I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

—W. H. Auden, “September 1, 1939,” Another Time

In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's classic Sherlock Holmes tale “The Adventure of the Devil's Foot,” the sleuth determines that a celebrated explorer and huntsman, Dr. Leon Sterndale, has avenged the murder of his mistress by fatally poisoning her killer with a vaporized toxin. Holmes empathizes with Sterndale's decidedly human motivation and is unable to condemn him as a basically evil man, remarking to his friend and biographer, “I have never loved, Watson, but if I did and the woman I loved had met such an end, I might act even as our lawless lion-hunter has done. Who knows?”1

Dr. Sterndale's crime is a plausible example of the type of violence generally designated to the first six categories of the Gradations of Evil scale—and the reaction evoked in Holmes is precisely the type typically experienced by those who hear about such acts. Individuals ranked at this low end of the spectrum will all have felt driven to kill or commit other heinous acts in the contexts of specific situational factors, such as the need to escape abuse or defend oneself, or under the duress of intense emotions, such as jealousy or rage. Scattered narcissistic or antisocial traits may be present in such persons but never to degrees associated with psychopathy—again, a concept we will discuss in some detail in the coming chapters. These types rarely progress to commit murder or other serious crimes on separate occasions, and tend to subsequently exhibit sincere remorse and amendment of life, although these moral prognoses must be examined on a case-by-case basis. Let us now individually touch upon these first six categories, providing case examples as we go.

CATEGORY 1

Individuals ranked here have killed, but solely in self-defense during an attempted manslaughter, murder, rape, or armed robbery. Such homicides are deemed to be “justified” in the eyes of the law and are, therefore, categorized on the scale as “non-evil” acts. They do not involve malice aforethought, are not vicious or wildly extreme in nature, are committed by persons with no psychopathic or sadistic personality features, and are followed by genuine contrition. Thus, such homicides are included in the scale merely to establish a point of distinction from the types of actions associated with the twenty-one other categories, which will, by contrast, involve, to increasing degrees, the characteristics of “evil” proposed in our introduction. The following example received considerable media attention in 2009.2

John Pontolillo, a twenty-year-old chemistry student at Johns Hopkins University, filed a police report after discovering that two laptops and a video game system had been stolen from a home he shared with three friends. Deciding that he should check on his car, Pontolillo stepped outside with a samurai sword he kept in his bedroom, where he noticed forty-nine-year-old Donald Rice hiding under a porch behind the house. Rice, who had just been released from jail two days prior, was a career criminal who had been arrested more than two dozen times for breaking and entering, burglary, and car theft.

Pontolillo raised the sword and shouted at Rice to remain in place, calling for his roommates to alert the police. Rice instead raised his arms and hurled himself at the student, backing him up against a wall. Pontolillo, fearing for his safety, struck Rice with a single blow of the sword, creating a large gash in his chest and nearly severing his left hand. The attacker expired at the scene.

It was ultimately determined that Pontolillo legitimately believed he was in danger of death or suffering some serious bodily injury, such that he was fully justified in defending himself as he did. He was not charged in Rice's death.

A second example is the case of twenty-six-year-old Faith Martin of Illinois. In November of 2010, she had a squabble with her abusive, hard-drinking, forty-four-year-old boyfriend, Willie Arrington, with whom she had a young son. Arrington had a history of several violent assaults on other people, including kicking his best friend down a flight of stairs and biting off a chunk of a man's cheek during a brawl. She compared him to “a freight train going 1,000 miles per hour” when he was drunk and enraged. The day after their blowup, he visited her apartment and began punching and choking her, and the two wound up in her kitchen. Certain that he was hell-bent on taking her life, she grabbed a knife from the sink and fled into another room. Arrington pursued her, slamming her into a closet door and pushing her to the ground. She plunged the blade into his chest, piercing his aorta. Martin, horrified at what she had done, raced to a friend's apartment to seek help, but Arrington died at the scene. “I loved him, I didn't want to hurt him,” she would later say. “I wanted to scare him—I wanted him to stop.” Martin was initially charged with first-degree murder and held in prison for over a year. She was, however, subsequently acquitted on the grounds that Arrington had been a brutally abusive partner and that, during his violent assault, she fatally stabbed him in the context of very real fear for her own safety. According to the Chicago Tribune, “The judge called it the best case of self-defense that he had ever seen.”3

