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- [00:02]
Vanessa Richardson
Hi there, it's Vanessa. If you're loving this show, you won't want to miss my new show, a fellow Crime House Original Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes. Every Wednesday, I'll uncover the true stories behind the world's most shocking crimes, deadly ideologies and secret plots. From mass suicides and political assassinations to secret government experiments and UFO cults. Follow Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music or wherever you listen. And for ad free listening and early access to episodes, subscribe to Crime House plus on Apple Podcasts.
- [00:50]
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- [00:55]
Vanessa Richardson
This week in crime history features two of the world's most terrifying acts of deadly revenge. On August 20, 1960. In 1989, brothers Lyle and Eric Menendez brutally murdered their parents in the living room of their Beverly Hills mansion, retaliating for what they claimed was a lifetime of abuse. 27 years later, Derek Dearman killed five people and an unborn child with an axe. Because he was furious, they wouldn't let him see his girlfriend. Welcome to True Crime. This week formerly known as Crime House the Show. I'm Vanessa Richardson. It's still the same show, but now will be releasing on Sundays instead. And as always, we'll be revisiting notorious crimes from the upcoming week in history. From serial killers to mysterious disappearances or murders, every episode will explore stories that share a common theme. Each week we'll cover two stories, one one further in the past and one more rooted in the present. This week's theme is deadly Revenge. First, we'll start on August 20, 1989, when Lyle and Eric Menendez gunned down their parents while they were watching TV. Then we'll jump forward to August 20, 2016, when Derek Dearman broke into an Alabama home, setting in motion a real life horror movie. Both of today's killers felt like they'd been wronged in some way. Whether it was an alleged lifetime of abuse or sabotaging a treasured relationship. And they were willing to do anything to get revenge. But the blood they spilled in their brutal acts of violence didn't bring them any closure. It only led to more suffering. All that and more coming up. On August 20, 1989, 44 year old Jose Menendez and his wife, 47 year old Mary Louise, who went by Kitty, were enjoying a quiet night at home in their Beverly Hills mansion. Their sons, 21 year old Lyle and 18 year old Eric were both out for the night. So the parents had dinner together. Then some settled in to watch a movie on their TV. Around 10pm Jose and Kitty had dozed off in the darkened room, lit only by the light of the tv. They didn't hear the French doors open in the study or the two pairs of footsteps coming down the hallway. They only woke up when the intruders started firing their shotguns. The pellets hit Jose first, spraying across his arms. And then one of the shooters placed the barrel of his gun against the back of Jose's head and fired again, killing him instantly. Kitty woke up covered in her husband's blood and leapt off the couch, trying to flee, but one attacker shot her in the leg. Lying on the floor, Kitty tried to crawl away, but the intruders riddled her with shotgun blasts until their weapons were empty. Somehow, Kitty was still alive. So the shooters ran back outside to get more ammo from their car, then came back to finish her off. They couldn't take any chances. She'd seen their faces, and she'd certainly recognized them, because the two men who'd murdered Jose and Kitty Menendez that night were their own children. Before he met his violent end, Jose Menendez's life seemed like a true rags to riches story. Although he was born into a wealthy family in Havana, Cuba, they had to flee to America in 1960 after Fidel Castro came to power. By the time they settled in Pennsylvania, they had no money. And although Jose didn't speak any English, he was determined to regain what his family had lost. He studied hard in high school to become fluent in English, then won a swimming scholarship to Southern Illinois University. He got a degree in accounting. Along the way, he met a pretty girl named Kitty Anderson. Kitty was almost three years older than Jose, but she was immediately drawn to his tenacity and work ethic. Jose felt the same way about Kitty, who'd overcome crippling shyness to become a radio host for the university's station. Even though the sight of a Cuban boy dating a white girl turned some heads in 1960s Illinois, it didn't stop their devotion to one another. They got married in 1963, when Kitty was 22 and Jose was just 19. After Jose got his degree, the young couple settled in the New York City area. Kitty worked as an elementary school teacher, while Jose got a job at an accounting firm. Over the next 15 years, Jose's work ethic paid