On Thursday, July 29, 1999, Mark O. Barton murdered his wife and two children, then went to two local brokerage firms and opened fire. He escaped, but later killed himself just before the police could arrest him.
Here are some articles about the case from The New York Times:
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Gunman in Atlanta Slays 9, Then Himself
ATLANTA, July 29 — A securities day trader killed nine people this afternoon in two office buildings in the city's glitzy Buckhead district, eluded an extensive police manhunt for five hours and then killed himself in his van after the police pulled him over in nearby Cobb County. An additional 12 people were injured in the incident, 7 from gunshot wounds.
The man, Mark O. Barton, 44, also is suspected in the killings of his wife, Leigh, and two children from an earlier marriage, whose bodies were found today in an apartment in suburban Stockbridge, about 15 miles southeast of Atlanta.
A 9-millimeter pistol and a .45-caliber handgun were found near Mr. Barton's body and a computer-generated letter and three notes were found near the bodies of his wife and children, the authorities said.
The Stockbridge killings took place before the Buckhead shootings, but it was unclear exactly when, said Mayor Bill Campbell of Atlanta.
Seven of those injured in the Buckhead shootings were in critical condition at Atlanta hospitals late tonight.
Mr. Barton, of Morrow, a chemist who took on the high-risk life of an independent stock trader, also was a suspect in the 1993 bludgeoning deaths of his former wife and her mother in Cedar Bluff, Ala., the authorities said. He was never charged in those killings.
No motive was apparent for the killings that occurred in two brokerage offices yesterday, the deadliest shooting rampage in the city's history. Investigators speculated that recent trading losses contributed to Mr. Barton's ire, although they also said he had not expressed any such motive in the notes he left.
''What happened today is a tragedy of massive proportions,'' Mr. Campbell said this afternoon, his face locked in a sweat-dampened grimace. ''We are praying for the families and praying for our city.''
Today's incident was the third shooting rampage in the Atlanta area in less than three months. On May 20, a 15-year-old student at Heritage High School in nearby Conyers took a gun to school and shot six other students, none fatally, before being captured. On July 12, an Atlanta man killed six members of a family and himself in an apparent domestic dispute.
The shootings in the Buckhead business and entertainment district today began around 2:50 P.M., when Mr. Barton, dressed in shorts and a shirt, walked into Momentum Securities and, without warning or provocation, began to fire with two weapons, Mr. Campbell said.
Four people were killed in that building.
James Lee, a co-owner of the firm, would not say whether Mr. Barton did business there.
Mr. Barton then crossed bustling Piedmont Road and walked into another brokerage firm, All-Tech Investment Group. He opened fire there as well, killing five people.
Mr. Barton had traded at the office in the past but not recently, the company said in a statement from its headquarters in Montvale, N.J.
Mr. Barton ''came into our office and after speaking to the branch manager, suddenly stood up and for no apparent reason opened fire on the branch manager and his secretary,'' said the statement from All-Tech. ''This man then went into our main trading room and began indiscriminately shooting at our customers. The man then ran out of our office and continued shooting in another part of the office building.''
Harvey Houtkin, the chief executive of All-Tech, in a statement on the company's Web site, expressed sympathy to the victims' families and said, ''No explanation can alleviate our grief or bring a sense of closure to the horror of these shootings.''
For confused hours after the shootings, the police seemed to have few clues to Mr. Barton's whereabouts or his method of escape. Aided by SWAT teams, dogs and helicopters, they conducted a suite-by-suite search of the office buildings and the leafy grounds surrounding them to no avail.
After officials broadcast a description of Mr. Barton's van, Cobb County police officers saw him driving north on Interstate 75, said Lieut. Lee Schwein of the Acworth police.
As Mr. Barton took the exit at Acworth, Lieutenant Schwein said, Acworth police cruisers converged on him. He then pulled into a BP service station, and officers blocked his escape.
He pulled to the back of the station, put a 9-millimeter handgun in one hand, a .45-caliber handgun in the other, and fired both into his head, Lieutenant Schwein said.
''This brings a very tragic day to an end,'' Mr. Campbell said about 8:20 P.M., after returning to a bank of microphones near the scene of the shootings. ''I don't know if any of us can understand why something like this occurs. All we can do is comfort the families and pray for our city.''
