By Serial Killer Magazine
The two investigations never found each other. Five people were dead in fifteen hours, in two states, and for three weeks the sheriff’s departments working them did not know they were working the same man. What finally connected them was not forensic science or a database. It was Levi King talking to somebody in an exercise yard.
On the afternoon of September 29, 2005, Orlie McCool came home to Anderson in south-west Missouri with his daughter-in-law Dawn. He was seventy, an Army veteran who had run a restaurant. His wife was away, and he had needed help carrying the shopping. Dawn was forty-seven and had gone downstairs with the bags. Both were shot dead in the house.
A man had got in through an open bathroom window earlier, gone through the rooms, found a pistol beside the bed and taken it, and then heard them coming back and hidden in a closet off the hall.
He took the keys to Orlie’s pickup from beside a flower box and drove away in it.
Then he drove for thirteen hours, six hundred miles, to Pampa in the Texas panhandle, and at about four in the morning turned off the highway down a country road toward a farmhouse.
Brian Conrad was thirty-one. His wife Michell was thirty-six and pregnant. Her two children from an earlier marriage, Zach, fourteen, and Robin, ten, were asleep in their own rooms. King came in through a back door with an AK-47.
Robin heard her mother scream and the shots that followed. She got down by the bathroom door and watched him come out of her parents’ room, then ran back to her bed and pulled the covers over herself. He came in and fired once. The bullet grazed her arm and her leg. She fell to the floor and stayed absolutely still, and he took her for dead and went to her brother’s room.
She lay there while he went downstairs, searched the house, went through the kitchen drawers, ate something and left.
She did not move until the sun came up. Then she got up, and she did not go into either of the other two bedrooms, because she already knew. She walked out of the house with a cordless phone and called 911. When deputies arrived she was sitting on the tailgate of her stepfather’s truck. She told them she was not hurt.
Missouri had a case moving by then. Orlie’s nephew found the bodies that morning. A neighbour said he had seen a man around the house who looked like a local named Scott King - and Scott King had, that same day, reported guns stolen from his own home, including a 9mm Smith and Wesson. Deputies went out, found spent casings in the yard where his sons practised shooting, and sent them to the laboratory. They matched the casings from Orlie McCool’s house.
Scott King then told them about his son. Levi was twenty-three, had walked out of a halfway house a week earlier after serving seventeen months of a fourteen-year sentence for arson and burglary, and had been dropped at a bus stop on the morning of the 29th. He had got out of the truck saying he was going to the toilet and had not come back. His father thought he might have the guns, and might be involved.
Within thirty-six hours Missouri had a warrant out for him.
Texas had nothing. Fifteen spent casings, shoe prints, tyre tracks, and nothing taken from the house. A family shot in their beds by somebody with no reason to be there. Pampa is a small town and people started carrying guns.
King was already out of the country. He had driven five hundred miles to El Paso and crossed into Ciudad Juarez, and then he made a mistake. He came off the main road, could not find a way back, and ended up in the queue for the Bridge of the Americas heading north.
At the checkpoint an agent asked for identification. He handed over several pieces, and one of them was Brian Conrad’s.
Asked whether he had weapons in the vehicle, he said yes. Agents took him out of the car and found the AK-47, the 9mm Smith and Wesson, a .380 and a scoped rifle. The truck came back registered to Orlie McCool. A Missouri Department of Corrections card gave them his name, and his fingerprints came back against a warrant for a double homicide.
El Paso police interviewed him for forty minutes. He admitted taking his father’s guns, killing the McCools and driving off in the truck. He said nothing about Texas at all, and was sent back to Missouri.
He was formally interviewed there on October 6 and took detectives through the Missouri killings step by step - the hatchet he used on his father’s gun locker, twenty or thirty minutes of it, the guns he stashed in the woods and came back for, the open window, the closet. Asked why, he said he had no reason. He did not know why he shot them. He said nothing about Texas then either.
The Texas case was three weeks old and going nowhere.
On October 19 the Gray County sheriff’s office in Texas took a call from Missouri. A man in their custody had told somebody in the exercise yard at the county jail that there were four more in Texas like the ones he had done in Missouri.
Four. He thought he had killed Robin.
That was the link, and the physical evidence followed easily once anyone thought to look - the AK-47 in the truck matched the Pampa scene, and he had handed a border agent Brian Conrad’s identification three weeks earlier.
He was indicted in March 2006 for two murders in Missouri and three in Texas, facing a possible death sentence in both states. He pleaded not guilty everywhere.
In April 2008, with the death penalty off the table, he changed his plea in Missouri and took the stand at his own sentencing. His lawyers had the material for a mitigation case and he declined to run it. The house he grew up in had no running water and no rules. His father kept guns, swords and hatchets, and took drugs in front of the children. He was drinking at twelve, taking pills at thirteen, out of school at fifteen, in a psychiatric institution at seventeen. His brother Spencer was killed at home in 2002 with one of their father’s guns. He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder at twenty.
What he said in court was that he was not going to blame it on anything. He did it. He was guilty. He was responsible. He got two life terms without parole.
Texas tried him anyway, and the reason was Robin.
Prosecutors sought death there because of what had been done to her - not the wound, which was minor, but the hours she spent on the floor of her own bedroom listening to the man who had shot her family move around the house below.
She was fourteen when she testified. She talked about her mother and her stepfather and her brother, and she broke down on the stand.
The jury had to be unanimous. One juror would not vote for death, and held out for more than seven hours. On October 6, 2009 King received three more life sentences without parole.
He is at the Eastern Reception, Diagnostic and Correctional Center in Bonne Terre, Missouri.
There is a thing worth noticing about how this ended. The border agent who stopped him was not looking for him. The Missouri deputies had a warrant but no idea where he was. Texas had no suspect at all. Every piece of it turned on ordinary procedure - ask for identification, ask about weapons, run the plate, take the prints - and on a man who could not stop talking about what he had done.