Real Life Murder Songs

Farmville, Virginia, sits in both Prince Edward and Cumberland counties in the middle of the state, an hour and a quarter from Richmond. In 2009 it was a town of about 7,300 people and a college town, home to Longwood University, where Dr Deborah Kelly taught sociology and criminal justice studies. Deborah, born in Richmond in 1955, had divorced the pastor Mark Neeterbrock at the end of 2008 after a long marriage. Mark, born in Benton, Illinois, in 1959, had been pastor of the fifty-strong Walker's Presbyterian Church in Hicksburg, in Appomattox County, since 2003. The divorce was amicable: the two remained friends and shared the parenting of their sixteen-year-old daughter Emma, a home-schooled girl who liked fashion, music and the online world, where she called herself Ragdoll.

Emma's main interest was horrorcore rap, a genre of graphic, violent hip-hop. In late 2008 she began an online relationship with a twenty-year-old rapper from Castro Valley, California, who performed as Psycho Sam. details of the account remain covered until revealed He had never met Emma in person, but in September 2009 he flew to Virginia to see her.

On 12 September 2009 Deborah drove Emma, Emma's friend Melanie Grace Wells, eighteen, who was staying with them while she worked towards her GED, and Sam to Southgate, Michigan, for the Strictly for the Wicked horrorcore festival, run by Andres Schrim's Serial Killing Records. Schrim later described Sam as a brilliant web designer and said the label had commissioned work from him. During the festival Emma was texting, and Sam grew angry and jealous. The party returned to Deborah's four-bedroom house at First Avenue in Farmville, and Sam's mood darkened.

the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it At about three in the morning on 15 September, furious about Emma, he took a wood-splitting maul and a ball-peen hammer and went through the house as the family slept. He killed Melanie first, in the downstairs den, then Deborah in an upstairs bedroom, and finally Emma in her downstairs bedroom, striking each of them repeatedly about the head. There were no defensive wounds. He then dragged the bodies into Emma's room. Two days later, on 17 September, Mark arrived at about five in the evening to check on the family; Sam attacked him in the living room and killed him too, before moving the body upstairs. He stayed in the house with the dead for several days, recorded a video of himself on a digital camera in which he said he knew he would have to pay for what he had done, and called the police once about noises in the basement on Melanie's mother's advice.

Melanie's mother, in West Virginia, had been telephoning the Farmville police. On 17 September officers called at the house and Sam told them the women had gone to the cinema. On 18 September she called again; officers returned, noticed the smell of decaying bodies, forced entry and found three women bludgeoned beyond recognition on the floor of the downstairs bedroom, and Mark's body in an upstairs bedroom. Mark's Honda was missing. The next day a sheriff's deputy stopped Sam in the car, issued him a summons for driving without a licence and had it towed; the tow-truck driver left him at a petrol station. At 11.30 that morning police found him asleep in the baggage claim at Richmond Airport with a ticket to California. Asked by a reporter how he had done it, he said, 'Jesus told me to do 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 Investigators recovered the maul, the hammer and the camera with his video. Two self-styled occult experts, Don Rimmer and Paul Calcagno, publicly blamed horrorcore music and a satanic cult, but the prosecution said the music had nothing to do with it: Sam was a rejected young man who could not take no for an answer, and the other three were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

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 A letter of his later offered for sale on a murderabilia website asked for photographs of two of his victims, to keep in photo albums 'for memories'.