Michael and Andrea Roberts had been to their daughter's soccer game the evening before. That night, at their house in the 1800 block of 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, and never determined the order in which they happened. No neighbor heard anything.
"They were shot sometime during the night. They were found in their beds. It did appear they had all gone to bed," said Lieutenant Wendell Mitchell of the Flower Mound police.
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. Dylan Jacob loved soccer too, and Micayla Shea was a Girl Scout; both had been born in Denton County and went to Prairie Trail Elementary, and Micayla was to start at Lamar Middle School. Michael Roberts ran his own consulting business. Born in Kansas City on June 16, 1966, he had grown up in Blue Springs, Missouri, finished Blue Springs High School in 1984 and the University of Missouri-Kansas City in 1988, and in Texas worked as a management consultant. He played golf, was teaching Dylan to play, and went to Micayla's soccer games. 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 and said he had seen no sign of violence. "We never heard any yelling or screaming," he said.
She left two long handwritten notes, several pages in all, and police would not release them. What investigators said of them was that she had planned to shoot her family and explained that she was doing so. "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," Mitchell said. 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 she did not have a terminal illness, and would not explain what had prompted the statement. 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; one sign read "We love you Roberts family." Michael, Micayla and Dylan had one funeral together, on August 6 at Floral Hills Funeral Home in Raytown, Missouri. The family's obituary gives his middle name as Louis; the press reports gave it as Lewis. There was no one to charge. The case was closed as a triple murder-suicide, and no motive was ever established.
June 16, 1966: Michael Roberts is born in Kansas City.
January 2007: officers log a call to the Roberts house as a verbal disagreement between the couple, with no one hurt and no arrest.
July 30, 2007: between ten that night and four the next morning, Andrea Roberts shoots her husband, Michael, their children Micayla and Dylan, and then herself in Flower Mound.
August 6, 2007: Michael, Micayla and Dylan share one funeral at Floral Hills Funeral Home in Raytown, Missouri.