Michael and Andrea Roberts had been to their daughter's soccer game the evening before. That night, at their house on Marble Pass Drive in Flower Mound, a suburb northwest of Dallas, Andrea Roberts shot her husband, forty-one, her daughter Micayla, eleven, and her son Dylan, seven, each once in the head as they slept, and then shot herself. She was forty-one. Investigators put the shootings between ten at night on July 30, 2007 and four the next morning. No neighbor heard anything.
The next morning Michael Roberts missed a business flight to Chicago. A co-worker called his mother, who tried the cell phones of her son, her daughter-in-law and her granddaughter, got no answer, and drove over. She and the next-door neighbor, Tim Warren, went into the house shortly before ten and found them. Andrea and Michael were in their bed, he under the sheets; the children were in their own beds. A .38-caliber handgun was in her hand.
Dylan liked to ride his scooter around the neighborhood, chase wild rabbits with a butterfly net and hit plastic golf balls in the front yard. Micayla had a giggle that made the people around her laugh, and she was about to start sixth grade at a Lewisville district middle school, which opened on the Monday after the deaths with counselors for anyone who wanted them. Michael Roberts ran his own consulting business. Andrea Roberts stayed at home, was active in the PTA and volunteered as a room mother in her children's classes. "She would always volunteer and step up," a neighbor said. "One of her biggest flaws was she couldn't say no." Warren, who had lived next door for seven years, called them an ideal couple.
She left two long handwritten notes, several pages in all. Police would not release them. "She explained in the note she was taking the lives of her family, but she did not leave anything we could determine as a motive," said Lieutenant Wendell Mitchell of the Flower Mound police. The only recorded trouble in the house was a call in January that year, which officers logged as a verbal disagreement between the couple, with no one hurt and no arrest.
Friends noticed that she had recently lost a good deal of weight, and word went around the neighborhood that she was dying. The police took the unusual step of saying in a news release that her medical history showed no terminal illness, and would not explain further. About a month later the Tarrant County medical examiner's office, which conducted the autopsies, reported that she had a history of depression and paranoia and had been taking sertraline, the drug sold as Zoloft, according to the Dallas Morning News. A police spokesman, Officer Steven Caldwell, said there was probably no way to know whether the medication played any part.
Close to a hundred people held a vigil in front of the house the night the bodies were found, leaving letters, flowers and stuffed animals at the door. There was no one to charge. The case was closed as a triple murder-suicide, and no motive was ever established.