A number of Spanaway Junior High School students heard 14-year-old Heather Smith threaten to “get” her ex-boyfriend, Gordon Pickett, and his best friends. None of them took her threats serious, though. “We didn’t really think she’d do anything,” said one student. Smith, who was a straight-A student, was a practical joker and everybody thought she was kidding around.

However, Smith wasn’t kidding around. Two days before thanksgiving of 1985, Smith retrieved a .22-caliber semiautomatic rifle from her home and returned to school. She waited for Pickett to leave the gym after wrestling practice. Pickett left the gym with his best friend, Chris Ricco, 15. Upon seeing Smith standing there, armed with a rifle, Ricco stood in front of Pickett, hoping Smith wouldn’t shoot. She did. First, she fired at Ricco and then fired at Pickett before fleeing.

Smith shortly returned to the scene which was now surrounded by officers. They urged Smith to put the rifle down, telling her “it’ll be all right.” Smith responded: “No, it won’t,” before pointing the gun at herself and pulling the trigger. Pickett, who was shot once in the head, died at the scene. Ricco, who suffered three gunshot wounds, died the following day at Madigan Army Medical Center. Several hours later, Smith died at the same hospital as her victim. An investigation into the shooting revealed that Pickett had broken up with Smith, telling her that he only wanted to be friends.

Justin Barnett (pictured left) was last seen at the age of 23 on June 3rd, 1995. At the time, he lived at an apartment in Birmingham, Alabama with his ex-girlfriend Sheila Horton. On the night Justin was last seen, he borrowed Sheila’s car to go meet some friends for a few drinks. At some point during the evening, Justin told his friends that he needed to meet somebody but that he would be back later. He unfortunately never returned.

Justin’s friends expected to see him at a party later that night, as he had plans to meet up with a new female friend. When he did not show up as planned, his friends made several unsuccessful attempts to get ahold of him. Justin’s friends eventually guessed that he just went home and fell asleep, but when his ex-girlfriend Sheila returned home from her own outing around 2am, Justin was not there. He was reported missing the following day.

Several days later, the car Justin had borrowed from Sheila was found abandoned in the Lakeview area. Investigators concluded that the car had been parked there very recently before it was found, because they had already searched that location and it was not parked there before. While this seemed quite suspicious, the car did not appear to provide any further clues pointing to Justin’s whereabouts.

After months passed without any trace of Justin, the case grew cold. Nearly two decades passed before an unexpected break in the case occurred. In January 2015, a man named Johnathan Abney went to the Birmingham police and told investigators that he had a secret he could no longer live with—and it involved a murder that occurred in June 1995. Johnathan was only 18 years-old at the time, and he lived with his older sister Tricia Abney (pictured right) and her boyfriend Jeff Martin in a small apartment on Sunrise Lane. He told investigators that, on the evening of June 3rd, 1995, he returned to the apartment and stumbled upon a horrific scene: a man had been murdered, and his dismembered body parts were scattered on the bathroom floor. Johnathan soon learned that the deceased man was Justin Barnett—who he had only met once before, while buying drugs at a Southside apartment.

When investigators pressed for more information, Johnathan explained that Tricia had asked him to go out that evening because she and Jeff wanted to spend some time alone together. But instead of having a romantic night, the couple lured Justin to their apartment with the intention of robbing him. The robbery went bad, and the pair ended up stabbing Justin to death before dismembering him in the bathroom. The couple enlisted Johnathan’s help in disposing of the body in Bibb County. Johnathan later parked Sheila’s car at the location where it was later found.

Johnathan worked with investigators over the next 5 months. He told them where to find Justin’s remains, but a search of the area did not recover them. Warrants for the arrests of both Tricia and Jeff were finally issued in June 2015. Tricia was apprehended first, and Jeff killed himself shortly after her arrest. Johnathan himself was given immunity due to his cooperation with investigators.

