The Best American Crime Reporting 2010 (12 page)

In December Erin asked her parents if she could return to public school. Her brothers had already reenrolled that fall after Bubba, who was thirteen, told them that he missed his friends, and the Caffeys—who were eager to free up time for Penny to earn some extra income—agreed to let Erin go back before Christmas. At school, where she enrolled as a freshman, she and Charlie were inseparable; they ate lunch together and walked down the hall hand in hand, and sometimes they slipped away to Erin’s pickup to fool around. Terry began allowing them to go out for dinner every now and then, with the assurance that Charlie would have Erin home no later than nine-thirty. Often they went to a friend’s house where they could be alone, and after Christmas, they had sex for the first time. One night not long afterward, Charlie pulled his car over on a country road, knelt on the pavement, and presented Erin with his grandmother’s engagement ring. It was a promise ring, he told her. Though it was not a formal proposal, he was declaring his intentions.

Penny noticed the ring on Erin’s finger a few days later at a church function and ordered her to give it back. Charlie was playing basketball outside the fellowship hall that afternoon, and Terry pulled him aside. “This is totally inappropriate,” he told the boy, who shrugged. “You’re promising yourself to my daughter? Do you realize she is sixteen years old?” Terry had already begun to grow uneasy with how fast the relationship seemed to be moving. He did not care for Charlie, and he was not happy about how much time the high school senior was spending with his daughter. He had never gotten over Charlie’s nonchalant attitude when they first met; Terry had come home from work, and Charlie—his legs slung over the side of Terry’s armchair—had not bothered to stand up or shake his hand. “I don’t like that boy,” Terry used to tell Penny. “If he can’t show me any respect, how does he treat our daughter?”

From then on, the Caffeys limited Erin’s time with Charlie to once a week, in their home, under their watch. Furious with her parents, Erin told her aunt that she planned on running away to be with Charlie when she turned seventeen. More and more she and her mother were at odds, and Erin once called Charlie in tears to report that Penny had slapped her in the heat of an argument. Then, in early February, Penny overheard Erin giggling one night past her phone curfew—Erin had sneaked her cell phone into her room to call Charlie. Penny informed her daughter that she was grounded. Erin’s car keys and phone were taken away, and for weeks, her parents drove her to and from school. Worst of all, as far as Erin was concerned, Charlie’s weekly visits to the house were suspended.

K
ILLING HER PARENTS
, Erin told Charlie, was their best option. She talked about the idea relentlessly. In school, she brought up the subject once or twice a day; during a lunch break in mid-February, a junior overheard her tell Charlie that killing her parents was the only way they could be together. Charlie, who turned eighteen that month, wanted to be with Erin, and he promised to do whatever it took to make her happy. His father used to joke that he had “lost puppy dog syndrome”—he tried to help whoever was down on his luck; Erin was someone he wanted to rescue. Charlie told several friends that he intended to kill her parents. Still, sometimes he seemed ambivalent about their plan. He only wanted to run away with Erin, he told a buddy. As late as two days before the murders, he gloomily admitted to the same friend that he wished he could just get her pregnant so the Caffeys would have no choice but to accept him. But Erin was insistent. She was too young to have a baby, she said, and as long as her parents were alive, she and Charlie would have to be apart. “She had him around her finger, pretty much,” said a girl who was a senior at the time. “She could get him to do whatever she wanted. She asked for something, she got it.”

At Miracle Faith, people sensed that something was wrong in the Caffey home. Penny was withdrawn for most of February, and she declined to go on a women’s church retreat, saying that she needed to spend more time with her family. At church functions, Erin was aloof and distracted. During a Valentine’s Day dinner that was hosted by her youth group, she stood idly by, too preoccupied to even fill water glasses. The pastor’s wife, Rebecca McGahee, was deeply troubled by her demeanor later that month, when she sang at her grandfather’s funeral. Terry’s father had died of a heart attack on February 21, and though none of the Caffeys had been close to him, they performed “Amazing Grace” in his honor. Terry and Bubba played harmonica, with Penny on piano. But Erin—whose jubilant singing often brought parishioners to their feet—turned in a listless, halfhearted performance. Her voice faltered, and her cousin, who did not have her natural talent, outshone her. Rebecca sensed that something was spiritually wrong with the girl. “Erin’s anointing had lifted,” she said. “She couldn’t sing a lick.”

