I recently watched an episode of 48 Hours about a case in Sugar Land, Texas that made me think of the Millard-centric cases we've all been following here. It involved a family of four - parents and two sons, with the older of the boys, Bart Whitaker, ostensibly graduating university. In fact, he wasn't even attending school at the time, and on the night he was out celebrating his "graduation" with his family (and accepting their gift of a Rolex), he had set up their murder on their return to the family home. His brother and mother died, but his father thankfully survived his wounds.
Bart had actually been plotting this murder for years, and had gone through at least three sets of potential co-conspirators recruited from his friend groups. Some of these co-consipirators got to varying stages of the plot. One of the potential murder teams got as far as trying to break into the house through a window, but fled when an alarm went off. One of the plots a few years prior was overhead by a college aquaintance who notified police, who in turn warned the family that Bart was on his way home to kill them. It was eventually chalked up to a "misunderstanding".
With all this history, a string of potential witnesses and actual previous police involvement, Bart's story didn't hold up long. It seems literally insane that he ever thought he could get away with it, given all the circumstances. It made me think of how much head scratching I did in the beginning of the Millard/Smich cases on what did and didn't "make sense" in the more brazen acts involved in Tim's killing. I couldn't get my head around people being that delusional, to think they could saunter down Tim's driveway in full view of two witnesses, and get away with it. It just didn't seem that that could have been the plan, and I considered alternate explanations for quite a while. But the perspective of sociopaths like Millard and Whitaker really IS that distorted. They have such a warped sense of their own relative intelligence and cunning, and such a high tolerance for risk, that they do things that the normal brain just can't conceive of.
Whitaker fled to Mexico for a while when he felt the axe coming down, and he lived there under an assumed name. At one point he suggested to his Mexican girlfriend that they could kill her parents if they were bothering her. Her father had given him a job in the family furniture store. So even while on the run for his life, he would have risked it all again, utterly heartlessly.
Whitaker's series of co-conspirator friends and their varying degrees of willingness made me think of the crew around Millard. I've made the point here previously about how ordinary a lot of those people were, even though they ultimately did ugly things. CN, AM, MH et al. It was the same thing with these friends of Bart Whitaker. Some were college students, some peers in his wealthy neighbourhood or from his "good" school. Their motivations included money and "wanting to see how far he would take it". Seems unbelievable. But it's so often true.
Anyway, if the story sounds interesting to anybody, there's lots of stuff on YouTube, and that 48 Hours piece was recent.
