Family Annihilators
People who killed several members of their own family.
16 cases
The Security Chief
Chris Coleman guarded world-famous televangelist Joyce Meyer for a living, yet couldn't seem to protect his own family from an anonymous letter-writer's threats — until police climbed through a window of his Columbia Lake home into a scene reeking of spray paint.
The Incest Killer
Given up for adoption to protect her from her volatile father, Katie Fusco grew up happy in Dover, New York — until, just after turning eighteen, she went looking for her biological family and found Steven Pladl waiting.
The Crossbow Killer
Behind the Versace wardrobe and the nice car, Scarborough house painter Brett Ryan was drowning in sixty thousand dollars of debt — but Brett had a plan, one that began at a Toronto bank counter and later involved a youth-model crossbow.
Saving a Soul
Devout Tom Pendergast made it his God-given mission to rescue wayward boys, so when he found six-foot-four teenage runaway Carl Eder sleeping in a coat closet at the Mission Beach Ballroom, he brought him home to his wife and children in El Cajon.
A Perfect Holiday
Failed stage hypnotist Martin Smith controlled every corner of Lianne's life — even after his crimes surfaced and the family fled Britain for Spain under false names. For her children, Rebecca and Daniel, the perfect holiday their mother promised would be their last.
Twisted Triangle
Karen and Kraig Kahler had the marriage other couples tried to emulate. Then, the Saturday after Thanksgiving, a neighbor in Burlingame, Kansas, watched a man park a red SUV outside great-grandmother Dorothy Wight's farmhouse and stomp toward the porch carrying something large.
Better Off in Heaven
To her Pittsburgh-area church and school colleagues, Laurel Schlemmer was sweet, kind-hearted, and devout — a woman who had never wanted the children her husband Mark insisted on. One morning, with their grandmother watching television downstairs, Laurel ran a bath for the boys.
The Griekwastad Farm Murders
On Good Friday 2012, fifteen-year-old Don Steenkamp burst into the Griekwastad police station drenched in blood, telling officers he had found his parents and sister shot on the family farm. The question was what had really happened inside that farmhouse.
The Slumber Party
After her bitter second divorce, Sandi Nieves gathered her daughters for a special slumber party, letting them fall asleep together in the kitchen of their California home. What the morning brought would put her at the center of one of the state's most disturbing trials.
The Millionaire
Millionaire Christopher Foster spent August 25, 2008, shooting clay pigeons and relaxing at a neighbor's barbecue with his wife Jill and daughter Kirstie. By sunrise, their Shropshire mansion, Osbaston House, was a smoldering ruin concealing the truth of his collapsing empire.
The House of Secrets
When police knocked on the door of 7 Pump Hill in Great Baddow, Essex, for a routine welfare check, Virginia McCullough had been waiting four years, three months, and twenty-eight days for that moment — and for what lay hidden behind the walls.
The Vanishing Act
When police climbed through a window of the darkened List mansion in Westfield, New Jersey, in December 1971, the house was ice cold, the family had been 'away' for a month — and church hymns were still playing over the intercom.
The Broken Arrow Massacre
A whispered 911 call from a Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, home began: 'My brother's attacking my family.' Then the screaming stopped, a male voice said hello, and the line went dead.
The Kennedale Murders
Eight days before Christmas 2009, a house fire lit up a quiet street in Kennedale, Texas — the home of John Hummel, his wife Joy, their five-year-old daughter, and Joy's father. Investigators soon realized the fire was only the cover story.
Over Our Dead Bodies
When fire tore through the Prairie Village, Kansas, mansion of physician Debora Green in October 1995, her children were still inside — and investigators would learn the flames were not the family's first brush with poison and ruin.
Mockingbird Hill
On a December morning in 1987, a man in a black coat and cowboy hat shot receptionist Kathy Kendrick in a Russellville law office and drove off toward the next name on his list — and what Ronald Gene Simmons had already done at Mockingbird Hill was worse.
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