On February 27, three days before the murders, the Caffeys demanded that Erin break up with Charlie. Earlier that day, Penny had stopped by the local library, at her sister’s suggestion, and gone online to look at Charlie’s MySpace profile, which had included comments about having sex and getting drunk. When Erin came home that afternoon, her father and mother were waiting for her in the living room. “It’s over,” Terry told her.
“You’re breaking up with him today. I mean, it’s over now.” To their surprise, she did not protest. She had wanted to break things off with Charlie for a while, she tearfully confessed, but had not been sure how. Before the family left for Bible study, Erin promised that she would end things with Charlie.

III

“You’re Erin Caffey?” chief deputy Fischer asked the girl again. She nodded and looked as if she might throw up. In her flower-print pajamas, with her blond hair pulled back into a ponytail, she seemed sweet and guileless. She glanced apprehensively around the trailer. She was disoriented, and Fisher thought that she appeared to be under the influence of some kind of drug.

“Can you tell me what happened?” Fischer asked.

“Fire,” she said, her voice trailing off.

Erin was taken by ambulance to the Hopkins County Memorial Hospital, in Sulphur Springs, where she was given a full medical assessment. At the suggestion of Detective Almon, she was interviewed in the hospital’s trauma room by Shanna Sanders, the young, personable chief of police for the Rains Independent School District who was on a first-name basis with most of the high school’s students. Sheriff’s deputy Serena Booth sat in. At the time, Erin was believed to be a victim—a girl who, investigators presumed, had been kidnapped after the murders.

Gently, Sanders asked Erin what she remembered. In a timid, childlike voice that Sanders had to strain to hear, Erin spoke haltingly, offering few details. She seemed confused, repeatedly telling the officers that she was fourteen years old. She had woken up in a house full of smoke, she said. There had been “two guys with swords” dressed in black who had ordered her to get down on the floor. Though she was unsure how she had gotten to the trailer, she said, she did remember trying to call her “friend” Charlie and being unable to reach him. Then she drank “some stuff” that was offered to her at the trailer, and she could not recall anything afterward. She was teary at the start of the interview, but otherwise she showed little emotion. When Sanders asked if she had anything else to say, Erin whispered, “They’re coming after me.”

Sanders and Booth would later reflect on the fact that Erin had not smelled like smoke, and Sanders regretted that she had turned away to give Erin some privacy when her maternal grandmother, Virginia Daily, had come to tell her that her father had, miraculously, survived the attack. But that morning, the two officers felt only pity for the soft-spoken girl who had just lost her mother and two brothers. They stayed with her for five hours until she was released from the hospital, then offered to accompany her and her grandparents to the intensive care unit at the East Texas Medical Center in Tyler to see Erin’s father. “You’re a tough little girl,” Sanders told her.

H
ER STORY WAS
already beginning to unravel, though, as Charlie was being questioned at the sheriff’s office in Emory. Detective Almon, a plainspoken Navy veteran with a blunt, intense manner, led the interrogation, while Texas Ranger John Vance assisted. At the outset, Charlie muttered, “I’m in a lot of trouble.” Almon informed Charlie that he had been identified by a victim who had survived the attack and asked him to tell them exactly what had happened the previous night. If Charlie was startled by the news that he had left behind an eyewitness, he did not give himself away. Slowly, though, he began to parcel out information. Erin had called him the day before, Charlie said. She was, he recounted, “still pretty pissed off about her parents telling us we could not see each other.” Once again, she told him that she wanted them dead. Charlie had urged her to just run away, but Erin had said, “No, kill them.”

Around one-thirty the next morning, he told Almon, he and a friend had gone to the Caffey home. The friend, whom he initially refused to identify, was his hunting buddy Charles Waid, Matthew’s younger brother. The twenty-year-old needed money, and Charlie had promised him $2,000 if he would help him kill the Caffeys—cash that Erin had told Charlie he would find in a lockbox inside the house. They brought along Waid’s girlfriend, a bubbly high school senior named Bobbi Johnson, whose silver Dodge Neon they were driving. According to Charlie, Johnson did not know what the boys’ plans were but had insisted on coming with them. Charlie told the detective that when they first drove up, the Caffeys’ dog had barked so much that they decided to leave, but Erin called him on his cell phone afterward and promised to keep the dog quiet when he returned. And so with Waid behind the wheel of the Neon, they went back to the Caffeys’ house.