off and he landed executive roles at companies like Hertz rental cars and RCA records. Finally, in 1986, at the age of 42, he was hired as president of Live Entertainment, a company that produced tapes of Hollywood blockbusters for the growing video rental market. From the Outside, Jose Menendez had it all. All. He was a millionaire with a loving wife and two handsome sons. Lyall, born in 1968, and Eric, born in 1970. But along the way, he made plenty of enemies. Jose stepped on a lot of people as he climbed the corporate ladder. He was abusive to his employees, publicly humiliating them whenever he was unhappy with their performance. And he was unfaithful to Kitty, too, cheating with multiple women throughout their marriage. But the two people who suffered the most from Jose Menendez's cruelty were his sons, Lyle and Eric. Jose had fought his way to the top and he wanted his boys to have the same killer instinct. Instead of giving them love and affection, he imposed strict rules on Lyle and Eric. Jose controlled who they saw, what they ate and what they did with nearly every minute of their day. Each morning at breakfast, he quizzed the boys about current events and made them recite a credo he'd written a sample from. It reads, Today I will be the master of my emotions. If I feel depressed, I will sing. If I feel sad, I will laugh. If I feel ill, I will double my labor. If I feel poverty, I will think of wealth to come. And that wasn't the only message Jose Menendez drilled into his boys. There was also the family motto. Lie, cheat, steal, but win. Lyle and Eric didn't respond well to the pressure. As they grew up, both boys developed stutters and suffered from stress induced stomach pains. Lyle developed such bad anxiety, his hair began to fall out by the time he was a teenager, he had to be fitted for a toupee. Despite the stress, the Menendez brothers did their best to emulate their father. In school, Lyle and Eric were just as rude and bad tempered as Jose was at the office. But they didn't share his appreciation for hard work. They received average grades and teachers suspected they paid other students to do their homework. Despite Jose's many threats, that lack of effort didn't have any real consequences. In 1987, 19 year old Lyle got into Princeton, thanks largely to his dad's money and connections. He wasn't there for long though. In his first semester, Lyle was caught trying to pass off another student's work as his own and was hauled in front of a disciplinary board. Jose tried to get the university's president to let his boy off the hook. But it was no use, for Lyle was suspended from Princeton for a year. Jose was furious. Lyle had broken the family code. He'd cheated and he'd gotten caught. After getting kicked out of Princeton, Lyle went back to live with his family the year before, they'd moved to the wealthy LA suburb of Calabasas where 16 year old Eric was finishing high school. Like his brother and father, Eric was considered cocky and arrogant. Although he did have some friends on the tennis team. And although his grades weren't great, he showed a creative streak. He even wrote a screenplay in high school. It was about a teenager who murders his wealthy parents so he could inherit all their money. Meanwhile, Jose made Lyle work an entry level job at Live Entertainment. But if this was supposed to instill some kind of work ethic, it was unsuccessful. Lyle showed up late, slacked off and frequently skipped work to go play tennis. His performance was so bad that his own father fired him after a few months. Lyle was desperate to maintain his carefree lifestyle, but he didn't want to work for it. So in the summer of 1988, the 20 year old started robbing houses and he got his little brother to join. The Menendez brothers were able to steal more than $100,000 worth of property in just a few short months. But the crime spree came to a stop in September 1988 when 17 year old Eric got pulled over with a trunk full of stolen goods. Jose pulled a lot of strings and spent a lot of money to keep his sons out of jail. Since Eric was still a minor, he took the full fall for all the break ins. In the end, he only received community service and had to start seeing a psychiatrist. But the social cost was huge. The Menendez family were now outcasts in Calabasas. As a result, In October of 1988, Jose moved the family to Beverly Hills. Jose and Kitty didn't know how to get through to their wayward sons. So they decided to threaten. The only thing the boys seemed to care about. Their money. In the aftermath of the burglaries, Jose and Kitty told the brothers that if they didn't straighten out, they'd remove them from their will. Lyle and Eric heard this threat loud and clear. They'd learned from their father what it was like to lose all your wealth and wind up penniless. So they hatched a plan to make sure it didn't happen to them, no matter what the cost.