CATEGORY 2

Here, we shift into the portion of the scale, ranging from Categories 2 through 6, associated with homicides committed by non-psychopathic individuals who act out of impulse. The specific impulse that serves as the impetus in Category 2 is jealousy within the context of spurned or unrequited romantic love. Sometimes called crimes of passion, these killings are generally carried out by egocentric and immature, but otherwise reasonably “normal” individuals with no criminal backgrounds, who suddenly act out in moments of blind, murderous rage. These are typically followed by feelings of sincere remorse. We find an example of this type of homicide in the case of Samuel Collins of Maine.⁴ In 1996, Collins, who was then forty-two, made a surprise visit to the supermarket where his beloved wife of ten years, Lucinda, was employed. After discovering her kissing a coworker, he traveled home, shocked and consumed by overwhelming jealousy. Upon her return from work, he attacked her, dragging her across the floor by the hair, beating her and fatally stabbing her at least a dozen times with a knife. He then turned the blade on himself, slashing his wrists and chest, and phoned his mother to announce the intended murder-suicide, saying, “I can't live without her, she can't live without me, and this is the best way of doing it.” Police found Collins lying alongside his wife's bloody corpse on the floor of their bathroom. They were able to save his life, and, two years later, he was found guilty of the grisly homicide.

Notably, some jealousy-related murders require higher rankings on the Gradations of Evil scale, due to narcissism, premeditation, unusual degrees of violence, or lack of subsequent remorse. Consider, for instance, the widely publicized Belgian “Parachute Murder” case, in which a woman was convicted of killing a romantic rival in a methodical, ruthless, less impulsive manner.

Els “Babs” Clottemans, a twenty-two-year-old elementary school teacher, and Els Van Doren, a thirty-eight-year-old married mother of two, both met and fell in love with Marcel Somers at a parachute club in Zwartberg. The three drank together, and the handsome twenty-five-year-old arranged to sleep with the two women on a strict schedule: Clottemans saw him on Fridays, and Van Doren on Saturdays. In November of 2006, while Clottemans was spending a night on Somer's couch, she overheard him and Van Doren making love in the bedroom. It is believed that, having noticed Van Doren's parachute nearby, she severed the release cords. When the trio went skydiving the following week, Van Doren's primary and reserve parachutes both failed to deploy, and she plummeted, while frantically fumbling, two miles to her death, landing in a garden in the town of Opglabbeek. Horrifying footage of the tragedy was captured on a camera mounted atop the victim's helmet. Investigators noted that, while the three would normally jump together to create a formation, Clottemans remained on the plane a few extra seconds and watched her rival's dive from above. Protesting her innocence, she attempted suicide during questioning by police. She was sentenced to thirty years in prison in 2010.5

In this case, the motive was, indeed, jealousy, but, even after a week of contemplation, the apparent murder plot by Clottemans was not aborted, and Van Doren's demise seems to have been designed to be particularly cruel in nature, with no chance of survival. Since the more sudden impulsivity and blind rage components seen in the Collins case are not present here, a ranking of 2 would not sufficiently characterize the nature of this crime. As we shall see, it would instead be assigned to Category 9 of the Gradations of Evil scale.

CATEGORY 3

This uncommon ranking is for impulsive, sometimes somewhat antisocial individuals who participate in the depraved acts of a killer or the leader of a murderous cult, either through passivity, fear, brainwashing, or some other factor. Typically, a blend of dread, adoration, or personal need leads them to blindly follow some master manipulator. When the trancelike hold is ultimately broken, such persons generally experience sincere remorse and accept responsibility for their actions—unlike those whose horrible crimes they aided and abetted. Let us consider, in some detail, the story of Leslie Van Houten, who participated in the two-day murder spree perpetrated by Charles Manson's mind-controlled cult in 1969.

