#multiple murder

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88. A Noiva Estava de Preto (La mariée était en noir, 1968), dir. François Truffaut

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A War Between Neighbors that Went Horribly Wrong

The night of September 3, 2012, a neighborhood in Titusville, Florida, was filled with screams and gunshots. William Woodward (then 44) dressed in full camo and, as if he were in the battlefield, he crawled and snuck into his neighbor’s house and shot two people to death and wounded a third one.

The victims were Gary Hambree (39), the house owner, and Roger Picior (44), who was temporarily living with Gary. Wounded was Bruce “Tim” Blake (50), who also lived in the neighborhood. They were having a barbecue when William attacked, and the rampage was vicious: there were 31 shots fired, each victim impacted several times, both from a distance and at point-blank in the head, execution style. Woodward would later explain to police that it was to “make sure there weren’t any survivors in the battlefield”. The only reason Blake survived, he added, was that he had ran out of bullets.

Woodward hadn’t always been at odds with his neighbors; in fact they all used to be friends, with William even paying rent for Blake when he was having money issues. But then, in mid July of 2012, a package was stolen.

William accused the daughter of Gary Hambree of taking a package that was in his lawn. Hambree denied it and it was the start of an escalating feud, in which Blake took Gary’s side. Over the following six weeks, there was a series of altercations, with the police been called multiple times. Five days before the shooting, everyone had been at court to request restraining orders against each other, but the judge had denied them. According to testimony giving in court, the night of the killings, Hambree and his friends had taunted William for hours, shining a floodlight onto his property, putting loud music and yelling insults at his house. The victims’ families testified that, in this ridiculous taunt war they’d been having, Woodward gave as good as he took.

William Woodward was a veteran from the Gulf War who had PTSD and a head injury that he claimed had left him mentally disabled and unable to control his actions well. When arrested, William not only showed no remorse for the murders, but felt he had acted in self defense. Later, he requested a special hearing in which his lawyers said he should get immunity from prosecution, citing the State your Ground law in Florida, which allows you to defend your life if you’re in fear of bodily injury.

At that hearing, Woodward’s defense lawyer said that his client had experienced a month of “domestic terrorism," in which his neighbors had threatened to burn his house and rape his 12 year old daughter. Woodward had installed surveillance cameras outside his house, and recorded all this. (The cameras also caught the night of the shootings). The prosecutor alleged that this wasn’t a shooting out of fear, but out of anger, and the judge agreed with him, saying that William was not in immediate risk when he had killed his neighbors and he had “preemptively struck” at them.

William Woodward was charged with two counts of first degree murder and one of attempted first degree murder, and he could have faced the death penalty. But in January of 2018, the jury at his trial dismissed those charges and instead found him guilty of second degree murder. In March 2018, he got two life sentences, with a minimum of 25 years, that he will serve concurrently.

Further reading:

Here’s a description of how the shooting went down and Woodward’s statement to police.

Here is a Facebook post by Jeanie Huppert, Gary Hambree’s mother, telling her version of the story.

And here’s a website by William Woodward’s family in support of him.

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Kim Edwards and Lucas Markham are considered to be Britain’s youngest double murderers, being only 14 years old whenever they murdered Edwards’ mother and younger sister. The pair stabbed their victims to death while they slept, Edwards’ sister was only 13 years old when she was killed.

The pair were described as ‘besotted’ by news agencies, they had previously ran away from home together and spent 6 days sleeping rough before being returned to their families. Edwards’ was allegedly also jealous of the close relationship that her mother had with her younger sister. Edwards’ and Markham planned the murders together, and once they were finished they spent the next 36 hours together in the house, they had sex, shared a bath, and watched the Twilight movies.

When Edwards’ was interviewed by a psychiatrist she stated that “I wanted to get revenge for the way she treated me, I did it because I did not like Mum at all and I did not want her to ruin or corrupt anyone else. I did not feel anything for my mother, she deserved it and I’m glad she’s dead.“

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The Lillelid murders were the result of a carjacking that escalated to muliplte murder on the 6th of April 1997. The Lillelid family, consisting of Vidar and Delfina and their two young children Tabitha (6) and Peter (2), were held at gunpoint after Vidar entered into a conversation with a teenage girl at a picnic spot on the side of the road. He was discussing his religious views with the teenager when two of her friends approached him and pointed a loaded gun at the father of two, stating he was going to have to take the family’s van.

Vidar initially offered the youths his wallet and keys on the condition that the teenagers would allow the family to remain at the rest stop, but instead the group insisted that they enter the back of the van. The group, which consisted of six teenagers, forced Vidar to drive to a secluded spot off the interstate, before the family were instructed to line up next to the ditch. Each of one of them were shot, before a member of the group, Jason Bryant, stated that they weren’t dead and shot the family again.