- [12:13]
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- [12:31]
Vanessa Richardson
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- [12:33]
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- [13:02]
Vanessa Richardson
In September of 1988, Lyle and Eric Menendez got busted stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of cash and jewelry in the LA suburbs. In response, their parents threatened to cut them out of their will. 20 year old Lyle and 17 year old Eric had always assumed they'd inherit their father's riches and they would do anything to protect the lifestyle they'd grown up with. Eric had already written a screenplay about a rich boy killing his parents to inherit their money. They were also reportedly obsessed with a made for TV movie called Billionaire Boys Club. It was based on the true story of well to do Beverly Hills rich kids who committed two murders for financial gain. Lyle and Eric figured they could do the same thing. As the brothers formulated their plan, Eric Kitty Menendez seemed to sense that something was wrong. In July of 1989, she told her therapist she was afraid her sons were narcissistic sociopaths. She started sleeping with her bedroom door locked and kept guns in her nightstand. But she was still caught by surprise when Lyle and Eric sprung their trap. At 11:47pm on August 20, 19, 1989, Beverly Hills Police received a frantic 911 call from the Menendez brothers with Eric wailing in the background. Lyall told the dispatcher they'd come home to their parents shot dead in the living room. When police arrived at the house just A minute later, 21 year old Lyall and 18 year old Eric ran out onto the lawn distraught and in tears. As detectives investigated the Grizzly crime scene, Lyle and Eric told the police how they'd spent their evening. At 8 o' clock they tried to go see the new James Bond movie License to Kill at a nearby mall, but the movie was sold out so they went to see Batman instead. After the movie they called a friend and made plans to meet up at the Cheesecake Factory in Beverly Hills. Along the way they swung by the house so Eric could get his fake id. And that they said was when they found their parents had been murdered. When detectives asked who might want their parents dead, Lyle suggested the Mafia may have been involved. The police found this theory convincing. The close range shotgun blast to Jose's head looked like a typical mob style killing and Jose's video distribution company had some ties to Mafia aligned businesses, including in the adult film industry. But that wasn't the only possibility. Jose was a man with a lot of enemies. When his co workers learned he'd been murdered, many of them speculated that one of his employees had done it. The police certainly didn't suspect Lyle and Eric. The boys story was plausible and their grief seemed very real. Detectives were so certain the brothers weren't involved, they didn't even test them their hands for gunpowder residue. For the next seven months, it seemed as though Lyle and Eric's plan had worked perfectly. They split the $650,000 from Jose's life insurance policy, which they used to go on an immediate shopping spree. Just three days after their parents were killed, Lyall and Eric spent $15,000 on new RA Rolex watches and money clips. They claimed to be too afraid of the mafia to return to their mansion, so they moved into a luxury hotel in Bel Air. By October of 1989, less than six weeks after the murders, Lyle had run up $90,000 in charges on Jose's American Express card. And he was also trying to step into his father's shoes as a businessman. He spent half a million dollars to buy a takeout restaurant near Princeton's campus in New Jersey, paying more than double what the business was worth. He then renamed the restaurant and started making aggressive expansion plans even as the business began losing money hand over fist. Meanwhile, Eric spent his cash on tennis. He paid $60,000 for a professional coach and began traveling the world to compete compete in private tournaments, always staying at the fanciest hotels. In just four months since their parents murders, Lyle and Eric Menendez had racked up more than a million dollars in spending and credit card charges. It was an eyebrow raising amount of money for two young men who were supposedly grieving. And it was enough to make the Beverly Hills police start to doubt the brothers mob hit story. In addition to the brothers big spending, investigators learned that less than two weeks after the murders, Lyle and Eric hired a tech expert to delete a new draft of Kitty's will from her computer. Detectives decided to question Eric on his own. Of the two, he seemed to have a guiltier conscience and would be more likely to crack without his big brother to cover for him. So in late October 1989, while Lyle was in Princeton trying to manage his restaurant, detectives visited Eric for another interview. Eric was able to stay cool in the moment. But after the police left, he was a nervous wreck. He decided to go see his old therapist, the one his parents had hired. After he was caught burglarizing houses in Calabasas Dr. Jerome Ozil. During their session, Eric broke down and confessed. Confessed to killing his parents. He reportedly explained how they'd been