THE ACCIDENT
It was a calm, warm summer night.
August 4, 2009.
Penny Stephens was on vacation with her daughter, her father and his wife at the time in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
Penny was collecting shells by the shore, one of her younger sister Shannon Hercutt’s favorite activities.
It was the last moment of normalcy before Penny’s life was changed forever.
“We were walking back towards the hotel. My daughter was on the balcony, and she saw us coming, and she was hollering at us, ‘Hurry, Mommy. Grandpa’s crying. Something’s happened,’” Penny told Dateline. “And you can tell she was very upset.”
Penny ran back up to the room, and her father, Ted Hercutt, broke the news.
“He told me that my sister was in an accident. They found her body in her Escalade over a cliff on Walker Trail Road, which was behind Dollywood amusement park,” in Tennessee, Penny told Dateline. Shannon Hercutt was 40 years old.
According to Penny, Shannon’s car had been found late on August 3, 2009, around 11:30 p.m. The vehicle’s crash detection feature had issued an OnStar alert, and a sheriff’s deputy responded to the scene shortly after, as did Tennessee Highway Patrol. Dateline spoke to Sevier County Deputy Chief of Investigations Jeff McCarter, who confirmed this information. “Several people responded,” he told Dateline.
The road near where Shannon’s car was found is winding and mountainous. The vehicle crashed a few hours before midnight, so it was also very dark when responders arrived.
“911 received a call that was initiated by OnStar,” Chief Deputy Jeff McCarter told NBC10 in 2019. “Officers responded and found a black Cadillac Escalade down an approximately 125-foot embankment.”
Law enforcement spent the next day — August 4 — trying to contact Shannon’s family.
Penny says one of the investigators knew her ex-husband, who was a police officer in Gatlinburg at the time, and reached out to him. The ex-husband asked if he could be the one to relay the news to Penny and her father. Penny was shocked and upset by the news, but says she couldn’t shake the feeling there was more to the story. “In my heart, when I heard about this, I was like, ‘No, this was not an accident,’” she remembered thinking. “’This was a murder.’”
A GUT FEELING
The family immediately ended their vacation and headed back to Tennessee. “After we found out at Myrtle Beach, we threw all of our clothes in the bag, our suitcases, and we were in the car,” Penny said. And the gut feeling she’d had about her sister Shannon’s death only strengthened on the ride home. And that wasn’t all. The gut feeling told her their father was involved somehow.
“I knew my dad had something to do with it, even though we were in Myrtle Beach. I’m like, you know, ‘This is an alibi for him,’” she said. “And me and my mom and sister Shannon always said if one of us died and it wasn’t a natural cause, we needed to get it investigated. Because all three of us knew my dad would have done it, you know? Or had someone else do it.”
On the drive home, Penny kept her suspicions to herself. “If I would have said something, I knew I would have been fearful for my life and my daughter’s,” she said.
According to Penny, the rocky relationship between Ted Hercutt and his children was common knowledge in their circle. Shannon owned a real estate rental business, and her employees were aware of the situation, so when police began to make calls trying to get in contact with Shannon’s family, people started to talk.
“We were in the car, and my dad was getting calls left and right already, but it was -- it was someone -- one of his friends -- telling him, you know, ‘They’re blaming you already and you need to stay away,’ all this kind of stuff. And I was listening and my dad was being very quiet and kind of like a zombie,” Penny said. “It was just a weird situation when I was watching him.”
What Penny says happened before their drive home was even weirder. “He made us get out of the car, go back to the hotel room and take a picture of us on the balcony and the ocean behind us to confirm that he was at the beach,” she said, adding that she has never seen the photo. “How can you smile or look for the camera, you know, after you hear this trauma?”
THE AFTERMATH
They went straight to Shannon’s house in Sevierville when they got back to Tennessee. The next morning, August 5, Penny and her father went to meet with Penny’s cousin, who had Shannon’s will, to go over Shannon’s last wishes.
“Well, [Shannon] at some point took [our dad] out of the will, and he got very upset,” Penny said. “He eventually took that out on me because I was in the will and my daughter was in the will and he started treating me very bad and trying to tell me what to do.” Penny says she was upset by what she viewed as her father’s priorities in the immediate aftermath of his daughter’s death. “I’m trying to grieve over what just happened with my sister. And he’s worried about money, financial, the business,” she said.
According to Deputy Chief McCarter, Shannon’s autopsy was performed on August 6th at 8:00 a.m. A gash was found on the back of Shannon’s head that was determined to be inconsistent with an injury from a car accident. The cause of death was blunt force trauma and the manner homicide, according to Chief Deputy McCarter.
Penny learned from her cousin that investigators were at her sister’s house. “So I went and they had the garage door open,” she said. “Right away, I see blood and broken bottles in the garage,” Penny told Dateline. “There was blood on the refrigerator and then there was a baseball bat, and it was the one that my sister had bought my daughter. And then they said there was some stuff in the kitchen, a little bit of blood leading out to the garage, but the garage was the crime scene.”
“We did find evidence of a crime [at her house],” McCarter said, but would not elaborate.
According to McCarter, there was no sign of forced entry into Shannon’s house. “Perpetrator knew alternate method of gaining entry,” he said.
Penny says in the days that followed, she learned more about the events of her sister’s last day from Shannon’s employees.
Shannon apparently left work early that day due to a bad headache. She was supposed to meet a friend for a workout class that evening, but never showed. The friend tried to call Shannon several times that evening but never got ahold of her. “The friend almost went to her house to check on her,” Penny said. “I’m glad she didn’t, because the murderer was still there with my sister.”
