Robin Doan was ten years old. On the night of September 30, 2005 she woke to her mother screaming and lay in the dark listening to a man walk from room to room in her house, firing. Then he came into her room and shot her, and left believing she was dead.
She was not. When the house was quiet she got to a telephone and called 911. She told the dispatcher there had been a shootout in her house. At one point she can be heard sobbing that she wanted her mother.
Her mother, Michell Conrad, was thirty-five and six months pregnant. Her stepfather Brian Conrad was thirty-one. Her brother Zach Doan was fourteen. All three were dead in or near their beds, and so was the family dog.
The man who did it had never met any of them. He had come off the interstate at Pampa, in the Texas Panhandle, and picked the farmhouse because it was there.
Levi Alexis King was twenty-three. He had been released to a halfway house in St. Louis after serving seventeen months of a fourteen-year sentence for arson and burglary. On September 23, 2005 he told the staff he was going to work and did not come back. Nobody at the halfway house reported him. He was at large for a week before anyone official knew.
On September 29 he went to his father Scott King’s house at Pineville, Missouri. There was an argument and his father barred him from the house. He later said in a television interview that being rejected by his family was what set him off. He went back in anyway and took three guns out of the safe: an AK-47, a nine-millimetre handgun and a hunting rifle.
A few miles down the road at Anderson, Orlie McCool was seventy, an Army veteran and a retired restaurant owner. His daughter-in-law Dawn Burr McCool was forty-seven and had come to help him carry groceries into the house. Orlie was shot once. Dawn was shot several times. King took the keys to Orlie’s red 1995 Dodge Dakota and drove south. Their bodies were found the next day.
Ballistics later matched the shell casings at the scene to the Smith and Wesson taken from his father’s safe.
He drove into Texas, killed the Conrads and the Doan children, and kept going toward the border. At about half past eleven that night, roughly eleven hours after the McCools were found, an officer with US Customs and Border Protection near El Paso noticed the red pickup driving too close to the car in front. He stopped it and arrested the driver.
Missouri came first. On April 18, 2008 he pleaded guilty to the murders of Orlie and Dawn McCool in exchange for the state dropping its request for the death penalty, and took two consecutive life sentences without parole.
Texas would not make the same bargain. The trial was moved from the Panhandle to Lubbock because of the coverage, and he pleaded guilty to three counts of capital murder without any promise about the sentence. The district attorney, Lynn Switzer, said afterwards that if there was ever a case where a man deserved to die, it was this one.
Under Texas law the jury had to answer two questions to impose death: whether he was a continuing threat, and whether any mitigating circumstance warranted mercy. They answered yes to the first. They could not reach an answer on the second, and that made a life sentence automatic. They had been out nearly eight hours. One account has all but one juror holding for death.
Robin Doan was fourteen by then. She testified about the night, and after the verdict she told King that she forgave him. She also said she felt guilty for not having been able to save her family.
He is serving five consecutive life sentences without parole, in Missouri.