The killings of Mr. Barton's family members, including his children identified by Henry County police as a 12-year-old son, Matthew, and an 7-year-old daughter, Elizabeth Mychelle. Because those killings took place before the Buckhead shootings, Mr. Campbell warned that it was dangerous to assume that today's market fluctuations had triggered the attacks.
''Clearly this is a deranged individual and has nothing to do with what occurred today,'' he said. But the Mayor did say that the police had learned that Mr. Barton's investments had ''substantial swings, losses and gains,'' and that Mr. Barton ''seemed to indicate some concern about losses.''
In the apartment in Stockbridge, meanwhile, the police said they found the bodies of the children in their beds, covered except for a small part of their faces. Notes had been placed atop each body. Henry County Police Chief Jimmy Mercer said that Mr. Barton's wife was found in a bedroom closet, also covered, with a note on top of the cover. Another letter, apparently written by Mr. Barton on a computer, was found in the living room.
Mr. Mercer said that the police believed that Mr. Barton's wife was killed on Tuesday and his children on Wednesday. He said the notes suggested that the victims died as a result of ''blunt force trauma.'' He also said the notes mentioned the 1993 killings in Alabama, but not in the form of a confession.
''It's almost written in a denial phase,'' he said. He did not say whether the notes specifically warned of today's shootings, but said, ''There may be reason to believe that this mayhem would not stop at this particular point.''
Although Mr. Barton was never charged in the Alabama slayings of his former wife, Debra Spivey Barton, 35, and her mother, Eloise Powell Spivey, 59, investigators clearly viewed him as a possible suspect. The two women were found in a trailer at a campground in northeastern Alabama, hacked to death with a sharp, heavy blade, according to news accounts of the killings. Mr. Barton's lawyer, Michael R. Hauptman, told WSB-TV tonight that Mr. Barton had purchased a $600,000 insurance policy on his wife shortly before the killings.
In the office buildings where the shootings occurred, workers described blood-splattered walls, lifeless bodies and nervous police officers shortly after the shootings. Many were locked in their offices for hours as officers searched the buildings, their weapons drawn.
Dari A. Payrow, 23, a worker at Allegiance Telecom, which has offices on the third floor of 2 Securities Center, said he was returning to his office from a bathroom when he found a trickle of blood in the hall. He glanced through the glass windows of the building's leasing office, which is adjacent to his own, and saw puddles of blood on the floor.
''There was a guy on the floor and nobody was helping him so I assume he was dead,'' Mr. Payrow said.
Mr. Payrow and other workers huddled in their offices waiting to be evacuated by the police. ''They all had their guns drawn, bullet-proof vests, guarding corners, near the elevators, running around our office,'' he said. ''They told all the males in our office to come out with our hands up and out of our pockets.''
Periodically, the police escorted officer workers out of the building and led them down Piedmont Road. Many jogged to safety, then bided their time in a nearby Mexican restaurant,
Melinda L. Truan, a 49-year-old psychotherapist, sat outside the restaurant speaking on her cell phone to her boyfriend, Bill J. Post, who was locked inside one of the Piedmont Center Buildings.
''We've seen a lot of police activity,'' Mr. Post said. ''We just saw 15 or 20 police and some SWAT members go into Building 8.''
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In an Office Building, Scenes Of Chaos, Blood and Death
John Cabrer did not think. He just ran toward the noise. He saw a man running at him. The man's face was purple and red and all twisted up with panic. ''Call the police!'' the man was screaming, over and over.
In the chaos after Mark O. Barton went on a shooting rampage in an adjacent Atlanta office building, Mr. Cabrer kept going. Security guards were running everywhere. He crossed a walkway and found himself at the emergency exit of All-Tech Investment Group. He looked inside a large room. He saw a man with a bullet hole in his cheek. Silently, the man was feeling his body to see where he had been hit.
A few feet away, a man was on his back, eyes wide open, not moving. Mr. Cabrer went to him. There was blood. Mr. Cabrer leaned forward and began CPR.
''I'd never done it before,'' said Mr. Cabrer, 30, an analyst for the Georgia State Tollway Authority. ''When I pressed on his chest, I could feel his ribs cracking. When I blew into his lungs, it was coming right back out. He was gone.''
