On October 5, 2011, a police officer outside Yuba City, California, spotted a car that belonged to a murdered nineteen-year-old and stopped it. Inside were David Joseph "Joey" Pedersen, thirty-one, and his girlfriend, Holly Ann Grigsby, twenty-four. Authorities had been tracking them through stolen credit cards and had warned police in several states. Grigsby told the officers, according to court documents, that they were on their way to Sacramento to "kill more Jews."
Pedersen had spent almost all of his life from sixteen to thirty-one behind bars, and prosecutors described him as the founder of a white supremacist prison gang who talked to Grigsby about starting a revolution with a killing rampage aimed at Jewish leaders. Instead, federal prosecutors said, the couple carried out a series of robberies and carjackings to collect guns and cars.
The first victims were Pedersen's father and stepmother in Everett, Washington, around September 26. The couple said they killed David Jones "Red" Pedersen, fifty-six, because he had molested his daughter and a niece years earlier, and Leslie Mae "Dee Dee" Pedersen, sixty-nine, because she had known and done nothing; the police said they had not yet looked into the allegation. Pedersen shot his father as the older man drove them in his Jeep. Grigsby told investigators that they then went back to the house, where she killed Leslie Pedersen with two knives; she was found with a bloody pillow wrapped around her head. The couple drove south with Red Pedersen's body in the Jeep and dumped it off a steep logging road in the Cascades. In court, Leslie Pedersen's daughter, Lori Nemitz, told Grigsby the killings were "beyond cruel" and made no sense, since the family had welcomed her into the home.
In Oregon they sought shelter with Corey Wyatt and his fiancée, Kimberly Scott, in Springfield, who were later prosecuted for helping them get a gun and dispose of evidence. Near the coastal town of Newport they came upon Cody Faye Myers, nineteen, of Lafayette, who was on his way to a jazz festival. They shot him in the head and chest because his name sounded Jewish, according to court documents; he was a devout Christian. They dumped his body and took his car.
On the night of October 4, at a WinCo Foods store in Eureka, California, Grigsby approached Reginald Alan "Reggie" Clark, fifty-three, a Black man, and lured him back to his truck, where Pedersen shot him in the head. His body was found the next day. They were arrested hours later.
Attorney General Eric Holder decided not to seek the death penalty against either of them. Pedersen pleaded guilty in Snohomish County Superior Court to murdering his father and stepmother and was sentenced to life. In federal court he pleaded guilty to two counts of carjacking resulting in death, for Myers and Clark, and in 2014 U.S. District Judge Ancer L. Haggerty imposed two more life terms without release. Pedersen told a newspaper that Grigsby had taken part only under duress. She was not tried in state court. In March 2014 she pleaded guilty in federal court to racketeering, with the four murders as part of the pattern, and on July 15, 2014, at twenty-seven, she was sentenced to life without possibility of release.
The killings ran over about nine days across three states, a single spree rather than a series separated by time.