It took five years to get to the case to trial and five weeks to
get through all the testimony. But it took just 50 minutes of
deliberations for jurors to find Christopher Vaughn guilty.
The
suburban Chicago computer specialist was convicted of fatally shooting
his wife and three school-age children during what he told them was a
road trip to a water park.
Vaughn slaughtered his family because
he saw them as obstacles to his dream of starting a new life subsisting
in the Canadian wilderness, prosecutors told jurors before they withdrew
to deliberate.
Vaughn, 37, hunched forward as jurors re-entered
the Joliet courtroom but displayed no visible emotion as their verdict
was read. Sitting nearby, his wife's sister smiled and cried quietly,
and family members later wept as they fell into each other's arms in a
courtroom hall.
"This case is not just a murder, it's an
atrocity," Will County States Attorney James Glasgow said outside the
courthouse. "To annihilate your family, I can't think of a more
unspeakable crime."
Glasgow noted that Vaughn's two daughters and
son were each shot in the chest and head, and he said the father's lack
of emotion was the mark of "a psychopath."
Jury foreman Dan
Lashat said jurors believed Vaughn's odd and inappropriate demeanor
strongly suggested he killed his family. The jurors were later applauded
by relatives of Vaughn's wife as they walked into a nearby restaurant.
Vaughn faces a maximum life prison term when sentenced Nov. 26.
The
prosecution argued that he had compiled survival guides and posted
wistful Internet messages about constructing a cabin and settling for
good in the Yukon, cut off from the world.
Then early on June 14,
2007, Vaughn awoke his wife and children, promising a surprise trip to a
water park downstate. Prosecutors alleged that he pulled the family SUV
off the highway after 5 a.m. He placed a pistol under his 34-year-old
wife Kimberly's chin and fired, then meticulously shot 12-year-old
Abigayle, 11-year-old Cassandra and 8-year-old Blake — each in the chest
and head.
Abigayle was found holding a stuffed animal and a
Harry Potter book. Forensics experts said the trajectory of the bullet
into Blake's chest indicated he had raised his arm up as he was shot.
During
nearly a full day of closing arguments Thursday, prosecutor Chris Regis
read emails that Christopher Vaughn wrote to a friend before the
murders saying he longed for a life unencumbered by cellphones and other
hallmarks of modernity.
Regis said Vaughn felt held back by four
obstacles, all of which "were eliminated on June 14, 2007." Vaughn took
notes during the nearly six hours of closing arguments but displayed
little emotion, even when prosecutors displayed crime-scene photos of
his wife, her head hanging back and dried blood near her nose and mouth.
In
his closing, defense attorney George Lenard repeated Vaughn's
contention that his wife was suicidal over marriage troubles and
affected emotionally by antidepressant medication. The defense claimed
she shot Vaughn in the wrist and leg, then killed the children and
herself.
Lenard added later that Kimberly Vaughn may have seen
the murder of her kids as a twisted act of mercy. "(She) was of the
mindset that if she was gone, they were better off with her ... 'Come
with me to heaven,'" Lenard said, depicting what the mother might have
been thinking.
Prosecutor Mike Fitzgerald cited witnesses who
testified that Kimberly Vaughn was upbeat around the time and that, just
the evening before, she had fussed cheerfully over a recipe for "cheesy
potatoes."
Moreover, he asked how the wife could have just
grazed her husband with two bullets as he sat right next to her — yet
somehow managed to put a bullet into each of her children's heads. "No
way, ladies and gentlemen," Fitzgerald told jurors. "No way that's
possible."
Prosecutors called more than 80 witnesses during their
three-week presentation to jurors, including a stripper Vaughn confided
in about his marital troubles. The manager of a suburban strip club,
Scores Chicago, testified that in the days before the killing, Vaughn
spent nearly $5,000 at the establishment.
A series of forensics
experts testified that blood splatter, the angle of the shots and other
evidence proved Vaughn pulled the trigger. An investigator described
finding a magazine at Vaughn's home with an article on how to make a
murder look like a suicide. And prosecutors entered evidence that he
visited a gun range the day before the slayings.
Jurors also
watched hours of videotaped police interviews of Vaughn from the day of
the shootings. In one, state Trooper Cornelious Monroe brought out
pictures of Vaughn's children, questioned Vaughn's cool demeanor and
added that, if his own kids had been murdered, he would be crying. "Good
for you," Vaughn replied.
Regis said Vaughn didn't display a
hint of guilty conscience until he was left alone in an interview room
with a crime-scene photo of his son. Video shows Vaughn staring at the
picture, then pushing it away, then covering it up.
The
prosecutor likened the scene to Edgar Allen Poe's horror story "The
Tell-Tale Heart," in which a killer goes mad as he starts to hear his
victim's beating heart. "That picture is like a Tell-Tale Heart. It's
beating louder, louder, louder," Regis said, his voice rising in
indignation. "That picture is screaming at him."
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