It would be difficult to overstate the hold Manson—a grungy, diminutive ex-convict with a psychopathic, highly charismatic personality—maintained over his so-called “family.” Manson's followers, people in their teens and early twenties who were dealing with various family conflicts, viewed him as an authority figure who, unlike their parents, understood their true needs and desires. In exchange, they were required to undergo “ego-death,” a complete abandonment of the sense of self.⁶ A misogynist who believed women to be lesser beings, Manson commanded them to participate in orgies at the isolated ranch where they lived a communal existence, sometimes involving male visitors who were strangers to them.⁷

Manson further disintegrated his followers’ personal identities by drugging them with LSD and constantly barraging them with pseudo-spiritual rhetoric,⁸ claiming, at various points, that he was Jesus, God, and the devil,⁹ and that all aspects of traditional society, including the nuclear family, law, and morality, should be disregarded or dismantled.¹⁰ He convinced them that, when the great race war he called Helter Skelter finally arrived, they would survive it by going underground and building up a population of 144,000 cult members, who would later reemerge and dominate the world.11 The Beatles, he claimed, were the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse described in the New Testament book of Revelations, and, through their White Album, they were directly communicating with him.¹² Although, to someone encountering him for the first time, he may have seemed utterly deluded and disorganized as he rambled on about such things, he was, in fact, an adept con artist who, while in McNeil Island Penitentiary in the 1960s, had absorbed ideas about interpersonal influence and manipulation from inmates steeped in hypnotism, Scientology, psychology, and the ideas of Dale Carnegie about how to win over other people.¹³ His paranoia and other psychotic-like traits were firmly embedded within a wider picture of psychopathy and mind-altering drug use—concepts we will discuss in detail later in this book.

Manson reasoned that, if the family were to commit high-profile crimes against wealthy whites, African Americans would be blamed for them and his prophesied race war would rapidly erupt. On August 9, 1969, cult members Charles “Tex” Watson, Linda Kasabian, Susan Atkins, and Patricia Krenwinkel were sent to the friend-filled home of pregnant actress Sharon Tate, wife of director Roman Polanski, and instructed to “totally destroy” the inhabitants, “as gruesome as you can.”¹⁴ Steven Parent, a friend of the property's caretaker, was immediately stabbed and shot to death. Watson announced himself as the devil and kicked sleeping houseguest Wojciech Frykowski in the head. Watson bound Tate and Jay Sebring together with ropes, which were tied around their necks and slung over the ceiling beams, before Sebring was fatally shot for his protestations. Frykowski and coffee heiress Abigail Folger, who were brutally stabbed twenty-eight and fifty-one times, respectively, were both killed. Watson and/or Atkins stabbed Tate sixteen times.¹⁵ An “X,” believed by some to signify removal from society, was carved into her pregnant belly.¹⁶ Having been told by Manson to “leave a sign…something witchy,”¹⁷ Atkins wrote the word “pig” in Tate's blood on the front door of the house.¹⁸

The following night, after the cult celebrated its “triumph” with an orgy of sex and marijuana, Manson instructed the same cult members to kill anew, this time adding Van Houten and Steve Grogan and accompanying the group himself. They randomly selected the Los Angeles home of forty-four-year-old grocery store chain owner Leno LaBianca and his thirty-eight-year-old wife, Rosemary LaBianca, who operated a fashionable dress shop. After Manson and Watson tied up the couple, assuring them they would only be robbed, Atkins, Grogan, and Kasabian departed the scene with their leader and the others went straight to work, like so many obedient drones. Watson placed pillowcases over the heads of the victims, who were in separate rooms, before wrapping pieces of electrical cord, torn from a lamp, around their necks.19 He then stabbed Mr. LaBianca to death. The deceased would later be found with a knife and a fork jutting out of his body, and the word “war” carved into his stomach.²⁰ His screams prompted his wife, who was with Van Houten and Krenwinkel, to thrash out in self-defense. Van Houten held her down while Krenwinkel unsuccessfully attempted to stab her in the chest with a knife taken from the kitchen. The blade bent on the victim's clavicle. Watson then entered the room and stabbed Mrs. LaBianca numerous times. When he reminded Van Houten that she had been instructed by Manson to “do something” that night, she stabbed Mrs. LaBianca, who was already dead, over a dozen times, in the lower back and buttocks. A subsequent autopsy would tally forty wounds in all. Krenwinkel then wrote on the walls with Mrs. LaBianca's blood, and Van Houten attempted to remove possible fingerprints, after which the trio ate cheese and drank milk from the victims’ refrigerator.²¹