inspired by the Billionaire Boys Club movie, how they'd bought shotguns in San Diego using a friend's driver's license, and how they'd thrown the murder weapons into a canyon. After the crime, when Lyle returned to LA and learned that his brother had confessed to his therapist, he rushed to Dr. Ozil's office and said he'd kill him if he turned them in. Ironically, by threatening Dr. Ozil, Lyle had eliminated their legal right to doctor patient confidentiality. But instead of going to the police, Dr. Ozil continued to treat the Menendez brothers for the next few months. As he later explained, he wanted to help them figure out what truly drove them to murder their parents. But Dr. Ozil knew he was risking his safety, so he came up with with a safeguard in case things went wrong. Dr. Ozil asked his business associate and mistress, a woman named Judalon Smith, to eavesdrop on his sessions. That way, if his life was in danger, she could call the police. And in early March of 1990, Judalon was listening in when she heard the Menendez brothers confess to the killing and threaten Dr. Ozil. And she reported it to the police who got a warrant to search Ozil's office and confiscate tapes he'd recorded of his sessions with Lyle and Eric. Once the police heard the tapes, they had everything they needed to make an arrest. On March 8, 1990, 22 year old Lyle was heading out to lunch with friends when police surrounded his jeep and took him into custody. 19 year old Eric was in Israel for a tennis tournament at the time. As soon as he learned that Lyle had been arrested, he rushed to be with his beloved brother. Police arrested him the minute he got off the plane. In la, the Menendez brothers spent the next three years in the LA county jail awaiting trial. Meanwhile, their defense lawyers, paid for with the riches from the family's estate, readied their defense. As the trial got underway, the brothers alleged that Jose had been sent to sexually abusing them throughout their lives. Lyle and Eric's lawyers argued that Jose's constant sexual abuse had pushed them to their breaking point and they'd killed him in self defense to put an end to their suffering. They also argued that Kitty had been a willing enabler and accomplice in the abuse, which was why they'd killed her as well. The prosecutors weren't sure how to respond to this defense strategy because it seemed almost Ridiculous. Jose Menendez was certainly a stern and often cruel father. But there was no physical evidence that he'd ever physically or sexually abused his sons. However, Lyle and Eric had talked about it during their therapy sessions. Once they were on the stand, they wept and trembled as they talked about Jose's many years of abuse. And the brothers attorneys made sure their clients looked as innocent as possible. They dressed 25 year old Lyle and 22 year old Eric in boyish looking sweaters, khakis and sports shirts, and referred to them as boys whenever possible. Their plan worked. Almost. In January of 1994, after weeks of deliberation, the jury deadlocked. They couldn't decide whether the brothers were murderers or abuse victims fighting back. What was supposed to be an open and shut case had now ended in a mistrial. The Menendez brothers stayed in jail for almost two more years while preparations were made for a retrial which finally began in October of 1995. This time around, the prosecution was better prepared to argue that Lyle and Eric were motivated by by greed. They presented new evidence that the brothers had a safe containing their parents will moved out of the house within 24 hours of the murders. They had experts testify that forensic evidence showed that Jose and Kitty weren't shot in a blind panic like the defense said, but in a cold and calculated ambush. This time the argument worked. After just four days days of deliberation, the jury convicted the Menendez brothers of two counts each of first degree murder. They were both sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. For years, the once inseparable brothers were locked up in different prisons. But in 2018, 50 year old Lyle and 47 year old Eric were moved into the same housing unit at San Diego's Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility. They hadn't seen each other face to face since 1996. According to witnesses, they both burst into tears the moment they were reunited. The Menendez brothers had lied, cheated and stolen and gotten caught every time they lost the fortune they were convicted of killing for. But if nothing else, behind bars, they had each other. And soon they might even have their freedom. In May 2025, a judge changed the brothers sentence to make them eligible for parole, arguing that they deserved a second chance because of how young they were at the time of the murders. The Menendez brothers fate is now in the hands of the California Board of Parole hearings. As of this recording, their hearing is scheduled for August 21 and 22, 2025. Until then, the debate about their motivations will continue. Were they greedy murderers or abused young men desperate to fight back. We may never know the truth, but one thing is clear in the Menendez brothers quest for revenge, nobody did got what they wanted. Coming up, another case of a killer who went on a misguided rampage.
