and CBS News, this is 48 Hours NCIS. Listen to 48 Hours NCIS ad-free starting October 29th on Amazon Music. Have you ever wondered who created that bottle of sriracha that's living in your fridge? Or why nearly every house in America has at least one game of Monopoly? Introducing The Best Idea Yet, a brand new podcast from Wondery and T-Boy about the surprising origin stories of the products you're obsessed with and the bolder risk takers who brought them to life. Like, did you know that Super Mario, the best-selling video game character of all time, only exists because Nintendo couldn't get the rights to Popeye? Or Jack, that the idea for the McDonald's Happy Meal first came from a mom in Guatemala?

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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. I was the only beneficiary. That could only mean that they suspected me. Let me just ask, did you have anything to do with this? 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. 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. 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. I tell him it looks like somebody came into the home and shot your dad to death. And how did he absorb that news? He asked me, did he suffer? Was that an odd question? It definitely struck me as odd, yes. 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. Nick and Jackie continuously tried to talk to the media. We asked them to stop and to 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 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 crosstalk with detectives or law enforcement. people will get information from crosstalk with detectives or law enforcement. And so I didn't automatically 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. The time of the window being opened was 4.27 that morning. Following that was glass break activations. We believe that's when the bullets started breaking the glass in the house. That's when Ted died. That's when the shots were being fired. Was this important to have?

Extremely. Police also saw something that seemed important in Jackie Edison's behavior. We were going to do gunshot residue tests on their hands. We then separated them, and at that time, Jackie broke down hysterically. And what did you make of it? That was a major red flag for me. We knew there was something more to this at that point. A woman officer put your mom on the phone, and then your mom told you what happened?

Yeah. She's like, like someone came in the house there was an exchange of gunfire i believe she fired a shot and then she ran to the closet in questioning later that day nick and jackie reminded police they'd been at their home in college station when the shooting happened we both both moved to College Station, and he just works from home. A few days later, investigators got a search warrant. Once we get into the apartment, we're going through it. We're finding ammunition.

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. You discovered that Nick and Jackie were married by searching Nick's apartment?

No. In all of the conversation you were having, they never said that they were married? No. 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. Corey Shaughnessy says Nick and Jackie didn't tell her about their clandestine marriage until after the murder. And I told them, I said, this is not, you shouldn't have done this, you're too young. Trying to be a good mom, she says she promised to help them plan a proper wedding. I said, you need to do it the right way.

Corey had ample opportunity to make sure it happened because over the next few days, Nick and Jackie moved back into her house. We were planning the engagement party. We 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 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. 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.

There is a set of circumstances that the police are trying to make work in the easiest way that they can. On March 10th, 2018, she hired her son the best defense attorney she could find. You could have told me aliens landed on the front yard, and I would have believed that before I would have believed that Nicholas and Jackie planned to have us killed. 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,

I don't know. they'd been wrong about her. The last thing that I would ever do would be kill my husband. And I thought, well, if they think I did it, it's not a stretch for them to think Nicholas did it. But the closer police looked, the more incriminating evidence they seemed to find that Nick and Jackie had planned to have both Shaughnessy's 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. We ultimately see cell phone usage in Austin on February 28th, which is just two days before Ted ends up getting killed. 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. And Jackie's response to the text message was, do they want 50K or not? And she says, we can't afford to pay half before. 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. Trying to get a hold of Spencer was kind of difficult.

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.

There was also communication between Spencer and Nicholas, where Nicholas was trying to hire him to kill a family. Just walk in and shoot a family, writes Nick. Steal all their s***. No mask needed. Because they'll all be dead. Spencer didn't want to go along with it, but Nick still pitched the idea. Police cleared Patterson and on May 29, 2018,

they arrested Nick Shaughnessy and Jackie Edison for criminal solicitation. Corey couldn't believe it. I'm still under the assumption that he's being wrongly accused. 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. I got to where I understood that, yes, they were involved in some way. But as a mother, she says she still couldn't convince herself they'd deliberately tried to kill anyone.

I was then hoping that they had maybe gotten caught up in something in College Station where maybe Nicholas owed someone money or maybe there was some sort of a strange drug thing or maybe he told the wrong person that we were jewelers. Confident Nick and Jackie were behind the attack, police hoped some time in jail might make them come clean about who had actually pulled the trigger.

For the moment, though, neither one was talking. The next step was, who were the actual shooters? And how do we figure this out? 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.

I see two individuals show up to his front door. 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. 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. And this woman still remembered his name.

Sergeant, what are the odds of a hit like this on the identity? It was crazy that we got that break. His name was Cameron Vosbeck, and he wasn't home that day. But his wife answered the door and quickly got their attention. I know why you're here. That kid who hired somebody to kill his jewelry store parents. 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. When they brought him in for questioning, he told them he was no murderer, but he admitted Nick had tried to hire him. I'm not going to lie to you. If someone offers you $100,000, you're going to think about it. He's luring him into this to hire him.

Police were convinced that Leone had taken the bait. Leone was arrested for capital murder, You know I'm involved? Absolutely. There's no doubt. 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 Arian Smith. They also discovered both men had arrest records. In fact, the two had been arrested together for drugs a year earlier. Detective Moore and I interviewed him. He did admit that he had met Nick.