Mr. Cabrer stood up and looked around. He saw another man on the floor. Dead. Shot in the chest. Covered in blood. And then another man. Also dead.
Now people were rushing into the room. But the room was quiet, or it seemed that way to Mr. Cabrer. The senses, he said, go a little strange when you find yourself wandering the scene of the latest American massacre.
He noticed something on the floor. It looked like a 9-millimeter bullet, hollow point. He recognized it because he has his own 9-millimeter handgun. Nearby, he saw what looked to him like the shell casing from a .45.
Two guns, he thought.
Mr. Cabrer looked for someone to help. The room was perhaps 40 feet long. It had two long conference tables in the middle. There were lots of chairs and computers. He started clearing chairs out of the way. It seemed a useful thing to do.
By the front of the room, a young woman was slipping into shock. She had been shot in the hip, Mr. Cabrer said. People were covering her with clothes to keep her warm. To her left was a man with wounds in his chest.
Mr. Cabrer noticed an ambulance, and then a couple of paramedics.
''They really weren't prepared for what they saw,'' he said.
The man with the chest wounds seemed to be alive when they took him away. Mr. Cabrer wondered if he would live. He heard a police officer questioning someone. A snippet of the interview stuck in his mind.
The witness said the gunman walked into the office and said, ''I hope this doesn't ruin your trading day.'' And then he walked into the manager's office, closed the door, and started shooting, the witness was telling the police officer.
Mr. Cabrer looked in the manager's office.
''There was blood all over the wall,'' he said.
Someone says the gunman shot the manager's secretary. Someone else says that a woman ran from the office and that the gunman ran out after her and shot her, too. Someone says the man may have lost some money in the market.
Mr. Cabrer took in these stray bits of conversation as he lingered in the bloodied offices. He felt oddly curious. He was not really frightened, though his heart felt like it was trying to beat its way out of his chest.
From across the walkway, Mr. Cabrer's boss was watching him from the tollway authority offices.
''That's my Generation X guy,'' Dan Guimond, 47, director of the tollway authority, thought to himself as he watched Mr. Cabrer helping the paramedics.
Yesterday afternoon, Mr. Guimond had been going over his budget, trying to figure out raises for his staff. A man ran into the offices, breathless.
''Call 911! Call 911! A man with a gun in our offices,'' he shouted.
Mr. Guimond noticed that man's eyes were watering. Then Mr. Guimond called 911.
A second man ran into the tollway offices. ''I'm glad you got out,'' the second man said to the first man. Mr. Guimond offered them water. The first man asked for a Coke. Mr. Guimond brought him a Coke. The man placed it against his neck. The second man wanted to call his wife.
Mr. Guimond thought of his 37 employees. He locked the entrance door. He ordered everyone to close all the window blinds. He told people to gather together in the central rooms, away from windows.
There was no panic.
''I think we were cool about it,'' Mr. Guimond said. ''You joke that these things are becoming just another daily event. 'Oh, another mass shooting.' Just this one happens to be across the way.
''We're getting so numb to it.''
In time, Mr. Guimond and his employees feel safe to stand at the windows and watch. They see police officers, and more officers, and then still more, as if the entire Atlanta Police Department is coming. They count the number of ambulance gurneys that leave the offices. First one, then two more, then a few more. They count, as Mr. Guimond put it, three ''walking wounded.''
Outside, in the courtyard, a water fountain bubbled away. Inside, in a blood-spattered room, John Cabrer, a man who likes to parasail and sky-dive, held a bag of saline solution for a paramedic fighting for another life.
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Drawn to Their Deaths By Lives in Day Trading
ATLANTA, July 30 — There were 22 of them, 22 people with disparate lives and interests, lives filled with children and lovers, with keeping store and fly-fishing, with building that dream house and chasing the American dream. But on Thursday afternoon, in a quiet office park here, they were 22 people with a single common interest, electronic day trading.
On any given day, a fortune could be lost or won with the punch of a computer button. On this particular hot Thursday, Dean Delawalla was one of nine day traders and trading house employees who lost their lives when Mark O. Barton went on his pistol-firing rampage in two trading offices. Thirteen other people were wounded, nine seriously.
