Pizzas galore!

Terry took three shots to the arm and one through the cheek which sent him flying out of bed. Amid the ricochet of gunfire and Penny’s screaming, he fell unconscious by the wall. When he came to, blood was coming out of his ears, his nose, mouth and eyes. He could hear two male voices. He heard furniture being turned over and things being broken. Then it went silent. “Sudd-enly I heard boots on the hardwood floor and I’m thinking about Penny and the kids. Someone came up to me and kicked me in the foot to see if I was alive. I remember hearing them breathing real heavy. I thought they had to hear me breathing. Then I heard the gun being reloaded, click click. I clenched my eyes and said, ‘God, make it be quick.’ I was waiting for the back of my head to be blown off. But I just heard those boots walking off. Then I heard the footsteps going upstairs.

“I tried to pull my left arm from underneath me, but I kept sliding on the blood. I finally pulled my head up just so I could see over the mattress.

I couldn’t see Penny. Then I heard Bubba saying, ‘Charlie, why are you doing this? No Charlie, no,’ and I heard the gunshots going off. That’s when I fell back down.”

When Terry regained consciousness for the second time, flames were shooting up the bedroom wall. He tried to get upstairs to his children but the heat and smoke forced him back. He crawled over the mattress. That’s when he found Penny. She was almost entirely decapitated. Terry says he’d never seen so much blood in his life.

He tried going through the laundry room to get upstairs, but it was also engulfed. He could hear windows blowing out and debris falling off walls; Terry was forced back into the bedroom. Choking, he felt his way to the bathroom.

“I was panicking. I was bleeding. I didn’t know what to do,” he says. “I couldn’t unlatch the window but finally it shot open and I stuck my head outside and I remember taking in that first breath of air and it felt good. For some reason I thought I could go back inside to do something, but it was no use. I pushed my body out the window and let the weight carry me to the ground.”

Terry was sure his attackers would be watching from the road, so he decided to crawl through the woods to the Gaston house. “Even though I saw my wife dead and there was no doubt the kids were gone, I just thought if I could get to Tommy and Helen’s they could get help and everything would be okay.”

Erin and Bobbi waited in the car around the corner until they got the phone call from Waid. Johnson says Erin kept asking: “Are they dead, are they dead?” When they reached the car, Johnson saw the sword. “It’s something I will never forget,” she says. “They put it in the trunk. It had blood on it. I was freaking out but Erin was jumping up and down in her seat, excited.”

Detectives reckon it took Terry the best part of an hour to get to his neighbours’ house. Halfway there he leant against a tree and looked up at the night sky. “I remember thinking, ‘God, if you just let me get to Tommy’s house I can tell them who did this and then you can take me.’ ” At one point he fell into the creek that divides the two properties and struggled to pull himself out. Tommy was asleep when Terry reached his door. “I could see the flames. Terry told me he needed help and had been shot. He told me Charlie had done it and that there was somebody else with him; he didn’t know who. I asked about Penny and the kids. That’s when I went out of it. I was thinking, ‘Is this really happening? No, Lord, not Penny.”

Detective Richard Almon was woken by a call from one of the sheriff’s deputies just after 4am. Nothing prepared him for what he would see that morning. “It was one of the most ghastly crime scenes I’ve ever witnessed,” he says. “I spoke to Mr Caffey before the ambulance arrived. He had five gunshot wounds and I didn’t think he would make it, so I wanted to get all the information as quickly as possible. Charlie was arrested within three hours. We had Charles Waid in custody by 2pm and Bobbi in custody right after. Erin wasn’t considered a suspect until later — not until we’d interviewed Charlie and Charles.”

Erin was found in Waid’s elder brother’s trailer home, hiding under a pile of soft toys. Under Texas law, they couldn’t interview her directly as she was a minor, but she wrote a statement saying she had woken to find the house full of smoke and two men dressed in black, armed with guns and a sword. She also said she had been raped.

Police found a condom near the bed she had shared with Wilkinson that morning. She was taken by ambulance to hospital, where doctors examined her for evidence of rape. Afterwards, she asked for a police escort to accompany her on the 50-mile trip to visit her father at the hospital in Tyler, Texas. Around the same time detectives began interviewing Wilkinson, Waid and Johnson. Their stories were the same: this was all Erin’s idea. Detective Almon had the car carrying Erin pulled over and she was arrested.

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