The night before, in a Walmart parking lot on Elmsley Drive in Greensboro, Mary Ann Holder handed Randall Lamb a check for ten thousand dollars made out to his wife. According to a search warrant, it was meant to settle a lawsuit Jennifer Lamb had prepared but not filed, accusing Holder of alienating her husband's affections. Holder asked to see him once more the next morning. He agreed.
By the time she met him, on Sunday, November 20, 2011, she had already been through her own house on Cocoa Drive in Pleasant Garden, south of Greensboro, with a .38 caliber revolver. Four young people were asleep there. She shot her son Robert Dylan Smith, seventeen; his girlfriend Makayla Woods, fifteen; and her niece and nephew, Hannaleigh Suttles, eight, whom she was raising, and Richard Suttles, seventeen. The girl's name also appears as Hanna Leigh. Each was shot in the head.
She then drove to the parking lot of the Guilford Technical Community College aviation center at Piedmont Triad International Airport, where Lamb was waiting, and fired several shots at him. One hit him in the shoulder. He called his wife, who called for an ambulance and told the dispatchers about the affair.
From there Holder drove to a friend's house where her younger son, Zack Smith, fourteen, had spent the night, and picked him up. A deputy came upon her black Ford Explorer on Remora Road. She had shot Zack in the head and then herself. At 10:13 that morning, deputies who had been waiting outside the house on Cocoa Drive went in and found the other four.
Dylan was dead at the scene. The other four children lived for days at Moses Cone Hospital, and the family prayed that one of them would survive to tell what had happened. None did. Hannaleigh and Zack died on the Monday, Makayla on the Wednesday, and accounts say Richard was the last to die. The five were buried after a joint funeral at a Baptist church near their home. The two brothers and Makayla had all attended Southeast Guilford High School; Hannaleigh went to Pleasant Garden Elementary.
Holder was thirty-six. She and Lamb, forty, had met on the board of the Pleasant Garden Community Center, and Jennifer Lamb dated the start of their affair to 2008. It lasted more than three years and ended in months of accusations of stalking and harassment on both sides. In February 2011 Jennifer Lamb sought a restraining order against Holder, and the case was dismissed when nobody appeared in court. In July Holder sought one against Lamb, writing that he had threatened her and had offered to stop his wife's lawsuit "if I give him what he wants." A neighbor said Holder's former husband had put up no-trespassing signs in the yard that year as the tension rose.
She left two notes at the house. Sheriff B.J. Barnes said they took responsibility and apologized for the pain she was causing, and that they showed she was angry about how the relationship with Lamb had ended. Investigators came to believe she had planned the morning in advance. Her mother, Frances Holder, said she could not believe her daughter was responsible, because she had cared so deeply for her children.
On January 10, 2012 Barnes confirmed that she had acted alone: ballistics showed that the gun found in her hand had been used at all three scenes, and her phone records placed her at each. The autopsy reports released on February 14 found only caffeine in her system, though a small bag of cocaine and a cutting agent were found in her vehicle. The sheriff said investigators could find no clear motive for killing the children. Most accounts describe the house as a home where Makayla, Dylan's girlfriend, also lived; one later retelling calls her Holder's niece, which the contemporary reports do not support.