He gave us a lot of good information. Smith opened up about the details of that night and broke down in the process. You're the only person I've shown regret. I don't understand how. How could you kill somebody and not have any emotion about it? And you actually killed him. I was in the situation.

I'm devastated. I cannot sleep at night. 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.

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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. He acknowledged firing the fatal shot and then made a stunning request. I request the death penalty. The death penalty.

I killed somebody. I didn't make a dime. What is that? 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. Too much had happened that pointed to Nicholas and Jackie having involvement.

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. Very. It's very chilling. I bought all the groceries. I paid all the bills. I bought her clothing. This is diabolical. Absolutely. They thought they had gotten away with it. Do you prefer Jackie or Jacqueline? Jackie. But after their arrest, it took just a couple of weeks for Jackie to blame Nick. Did Nicholas hire somebody to kill his parents?

Yeah. 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. due loans, including at least one from Corey. I think his mom gave him $30,000, and she expected money in return, but he wasn't paying her. After her cooperation, authorities released Jackie on a reduced bond, and prosecutor Amy Meredith resolved to go after Nick for the maximum. We're going to try Nick Lughnessy for capital murder.

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. 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. If I could speak to Ted,

I think that would have been his choice. 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? Yes, Jackie and I participated in multiple aspects to kill my parents. Never mind participated in multiple aspects.

Did you pay these two men to go kill your parents? Yes. Nick told us he's sorry for all of it. I know that I'm here because of those actions. Nick, at the end of the day, are you sorry for what you did, or are you sorry that you got caught? I'm most truly, passionately sorry for what I did. 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? Of course. It was always in the back of my head, like red flags, like stop. The back of your head? Yeah. Why not the front of your head? I guess the validation or approval from Jackie. 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. It's astounding. It's absolutely astounding. She began serving her time in June of 2023. It is an outright dismissal of everything that I went through as a victim, and it's a dismissal of Ted's life.

Three are doing 35 years. One is doing 120 days. Corey says that's outrageous. What are your thoughts? I had no involvement once I left the district attorney's office on Jackie's case. Amy Meredith was working elsewhere before prosecutors offered the plea deals. Corey's feelings aren't lost on her. Do you understand her rage?

I absolutely understand that she is upset. 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.

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. 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. Hey, Jacqueline.

What do you make of Nick Shaughnessy's apology? See more evidence from the case at 48hours.com. As a kid growing up in Chicago, there was one horror movie I was too scared to watch. It was called Candyman. It was about this supernatural killer who would attack his victims if they said his name five times into a bathroom mirror.

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And these days, it's safe to say they don't see eye to eye. In fact, there may be only one thing they do agree on. Jackie is not a victim. This is a 50-50 thing? Most definitely. Did Jacqueline Edison get away with murder? Absolutely. On October 17, 2023, Jackie Edison walked out of an Austin-area jail after serving her four-month sentence.

Hey, Jacqueline. We'd been asking for an interview for months. I don't want to do any interviews. But our producer, Jenna Jackson, had some questions for her anyway. Nick got 35 years. The hitman got the same. You got 120 days.

Are you getting away with murder? No. I think that it's fair. I think it accurately reflects the level of involvement. Corey and Nick have both told us that you were a partner in this murder plot. Yeah, I think Nick is saying whatever he has to say

to kind of clear his name. And Corey is very much in denial about what really happened. You weren't in on this plot. I was not in. Didn't get money out to pay the hitman. No, ma'am. Is she innocent? Absolutely not. No, ma'am. Is she innocent? Absolutely not.

No, she knew. She knew what he was trying to do. She could have stopped this at any time. I tried to stop him. 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. I found out that Jackie had already picked out the car she was going to buy her mother with the money that they made. Off of the murder of you and Ted? Yes.

I'm not defending her by any degree. Though she did eventually help them make their case against the person they identified as the key culprit. They're both to blame. Who took more action? It's Nick. You take Nick out of this, you don't have the incident. You take Jackie out? 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. Our job ended at the arrest, and there's not a single step further that we can take it. 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, 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?

No, absolutely not. It's a slap in the face to my mother. Now you're concerned about your mother? Most definitely. True or not, Nick Shaughnessy told us he hopes someday Corey will agree to speak with him. What would you say to her? I wish I could tell my mom how truly sorry I am that this is not something I'm proud of and I failed her as a son.

It means nothing to me. Do you think he believes it, what he's saying? I don't know that person. I have no idea who Nicholas Shaughnessy is. And Corey says there is no point responding to an apology. She was never meant to hear. In my mind, I am supposed to be dead. And so I'm a ghost, and ghosts can't speak.

But even after a betrayal no mother should ever have to see, Corrie still can't bring herself to condemn her son altogether. Do you still love your son? I love the person I knew to be my son before this happened. You love that eight-year-old boy racing cars with his dad?

Yes. She knows that boy is gone forever, and so is the life she and Ted tried to build around him. Nicholas and Jackie destroyed my entire world.

They took my husband. They took memories. They took my business. 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. It'll always be there.

It'll always be a part of who I am. But I've been given life, and I need to do something with it. Join me Tuesday for Postmortem from 48 Hours, where we'll dive even deeper into today's episode and answer your questions about the case.