Town note
In the early 1900s Dr Hugh H. Young, a doctor on the staff of Johns Hopkins University, began buying farmland to build a community.
about 0:05:22The story
Robert Lee Schwartz was born in 1931 in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, the middle of three sons. His father was a college dean and his mother a teacher, and the family moved several times before settling in Maryland. Bob joined the Navy and served four years, then worked for several years on the distant early warning system in Canada and Alaska before becoming a computer engineer and electronics instructor. He was a short, stocky man, balding from his twenties, with a burn scar on the left side of his face that he liked to blame on a motorcycle accident.
Catherine Ann Sullivan, known as Kate and later as Kay, was born in Iowa City, Iowa, the youngest of four children, and was valedictorian of her Catholic high school. She was tall, direct and clever, taught English and Spanish for a few years in Denver, then went to the University of Maryland for a master's degree in education. She met Bob in a university car park, where she was covering the rust spots on her old Ford Falcon with floral contact paper. He asked what she was doing; she said she was wallpapering her Ford. He was smitten.
Bob converted to Catholicism and they joined St Mary's Church in Annapolis. They hoped at first for a ready-made family of four brothers, but the agency decided four children at once was too much for a couple married only three years. They then learned that infants could take months or years, and that most couples did not want a child over two.
He was born a month early, weighing four pounds, and his early life was chaotic: his father beat his mother, his mother left, and by the age of three he was in foster care, hoarding food and waking in the night to check that people were still there. In one foster home the mother broke his arm in a rage over his bed-wetting.
The boys were close and were well liked in the neighbourhood. In May 1980 he wrote to the family from a youth centre, asking for a photograph of Annie.
At home he absorbed his mother's criticism without answering back. His schoolwork was poor, his IQ was measured at 87, and his parents' ambitions for the Naval Academy were never realistic. He was caught with amphetamines in November 1983 and admitted taking some, though they turned out to be fake.
He went to his room, drank rum from a Pepsi bottle, and later came downstairs. Kay was watching television in her blue pyjamas. He hit her on the back of the head with a wood-splitting maul, then stabbed her with a steak knife from the table. He dragged his mother's body into the snow, undressed her to remove fingerprint evidence, and interfered with her body. He threw the maul and knife into the swamp behind the house, and told Annie, who had heard a scream, that she was dreaming.
He was composed, businesslike, and showed no emotion. The emergency crew found Bob in the basement office, soaked in blood, and Kay naked in the snow beside the pool, with a green knee sock around one ankle and the top of her head blown open, which the crews took for a gunshot wound. Bloody footprints led through the neighbourhood, and Annie described a tall young man with long curly black hair carrying a shovel and wearing a grey Broadneck sweatshirt. A grey sweatshirt was found wet in the washing machine.
At first the police publicly ruled out the children, partly to protect Annie. He described the maul, the steak knife, his father's stunned face, the growl he made, and the impulse to drag his mother outside. He married, had a child, and died of a heart attack in 2005 at the age of 38.
Bell was stabbed forty-eight times. A book, Sudden Fury, appeared in 1990, and a television film, A Family Torn Apart, followed in 1993.