Mr. Delawalla, 52, made his living day trading, showing up almost every morning at the office park. But family and friends say day trading was just his job, not his life. His life, as they tell it, was his wife, Gulshan, a medical intern, and their two children, Saisal, 15, and Shahla, 4.
''They were everything he lived for,'' said his brother, Seroz Delawalla. ''He spent almost all of his time with them when he wasn't trading. In fact, he just traded to have money to take care of them and make a nice home here in America. That was his dream from the day he arrived in Atlanta.''
Mr. Delawalla, a native of Pakistan, came to the United States in 1973. He had been trained as a lawyer and a banker but once in America headed off in new career directions, first in the medical supply business.
''He was looking for new opportunities, exploring,'' his brother said. ''Eventually he began trading in options. And then when day trading came along, he got into that. What else to say? It's over for him. A tragedy. What a tragedy. Now we must look to Gulshan and the children.''
For Edward Quinn of Norcross, an Atlanta suburb, trading was just a retirement pastime. He had already made his financial mark, as an executive with the United Parcel Service.
So he did not show up at the office complex every day, frequently preferring to shoot a round of golf or try his hand at fly-fishing in a local stream. But he did show up on Thursday, and doing so cost him his life.
A Norcross neighbor, Eve Hoffman, described him as ''a quiet man, absolutely a devoted family man,'' who, already retired at the age of 58, had an unquenchable passion for life.
''There are certain people who you are around and they love life,'' Ms. Hoffman said. ''And there are other people who are just getting through it. He loved life completely.''
Mr. Quinn left a wife of 31 years, Mary, and three grown children. Three weeks ago he became a grandfather for the first time.
Allen Tenenbaum usually visited in the morning at the office where he traded. But on Thursday he went in the afternoon, and, as with Mr. Quinn, the timing of the visit proved fatal.
''He just happened to be there,'' said his brother-in-law, Freddy Allen of Greensboro, N.C. ''It was a little unusual for him.''
Mr. Tenenbaum, 48, owned a grocery store in Atlanta, Great Savings, and was an avid golfer and a devoted jogger, putting in at least four miles every day. He also served as president of his synagogue.
Like most survivors of the nine people killed, Mr. Tenenbaum's felt hit particularly hard by the random way that fate had seemed to choose him.
''You can't explain it,'' Mr. Allen said. ''It's just a tragic loss for no reason. And it's not just his family, it's his community. A lot of people feel the loss. It's just really hard.''
Mr. Tenenbaum left a wife of 18 years, Debra, and three children: Megan, 11; Brittany, 13, and Scott, 3.
The Tenenbaum and Allen families were to meet on Sunday in Myrtle Beach, S.C., for a vacation. Instead, they gathered in Atlanta today for a funeral.
Knowing that Vadewattee Muralidhara was down at the trading office, her family frantically began trying to reach her on learning of the shooting. But the Muralidharas had no success.
''We were calling everywhere,'' said her 18-year-old son, Rishi. ''She hadn't come home. She took care of us, took most of her time with us.''
Then there was a knock on the door. It was a police officer.
''We thought she would be one of the witnesses,'' the son said.
But the officer was bringing word of her death. She was 44 and lived with her family in Peachtree City, another Atlanta suburb.
The others killed were Russell J. Brown, 42, of the nearby town of Cumming, and Kevin Dial, 38; Scott A. Webb, 30; Joseph J. Dessert, 60, and Jamshid Havash, 45, all of Atlanta. No biographical details about them were available.
Among the 13 people hurt in the attack were Brent Doonan, 25, and Scott Manspeaker, 27, both of whom ran the local office of the All-Tech Investment Group, one of the two trading houses that Mr. Barton invaded. Both men were seriously wounded.
They grew up in Kansas and recently moved to Atlanta ''to find their fortune in this new world of day trading,'' as one friend, Derek Schimming, put it.
''They're young and aggressive and hungry to carve out their piece of America,'' said Mr. Schimming, who manages a day trading operation in Overland Park, Kan. ''They'll bounce back and they'll make it, because that's what day trading is all about.''
Mr. Schimming was on the phone to Mr. Doonan just minutes before the gunman burst in.
''What a senseless tragedy,'' he said. ''It just boggles the mind. But like I say, people will bounce back. You have to believe that.''
