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When Tonia Edwards dropped her children off at school, she had no idea the horror waiting for her at home.
On the morning of Sept. 3, 1999, Edwards arrived at her Florida residence to a devastating scene: her mother, Stephanie Jackson, was deceased in a living room chair, suffocated with a pillow and shot three times in the head.
“Somebody shot my momma,” Edwards wailed in a harrowing 911 call. “Please hurry up.”
Despite the passage of more than 25 years, the 48-year-old woman’s murder remains unsolved. However, Cold Justice’s Kelly Siegler and Abbey Abbondandolo, a homicide investigator, joined forces with Detective Bridgette Sanders from the Indian River County Sheriff’s Office and retired cold case expert Nancy McNally to revisit this intricate case.
Their mission was to ascertain whether Jackson, who led a private life without apparent adversaries, was targeted by someone with a vendetta, or if the heinous act was meant to send a twisted signal to Edwards herself.
What Happened to Stephanie Jackson?
At the time of the incident, Jackson was a long-serving supervisor at a packing house in Florida, having committed 25 years to her occupation, while living with her daughter and her grandchildren.
“She was kind,” Sanders remarked. “She was a God-fearing woman, a beautiful person that honestly was definitely taken out of this world too quickly.”
On the morning of her tragic death, Edwards followed her routine of taking her children to school, returning to an unusual scenario: the door was locked, something McNally noted as “unusual.”
Once she was able to enter, there were no evident signs of forced entry, but Edwards discovered her mother in a chair, a pillow with three bullet holes pressed against her head.
When deputies arrived a few minutes later, they noticed that two purses were knocked to the floor in the kitchen and someone had stolen Edwards’ driver’s license, leaving behind $187 in cash.
Edwards’ drivers license was recovered the next day by a woman who found it laying alongside 66th Avenue, not far from the home.
“There were no viable fingerprints or DNA, but the stolen driver’s license is a huge clue about Stephanie’s killer,” Abbondandolo theorized. “Why only steal an ID and why discard it so quickly? Did the killer have a change of plans or was he trying to send a message?”
A Potential Suspect Emerges
Those who knew Jackson couldn’t imagine who would have wanted to harm her, but there may have been someone in Edwards’ life angry with the family.
At the time of Jackson’s death, Edwards was in the midst of a difficult divorce from Jeffrey Swanigan, a former military man with an allegedly violent past.
Swanigan initially told investigators that he’d been driving around Palm Beach, Florida all morning trying to burn off some bad gas in his truck, but in a recorded conversation with his mom that took place at the station, he admitted to being in Indian River County that morning to pay his child support.
Cold Justice Team Revisits Key Witnesses
As part of the new examination of the case, the team spoke with Edwards, who was still devastated by her mom’s death.
She described Swanigan as “really strict” during their marriage and said he began stalking her after she left him. She recounted one alleged incident where he was waiting outside her workplace and made a “slashing motion” across his throat when he saw her.
According to reports, he also called and threatened her saying, “Wherever you go, I’m going to get you.”
Years later, Edwards still wondered whether Swanigan may have killed her mom to get back at her.
“The best way to hurt me…(to) continue to hurt me is to do something to my mom,” she told investigators. “You hurt me, I’m gone. I’m gone. But, to bother me, to hurt me every day would be to hurt my mom.”
A church staff member also remembered Swanigan once bragging to the congregation that he could get away with certain things because of his military training.
The team also spoke with Rev. Larry Taylor, a deacon at St. Peter’s Church, who recalled Swanigan punching a church musician who he suspected was involved with Edwards.
As for his movements on the day of the murder, the team was able to confirm he’d been in Indian River County that day to pay his child support after speaking with a county clerk. They also reviewed a recording from an eyewitness who reported in 1999 that she saw Swanigan’s distinctive red truck coming out of an orange grove not far from Jackson’s home.
As Siegler explained, “This witness places Jeff exiting an orange grove right by the crime scene at 9:15 a.m. that morning, which is just minutes before Edwards got home and found her mother murdered.”
Finally, they spoke with Wanda Simmons, one of Jackson’s coworkers at the packing house who remembered that Jackson had been afraid of what her son-in-law might do and once told her “if anything ever happens to her, her son-in-law would be responsible.”
Although investigators were eager to talk to Swanigan himself, he refused to answer any questions without his lawyer.
Given all the evidence they were able to uncover, the investigators believed that Swanigan was likely responsible for Jackson’s death. By the episode’s end, Sanders planned to take what they learned to a prosecutor in the hopes of securing an arrest warrant.
Siegler remarked, “We’re gonna stay in contact and hope that the prosecutors want to move forward on this case.”
