Bart Whitaker: Relative Tragedy

A Young Heir Tries to Hasten His Fortune
(“Family Interrupted,” Forensic Files)

Two years before a masked assailant shot them in their own house, Kent and Patricia Whitaker found out that their son had formulated a plan to kill them.

Kent and Tricia Whitaker with sons Kevin and Bart
Kent and Patricia Whitaker with Kevin and Bart

But how could parents believe such a thing? Their mental highlight reel was probably playing footage of an 8-year-old Bart teaching his little brother how to ride a bike.

At it again. So the couple believed Bart’s explanation that it was all a joke or misunderstanding when a college friend tipped off police about a murder plot.

Instead of thanking his lucky stars that his parents bought his story, Bart decided to push his luck again. (a common Forensic Files pathology — see Barbara Stager and Mark Winger.)

Bart, then a wholesome-looking 22-year-old with a Princess Diana complexion, came up with a new plot to wipe out his mother, father, and brother, and get his hands on all of the family’s assets, worth $1 million to $1.5 million.

Jekyll and Hyde. He succeeded in annihilating two-thirds of the other Whitakers but, instead of an office visit with an estate attorney, Bart got himself a trial with a judge and jury. They handed him a death sentence.

Past posts on this blog have briefly touched on the Whitaker murders and their aftermath, but a deeper dive seems in order.

The Whitakers house in Sugar Land, Texas
The scene of the crime in Sugar Land, Texas. The house is part of a planned community

I’m curious to find how the community in and around the family’s home in Sugar Land, Texas, reacted when the justice system bared the id of the respectable-seeming young man in their midst.

Partners in crime. There’s also the question of what turned Bart Whitaker into a homicidal fiend. Was he a born a sociopath or did some kind of abuse taint and mold him?

And finally, I checked into where Bart’s young accomplices are today.

So, let’s get going on the recap of “Family Interrupted” along with extra information drawn from internet research:

Gathering place. Thomas Bartlett Whitaker was born on Dec. 31, 1979, to Kent Whitaker, a comptroller for a family-owned construction business, and Patricia, known as Tricia, who gave up a career as an elementary school teacher to stay at home with Bart and his younger brother, Kevin.

Bart would later tell ABC’s 20/20 that he never felt as though he fit in. In a jailhouse interview with Lisa Ling in 2014, Bart said he committed the murders because he felt inadequate and thought his parents didn’t love him.

But from the outside, his home life and social life seemed near perfect.

The Whitakers had the “cool house to be at” and Kent and Tricia “were the second parents to so many people,” according to Kevin’s friend Brittany Barnhill, who appeared on the 48 Hours episode “The Sugar Land Conspiracy.”

Mr. Popular. During her teaching days, Tricia was known for her kind and fun-loving approach to her job, according to friends who appeared on 20/20.

Book cover
Book in stores and online

Kent spent lots of time with his sons. He and Bart enjoyed biking long distances together.

Bart was close to 19-year-old Kevin, a college sophomore who looked up to him. After all, Bart was graduating from Sam Houston State University with honors. Barnhill also noted that Kevin’s friends considered Bart “cool.”

House of horror. Little did Kent, Patricia, and Kevin Whitaker know that their life together was just a house of cards.

On Dec. 10, 2003, after the Whitakers returned from a dinner to celebrate what Bart said was the completion of his final exams, an unknown gunman shot all four of them as they entered their house in Sugar Land, a wealthy suburb of Houston.

Tricia and Kevin sustained fatal chest wounds from the Glock pistol. Kent was also hit in the upper body but survived, and Bart escaped with a wound to his upper arm. He had been the last one to walk into the house; he lagged behind while checking his phone messages.

Waking nightmare. Sugar Land had a practically nonexistent murder rate and Kent would later recall that, when he saw the armed intruder, he figured it was one of his kids’ friends playing a prank with a paintball gun.

Then, things took a horrifying turn for Kent. As an NBC account later quoted a Whitaker lawyer:

Bart and Kevin Whitaker
Bart (left) and Kevin were always close

“He watched his son Kevin walk into the house, heard the first and fatal shot, and saw his son’s fallen body in their darkened home. He heard Tricia’s last, wet coughs as Kent himself lay dying from his own gunshot wound. The bullet hit Kent nearly six inches from his heart.”

Convenient scapegoat. But Kent didn’t die. A neighbor named Cliff Stanley raced onto the scene and used his own T-shirt to stanch Kent’s bleeding bullet wound.

Bart called 911, explaining that he was shot in the arm and had just chased the shooter out the back door. When asked about the race of the assailant he said, “Maybe black — I don’t know.”

Homicide detective Marshall Slot, who appeared on both Forensic Files and the 20/20 episode about the murders, recalled that he thought the operator was joking when she said a shooting of four people had taken place in Sugar Land.

Red herring. But he arrived to find a real firearm, not a paintball gun, on the scene and four people with one bullet wound each. It turned out the gun was registered to Kevin Whitaker. Someone had pried open his gun safe.

