'The burglar leaves the gun, leaves all the electronics, but takes a cell phone that we couldn't find in the scene,' Slot said. There was no evidence of a break-in, and the only thing missing from the house was Bart Whitaker's cell phone. 'Left and right.'īart Whitaker had good reason to believe he'd gotten away with murder, but Slot was beginning to doubt that the crime was the result of a burglary gone bad.įor one thing, he said, the dresser drawers were pulled out but not rifled through. 'It seemed like every piece of evidence that we collected, we ran into dead ends,' said crime scene investigator Max Hunter. They took the gun back to the crime lab for a closer examination, but a palm print they found wasn't big enough to identify one particular person. Crime scene investigators found no fingerprints. Police tracking dogs picked up a scent in the house and followed it outside, but only to a dead end. He found drawers pulled open as if by a burglar, a gun safe that had been pried open, four spent shell casings and a 9-mm handgun with four bullets missing from its clip.īut Slot's investigation led him to one dead lead after another. Slot scanned the crime scene for any clues that might help him find the killer. 'The crime scene that I was investigating was a burglary gone bad, where the victims were shot by the suspect and the suspect fled the scene.' Marshall Slot, the lead investigator on the case. 'When the dispatcher told me that four people had been shot, I initially thought she was joking with me,' said Sugar Land homicide Sgt. To honor his achievement, his parents presented him with a Rolex watch, and that night the family went to a popular restaurant to celebrate.Īfter clearing the house, police initially thought they were dealing with a burglary gone awry. Bart Whitaker told Kevin and his parents, Kent and Tricia Whitaker, that he had finished his final exams at nearby Sam Houston State University and would be graduating. 10, 2003, began with a special announcement at the Whitaker residence. To outsiders, there seemed to be a lot of love in the family.

Bart and his father shared a passion for distance bicycling, and the family went on vacations to places like Cancun, Mexico. 'It was my idea.'īy all accounts, Bart Whitaker and his younger brother, Kevin, were as close as two brothers could be. 'I wanted them dead,' Whitaker, 29, told ABC News. And he came very close to getting away with it. Today, Sugar Land native Bart Whitaker is on death row in Texas, convicted of capital murder and sentenced to lethal injection for masterminding a plot to murder his parents and brother. But in December 2003, the quiet community was shattered when a family of four was ambushed by an armed intruder as they entered their home.

May 1, 2009— - Sugar Land, Texas, is an idyllic, upper-class suburb 40 minutes southwest of Houston.

I want them dead