- [25:16]
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Vanessa Richardson
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- [26:09]
Vanessa Richardson
Science, aviation and medicine. Plus education and sign on bonuses. Parents help your grads start their career today@navy.com 27 years after Lyle and Eric Menendez ambushed and killed their sleeping parents, another another killer committed a horrific act in the dead of night, murdering five people and an unborn child. Like the Menendez's, he was fueled by a desire for revenge against those he thought had wronged him. And in the aftermath of his crimes, he claimed he thought he was actually on a rescue mission. In the early morning hours of August 20, 2016, 27 year old Derek Dearman was sitting on the tailgate of his pickup truck deep in the countryside of Mobile County, Alabama. He'd had a rough few hours. All night long he'd been trying to see his ex girlfriend, 24 year old Lynetta Lester. She was staying with her brother Joseph, who lived in a small two bedroom house off a nearby dirt road. But Joseph wouldn't let Derek through the door. Derek and Lynetta were going through a difficult period and he was desperate to get their relationship back on track. But the way he saw it, everybody around her was conspiring to keep her away from him. Again and again throughout the night, he'd try to approach the house to see her and each time they'd sent him away. They even called the cops on him. Now it was after 3am and Derek was sitting on the back of his truck at the edge of the Joseph's property. He knew he had no chance of getting Lynetta back as long as her brother and his friends were in the house. In a moment of desperation, Derek scanned the grassy wooded area around him. He spotted an axe planted in the side of a nearby tree. And then Derek made a decision that would change his life and the lives of everyone inside that two bedroom country house forever. Lynetta Lester first met Derek Dearman in high school when she was 15 and he was 18. What started as a teenage romance gradually turned into a tumultuous relationship that spanned the next 10 years. Although Derek could be incredibly loving, he also had a long history of anger management issues. He'd go from being totally calm to to completely furious in the blink of an eye and would take out his anger on anyone. At some point in his youth, Derek reportedly flew into a rage and beat up his own mother. A note in his student records from high school described Derek as, quote, a cocky 15 year old who wants his way and will argue until he gets his way. He does not think he does anything wrong. And when Derek started dating Lynetta, she became a frequent target of his outbursts. Making things worse, Derek started using methamphetamines as they got older, which only fueled his volatile and unpredictable rage. On more than one occasion, Linetta broke up with Derek during one of their splits. He married another woman and had two kids with her. But the relationship didn't last last thanks to Derek's violence and drug abuse. After his wife left him and took the kids, Derek and Lynetta eventually wound up together again. Even though she knew Derek was bad news, it was hard for Lynetta to stay away from him. Part of that was because Derek, like most abusers, was emotionally manipulative. He could be sweet sometimes, and he always did just enough to give Lynetta hope that he'd actually changed. But Lynetta's attachment to Derek also had to do with proximity. They both lived in the farm town of Citronelle in southern Alabama. It's a small place with a population of less than 4,000 people. The kind of tight knit community where it's hard to avoid somebody, especially when that person has decided that they don't want to let you go. But eventually, Linetta was determined to try. In the summer of 2016, when Lynetta was 24, she finally hit her breaking point. After almost a Decade of ups and downs. After another one of Derek's violent outbursts, she packed her things and went to stay with her brother Joseph Turner. Joseph was 26 and lived out in the country with his wife Shannon and their three month old baby Darren. He was happy to help his his sister even though they didn't have a lot of room around their two bed, one bath house. And there was already another couple staying at Joseph and Shannon's place. Their friends, 23 year old Justin Reed and his wife, 22 year old Chelsea Reed, who was five months pregnant at the time. But they made room for everybody. Joseph, Shannon and their baby in one bedroom, Justin and Church, Chelsea in the other and Lynetta somewhere on an air mattress. Derek knew Lynetta was staying with them and he came to see her on multiple occasions, trying to work things out. Joseph was fine with Derek showing up on one condition. Derek could only see Lynetta during the day. He wasn't allowed to spend the night on the property. But Derek never liked following the rules. And on the evening of August 19 2, 2016, he decided to break them. It