by Kerry Doherty
Autumn, with its crisp temperatures, pumpkin spice and vibrant colors, seems to be everyone’s favorite season.
Not Paige O’Shaughnessy’s.
In fact, each year when the season changes she’s reminded of the hellish fall of 2000. That was the year her husband, Timothy O’Shaughnessy, 40, was murdered in his downtown Norfolk office.
It was Tuesday, November 7, when he was killed by an unhinged former employee bearing a grudge, a golf club and a gun.
Paige O’Shaughnessy was left alone to raise their four sons, ages 9 months, 2 1/2 years old, 4 1/2 years old and six.
The killer was stockbroker Joseph Ludlam. He beat the man who’d fired him from his job five weeks earlier and when the golf club broke, he stabbed O’Shaughnessy with the shaft and then shot him. Twice.
Ludlam stole O’Shaughnessy’s wallet, car keys and car and sped to his parents’ house in South Carolina where he holed up for 18 hours. He was finally arrested and charged with capital murder.
After numerous delays, Ludlam’s murder trial was finally set. But on Columbus Day of 2002 then-Commonwealth’s Attorney for Norfolk, Jack Doyle (now a retired circuit court judge), contacted the widow and said Ludlam had agreed to plead guilty to first degree murder and the use of a firearm in the commission of a felony in return for a prison term of no more than 40 years.
She’d be spared the ordeal of a trial, the state would be spared the expense and the murderer would be locked up for a very long time.
Mrs. O’Shaughnessy recalls the prosecutor reassuring her that, “He’ll be an old man when he gets out.”
“This gives us an assured conviction, and he waives his rights to appeal,” Doyle told The Daily Press at the time. “Forty years is virtually a life sentence.”
Not exactly.
There was one factor no one mentioned: geriatric parole. (more…)
by Jeanine Martin
from Liberty Unyielding
