They Called Her the Teenage 'Show and Tell' Killer. Now Pardoned, She Shares What Really Happened (Exclusive) By Johnny Dodd

The plan that night was supposed to be simple, 15-year-old Sandy Shaw told herself. She would lure 21-year-old James “Cotton” Kelly into the desert on the outskirts of Las Vegas, and then her childhood friend Troy Kell would rough him up in an attempt to force Kelly to stop his monthslong campaign of stalking and harassing her.

But instead of beating Kelly, Troy, 18, shot him six times in the head and neck and robbed him with the help of a teenage boy. “After that first gunshot went off, I started running,” Shaw recalls. “I thought I was gonna be sick. I just kept saying, ‘This wasn’t supposed to happen. Why did you do this?’ ”

Shaw has spent the past four decades dealing with the fallout from that night in September 1986. Despite testifying that she never intended for Kelly to die — and didn’t pull the trigger herself or tell her friend to — Shaw, a former cheerleader and straight-A student, was dubbed the “Show and Tell” killer after prosecutor Dan Seaton wrongly claimed she took people to view Kelly’s bullet-ridden body.

She was found guilty in 1987 of Kelly’s first-degree murder and received two life sentences, becoming the youngest female ever incarcerated in the state’s prisons. She spent 21 years behind bars and another 15 years on parole before being pardoned in 2022, with officials citing her character. Attorney General Aaron Ford called it an “act of mercy.” Their decision restored Shaw’s freedom, though it did not set aside a verdict she continues to dispute. (Pardons don’t overturn convictions.) 

Today Shaw feels empowered to tell her side of the nightmare. “This literally ruined my life,” says the 54-year-old, who details her harrowing odyssey in the new memoir Life Without. In an interview on a recent night from her Las Vegas home, she adds, “I’m determined not to let it define me.”

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Even before Kelly’s murder, Shaw’s childhood was tumultuous. She was dragged back and forth between her parents, Connie and Michael, after their marriage crumbled, and by the age of 13, she had witnessed a grisly triple murder and suicide at a friend’s home. “I went downhill really fast,” she says, “and started hanging out with the wrong people.”

A little more than a year after that incident, Kelly, whom she describes as “very creepy and scary,” spotted her at an arcade and eventually started showing up at her house. He began constantly calling her as well, and asking her to pose nude. “My mom called the police, and they told her, ‘There’s nothing we can do unless he physically harms her,’ ” says Shaw.

When she told her friend Troy Kell about her predicament, he agreed to knock Kelly around. Shaw then told Kelly she’d meet up with him, but he would need to pick up Troy on their drive. “There really was no plan” beyond that, she says. Then Troy pulled a gun.

Five days later she and Troy were arrested along with William Merritt, Troy’s friend who accompanied him and was later convicted as an accessory. “My trial was a circus,” says Shaw, describing how another friend she had confided in — and who had, unbeknownst to Shaw, brought kids out to view the corpse — testified against her to keep from being charged with stealing a watch and ring from Kelly’s body. That sequence of events fueled the “Show and Tell” moniker.

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After hearing the guilty verdict, the judge immediately sentenced Shaw to life without parole. “I remember my mom screaming so loud it shot through my heart,” she says. “But in that moment I didn’t have any emotion.”

Shaw spent the next two decades in prison, determined to make something positive out of her predicament. She earned a high school diploma and two associate degrees, in arts and business. “I realized I might not ever get out,” she says. “But I was focused on showing everyone that I wasn’t that person [they painted me as].”

By 2007, she had persuaded officials to show mercy and was released on parole. Troy Kell — now on death row in Utah after stabbing a fellow inmate — provided a sworn affidavit saying she had “no knowledge” of his plan to murder Kelly.

“Everybody — the guards and prisoners — were ecstatic and just kept hugging me,” she says of leaving custody. She soon landed her current job as a dispatcher and office manager for an HVAC company and, three years after her pardon removed the final limitations on her life, lives with two pit bull mixes whom she calls her “children.”

Shaw is stepping back into the spotlight, she says, to correct years of false headlines and narratives told by other people. Though she finds it hard to move past the “surreal” twists and turns her life has taken, she is grateful nonetheless. “My blood pressure is high, my anxiety is off the charts, and I’m always in a state of tension,” she says. “But I’m finally in a good place, and I feel very blessed.”