In fact, the bounce-back seemed to be already under way this morning at the office park. Cleaning crews were hard at work, cutting out stained sections of office carpet and mopping down floors and walls.
The two trading firms hit by the violence -- Momentum Securities in addition to All-Tech -- were not open for business, but other firms were. Eric Blaier, a sales manager, lamented the violence of the day before, but then added: ''In the game of telecom sales, it's business as usual. Unfortunately true.''
Outside the building where he works, someone had left a bright bouquet of flowers. ''I'm sorry,'' the attached note read. ''God bless you.''
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A Chance That He Killed in '93
Before he burst into the national news yesterday as a frustrated-day-stock-trader-turned-killer, Mark O. Barton had already been at the center of an extraordinarily violent story.
In 1993, his wife and mother-in-law were found beaten to death inside a camper at a northern Alabama campground. Yesterday the authorities said that although Mr. Barton, 44, had never been charged in the connection with the killings, he was a suspect in them.
For the past few years, Mr. Barton, a Scout master and chemist, seemed to lead an ordinary life in Morrow, Ga., a solidly middle class suburb of Atlanta. Neighbors commented, however, that he seemed intent on keeping to himself.
''He was preoccupied,'' said Cindy Northcutt, a neighbor on Sinclair Place. ''He was always short and brief.''
Mr. Barton lived with a woman who the authorities said was his second wife, Leigh, and the two children from his first marriage. Several neighbors said they knew so little about him that they were not sure whether he and his companion were married.
He seemed standoffish, neighbors said, but until the shootings yesterday, they said, they thought he was simply busy with some sort of computer work.
''He was always on the computer, always on the phone,'' said Mrs. Northcutt, who lives two houses away.
Mr. Barton ran a chemical consulting business out of his home at 6475 Sinclair Place. Last winter, his wife and his 7-year-old daughter, Elizabeth Mychelle, moved to an apartment in nearby Stockbridge. On the recent Fourth of July weekend, Mr. Barton and his 12-year-old son, Matthew, moved into the Stockbridge apartment, apparently in at effort at reconciliation. Bodies believed to be those of his wife and children were found yesterday in the apartment.
Back in 1993, Mr. Barton's first wife, Deborah Spivey Barton, 36, and her mother, Eloise Powell Spivey, 59, had been spending Labor Day weekend together at the Alabama campground. Their bodies were found inside their camper, which showed no signs of forced entry; some jewelry was missing, but cash and other pieces of jewelry were untouched.
In an interview that appeared several months later in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Mrs. Barton's father, Bill Spivey, said Mr. Barton had been the perfect son-in-law, until the killings.
''Since then,'' Mr. Spivey said, ''we have cooled tremendously toward each other.''
After Mr. Barton and his son moved earlier this month, the Sinclair Place house, with its facade of brick and green siding, was rented by Gail Walker and her family.
''He was your average middle-income business person,'' Ms. Walker said yesterday.
Aside from a lot of computers that Ms. Walker had seen on an earlier visit and three or four phone lines, the scene the Barton family left behind was as ordinary as could be, she said.
Neighbors said that Mr. Barton usually wore slacks and dress shirts and that there was little that distinguished him except his being thin and well over six feet tall.
It was a household that held few clues to anything other than a typical suburban family life. At the Bartons' moving sale, Dennis G. Walker said, there was a Martha Stewart cookbook and five Bible study books.
Rebecca Earls, who runs a day care center in her home three doors from the Barton house in Morrow, said the Barton children seemed typical in a neighborhood of orderly two-story homes about a 20-minute drive from downtown Atlanta.
But Martha Jean DeFreese, whose grandson was a friend of the Barton boy, said she had recently noticed something about their father.
He had stopped by to drive the boys to a Scout meeting, Ms. DeFreese said, and ''he looked a little odd to me.''
''I said to myself,'' she said, ''there is something wrong with this man.''
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Killer Confessed in a Letter Spiked With Rage
ATLANTA, July 30— After bludgeoning his wife and two children to death with a hammer, and just eight hours before slaughtering nine people in the brokerage houses where he traded, Mark O. Barton typed a chilling confession on his computer and warned that he planned to live just long enough to kill ''the people that greedily sought my destruction.''
