Paperback: In September 2008, Roanoke, Texas, police discovered a house of horrors: poisoned pudding, a bathtub set up for electrocution, a bloody butcher knife and a hank of chopped-off hair. The worst was yet to come.
Days before, seventeen-year-old Jennifer Bailey, her thirteen-year-old brother, David, and their friends Paul Henson, 16, and Merrilee White, 14, had made a gruesome pact: they would kill their parents, steal their cars and credit cards and flee to Canada.
Paul and Merrilee's parents thwarted their fates but Jennifer and David's mother, Susan Bailey, 43, was not so lucky. When the devoted mother returned home from work, her two children and Paul took turns stabbing her and slicing her throat. When they were done, they fled in Susan's car. They made it as far as South Dakota before being arrested.
What really led them to make such a despicable pact? The answers would cast a disturbing new light on the way we see the all-American family, our neighbours, our children and the society that nurtured them.
In Texas, capital murder is a death penalty case. If the kids had murdered Susan, and if they did it in the course of committing another felony, such as stealing her car or credit cards, that would qualify as a capital case. An alternative to the death penalty would be life in prison without parole. If everything was as it appeared right then - a combination of brutal violence and childish fantasy, they qualified for a charge of first-degree murder.
Let's Kill Mom (2015) is thorough account about four Texas teens and a horrifying murder pact but the heart of this story is Susan Bailey's mother who relived the anguish of the events in 2008 so that the author might recreate the emotions of a woman torn between love for her grandchildren and grief and anger over the death of her daughter. The author has dedicated it to all the mothers who have sacrificed so much for their children.
In 2009, both Jennifer and Paul were sentenced to 60 years in prison after pleading guilty to murder in the stabbing death of her mother. However, Jennifer and Paul must serve at least 30 years before they are eligible for parole in 2038. Assistant prosecutor Jamie Beck said Jennifer’s brother, David, who was 13 at the time of the stabbing, faces a capital murder charge in the juvenile system. The teenager will not face the death penalty. He pled guilty to murder in a plea agreement and was sentenced to twenty-six years, first in juvenile custody and then in adult felony prison. He would continue to be incarcerated until either his sentence was completed or he was released from parole in 2021. However, law enforcement officers do not think he will be paroled that soon.
Merrilee White, who was not present when the murder occurred, was charged with aggravated assault, family violence, and held in a juvenile detention centre for trying to stab her mom in a separate incident days before Susan Bailey's murder. Eventually, her parents bailed her out of the detention centre. Fort Worth police believed she was part of the conspiracy to murder their mothers and a long prison term could be her fate if she did not cooperate with the police. After months of negotiations, Merrilee eventually pleaded "true" (equivalent of guilty) to aggravated assault in juvenile court and was assessed five years of probation. She and her mother moved to another school district. Since then, she has completed that probation and now has no criminal record.
About the author: Donna Fielder, a national bestselling author of Ladykiller (2012), is an award-winning veteran journalist in the areas of investigative reporting, crime, courts, lifestyle and arts. She has been featured on Dateline NBC, Women Behind Bars and Psychic Detectives. She has worked with 48 Hours and has had weekly columns in the Denton Record-Chronicle and her crime stories have regularly appeared in the Dallas Morning News.
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