Shannon’s funeral was held on Saturday, August 8.
Penny found their father’s behavior strange then, as well. “Number one, he didn’t walk up to the casket with me,” she said. “A funeral director walked me up there.” And then, Penny says, her father walked away from the line where family greets the mourners. “He was talking to some of his friends. And I noticed he was laughing. I’m like, ‘What part of this am I not getting? Why is he laughing at his daughter’s funeral?’ You know, what is there to say that would make you laugh?” Penny wondered. “And that made me sick to my stomach.”
And then, she says, there was a confrontation with her father about who would carry Shannon’s casket. According to Penny, Shannon had a list in her will of who she wanted to be pallbearers when the time came. Their father was not on it. Penny says her father insisted he and his friends do it and, exhausted from the day’s events, she gave in. However, “that’s not what Shannon wanted.”
THE INVESTIGATION
The Sevier County Sheriff’s Office brought Penny in for an interview. She says she offered to take a lie detector test but was told it would not be necessary. She says she later learned that her father, was asked to take one but refused.
Deputy Chief McCarter confirmed that Ted Hercutt was questioned but would not confirm whether he declined a polygraph. He did say Ted has not been named a suspect. “Ted Hercutt was out of state with daughter Penny when the murder occurred,” he said. “We investigated any possible involvement, but no evidence was found to corroborate.”
According to Penny, Shannon had an ex-boyfriend she was still having issues with at the time of her death. Deputy Chief McCarter told Dateline that the ex-boyfriend was questioned, but they were not able to tie him to the murder, either.
“A lot of people thought, you know, he may have done it because after they broke up, they were still feuding and all that. And I, truly, I was kind of going back and forth with my dad and her ex-boyfriend,” Penny told Dateline. “But in my heart, I just knew it had to be my dad. And he had someone to do it.”
McCarter told Dateline they looked into several other people as well during their investigation. “We have multiple ex-boyfriends that we investigated and still have on our radar,” he said.
Penny has only one thing on her radar: Getting answers for her sister.
And that’s why, years later, she decided she needed to make a big splash.
A NATIONAL CONFRONTATION
On February 3, 2015, six years after Shannon’s death, Penny and their father, Ted Hercutt, appeared on the ‘Dr. Phil’ show.
“It was a couple weeks prior to that that they called me, because I had emailed them,” Penny told Dateline. In her email she told the producers that she wanted to confront her father about the death of her sister.
“They called me and I said, ‘But he can’t know why I, you know, that I want to confront him.’ And so they go, ‘Well, we can see if he’ll accept that you’re wanting to talk to him, try to get y’all’s relationship back to normal,’” Penny told Dateline.
“I figured, um, he would do it because this spotlight -- the fame -- he was always about. I just knew he would probably do it,” Penny said. “And sure enough, he told him, ‘Yeah, I’ll go.’”
“[I spent] so many years, like, seven years of my time trying to figure out stuff and, you know, just do everything possible that I could to try to help my sister’s case and find justice. I knew that, OK, the last thing I could do would try to go national.”
When Ted Hercutt came on stage, he asked “Can I hug my daughter?” And Penny responded, “No, you’re not gonna hug me.”
Penny then confronted her father saying, “I know you have paid someone to kill Shannon, and don’t sit there and act like you’re so innocent.” Penny believes money was the motive, as her sister was a very successful businesswoman. “My dad thought he was in her will,” Penny said on Dr. Phil. “After she was murdered, he found out that she had taken him out.”
Ted maintained his innocence throughout the show, saying “Anyone saying I would kill my daughter for money is crazy, because I had money,” and “I was not involved in my daughter’s murder,” and “Just because we were in a feud, I would not kill my daughter,“ referring to a lawsuit involving Shannon.
On the show he called his daughter Penny “sick” and accused her of lying. “I don’t know where you dream this stuff up at,” he said. “But you really are doing a damn good job of it.”
“That’s how it was all my life. Um, for me, my sister and my mom, we were always the issue. It was always, we were always the problem,” Penny told Dateline. “He was always right about everything. You know, he was perfect. So he did this on national TV.”
One of Ted’s ex-wives — not the one who had been on the Myrtle Beach trip in 2009 -- also appeared on the show and supported Penny’s allegations against Ted, saying, “I do believe Ted is responsible for his daughter’s murder.”
Ted Hercutt died in November 2017. He was never named a person of interest or suspect in his daughter’s death.
Deputy Chief McCarter told Dateline the Sevier County Sheriff’s Office resubmitted some evidence in 2024 to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI) for further testing. They are awaiting those results. “This case is still an active murder investigation. Any new information, anything new technology that that, uh, that we could use to try to examine the evidence, you know, we will certainly do that,” he told Dateline. “Anything that we can do to help bring this to justice.”
Penny Stephens remembers her sister, Shannon, as a brave, ambitious, and passionate businesswoman who knew what she wanted out of life. “She always said she would never get married,” or have children, Penny said. “But she spoiled my daughter,” Penny said. “She spoiled her like crazy.”
“She was a strong businesswoman, a strong person,” Penny said. “She didn’t take crap from anybody. That’s for sure.”
There is a $45,000 reward being offered by the family and the state of Tennessee for information leading to an arrest and conviction of the person or persons responsible for Shannon Hercutt’s death.
Anyone with information is asked to call the Sevier County Sheriff’s Office at (865)-453-4668.
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