On the night of July 30, 2007, at a house on Marble Pass Drive in Flower Mound, north-west of Dallas, Andrea Roberts shot her husband Michael, forty-one, her daughter Micayla, eleven, and her son Dylan, seven. She then shot herself. She was also forty-one.
All four died of gunshot wounds to the head. A .38-calibre handgun was in her hand. She was on the bed in the master bedroom beside her husband, and the two children were in their own beds, in the words of the lieutenant who described the scene, as if they were asleep or going to sleep when they were shot. Investigators put the shootings between ten at night and four in the morning. No neighbour reported hearing anything.
They were found late the following morning. Michael Roberts had missed a business flight to Chicago, and his employer and his mother both became concerned. A neighbour who held a key went into the house and called the police at about a quarter to ten.
She left two lengthy handwritten notes running to several pages. Police would not release them and said they did not answer the question. In the words of Lieutenant Wendell Mitchell of the Flower Mound police, the notes made clear that she knew what she was doing, but gave nothing that could be identified as a motive. None was ever established.
The absence of an explanation drew the usual substitutes, and the police took the unusual step of contradicting one in writing. Rumours in the neighbourhood held that she was dying. Flower Mound police issued a statement saying their investigation had revealed medical history indicating she had no known terminal illness, and declined to say more. The Tarrant County medical examiner's office said it did not yet know whether she had been ill or had drugs in her body, and that toxicology would take four weeks.
Nothing in the family's life had suggested it. He was self-employed and ran a consulting business; she stayed at home, was active in the parent-teacher association and volunteered as a room mother at the children's school. Neighbours described a family whose life ran on their children's activities and community sport. The only recorded friction was a call to the house in January that year, which officers logged as a verbal argument between the couple with nobody hurt and no charges brought. Several people told police that she had recently lost a noticeable amount of weight.
Close to a hundred people held a vigil in front of the house the night the bodies were found, and letters, flowers and soft toys were left at the door. They had been cleared away a day later. The Lewisville school district opened a middle school on the Monday and made counsellors available to anyone who wanted them; it was the school where Micayla was to have started her sixth grade year that autumn.
Reporting at the time set the case against a run of similar killings by mothers in Texas, noting that this one was distinguished by the killing of a husband as well as the children. One of the cases cited was that of Gilberta Estrada at Hudson Oaks two months earlier, which is also carried in this archive.
This is a single act rather than a series, and it is filed here under that qualification. The count is the three she killed; the fourth death is her own.