By October of 1969, Manson and several of his followers, including Van Houten, were in police custody.²² In the months following the killings, Van Houten and the other cult members who participated in the various parts of the murder spree were tried in Los Angeles. Because Van Houten was the youngest and considered to be the least devoted to Manson, it was anticipated by some that she would likely receive a lenient sentence. However, she repeatedly disrupted trial proceedings with giggling, particularly during discussion of the murders. She also showed little remorse at the time, saying, “Sorry is only a five-letter word.” In 1971, all of the defendants were convicted and sentenced to be executed, but all of the death sentences were ultimately commuted.²³

By the late 1970s, Van Houten was considered to have undergone a significant personal change. In 2002, a superior court judge described her as having been a model prisoner for thirty years. She completed all available programs for inmates and assisted other incarcerated people.²⁴ She underwent decades of psychotherapy, to attempt to learn how she fell under Manson's mind control. Van Houten has long expressed remorse and renounced Manson, who, by contrast, took no real responsibility for his role in the killings.25 He died of cardiac arrest in 2017, at the age of eighty-three.

Manson, Atkins, Krenwinkel, and Watson might best be ranked in Category 15 of the Gradations of Evil scale, designated for psychopathic, cold-blooded spree killers or multiple murderers. In Manson's unique case, murders were carried out through willing participants, at his behest. Van Houten, by contrast, is ranked here, in Category 3. She was not at the scene of the Tate murders. While she helped to subdue the LaBiancas, she only stabbed the latter alongside Watson after Mrs. LaBianca had already expired. Moreover, with time, reflection, and the lifting of Manson's spell, Van Houten has displayed contrition, devoting her years in prison to altruistic behaviors and personal healing.

CATEGORY 4

Similar to Category 1, Category 4 is associated with individuals who kill in self-defense. However, they are not generally exonerated when legally tried, due to the critical difference that, here, the threat in which self-defense efforts are carried out is the result of what is demonstrated to be extreme provocation on the attacked person's own part. Consider the following example.

On August 9, 2010, thirty-one-year-old Jose Rodriguez Elizondo, an off-duty US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer, visited the Punto 3 nightclub in Texas with his wife and brother. His wife alleged that, while they were being ejected from the club following a disagreement, she was pushed by bouncer Fermin Limon Jr., who was the son of the establishment's owner. Elizondo and Limon began arguing, and several security guards came over to assist. Elizondo broke free and ran nearly seventy yards to his truck, where his CBP-issued firearm and badge were located. He had his gun in hand as the men banged on the windows and forced him out of the vehicle. When Limon grabbed him, Elizondo began to pistol-whip him. He was suddenly approached by forty-nine-year-old Limon Sr., who was holding a 9mm pistol. Elizondo claimed that he told the elder Limon to put down his weapon at least twice before feeling compelled to shoot him in self-defense. Bar security saw it differently, reporting that Elizondo fired instantly as Limon was trying to calm the escalating situation. Following shots to his leg and chest, Limon Sr. hid behind a vehicle while a bouncer, who had taken over the pistol, fired several shots at Elizondo. The club owner later died as a result of his injuries. The following year, Elizondo, who it was felt provoked and did not abandon the encounter, was convicted of murder and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. Later the defense appealed, and Elizondo was granted a new trial, due to an error related to the charge. He pled guilty and accepted a sentence of five years, of which he had already served a substantial portion.26

