Jurors punished Cody Arnold after prosecutors said he and Chelsea Shipp plotted around a pregnancy they feared would bring criminal trouble.

JEFFERSON COUNTY, Texas — A Southeast Texas jury has sentenced Cody Arnold to 34 years in prison in the 2022 killing of 16-year-old Katelynn Stone, ending the trial of a case prosecutors said began with fear over Stone’s reported pregnancy and the legal risk it posed to Arnold.

The sentence followed a guilty verdict in Criminal District Court after prosecutors told jurors that Arnold and Chelsea Shipp killed Stone inside Arnold’s home on Kolbs Corner and then left her body in the bedroom. The case drew wide attention because of Stone’s age, the allegation that Arnold believed he had gotten her pregnant, and the claim that the killing was meant to stop fallout that could have exposed him to sex-offender consequences. Shipp had already accepted a plea deal and received a 40-year sentence, leaving Arnold’s trial to settle the remaining criminal responsibility.

The path to that sentence began on Sunday, March 27, 2022, when deputies were called around 5 p.m. to the 14000 block of Kolb’s Corner in West Jefferson County. Officers found the body of a 16-year-old girl who had suffered a gunshot wound, and Arnold, then 22, was arrested at the home and charged with murder. Prosecutors later told jurors the shooting itself happened the day before, after a weekend in which Arnold and Shipp stayed at the house and talked through what they were going to do. Jimmy Hamm of the Jefferson County District Attorney’s Office told jurors the pair were “smoking meth that entire weekend to build up the courage to kill that girl,” framing the killing as deliberate rather than sudden.

At trial, the state’s theory turned on motive and the pair’s own words. Prosecutors said Stone had taken a pregnancy test that came back positive and that Arnold later told investigators he believed he had gotten her pregnant. According to the prosecution, Shipp warned that Arnold was “going to get in trouble,” pointing to the age gap between a 21-year-old man and a 16-year-old girl. Arnold’s account, as described in reporting on the probable cause affidavit, said he walked into the bedroom at about 2 p.m. and saw Shipp pointing a gun at Stone while the teen slept. The trigger was pulled, Stone was killed in bed, and Arnold later covered her head with a trash bag because, by his own reported statement, he did not want to look at her. Other local reporting said the body was wrapped and left on the bed with a shell casing on a pillow nearby.

Investigators then built the case outward from the house. The sheriff’s office first announced Arnold’s arrest on March 28, 2022, and said detectives were still working to identify other suspects. The next day, authorities publicly sought Shipp, describing her as armed and saying a murder warrant had been issued. She was arrested about 3:40 a.m. on March 31, 2022, at a residence in Liberty Hill, north of Austin, in an operation involving Jefferson County deputies and local agencies there. By that point, the sheriff’s office had identified the victim as Katelynn Nicole Stone of Vidor. Arnold’s bond was set at $1 million. The public record at that stage established the basic outline of the case, but important details remained unresolved in open view, including whether any pregnancy was medically confirmed and exactly how the final plan was formed inside the house.

Those gaps were partly filled by witness testimony and later plea proceedings. Witnesses told investigators that Shipp had been talking about the shooting after it happened, including one account that she said, “I got rid of her,” and another in which she said, “I shot her,” while making a shooting gesture with two fingers. A later local television account said Shipp told a witness she killed Stone because the girl was pregnant and Arnold would “get in trouble.” Reporting from the plea stage also said Shipp admitted she shot Stone in March 2022 at Arnold’s home in Jefferson County. When asked by investigators why she did it, one account said she answered, “Because one of them was sleeping around on the other.” Together, those statements gave jurors a view of jealousy, fear and self-protection that prosecutors argued explained the killing.

Arnold’s trial turned the legal focus from who fired the gun to whether he shared in the murder plot. Prosecutors said he did far more than stand nearby. They described him as part of the planning, part of the cover-up and part of the effort to conceal what happened after the shooting. The jury agreed on guilt and then moved to punishment, where Arnold faced a possible life sentence. Instead, jurors settled on 34 years. Shipp, who had already pleaded guilty, received 40 years from Judge John Stevens in June 2025. The split outcome left both defendants with lengthy prison terms but also highlighted the state’s view that each played a separate role in Stone’s death: Shipp as the admitted shooter, Arnold as the man whose conduct and motive set the crime in motion.

The case also carried a grim sense of place that remained constant from the first sheriff’s office bulletin to the final sentencing story. Again and again, the same address area on Kolb’s Corner surfaced in public records, television reports and courtroom testimony as the center of the crime. Stone was a teen from nearby Vidor. Arnold was from Beaumont. Shipp was identified by authorities as being from Winnie. Those nearby Southeast Texas communities gave the case a close-to-home quality for local audiences, especially once it became clear that Stone’s body had remained in the house after the shooting and that investigators believed the adults involved had spent the weekend using drugs while the plan took shape. Even after the verdict, some questions still sit outside the public record, including what Stone’s final hours were like and whether any additional forensic findings will ever be made public.

For now, the case stands with both defendants sentenced and Stone’s killing no longer waiting on a jury’s answer. The next milestone, if any, is likely to come through post-conviction filings or an appeal as the March 2026 judgment against Arnold moves deeper into the court record.

Author note: Last updated April 17, 2026.