In a case that made national headlines nearly a decade ago, Brent Springford brutally murdered his affluent and doting parents, Winston “Brent” Sr. and Charlotte Springford, at their home in Montgomery, Alabama, on Thanksgiving Day in 2004. Just two weeks later, Brent — who was living in Windsor, Colorado, at the time — was arrested in Louisville at Centennial Peaks Hospital where he had admitted himself for psychiatric evaluation.
The 28-year-old Brent confessed then, in painstaking detail, to parricide, first to hospital staff and then to law officers. After defense attorneys spent four years arguing that a documented history of treatment for bipolar disorder should spare the young man from a death sentence, Brent was ultimately sentenced to life in prison without parole in 2008.
But tragedy knows no bounds in this story: Brent consumed a lethal dose of Tylenol and overdosed in October of 2013 in Donaldson Correctional Facility near Bessemer, Alabama. He was 37 years old when he died.