The letter, which Mr. Barton apparently wrote near sunrise on Thursday and then left in the Stockbridge, Ga., apartment where he had killed his family, suggested that he was tortured by estrangement from his wife, by financial troubles and by unexplained fears that he said had been ''transferred from my father to me and from me to my son.''
The police in Henry County, Ga., which includes the Atlanta suburb of Stockbridge, released the letter today as the authorities searched for clues to the motive behind Thursday's killing spree, the deadliest in the state's history.
Because Mr. Barton, 44, shot and killed himself in his van as he was apprehended by the police on Thursday night, law-enforcement officials said they were unlikely to ever know exactly what caused him to snap. But the often rambling letter, typed neatly under Mr. Barton's letterhead and signed robustly in large script, offered a remarkable glimpse into the twisted thinking of a man who seems to have carefully calculated his three-day rampage.
The letter, along with recollections from people who knew Mr. Barton, suggests the rage that played out on a hot afternoon in a glitzy suburb here had its roots in the earlier years of his life. And perhaps, the authorities say, he had expressed the rage before.
Mr. Barton was the only suspect in the 1993 bludgeoning deaths of his first wife and her mother. The next year, he was investigated for possible molestation of his then 3-year-old daughter. During that investigation, a clinical psychiatrist evaluated him as someone who was ''certainly capable of homicidal thought and homicidal action.''
But recent events in his life may have been just as telling.
James Lee, the president of Momentum Securities Inc., where Mr. Barton killed four people, said today in a letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission that Mr. Barton had lost roughly $105,000 during 15 days of securities day trading that began on June 9. A source close to the company said that Mr. Barton had ''a propensity for highly volatile Internet stocks.''
Mr. Barton's mother, Gladys Barton, who lives in South Carolina, released a statement this afternoon saying that she was deeply saddened by the shootings, but that she loved her son. ''I wish there was some way to explain why this tragedy occurred or some way it could have been prevented,'' she said.
Mr. Barton's father, Truman, died almost two years ago.
Mr. Barton, a chemist and securities day trader, wrote in his letter that he killed his current wife, Leigh Ann, on Tuesday night and his two children, 11-year-old Matthew and 8-year-old Mychelle, on Wednesday night.
''There was little pain,'' he said in the letter, which the police said was left on a living room coffee table. ''All of them were dead in less than five minutes. I hit them with a hammer in their sleep and then put them face-down in the bathtub to make sure they did not wake up in pain, to make sure they were dead. I'm so sorry. I wish I didn't.''
Mr. Barton went on: ''Words cannot tell the agony. Why did I? I have been dying since October. Wake up at night so afraid, so terrified that I couldn't be that afraid while awake. It has taken its toll. I have come to hate this life and this system of things. I have come to have no hope.''
Capt. Jim Simmons of the Henry County police said that Leigh Ann Barton moved out of the couple's rented house in Morrow, Ga., in October, and moved into the two-bedroom apartment in nearby Stockbridge. Three weeks ago, he said, Mr. Barton and his two children, who were from his first marriage, showed up at the apartment, needing a place to live. Ms. Barton took them in.
Mr. Barton wrote that he killed his wife because ''she was one of the main reasons for my demise,'' but then added that he regretted killing her. ''She really couldn't help it and I love her so much anyway.'' He said he then killed his children to exchange ''five minutes of pain for a lifetime of pain.''
He also left handwritten notes on top of each child and his wife, said Chief Jimmy W. Mercer of the Henry County police. Each note paid brief tribute to the victims. The children had been placed in their beds and covered. A stuffed teddy bear was left on top of Mychelle's body and a Game Boy computer on Matthew's.
Ms. Barton's body was found in a bedroom closet, placed behind boxes and under clothes, presumably so it would not be discovered by the children, Mr. Mercer said. He said the suspected murder weapon, a hammer, also was found.
Mr. Barton noted in his letter that investigators might notice similarities between the deaths of his family members and those of his previous wife, Debra Spivey Barton, 36, and her mother, Eloise Powell Spivey, 59, both of whom were found in a camping trailer, bludgeoned with a sharp, heavy blade. But he denied killing them. ''There's no reason for me to lie now,'' he wrote.
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Why does anyone do anything?
Subject: Mark Barton murders family and shoots up Atlanta brokerages - July 1999 
Fri Jul 19, 2019 7:58 pm