Tricia went to trial in 2017. She was found guilty and given a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Lawrence Bittaker, with an IQ of 138, dragged high school girls into his van - brutally raping then murdering them by twisting a coat hanger around their neck with a pair of pliers. When his tape recording of one murder was played in court, people rushed outside and vomited.

Photo by Virgilio Tzaj (virgiliotzaj)  

Columbine had a tragedy a year before the shooting.

“Kids lead secret lives”

By Susan Greene
The Denver Post 
1999

April 27 - To concerned parents, to armchair psychologists and to others speculating about the family lives of the two teens behind last week’s Columbine High School massacre, Joanne Sharpe has a message:

“Kids lead secret lives. Sometimes it’s impossible to know them. Sometimes they’re way beyond your control.”

In September 1997, Robert Craig, a Senior at Columbine High School, killed his stepfather with a 22-caliber handgun. He then went into the garage and fatally shot himself through the roof of the mouth. 

Robert - who, as he grew older, urged his mom to stop calling him Robbie - had a 3.8 grade-point average (GPA), a part-time job at a Quiznos Sub Shop and plans to attend the University of Colorado.

Robert’s mom, Joanne Sharpe, said that Robert was in a heavy metal band with some friends called “Lost Cause”. He played electric guitar. She said he enjoyed Stephen King novels and math. Joanne said that she and Robert would watch late night movies, often dashing to King Soopers for chocolate and Cheetos on the weekends, and they always had a good time together. Sharpe said he didn’t drink or do drugs. He had friends, returned home before his curfew and often told his mom he loved her.

“I thought he was a pretty wonderful kid,” Sharpe, a semi-retired paralegal, said of her second and youngest child.

For what it’s worth, she said Robert “looked like every other kid at Columbine,” with T-shirts, baggy pants and a chain he wore hanging from his waist.

Joanne says that Robert was very close to his stepfather, Steve Sharpe, 44. They never fought, or had any issues. Joanne said she had been married to Steve for over a decade, and he was the one who had the big talks with Robert. He talked to him about sex, college, the dangers of drinking and driving  and so many other issues that magazines and public service announcements urge parents to discuss with their kids. She had, quite simply, assumed Robert was doing fine.

“Nobody’s going to believe me, but they didn’t fight. They got along very well,” she said.

“You don’t even think to tell them not to commit suicide or not to commit murder,” she said. “That just never enters your mind.”

But looking back, she realizes there were signs she shouldn’t have ignored.

Even though Robert was often moody, quit and withdrawn, she never expected him to do anything like murder, or suicide. She said he always complained of hating school, but his grades were always great. Joanne thought if there was really a problem at school, it would show in his grades. She said he would never elaborate on why he hated school, and they didn’t push him on it.

A few weeks before his death, Robert was giving away his personal items to friends. He had given away some of his T-shirts to friends. He also told his mother that he didn’t want her to buy him a new car for his 18th birthday to replace the 1979 Malibu clunker he inherited from his grandmother, like she planned to. 

“What 18-year-old boy doesn’t need a new car?” she asked, angry at herself for not noticing his warning.

Joanne thought that was a bit strange, but again, he never elaborated. 

Sharpe, 48, said “there must have been” some incident or experience that traumatized her son, “but he didn’t confide it to me.’‘ With hindsight, she knows Robert simply told her what she wanted to hear - that everything was fine.

“He kept it really carefully guarded from all the people who had power to stop it,” she said about his troubles. “If my antennae were up, I would have figured it out.”

She thinks the murder-suicide was an act of hate towards her and Steve, because they didn’t see the amount of pain that he was in.

“I think he hated us both because we didn’t see the amount of pain he was in,” she said. “I think after he killed his (step)father, it wasn’t what he thought it would be. He couldn’t go any further. So, the suicide.”

Before last week’s killings at Columbine, Sharpe had never heard of the school’s Trench Coat Mafia - the group of teens with which last week’s killers, Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17, have been linked. And, despite reports from students, Robert wasn’t a member of the clique,  but he did know Eric Harris, because Eric had introduced him to a few of his friends at school. 

