Before he passed sentence on May 13, 2015, Judge Jeffrey Ramsdell of the King County Superior Court placed six carnations and six placards on an empty bench in the courtroom gallery, one for each of the people Joseph Thomas McEnroe had been convicted of killing. That empty bench and those six flowers, he told McEnroe, stood for the lives he had taken. The flowers were a reference to the place. Carnation is a small rural town in the Snoqualmie Valley, about twenty-five miles east of Seattle, and on Christmas Eve 2007 three generations of one family were shot to death in a house there.
The house belonged to Wayne Anderson, sixty, a Boeing engineer, and his wife Judy, sixty-one, who worked for the postal service. Their daughter Michele, then twenty-nine, lived in a mobile home on their property with McEnroe, a store clerk, who was her boyfriend. The prosecution's account of the motive was small and specific. Michele Anderson felt slighted by her parents, and she was angry that they had started asking the couple to pay rent; she also believed her brother owed her money. Pam Mantle, whose daughter married into the family, later said the talk of greed and money could not be the whole of it, because nothing about money explained six deaths.
According to court documents, McEnroe and Anderson told detectives that they armed themselves that afternoon, she with a nine-millimeter pistol and he with a .357 Magnum, and went up to her parents' house. McEnroe shot Wayne and Judy Anderson in their living room. The couple dragged the bodies to a shed behind the house, soaked up the blood with towels and carpets, and waited for the rest of the family, who were coming for Christmas Eve.
Scott Anderson arrived with his wife Erica and their two children, Olivia, five, and Nathan, three. Most reports give Scott's age as thirty-two; KOMO News, reporting the verdict, gave it as thirty. Prosecutors said Michele Anderson shot her brother and her sister-in-law several times, wounding them, and that McEnroe then killed them both and shot the children. At Anderson's trial the prosecutor Scott O'Toole told the jury that Erica Anderson, in her last moments, had Olivia tucked at one side and that Nathan, still in diapers, climbed on top of his mother and laid his head against her chest before McEnroe shot him. The charging papers said McEnroe apologized to the children before he killed them. The four had been killed, the prosecution said, to keep them from going to the police about the first two deaths.
Afterward the couple drove north toward Canada, turned around toward Oregon, and then decided to go back to Carnation and pretend to discover the bodies. Investigators were already at the house. Detectives noticed that neither of them asked what had happened at a crime scene crowded with police, began to question them, and in time both confessed. They were charged with aggravated first-degree murder, the only crime then punishable by death in Washington, and King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg said he could find no motive that made sense of it.
The case took more than seven years to reach a jury, much of it spent on litigation over the death penalty and on the two defendants' mental condition, and the two were tried separately. McEnroe's trial came first. His lawyers argued that he was mentally ill and that he had been under Anderson's control, coerced into the killings by a woman angry at her family. A recording of Anderson admitting to the killings was played in court. McEnroe testified and apologized to the families. In March 2015 the jury convicted him of six counts of aggravated first-degree murder after deliberating for little more than a day.
Prosecutors asked for death. O'Toole told the jury that McEnroe had not only murdered six people but wiped out three generations of the Anderson family. On May 8 the jury reported that it could not reach the unanimous verdict an execution required, which left the only other sentence the law allowed, life in prison without the possibility of release, and Ramsdell imposed it on May 13. Pam Mantle said the decision to spare him was fine with her. She said she still went through it every day, and that she could not accept his apology; Wayne and Judy, she said, were the two people who had been kindest to him, and he had shot them and thrown them in the back yard. His lawyer, Bill Prestia, said McEnroe hoped to use his time in prison to counsel other inmates.
Michele Anderson was tried from December 2015 into 2016, convicted of the same six counts on March 4, 2016, and sentenced to life without parole that April. The Washington Supreme Court struck down the state's death penalty in 2018 and the legislature abolished it in 2023. McEnroe is held at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla.