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 tried to run; the last shot was fired on the concrete stoop, and someone had covered him with a blanket.
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. 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. She stood to collect about seven hundred thousand dollars in life insurance on the four. Acquaintances told investigators she kept large policies on all of them and had fired shots at her sons' feet when she was angry.
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.
Nine months after her arrest she tried to kill herself in jail. She said she had multiple personalities. A defense psychologist, David Price, testified that 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, she pleaded guilty but mentally ill to all four murders in a plea bargain and was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. She admitted that she had misled the police. Wilkins 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.