On October 14, 2011, a woman outside Liberty, South Carolina, called her sister and mentioned, almost in passing, that her son Matthew had killed himself. The sister called the police. At Susan Hendricks's house, deputies found Matthew, twenty-three, dead in his bed with a gun beside him, and in another bedroom her stepmother, Linda Ann Burns, sixty-four, shot in the chest, arm and stomach, a trail of blood running from the living room to the bed. Next door lay her former husband, Mark Hendricks, fifty-two, shot in the chest on a couch, and her younger son, Marshall Wayne Hendricks, twenty, who had moved back home two days earlier. Marshall had been shot several times inside the house and had pushed past his mother in a hallway trying to get out; the fourth shot was fired on the concrete stoop, and he died there. Someone had covered him with a sheet. Matthew had been covered too, and Linda Burns lay under her bedclothes as if asleep, with five spent cartridge cases in and around the closet of her room.
Hendricks, forty-eight, told deputies that Matthew had killed the others and then himself, and pointed them to a goodbye note on the kitchen table. Hours before, she said, she had gathered the family to pray, worried about Matthew because several people had forgotten his birthday the day before. "I know it sounds pretty fricking bizarre, but we pray a lot as a family," she told investigators in a three-hour interview at the sheriff's office. They had knelt and held hands. She said she had heard nothing in the night, and had walked past the blood in the living room to make coffee when she found Matthew's note. It read like a Mother's Day card. He thanked his mama for making him the man he had become and said he could not ask for a better mother. "I know we have our differences, but I will always love you unconditionally," he had written. She explained why she had not called for help. "I didn't want to call EMS," she said. "I didn't want to call anybody because I didn't want them to come take him. I know it sounds crazy. I just thought, well, if I can sit here with him, it will all be OK." Through three hours of questioning she said little about Marshall, Mark or Linda Burns and kept coming back to Matthew, her voice flat and tired, and she sobbed only at the end, when she said she could not give a written statement and wanted to go home. The story came apart quickly. Deputies wondered why she had not called 911. Gunshot residue covered her clothes, and Marshall's blood was on her pants. Handwriting experts agreed that Matthew had written the note, but investigators concluded he had written it some time earlier. "Her statements were inconsistent with the scientific and forensic evidence," Solicitor Walt Wilkins said.
She was arrested on the night of October 24 at the Quality Inn in Easley, where insurance papers and wills were spread around the motel room. She was charged with four counts of murder and four of possessing a weapon during a violent crime. In a safe in her closet, beside three guns, detectives found life insurance policies on each of the four, all payable to her and worth more than $680,000 together; the figure usually reported was about $700,000. Six days after the killings, the owner of a Pickens County print shop said, she had come in to have him notarize a change to her will, replacing her sister as executor with one of her brothers.
Dozens of statements gathered across the county described a family coming apart. Acquaintances said she kept large policies on all of them and had fired shots at her sons' feet when she was angry. Mark Hendricks's sister, Rhonda Chappell, said Marshall had lived with her for two months after his mother threw him out and had moved back, at his father's request, only two days before he was killed. "This has been a very dysfunctional home for many years and she saw that the boys were working their way out and she was losing her grip," she wrote. Mark's second former wife told investigators that Susan had followed the couple to Myrtle Beach and told people she wanted to kill them.
It was not the first time someone had been shot dead in her home. In April 2006 Doyle Brian Teague, whose age is given as thirty-six and as thirty-nine, was killed there after, the coroner's office said, he entered uninvited and threatened someone inside. Investigators ruled that she had acted in self-defense, and no charge was ever filed. She liked to remind people of it, acquaintances said, and she told a former boyfriend about shooting a man who had come into her house uninvited before showing him the guns in her safe.
Nine months after her arrest she tried to kill herself in jail. A cellmate said she had hoarded forty of the pills she was given for her mental illness and swallowed them, leaving a note telling her family not to fight. "I'll be okay with Mark and the boys," she wrote. "See ya another day." She said she had multiple personalities. At the plea hearing a defense psychologist, David Price, testified that the personalities had probably begun as a way of coping, that she was competent to stand trial, and that while her main personality knew right from wrong, another, which did not, had been in control on the night of the killings. He said she had severe post-traumatic stress disorder from extensive sexual abuse in childhood, that both parents had abused her and let others abuse her, and that she left home at fourteen; he called it the worst he had ever seen. She had been admitted to psychiatric hospitals several times over three decades.
On April 26, 2013, at forty-nine, before Circuit Judge Letitia Verdin, she pleaded guilty but mentally ill to all four murders in a plea bargain that took the death penalty off the table, with the agreement of the family, and was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole on each count; the plea meant she would receive psychiatric treatment in prison, and the weapons charges were dropped. Her public defender, John Mauldin, said she had not wanted to put the community through a trial. Asked what she was in court for, she said, "To plead guilty to four counts of murder." Verdin found that she knew right from wrong and recognized that what she had done was wrong, but that her illnesses had left her unable to conform her conduct to the law. She admitted that she had misled the police. Wilkins said the hearing was the first he had heard of the childhood abuse and that he would look into it if her lawyers sent him the details. He said the insurance money was one of many motives and that, because of her mental illness, the authorities would likely never know why she killed them. The families spoke. Linda Burns's brother, Gordon Finley, said he hoped the four would stand in judgment over her when she died, as she had stood in judgment over them. Stephanie Hopkins, a cousin of the two young men, remembered Mark as loving and self-sacrificing, a father figure to many; Matthew as fun-loving and full of life; Marshall as an excellent artist who planned to marry the love of his life once she graduated; and Linda Burns as a loving woman devoted to her step-grandsons. Afterward she said Hendricks had never seemed right to her. "I always knew she was crazy," she said. "But when I say crazy, I mean not mentally ill like this." In June 2013, in response to a Freedom of Information request from the Associated Press, the authorities released the audio of her three-hour interview, 324 pages of documents and more than six hundred crime scene photographs; Among the photographs was one of a photograph pinned to a kitchen wall beside a fly swatter: Susan Hendricks smiling in a dress next to her former husband in a coat and tie, their two sons, dressed up, on either side.
April 2006: Doyle Brian Teague is shot dead in her home after, the coroner's office said, he entered uninvited; investigators rule she acted in self-defense and no charge is filed.
October 14, 2011: her sons Matthew and Marshall Wayne Hendricks, her former husband Mark Hendricks and her stepmother Linda Ann Burns are found dead outside Liberty, South Carolina; she blames Matthew.
October 24, 2011: arrested at the Quality Inn in Easley and charged with four counts of murder and four of possessing a weapon during a violent crime.
April 26, 2013: pleads guilty but mentally ill to all four murders before Circuit Judge Letitia Verdin and is sentenced to life without the possibility of parole on each count.
June 2013: the authorities release the audio of her three-hour interview, 324 pages of documents and more than six hundred crime scene photographs.