was a Friday and everyone staying at Joseph's crowded house was celebrating with a cookout. Shannon's brother, 26 year old Robert Brown joined them for the barbecue. Afterwards they all went inside to watch a movie. As night fell, everybody went to bed. Lynetta settled in on her air mattress and Robert crashed on a recliner in the living room. Then there was a knock at the door. It was Derek Dearman. He wanted to come in and talk to Linetta. Joseph told him no, it was after dark, no nighttime visits allowed. But that wasn't the end of it. Derek came back three hours later demanding to see Lynetta once again. He was sent away, but then Derek came back again shortly after midnight. Joseph firmly told him to get off his property and that he wasn't allowed to come back. Derek argued with him and things got heated enough that Shannon eventually called the police. But Derek left before they arrived. The atmosphere at the house was pretty tense at this point. Everybody there knew Derek was hot headed, violent and often under the influence of crystal meth. So they started taking precautions in case he came back again. Joseph set up a spotlight and shined it on the driveway so they could see if Derek returned. Sadly, that wasn't enough to keep him away. Around 3am Lanetta woke up to someone tapping at the window near her air mattress. When she peeked out, she saw Derek standing outside in the dark through the window he opened. Asked her to bring him a cigarette and something to drink. Lynetta was sick of Derek's antics, but she got him what he asked for, possibly hoping it would get him to leave. When she passed him the cigarette and drink through the door, Derek asked Lynetta to come outside and talk to him. She said no. It was late, she was tired, and he'd already caused a lot of ruckus. Lonetta told Derek to leave, went back inside and crawled onto the air mattress. After that, Derek went back and sat on the bed of his pickup truck parked nearby. He was determined to get Lynetta back no matter what. And that's when he saw the axe stuck in a tree. Derek grabbed it, then walked back towards the little house full of sleeping people.
- [34:29]
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- [35:00]
Vanessa Richardson
After spending nearly 10 years in an abusive relationship with Derek Dearman, Lynetta Lester had finally broken free. But Derek wasn't ready to let her go. On the night of August 19, 2016, he repeatedly showed up at her brother Joseph's house demanding to speak to Lynetta. Every time Joseph and his friends told Derek to get lost. But in the early morning hours of August 20th, Derek came back. He was carrying an axe he'd found on the property and this time he didn't want to talk. Weapon in hand, Derek broke inside through the sliding glass doors and locked living room. The first person he encountered was Joseph and Shannon's friend Robert Brown, who'd fallen asleep in a recliner. Robert woke up and tried to get out of the chair, but Derek attacked him before he could get away. The commotion woke people up throughout the small house. When Joseph opened the door to his room at the end of the hall, Derek charged him, striking until he was incapacitated on the ground. Then Derek entered the bedroom and killed Joseph's wife Shannon while she was still lying in bed with her three month old baby right next to her. Fortunately, Derek left the child unharmed as he continued his killing spree. At this point, Joseph and Shannon's friends Justin and Chelsea emerged from their bedroom. Justin was armed with a.45 caliber pistol. The but in the close quarters of the hallway, Derek was able to strike. Before he could fire, Derek slashed at Justin and Chelsea repeatedly with the axe. Then he took the pistol from Justin and shot him in the throat. According to the Mobile County District Attorney, this is what woke Lynetta up as she saw the carnage that was unfolding. Robert Brown, the first person Derek had attacked, got up off the ground. He was badly injured, but still alive. As he stood up, Derek stormed back into the room with Justin's gun and shot him behind the ear. Robert's body fell forward and smashed through the sliding glass door. It's not clear where Lynetta was in the house at this point, but during the chaos, she rushed into Joseph and Shannon's bedroom where their baby was screaming. Screaming. Just as she grabbed the blood splattered child from the bed, Derek came in. Joseph was still moving on the floor, so Derek shot him in the head. Then he went from room to room, shooting all of the other victims in the head as well. When he was finished, the only people left alive in the house were him, Lynetta, and the baby. At last, Derek had what he wanted. Lynetta was with him, and there was nobody left who could take her away. But the night wasn't over yet. Derek forced Lynetta out of the house at gunpoint, baby still in her arms. He grabbed Shannon's car keys, then pushed his hostages into the vehicle. He got behind the wheel and took off along the