Christine Adewunmi had grown up in the St Louis area, went to Kirkwood High School under her maiden name of Pannett, and taught physical education at Parkway North from December 1998 to June 2006. She then stayed at home with her children. Neighbours described her as always out playing with them or driving them to their activities, and her family said she had made them the first priority in her life. Her three daughters were Lauren, eight, Samantha, six, and Kate, three, all at Oak Brook Elementary in the Parkway district.
Her husband, Leonard Adewunmi, left for work early on the Friday morning while his wife and the children were asleep at their house on Arbor Bluff Circle. He came home at six in the evening to an empty house, and rang her mobile telephone more than twenty-five times. That night he reported the family missing.
What he told the police is on the missing persons report. His wife had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, was suffering from depression, and he was afraid she was suicidal. She had been looking at websites about depression and suicide. She had recently seen a therapist and had been referred to a hospital for an evaluation. She had also taken the children away twice before and had lied about where they had been; the children had told him they were at a house by the water.
They were found at about one o'clock the following afternoon, Saturday March 17, 2012, near the Meramec River outside Bourbon, in Crawford County. The bodies were beside the family's four-wheel drive, parked at the dead end of a gravel road that ran down to the river through a remote part of the Blue Springs Ranch property, a place that takes campers, riders and float trips.
The sheriff of Crawford County, Randy Martin, said investigators from his office and the Missouri Highway Patrol had confirmed that she fired the shots, that the weapon was a handgun, and that they were confident it was a triple murder and suicide.
Her family issued a statement saying that depression is difficult to understand and a serious illness that is hard to comprehend, that nobody had known the depth of her problem or could have foreseen this, and that relatives, friends and professionals had stood by her while she coped with the disease. They described her husband as an involved and caring father who would miss cooking with Lauren, playing football with Sammi and singing to Kate.
The director of the American Association of Suicidology, Alan Berman, was asked about the case at the time. He said that most people who commit murder-suicide are men, that cases in which a mother takes her children's lives as well as her own are far fewer and more complex, and that some mothers have a delusion that they are protecting their children by killing them, believing that nobody else can care for them. Her children need to be under her wing even in her death, he said: it is a horrendous loss of life for the children, but that is not what is in her mind, which is that they need to be with her.
Her age is given as thirty-seven in the contemporary reporting; the roster has carried thirty-eight.
This is a single act, not a serial case, and it is in the archive under that classification.