Police initially thought they had a suspect in an armed robber who struck a different house soon after the Whitaker attack, but bloodhounds didn’t pick up his scent at the Whitakers’.

In the meantime, a newspaper reporter discovered that Bart never finished college. He had transferred from Baylor University in Waco — where an informant tipped off police about Bart’s aborted plan to kill his family in 2001 — to Sam Houston State University. Apparently he skipped a lot of classes, then stopped going entirely, and blew his tuition funds on some form or recreation; it’s not clear what kind.

Blueprint for murder. Forensic Files didn’t mention it, but Bart had a prior arrest record for breaking into his high school and stealing computers — after which his parents sent him to a private Christian academy, according to the LA Times.

Chris Brashear in court
Chris Brashear
in court. A
newspaper
account described
the gunman as
slight in build

Investigators also found it troubling that a picture of Bart taken at the “graduation” dinner showed him giving the finger (although I’d file that one in the “kids like to make obscene gestures, no big deal” folder).

Then, a buddy of Bart’s named Adam Hipp came forward five days after the murders and told police that Bart had tried to enlist him to shoot Bart’s parents two years earlier. Adam had replicated a diagram of the house’s layout and where the triggerman was to lie in wait.

Hipp said that Kent and Tricia had heard about the plot, but didn’t take it seriously.

Phones bugged. Police first checked out Adam Hipp himself as a suspect, but he had an alibi for the night of the shooting.

Next up, they focused on two of Bart’s co-workers from the Bentwater Yacht & Country Club near Lake Conroe. Chris Brashear and Steven Champagne denied any involvement in the homicides and provided DNA samples and scent-test specimens.

Cops secretly tapped Brashear’s and Champagne’s phones, but they never picked up any incriminating conversations.

Friend starts singing. Still, in an effort to unnerve the young men, police continually made it clear that they were watching them.

The authorities also directed Adam Tripp to try to get Bart to admit he planned his family’s murder. Bart didn’t specifically refer to any plot, but a phone call recording caught him trying to bribe Adam to keep quiet in return for $20,000.

Finally, a year and a half after the shootings, Champagne admitted that Bart hired him to help kill his family.

Money tangled. Champagne explained that he staked out the Whitakers at the graduation dinner at Pappadeaux Seafood Kitchen — where Bart enjoyed bread pudding with “Congratulations” spelled out in chocolate sauce — and called Brashear to let him know when the group left the restaurant.

Champagne also drove the getaway car although, he claimed, he really didn’t want to get involved with the homicide plot but felt trapped.

Brashear was the shooter, he said, and Bart had promised to cut both of his buddies in on a $1 million life insurance payout he would receive after his family’s death.

Rudy Rios
Rudy Rios allowed Bart Whitaker to assume his name while hiding out in Mexico

Sack of evidence. Champagne led police to the spot where he and Brashear threw a bag with the murder evidence into Lake Conroe. Divers recovered it.

The bag contained a chisel with paint matching that on Kevin’s gun safe. It also held a glove that matched one left at the murder scene and a water bottle with Chris Brashear’s DNA sealed on the inside of the cap.

Brashear and Champagne were arrested almost two years after murders.

Bart never paid his accomplices for their hit man services. He helped himself to $7,000 to $10,000 of his dad’s cash and fled to Mexico with the help of his friend Rudy Rios.

Tall tale. Rios got Bart settled in the town of Cerralvo, where he soon found a girlfriend and got a job at a furniture store owned by her family, according to 48 Hours.

The popular new guy in town explained to his south of the border friends that he sustained the bullet wound to his arm while fighting in Afghanistan. (Murderers like to tell war stories, whether they happened or not — Michael Peterson and John Boyle.)

Bart also reportedly told them his mother was a prostitute and he was essentially an orphan.

But Rudy Rios couldn’t resist a $10,000 reward offered for information on Bart’s whereabouts. Rudy ratted him out, and the law hauled Bart back to the U.S.

Trio of convicts. A grand jury indicted Bart, then 25, and Steve Champagne and Chris Brashear, both 23, in October 2005.

Chris Brashear pleaded guilty in 2007 and received life with the possibility of parole after 30 years.

Steve Champagne got 15 years in exchange for testifying against Brashear and Bart.

Police believe that while the Whitakers were out celebrating, Brashear entered the house, pried open the safe, and made an attempt at giving the master bedroom a ransacked look.

You missed something. But investigators couldn’t help but notice that the drawers were all neatly pulled out to the exact same length and nothing had been removed from them. The Whitakers’ cash, jewelry, and computer equipment remained untouched.

Bart and his lawyer in court
Bart, right, and his lawyer in court

Brashear shot Kent, Patricia, and Kevin as they entered the house and then gave Bart his courtesy wound in the arm. In his haste to exit the scene, Brashear gathered up Bart’s cellphone instead of the gun.

Then, Brashear entered a getaway car driven by Champagne, and they dumped the bag with the murder items in the water.

