Just hours before she killed her two sons, her ex-husband, her stepmother and then tried to frame one of her dead children, a South Carolina mother suffering from multiple personalities gathered her family to pray.
‘I know it sounds pretty fricking bizarre, but we pray a lot as a family,’ Susan Hendricks told investigators in October 2011 at the Pickens County Sheriff’s Office, just hours after authorities discovered the bodies.
According to new audio just released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from The Associated Press, the South Carolina mother initially tried to tell investigators that her son Matthew, 23, had committed the murders in October 2011 before turning the gun on himself.
However, it later emerged she was mentally ill, with multiple personalities and an inability to tell right from wrong when she committed the murders – which she plead guilty to in April.
Susan Hendricks, 49, pleaded guilty but mentally ill to four counts of murder and accepted a life sentence in a plea bargain with prosecutors.
As well as the three hour 2011 interview with police, the Associated Press got hold of 324 pages of documents and more than 600 crime scene photographs.
The documents include details on Hendricks’ suicide attempt behind bars nine months after her arrest, as well as the fact that her younger son, 20-year-old Marshall, had just moved back home two days before the shootings.
This Oct. 14, 2011 photo taken by a South Carolina Law Enforcement Division crime scene technician, shows a note written by Matthew Hendricks – which his mother Susan Hendricks (right) tried to claim proved his guilt
They also revealed that Hendricks had papers from insurance policies and wills spread throughout her motel room at the time she was taken into custody.
Hendricks’ acquaintances, whose statements are contained in the documents, said she kept large insurance policies on all the victims, fired gunshots at her sons’ feet when she was angry, and would often remind people that she shot and killed a man who broke into her home in 2006.
She claimed self-defense and was never charged in that killing.
The ballistics and other crime scene reports contained in the documents detail a quick, brutal ambush.
Matthew and Hendricks’ 64-year-old stepmother, Linda Burns, were killed in the Liberty home they shared with Hendricks, while Marshall and Hendricks’ 52-year-old ex-husband and the father of her sons, Mark Hendricks, were killed in their own home next door.
Blood stains and three cartridge cases show Hendricks cornered Marshall in a hallway between his bedroom and a bathroom.
He eventually got around her but she managed to fire one more shot that took him down. He died on the front porch, where he was covered with a sheet. Mark Hendricks was killed lying on the couch.
Emotional day: Family members of victims weep and hug outside of court after Susan Hendricks was sentenced to life in prison
Although handwriting experts confirmed the note was written by Matthew, authorities said they believe it had been written at a previous time, and that Susan Hendricks saved it, then retrieved it at the time of the killings.
In the audiotaped interview, Hendricks doesn’t cry much and her voice sounds flat, emotionless and tired much of the time. Most of the sobs come at the end of the questioning when she says she can’t give a written statement and wants to go home.
‘I’ll have to help you another time, OK. I need to go. I need to see my family,’ Hendricks said. ‘I need to see somebody that I know. I haven’t seen anybody I know. I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know where my kids’ bodies are at. I need to get out of here, OK? Please?’
Detectives fanning out across Pickens County gathered dozens of statements detailing a fractious relationship between Hendricks, her sons and her ex-husband.
Mark Hendricks’ sister, Rhonda ‘Suzy’ Chappell, told deputies that Marshall lived with her for two months after his mother kicked him out, and that at his father’s request, he had moved back two days before he was killed.
‘This has been a very dysfunctional home for many years and she saw that the boys were working their way out and she was losing her grip,’ Chappell wrote in a statement to investigators.
Mark Hendricks’ second ex-wife, Barbara Hendricks, told investigators Susan Hendricks followed the couple to Myrtle Beach and had told people she wanted to kill them.
An ex-boyfriend of Susan Hendricks, Rudy Parra, told deputies that Hendricks told him she had shot a man who came into her house uninvited in 2006. She then showed him three guns she kept in a safe in her closet.
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December 18, 2015, 07:00:10 AM