Teen's Rift With His Mother Leads To Sting and Murder-for-Hire Trial

(Courtesy Shannan Troiano - Courtesy Shannan Troiano)

Of all the times she worried about how much to discipline her teenage son, depriving him of a PlayStation and taking down posters of cars and rap stars he admired, Shannan Troiano never imagined their relationship had become so strained that he would try to hire a hit man to kill her.

But there in the spacious living room of her Southern Maryland house was a detective, talking about how Cory Ryder, then 16, had told someone he wanted to have his mother killed. "We need to find out if he is serious," the detective said.

He proposed a sting. The woman Ryder talked to, the mother of one of his friends, would take him to a hotel room, where he would meet with an officer posing as a hit man.

"He's not going to do this," Troiano told her husband after the detective left.

"He's just mad," Joey Troiano responded.

That night, on June 2, the detective called at 7. Everything was in place, he said. Troiano, not knowing what else to do, began to frantically clean her house. He called again several hours later. Ryder was in custody and would be charged with attempted murder.

In a bathroom, where she was still cleaning, Troiano fell to her knees and burst into tears.

Ryder, now 17, is scheduled to be tried tomorrow in Circuit Court in St. Mary's County. Detectives say he offered the undercover officer his stepfather's new pickup truck as payment to kill his mother and his stepfather. "Two bullets is all it takes," the teenager is alleged to have said.

Like parents of any teenager who has gone off track, the Troianos had struggled over when to ground their son, when to back off, when to call for help. They took things away -- radio, TV and the posters -- and grounded him for weeks at a time. After Ryder smashed a picture frame and threatened to cut his mother's throat in her sleep, they said, they had the police take him to a hospital for psychiatric evaluation -- testing that, according to the parents, turned up nothing serious.

Troiano, 35, who is expected to testify as a witness for the state, said she feels like a heartbroken mother wanting to believe her son's apologetic jailhouse letters and, at the same time, like a furious crime victim wanting him locked up.

"He needs to understand what he did was wrong," she told a judge at a hearing in September. ". . . I'm scared to death that if this kid is serious, and they put him in a three-month program, they're going to release him to the street."

Ryder has told Juvenile Services officials that he was upset his parents kicked him out of the house and that he felt pressured to talk to the man in the hotel, according to an agency report. He told them that he never intended to have his parents killed and that he wanted to call the police himself that night in the hotel room.