dark, winding country roads. Derek didn't know what to do next, so he drove to his sister's house in Greene County, Mississippi, about 440 miles away. When they arrived around 7am Derek's sister was shocked to see her brother and his girlfriend both covered in blood. Derek said they'd hit a deer on the highway earlier in the night. That was why they were driving Shannon's car instead of his truck. As for the baby, it doesn't seem like he had an explanation for that. Lynetta was too afraid to say what really happened or to make a run for it. In her state of shock, the best thing she could do to protect herself and her nephew was to play along with whatever Derek wanted. They didn't stay at his sister's place for long. They needed supplies for little Darren, so Derek drove them to a truck stop to buy diapers and formula. After that, they drove another 30 minutes down the road to a house where Derek's friend Scott lived with his parents. Derek asked Scott's parents to look after the baby. Then he took Lynetta to a trailer on the property to get some sleep. Lying beside him, Linetta didn't have much choice, but to do the same. They were with Derek's friends at a strange house in the middle of nowhere. Even if she tried to run, where would she go? After a few hours of sleep, Derek took Linetta back to the main house to get the baby, then loaded his hostages back into the car and took off again. This time, he drove them a few miles up the road to his father's property. But when they arrived, the two men stood and talked outside the house while Lynetta hung back. As their conversation dragged on, she realized this might be her best chance to get away. While Derek was distracted by his dad, Lynetta jumped back into the car with the baby. She started the engine and hit the gas, speeding back onto the main road. After several hours in hell, she'd finally escaped. Lynetta drove back to Citronelle and went straight to the police station. She ran into the front office, still carrying a blood splattered baby, to report the mass murder. Around the same time, Derek and his father went to the Greene County Sheriff's office in Mississippi. After Lynetta made her escape, Derek had confessed to his dad, who insisted that he turn himself in. When police showed up at the house in Citronelle, they were absolutely horrified by the crime scene. The local district attorney, Ashley Rich, called it the worst one she'd ever seen. Investigators would go on to call it the worst mass murder in Mobile County's history. Derek Dearman was charged with six counts of of murder for Joseph Turner, his wife, Shannon, Robert Brown, Justin Reed, and Chelsea Reed, along with her unborn child. Prosecutors also announced they would be seeking the death penalty. Derek wasn't planning to fight them. As the case grew closer to trial, he announced that he planned to plead guilty. But because Derek was facing the death penalty, he still had to stand trial. When the proceedings began in September 2018, he decided to act as his own attorney. All Derek wanted to do was explain himself. As he told it, in the early evening of August 19, 2016, he injected a large amount of crystal meth. In his paranoid state, Derek believed that Lynetta's brother and the others at the house had kidnapped her. Her. That, he said, was why he killed them. Afterwards, when he fled the house with Lynetta, he thought they were running away from people who were going to come and take her back. Only later that morning, after he'd come down off the drugs, did he realize the severity of what he'd done. Derek made it clear that he wasn't trying to avoid responsibility for his crimes. In his statements in court. Court he repeatedly said drugs are not an excuse. He acknowledged that he'd killed several innocent people. He apologized to the families of the victims and to the jurors for having to look at disturbing crime scene photos of what he'd done. And he expressed his desire to get the trial over with quickly so justice could be served. The jurors obliged. On October 12, 2018, Derek Dearman was found guilty on six charges of capital murder and sentenced to death. Six years later, on October 17, 2024, he was executed by lethal injection. Lynetta and the rest of the world was free of Derek Dearman. But this sentence didn't make up for for the lives he took and the child he left an orphan. Looking back at this week in crime history, we can see the dangers of misguided revenge. The Menendez brothers claimed their murders were in retaliation for years of alleged abuse, not greed. Meanwhile, Derek Dearman's drug fueled paranoia led to the the murders of five people and an unborn child. In both cases, these attempts at vigilante justice only led to more devastation. Innocent people died, families were torn apart, scars were left that will never heal, and because of that, true justice can never be served. Foreign thanks so much for listening. I'm Vanessa Richardson and this is True Crime this Week. 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