Some of the students didn’t really care, and their attitude was said to be: ‘’Aw great, another death-metal guy died’’. However, friends of his, including Brooks Brown, had been close to Robert, and became very upset. ‘’The people who weren’t in the popular crowd went through hell of a time when Robert died; seeing the jocks laughing about it made things even worse’’.

Sharpe places no blame on Columbine nor on the Jefferson County School District, and says she wonders each day who or what really was responsible.

Maybe she should have spent more time with Robert, she said. Maybe he had some kind of imbalance or was traumatized at age 4 by her divorce from his father. May be he saw too many violent movies. Maybe …

The details about the young lives of Robert’s schoolmates, Harris and Klebold, are starting to come to light. And, no doubt, the scores of people stunned by the bloody rampage will ask the same questions about them and their parents.

Sharpe - who describes the past 19 months as “a fog” - says TV viewers and others following the Columbine tragedy shouldn’t jump to conclusions about what was going on in the killers’ heads or homes.

Sometimes everything seems OK, she said. Sometimes parents can’t see that their kid is on the edge.

And so, she urges parents, “Ask your kids what’s hurting them. Get to the bottom of their pain.”

Rachel Scott’s checkbook that was in her backpack the day she was killed.

Henri-Joseph Harpignies, Moonlight, 1889,

Six Parkland students have been featured in a New York Times article looking at a half century of school shootings. Gracing the front cover is Anthony Borgues, a 15-year-old student from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High. During the February 14th massacre - perpetrated by Nikolas Cruz - Borgues was shot five times as he barricaded a classroom door, protecting 20 classmates. The bullets tore into his lung, abdomen and legs. “To think about that moment is difficult. It’s not easy to heal,” he said.

During the early morning hours of June 29th, 2017, 43 year-old Ronald McMullen Jr. (pictured right) called 911 and frantically told dispatchers that his daughter, 22 year-old Kailee McMullen (pictured left), had been shot in the face. The 911 operator is heard asking Ronald, “did she do it?”, to which Ronald replied “Yes.”

Paramedics and police officers were sent to Ronald’s home located in Norman, Oklahoma. When asked what happened, Ronald told police that Kailee had been playing with a wheel gun that went off when he tried to take it from her. Ronald was covered in his daughter’s blood, but he kept trying to wipe it off with a towel in front of police. He eventually had to be restrained from wiping blood off as crime scene investigators took photographs of him. Ronald also exhibited other odd behavior in front of police—at one point, he began laying on the ground and covering himself with dirt. This all seemed very suspicious to officers, but Ronald maintained that Kailee’s death was an accident that she caused herself.

As police pieced together the events over the following few days, they noticed many inconsistencies in Ronald’s story. The gunpowder residue found on Kailee’s face indicated that the gun was fired from around 18 inches away from her face. If Kailee had fired the gun herself, it could not have been more than 14 inches away. Police have stated that it is likely that the gun was fired out of Kailee’s reach. Additionally, there was evidence that somebody had tried to clean up the scene before police arrived. Police were able to confirm that there was a gap of time between Kailee’s death and the time they were called, because Ronald reportedly called Kailee’s mother before calling 911. In fact, Kailee’s mother was already on the scene when paramedics arrived, attempting to administer CPR to her daughter.

Police also spoke to Kailee’s friends and family about her relationship with her father, and learned that they had a dark past. Many described him as a “very controlling father” with abusive tendencies. In 2009, Ronald was accused of sexually abusing Kailee. No charges were ever filed. In the months leading up to Kailee’s death, she told her friends that her father had begun sexually abusing her again. He also allegedly slapped her in the face during an argument two months before her death.

On July 5th, 2018, Ronald McMullen was arrested and charged with first-degree murder in connection with Kailee’s death. He pleaded not guilty and remains behind bars as he awaits trial.