The threesome picked Erin up at the end of her parents’ driveway and rode around for an hour, talking about what to do. Charlie told the detective that he asked Erin several times to consider running away, but she was emphatic that she wanted her parents dead. Finally, they turned back toward the Caffey home and parked down the road. It was agreed that Charlie would kill Erin’s parents, and Waid would take care of the two boys so no witnesses would be left behind. “I ain’t got no conscience,” Charlie said to the investigators about his decision to follow through on Erin’s wishes. “I joined the Army to do whatever needed to be done without thinking.” As for her parents, he said, “I intended to kill them because I thought I was in love.”

According to Charlie, the girls had stayed behind in the car while he and Waid went inside. They entered through the front door, which Erin had left open. Armed with a .22-caliber pistol and two samurai swords, they moved through the house with brutal efficiency. Charlie crept into Terry and Penny’s first-floor bedroom and fired at them until his gun jammed. He handed the gun to Waid, who fixed the .22 and fired two more shots. They left the room, and then Charlie came back and cut Penny’s throat to make sure she was dead. The sound of gunfire had woken Bubba and Tyler, who called out for their parents and then locked themselves in Erin’s room.

Charlie told the detective that when he and Waid were satisfied that Erin’s parents were dead, Waid instructed him “to go get the kids” because “little ones talk.” Charlie had balked, and Waid, in return, threatened to leave. Charlie went upstairs and told the boys to come out of Erin’s room and go to their beds. “They were scared, and I could not stand to look at their faces,” he said. Bubba tried to put up a fight by kicking Charlie, and when he did, Waid, who was still downstairs, raised the .22, aimed at the balcony where the brothers stood, and shot Bubba in the face. He fell to the floor and did not move again. Charlie, who had narrated the night’s events with stoic detachment, broke down as he recounted how Waid had then come upstairs and stabbed eight-year-old Tyler. “I could not do it,” he said, covering his face with his hands. “Why did he have to die?” Yet Charlie said he thought he had also stabbed Tyler at least once.

After the killing spree, Charlie told the detective, he had carried a suitcase of Erin’s belongings, which she had previously packed, out to the car. She seemed happy, he remembered. She smiled and said, “I’m glad that’s over.” He and Waid went back inside and retrieved the lockbox, which Charlie opened using the combination that Erin had given him. The take, along with the contents of Terry’s wallet and Penny’s purse, amounted to $375 and some change, he said. Then they used their pocket lighters to set fire to furniture and clothes and bedsheets. As they hurried down the gravel road away from the Caffeys’ home, the teenagers could see that the house was ablaze.

They drove down back roads for a while to blow off steam.
Later that night, he told the detective, Waid dropped him and Erin off at the trailer, where they had sex. “I hope that God forgives me,” Charlie added.

T
HE INVESTIGATION MOVED FORWARD
quickly on Saturday afternoon. Almon learned that Erin’s toxicology test—she had been screened for Rohypnol, GHB, and other drugs that can cause memory loss—had come back negative. She also showed no symptoms of smoke inhalation. Chief deputy Fischer picked up Bobbi Johnson outside the restaurant where she washed dishes, and he pulled Charles Waid over driving her car. Johnson, who had recently played a minor role in the Rains High School production of
Oklahoma!
, seemed to be in high spirits. At the sheriff’s office that afternoon, she played dumb with the officers until they told her they had Waid and Wilkinson in custody, at which point she admitted what she knew. Waid, who held out the longest, finally confessed under Almon’s relentless questioning.

Their detailed accounts of the night were consistent with Charlie’s. A former special-ed student with a heavy-lidded gaze, Waid showed no remorse, and he casually recounted how he had killed the two boys. Before the conclusion of the interview, he added a detail to the story that Charlie had left out. As they had driven away from the burning house, he said, Erin had cried out, “Holy shit, that was awesome!”