Vidar was shot a total of six times, once in the head and five times in the chest, he and Delfina died at the scene. Delfina had been shot once in the arm and once in the leg, shattering the bones, inducing incredible pain and making her unable to stand, but it was the six extra shots in her back that killed her. Tabitha, who was six years old, was shot once in the head which resulted in immediate brain death. The young girl was brought to the hospital and found eligible for organ donation, and her organs were successfully harvested. She was pronounced dead the day after the shooting. Two year old Peter was the only survivor, he was shot once in the head and once through his back, and was left with serious disabilities.

The six teenagers were rumoured throughout their trial to have been involved in satanism and the occult, but this was considered a distraction from the main issues at the heart of the case. Jason Byrant, pictured above, is thought to have committed the shooting itself but was the youngest at the time of the trial and the judge was not convinced that he was the only person to have pulled the trigger. Karen Howell (pictured above) had a long history of abuse, both physical and sexual, had a borderline IQ for a learning disability (78), and had multiple suicide attempts in her history.

All six of the teenagers who were indicted and convicted received a life sentence without the possibility of parole.

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Bloody footprint left on entryway of 10050 Cielo Drive by Susan Atkins, one of the members of the Manson family who committed a series of murders in the 1960′s, including the high profile murder of actress Sharon Tate. Atkins was barefoot on the night of the Tate murders because of sores on her feet from an infection she had.

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The Hinterkaifeck murders are one of the most notorious crimes in German history. The Gruber family consisted of Andreas, his wife Cazilia, their adult daughter Viktoria, and her children, Cazilia and Josef. They also had a maid named Maria Baumgartner, who only worked a single day before she was killed; the previous maid had left because she believed the house was haunted. They lived on the Hinterkaifeck farmhouse 40 miles from Munich.

Andreas reported mysterious circumstances to neighbours in late March of 1922; he’d seen a set of footprints leading from the forest toward his farm, but none heading back. He heard footsteps in his attic and found a strange newspaper. A set of house keys went missing. And then, on March 31, the entire family was murdered in the barn, one by one, with a pickaxe. They were found a few days later. It was determined that whoever had done the killing remained on the farm for awhile; the neighbours saw smoke from the chimney, and the animals were fed. Police initially believed the motive was robbery, but  they dismissed the idea when a large amount of cash was found in the house.

To this day, the murder remain unsolved. The Munich Police Department investigated the crime for decades, but no suspect was ever charged. Some believed the killer was Viktoria’s husband Karl Gabriel, who’d been classed as killed in action during World War I, yet Karl’s body was never found.

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Above are images of the marks left on the building of the New Mexico State Penitentiary after a brutal 2 day riot that gutted the prison in 1980. The first image shows marks left by an axe after an inmate was decapitated, and the second image shows burns left on the floor where an inmate was allegedly burnt alive.

The riot was a result of the conditions the prisoners were living in at the time and would have easily been predicted, the tension building over time. The prison was designed to house 900 prisoners but there were 1,136 inmates. Many inmates were living in communal dormitories with unsanitary conditions. There were significant issues with staff as well, with policies being implemented inconsistently, poor communication and chronic staffing shortages. The riot was sparked when two prisoners took an officer hostage and used the officer’s keys to release the prisoners in the adjacent dormitory. Eventually, they broke into the central controls and opened the majority of the prison - with some cells in the northern block remaining locked due to an error in the central controls.

Violence erupted almost immediately within the cell blocks as inmates attacked each other, rival gangs targeting each other. The prisoners who had been housed in solitary confinement decided to break into the protective custody block. Here people were branded as ‘snitches’ or people with sexual offences against children were being housed for their own safety. A self appointed ‘execution squad’ managed to break in, they hauled the prisoners from the cells and murdered them - dismembering, decapitating and burning some prisoners alive. One prisoner was held up to the window, in full view of police, and was tortured by another prisoner who was applying a blow torch to their face. After the police gained access to the prison after the riot they discovered one inmate - who was a shop lifter who had been placed in protective custody after being gang raped - had been hanged from the ceiling, his throat cut, castrated and his genitals inserted into his mouth.

Several officers were taken hostage throughout, and while some were released unharmed others had been brutally beaten and raped. 33 inmates were killed during the riot, the majority of them having been brutally murdered, and 23 of them had been housed in the protective custody unit.

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“He personally never called himself Jesus, he just represented a Jesus Christ-like person to me.” - Susan Atkins, one of the Manson girls, talking about Charles Manson.

The ‘Manson Family’ were a commune of people who have also been labelled a ‘cult’, who were extensively involved in the drug trade in California in the late 1960′s. The group gained notoriety when members committed multiple brutal murders in an effort to misdirect authorities and free imprisoned commune member, Bobby Beausoleil. Beausoleil had murdered Gary Hinman and attempted to pass the killing off as the work of the black panthers by writing ‘political piggy’ on the wall. The plan to confuse authorities by perpetrating copy cat killings did not work and instead the members involved in the murders, and the commune leader Charles Manson, were arrested and convicted of the crimes.