A Grinch Of A Killer

Santa Claus, Georgia, is a tiny town of 166 people in Tooms County, in the south-eastern part of the state. It takes its name from a farmer called Green, who set up a roadside stand on US Route 1 in the 1930s and began calling the community Santa Claus to promote his business. In 1941 he led a campaign to incorporate the town, helped by William Salem, a state representative and developer who built most of its little red brick houses. Every street was given a Christmas name. The town hoped travellers heading for Florida would stop, but the interstates of the 1950s took the traffic away and left it poor and quiet.

Kimberly Denise Driggers was born in 1964. When she was three her father was killed in front of her, and she spent most of her childhood in foster care. By 1990 she was in her twenties, addicted to drugs and alcohol, living in her car, and had lost all three of her children to the state. She turned up barefoot at a church outreach building on Green Oak Road, where she met Danny Daniels, a postal worker ten years older and a Pentecostal Sunday school teacher everyone called kind. He helped her get clean; they married in 1992 and regained custody of her children. They bought a little brick house on Dasher Street and rebuilt it larger after a fire so they could foster and adopt. By December 1997 there were seven children in the house: Jessica, Danny's daughter from before; Amber, twelve, and Brooke and Brian, eight; and foster children Amanda, nine, Cory, four, and ten-month-old Gabriel.

details of the account remain covered until revealed He had open heart surgery at four and was moved between foster homes; one foster mother remembered him carrying a mouse and fearing a knife through the ceiling. He never held a job or owned a car and had a crack and alcohol problem. the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it this part of the story is covered for now He became fixated on Jessica, then fourteen, when he was eighteen, and was eventually banned from the house. He was also seeing Marie Spivey, who gave birth to a stillborn baby in 1997. details of the account remain covered until revealed

On 3 December 1997 Danny and Kim celebrated their fifth wedding anniversary, with sixty wrapped presents under the Christmas tree. the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it Late that night, after an argument at his mother Lutrell Mosley's house about the baby, he returned to Johnson's, stole his maroon Dodge van, some money and his disability cheque, and drove to Santa Claus on US Route 1.

He arrived a little after one in the morning on 4 December, climbed a garden step ladder to the bathroom window, found a Remington 1100 semi-automatic shotgun in the gun cabinet and went looking for Jessica. In the hallway he shot eight-year-old Brian in the back as he lay in bed. Jessica ran towards her parents' room and he shot her in the back in the doorway; she died there. He then fired repeatedly at Danny and Kim, reloading once. Kim was shot twice and Danny four times, the last blast to the head. A neighbour heard the noise at about 1.45am and called the police.

this part of the story is covered for now He drove them about fifty miles to a bridge over the Altamaha River, between Appling and Bacon counties. At a boat ramp he sexually assaulted nine-year-old Amanda. Afterwards, when she begged him to get rid of the shotgun, he threw it into the river. He left the girls in their nightclothes at the side of a farm road in Bacon County and drove back to his mother's house.

At six that morning a farmer found the girls walking along a rural Bacon County road; they said they had been kidnapped by a man they knew as Scott Taylor. details of the account remain covered until revealed Inside they found Danny and Kim dead in bed, Jessica in the hallway, Brian in bed with his teddy bear, and Cory and Gabriel hiding in a closet. the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it this part of the story is covered for now details of the account remain covered until revealed His mother visited the next day and he told her, 'Mama, I killed Kim.'

Funeral services for the four victims were held on 9 December 1997. the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it this part of the story is covered for now details of the account remain covered until revealed the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it this part of the story is covered for now details of the account remain covered until revealed Danny, Kim, Jessica and Brian are buried together in the Lyons City Cemetery, and the surviving children went back into the foster system.