We would also categorize here the case of Susan Cummings, one of two fraternal twin sisters born in Monaco in 1962 to a billionaire arms dealer and his Swiss wife, Samuel and Irma Cummings. In 1984, the twins’ father purchased for them a lavish estate in Warrenton, Virginia, named Ashland Farms, complete with a stone and frame manor house, two cottages, twenty-two horse stalls, and a two-hundred-foot indoor riding arena.²⁷ In 1995, Susan Cummings began dating Roberto Villegas, a dashing Argentine polo player. He had recently left a long-term relationship with a Floridian woman, who was pregnant with their son. Shortly after the child's birth, Villegas began spending his summers in Virginia to ride the polo circuit, where he was hired by Cummings as an instructor.²⁸ Before long, he moved into the estate, and, by the following year, their dynamic had become a stormy one. He was reportedly ill-tempered and verbally aggressive, and Cummings grew increasingly detached. Her alleged frugality, despite immense wealth, was a further point of contention.²⁹ Villegas was not paid for his work and came to greatly resent his financial dependency upon her.³⁰ Rumors swirled that he was engaging in affairs with other women.³¹ Their relationship ultimately became explosive, and, on September 7, 1997, Cummings fatally shot him four times with a Walther 9mm semiautomatic—one of the guns imported by her father—as he sat eating breakfast at their kitchen table.³²

Following her confession to police, she was arrested and charged with homicide. She claimed that Villegas had become physically abusive, grabbing her by the throat and slowly cutting her arm with a knife, saying he was going to teach her a lesson. She explained that she begged him to stop and suggested they have some coffee and talk. When she went over to the sink, she heard his chair move and believed him to be coming toward her. Thinking quickly, she grabbed the gun she kept in a nearby cabinet and repeatedly fired at him.33 An attorney defending Cummings noted that, two weeks before the shooting, she had filed a statement with local deputies, in which she called him “overpowering, short-fused and the crazy type.” She described how he refused to allow her to leave him and that, in the prior month, he had begun to show signs of aggression, allegedly telling her, “I will put a bullet in your head and hang you upside-down to let the blood pour on your bed.” A 1987 battery charge against him was also noted.³⁴ Villegas was quoted as once saying, “I treat my women and my horses the same way…. If I can't break them, I kill them.”³⁵

Prosecutors, by contrast, posited that the killing was premeditated and that Cummings had cut herself before staging a self-defense scenario. In the end, despite being convicted of voluntary manslaughter, she was sentenced to only sixty days in jail and a $2,500.00 fine.³⁶ In this case, we do not encounter a situation in which one inoffensive person is maltreated by someone else in a totally one-sided manner, as observed in Category 1. This case involved two individuals in a tense, negative dynamic, to which they both contributed to some degree, and it flared up into an incident in which one party then felt the need to defend herself against threat of bodily harm or even death. Hence, we feel that Category 4 is the most appropriate ranking for the slaying of Villegas on the Gradations of Evil scale.

CATEGORY 5

Individuals in Category 5, who show no signs of psychopathy, feel driven to homicide by traumatic or desperate circumstances, followed by bona fide guilt and remorse. These killings are generally impulsive, without much deliberation. The victims are typically family members or significant others, but other people perceived as contributing to the individual's negative circumstances might instead be targeted. Looking over a variety of cases classified here, we note that the emotions involved are more often than not about a sense of weakness or helplessness, arising due to the convergence of two forces: First, there is some external problem, such as aggression or maltreatment by a spouse or partner, financial difficulties, or some other adverse condition in the home. Second, there is an internal, psychological factor, such as intense anxiety, trauma related to prior abuse, or profound depression, sometimes with transient psychotic thinking. The individual consequently feels hopeless, lost, and driven over the proverbial edge, before a period of returning to his or her baseline level of functioning. We also note that these homicides can sometimes be especially violent in intensity, as if the individual has focused long pent-up hurt, resentment, and frustration into one explosive emotional expression.

