Susan Diane Hendricks was born in 1963 and lived at Liberty, in Pickens County, South Carolina.
On the night of October 14, 2011 she shot four members of her family across two houses in the town. Her sons Matthew Wayne Hendricks, twenty-three, and Marshall Wayne Hendricks, twenty, were killed at one address. Her former husband Mark Wayne Hendricks, fifty-two, who lived next door, and her stepmother Linda Ann Burns, sixty-four, were killed at the other. She had prayed with members of the family hours earlier.
She then tried to make it look as though Matthew had done it. She left the gun beside him, told deputies he had been suicidal, and directed them to a note. Handwriting examination concluded that Matthew had indeed written the note, but investigators took the view that he had written it at some earlier time and that she had used it.
The motive was money. She was the beneficiary of about seven hundred thousand dollars of life insurance on all four of them. When she was arrested at a motel at Easley, insurance papers and wills were spread around the room.
A forensic clinical psychologist found her competent to stand trial but not capable of conforming her conduct to the requirements of the law: she knew right from wrong and could not stop herself. The diagnoses given were dissociative identity disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder arising from physical and sexual abuse. About nine months after her arrest she attempted suicide in custody.
On April 26, 2013 she pleaded guilty but mentally ill to four counts of murder before Judge Letitia Verdin, and was sentenced to four terms of life imprisonment with no eligibility for parole. The plea took the death penalty off the table and weapons charges were dropped with it. Her public defender said she had not wanted to put the community through a trial. South Carolina Department of Corrections records her admission on April 30, 2013.
There is a fifth death. In April 2006 she shot and killed a man named Doyle O'Brian Teague, who was thirty-nine, and said that she had acted in self-defence. No charge was ever brought over it. That killing is why some accounts of this case give five rather than four; the four are the convictions, and the fifth has never been tested.