Tonight Saturday (January 20, 2024) “CBS 48 Hours” A newsmagazine that focuses on a single story per episode, told from a number of perspectives by a group of correspondents.
The January 20 2024 edition of “CBS 48 Hours” starts at 10PM ET/PT on CBS. Cayley Mandadi was a 19-year-old sophomore at Trinity University when she arrived at a hospital in Texas on Oct. 29, 2017. She was nearly naked, bruised and not breathing. Her sometime boyfriend Mark Howerton told doctors they’d taken ecstasy at a music festival and she passed out after consensual sex in his car. She died at the hospital. Mandadi’s mother and stepfather believed something far more sinister had happened and set out to prove it. Peter Van Sant reports on the case in 48 HOURS: “For the Love of Cayley Mandadi,”
The medical examiner ruled Mandadi died of blunt force trauma to the head and face and ruled it a homicide. Howerton was then arrested and charged with murder. At the trial, prosecutors argued Howerton beat Mandadi. His attorney maintained her injuries were caused during resuscitation efforts at the hospital or by a possible fall. When jurors couldn’t reach a verdict, a judge declared a mistrial. A new trial was set for 2023.
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Something about the crime scene just didn’t sit right with investigators.
“This was not a stranger,” says Amy Meredith, who was an assistant district attorney at the time of the murder. “This was not a stranger killing.”
Once investigators dug deeper, they learned their hunches were correct. It was not a random robbery but rather a plot involving the Shaughnessys’ son Nicolas and his wife, Jaclyn Edison, to have his parents killed. Police had evidence that included text messages between them, which appeared to be a discussion about paying for a hit. Soon after, Nick Shaughnessy and two alleged hit men were charged with capital murder.
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