We see these elements in the case of Diane Clark of England, who, at the age of forty-two, had suffered the final straw in an abusive marriage, brutally stabbing her forty-six-year-old husband Graham Clark to death.37 Mr. Clark, who was a heavy gambler and drinker, had a history of convictions for criminal behavior dating back to adolescence. The two were married in 1974, after a courtship of only two months, and, almost immediately, Mrs. Clark found herself subjected to her husband's violent outbursts, especially when he was intoxicated. Within three years, she had grown drawn, thin, and anxious. Mr. Clark hardly worked, forcing her to be the sole breadwinner for their five children, for whose sake she felt obliged to remain with her husband. He beat her, so she had to wear long-sleeved jumpers all year long to conceal bruises, and he forced her to engage in sex, first when drunk, and eventually even when sober. Mr. Clark falsely accused her of extramarital affairs and once flew into a rage when she said she wished to consult a physician who simply happened to be male.

In September of 1997, Mr. Clark demanded that his wife leave their home, and she sought refuge in a hotel, where she worked as a waitress. Making her mind up to tell her husband that she wished to leave the marriage, Mrs. Clark came home to find the house vandalized with paint and her husband in an alcohol-fueled rage. He suddenly punched her in the face, tore buttons from her blouse, and shredded a bouquet of roses he had brought home as a peace offering. Mr. Clark demanded that she leave again, and, as he searched around for a suitcase, she grabbed a kitchen knife and stabbed him four times in the back and left shoulder. He expired in their hallway. Mrs. Clark, who was arrested, told authorities that she simply could not take any more of her husband's maltreatment.

At her trial, it was made clear that Mrs. Clark, who felt authentic contrition for what she had done, had no indications of a psychopathic personality. The judge spoke of a “smoking fuse of provocation” that led her to act in a way “totally out of character.”38 Following her guilty plea to manslaughter, she was set free and returned to her children to begin her life anew.

A second example, also from England, is the case of fifty-nine-year-old former plumber Dennis Long, who killed his sixty-two-year-old longtime romantic partner, Judith Scott.³⁹ According to Long, he was routinely both emotionally and physically abused by Scott throughout their three decades together, during which they raised two daughters she had from a prior relationship. She also had four grandchildren. Scott ridiculed and shamed Long, repeatedly beat him with a poker, and once left him with a broken thumb. On occasion, he would walk away from the relationship, only to return shortly thereafter. In March of 2010, Long was assaulted by a local bully as he and Scott made their way home from a pub, and, in addition to not defending himself, he refused to inform the police. Enraged, Scott mocked him for lacking backbone, said she should wear trousers and he a dress, and called him a “pansy” and a “poof.” With that, Long explained, he snapped. After taking up a knife, he fatally stabbed her in the arm and twice in the chest. He immediately called emergency services and told the dispatcher, “I just lost it—She gave me grief, so I knifed her.” He was subsequently arrested and tried for murder.

Long was ultimately cleared of the charge, on the grounds of “cumulative provocation” over the course of years, but convicted of manslaughter. He was sentenced to four years and eight months in prison for the killing. It should be emphasized that, as his trial progressed, there were no indications of psychopathy across his lifetime. He was described as a kind, hardworking person of previously good character, who abhorred violence, avoiding even swear words. The judge described him as “a placid, unassertive, rather weak man,” and he was found to be filled with bona fide remorse about the killing of Scott.

CATEGORY 6

Category 6 is the designation for a hotheaded individual who commits homicide in an entirely impetuous manner. There is no self-defense involved. Because the person's temperament is an aggressive one, it is possible for there to be a prior history of violent behavior or even criminal acts. However, these temper-related incidents would not be of the type associated with an underlying psychopathic personality. The spur-of-the-moment, totally unplanned crimes assigned to this category can be set off by essentially any overpowering emotion or experience—for instance, some severe humiliation. If the trigger is jealousy, the violent act is so unusually extreme that a ranking of Category 2 is insufficient.

It is noteworthy that the violence associated with this ranking can extend to the killing of multiple individuals at one time. Thus, it is technically possible for an individual categorized here to have committed mass murder. Until recently, this was described by the FBI as “four or more victims slain, in one event, in one location,” but, as a result of a federal statute, the definition changed to “three or more killings in a single event” in 2012.⁴⁰ Either criterion would categorize Coy Wayne “Elvis” Wesbrook, whose case we will now discuss, as a mass murderer.⁴¹

On November 13, 1997, Houston-area police responded to numerous reports from the same apartment complex of what sounded like five gunshots fired during a span of about forty seconds. There were also descriptions of a man standing near his pickup truck in the parking lot, saying things like, “I did it” and “I did what I had to do.” There, authorities found Wesbrook, thirty-nine years of age at the time and, on the ground nearby, the body of forty-one-year-old Anthony Rogers. Wesbrook explained that he had just killed his ex-wife, thirty-two-year-old Gloria Coons. The two had been married for a year before divorcing in 1996, due to the rockiness of their relationship. Thereafter, they continued to see one another and even lived together for a time. He moved out of their shared apartment about three months prior to the current incident.

In the living room of one of the apartments, deputies found the bodies of thirty-five-year-old Antonio Cruz and forty-three-year-old Ruth Money. A third person, thirty-two-year-old Kelly Hazlip, was on the floor and still alive. In the bedroom, they found his ex-wife, also living. All had been shot once at close range in the head, chest, or abdomen. Coons died shortly after the arrival of emergency workers, and Hazlip expired five days later.

According to Wesbrook, he and Coons had lunch the night before the shooting, during which she expressed interest in possible reconciliation. Still in love with his ex-wife, he was elated by this development. He went to her apartment that evening, finding her with her roommate, Money, as well as two men, Rogers and Hazlip. They all appeared to have been drinking heavily. He was uncomfortable with the situation but agreed to join the group. Cruz appeared a short while later. Wesbrook had several beers and felt “buzzed.” Then, when Coons suddenly flashed her breasts to all present, Wesbrook felt humiliated. She proceeded to escort Hazlip into her bedroom, and the two were joined by Rogers several minutes later. Wesbrook would later report that, when Rogers emerged with his pants open, Coons announced that she had just performed oral sex on him and was about to have intercourse with Hazlip.

Wesbrook's account continued that, feeling distraught and crestfallen, he got up to leave but was followed outside by Cruz, who grabbed the keys to Wesbrook's truck to prevent his departure. Gabbing a .36-caliber hunting rifle from his truck, he followed Cruz back into the apartment with the goal of retrieving his keys, which were, indeed, later found in the pocket of Cruz's pants. Once inside, all hell broke loose. The group began to verbally harass, threaten, and physically assault him. Money hurled a beer at him, reportedly causing the rifle to discharge, killing her instantly. When Cruz and Rogers rushed toward him, he fired at both. Then, walking into the room where Coons and Hazlip were having sex, he shot them both, blinded with rage. He then walked outside and patiently waited for the police. Rogers apparently managed to exit the apartment building and expired in the parking lot.

At his trial, Wesbrook explained that he had no intention of killing anyone that night but that he “lost it.”42 A psychologist for the defense described him as having been “very much at the end of his rope” at the time of the murders. It emerged that, not long before the shootings, he learned that his nine-year-old daughter with a previous wife had allegedly been sexually molested. There was also some question of whether he was intellectually disabled. Wesbrook did not have a criminal record. However, the state alleged a history of acts in the context of hotheadedness that had never been reported to police, including threatening to burn down the home of his first wife, attempting to torch the home of his ex-landlords following an eviction, and intimidating Coons and her friends on another occasion.⁴³

In 1998, Wesbrook was found guilty of capital murder and sentenced to death. He expressed deep remorse, stating, “I've regretted everything a trillion times…. If I could bring those people back to life, I would.” He was nevertheless executed for his rampage by lethal injection in 2016.⁴⁴