Would-be Waco whackers. After the shootings, Bart did a good job of pretending that he was happy that EMTs saved his dad’s life, but at some point, he told Champagne he wanted to finish off the job and really kill his dad the next time, according to 20/20.

Apparently, Bart’s bloodlust had been brewing for even longer than originally thought. Investigators found out that in addition to Bart’s 2001 and 2003 attempts to eliminate his family, there was at least one prior plot: In 2000, Bart had a couple of his Baylor acquaintances break into the Whitakers’ home to kill them, but the henchmen fled when an alarm went off, according to an AP account.

On March 8, 2007, after deliberating for two hours, a jury found Bart Whitaker guilty of murder.

Serious needling. Before the sentencing phase, both Kent Whitaker and Tricia Whitaker’s brother asked that Bart be spared the death penalty. Bart had admitted his guilt and expressed remorse for the murders and for roping his friends into the plans, they stressed.

Bart had also said he always felt he couldn’t live up to his parents’ expectations (a halfway decent explanation for lying about college, but way short of mitigating murder).

According to a Houston Chronicle account, after an emotional, contentious 12 hours during which some jurors at first disagreed about whether Bart constituted a “continuing threat to society,” Bart got a sentence of death by lethal injection.

The Bentwater country club
The Bentwater Country Club, where Bart got to know his two accomplices

Corrections officers’ pet. The kind-hearted Kent Whitaker forgave Bart and fought for years to stave off his looming execution. (Kent also said he forgave shooter Chris Brashear.)

Kent believed his son had reformed.

Although no one knows whether Bart’s remorse was genuine, his polite, cooperative behavior behind razor wire impressed the guards so much that several of them wrote letters asking for clemency for Bart, according to the LA Times.

His lawyer Keith Hampton urged the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles to remember the Old Testament story of Cain, who killed his brother but was himself spared by God.

Last-minute reprieve. In February 2018, each of the seven board members separately voted to commute Bart’s sentence, and the governor concurred.

“Mr. Whitaker’s father insists that he would be victimized again if the state put to death the last remaining member of his immediate family,” said Gov. Greg Abbott.

Texas halted Bart’s execution within hours of his date with a gurney and syringe. The state reduced his sentence to life.

In return, Bart agreed to give up any rights to parole.

Faithful father. Today, Bart resides in the William G. McConnell Unit, or McConnell for short, in Beeville, Texas.

Along with his second wife, Tanya Youngling, Kent Whitaker visits Bart regularly, speaking to him from behind a glass partition. Tanya also accompanied Kent for court proceedings related to Bart’s fate.

Tanya and Kent Whitaker at their wedding
Second chance: Kent Whitaker marries Tanya Youngling

Kent came out with his own book about the shootings and their aftermath, and he travels around the country to speak about forgiveness.

As far as an epilogue on Bart’s accomplices, Chris Alan Brashear occupies a cell in the Eastham Unit and will reach parole eligibility in 2035, when he’s 53.

Parents provided. Steve Champagne got out and stayed out. He’s no longer listed with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

Finally, as to the question of what turned Bart into such a callous and motivated killer, no mention of any type of abuse or trauma came up.

Quite the opposite, his parents were kind and generous by all accounts. They bought him a townhouse to live in while he was supposed to be attending college and gave him a Rolex for his faux graduation.

Bart Whitaker, it seems, was born— rather than made — a sociopath.

You can watch the entire 48 Hours episode about the case online on a CBS news site.

That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. RR


Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube

Betrayal: The Walking Wounded

Q&A with Matt Barnhill
(“Family Interrupted,” Forensic Files)

Last week’s post told of a small-time con artist who burrowed into the pockets of a few religious groups in an unsuspecting town — and then promptly fled, leaving those duped feeling shocked and betrayed.

Matt Barnhill

To get some insight into how people on the receiving end of deceits both large and small can recover emotionally, I talked with Matt Barnhill, who has counseled people living with the aftereffects of betrayals ranging from minor theft to murder.

Forensic Files fans will remember Barnhill from his appearance on “Family Interrupted,” the episode about Bart Whitaker’s double homicide in Sugar Land, Texas.

Whitaker arranged to have one of his friends hide in the family’s house and shoot his parents, Tricia and Kent Whitaker, and younger brother, Kevin, as they returned home from a restaurant in 2003.

“My daughter was best friends with Kevin Whitaker,” says Barnhill, who knew the Whitakers from River Pointe Church, where he’s a pastor. “She was 19 at the time. Now she’s a week away from having her third child, and she has a healthy marriage and is incredibly well-adjusted. But having her friend murdered changed her life.”

Barnhill is the founder of Barnhill & Associates Counseling Center, based in Richmond, Texas. He’s still in contact with Kent Whitaker, who recovered from his gunshot wound and lives with the knowledge that his son wanted him out of the way so he could inherit the family’s financial assets.

Below are excerpts from my discussion with Barnhill:

What are the most common forms of betrayal that compel people to seek counseling?
Usually it’s related to marital infidelity. Once a woman finds out that her husband was unfaithful, everything he says is suspect — “Did he really like the eggs?”

We also have parents in their 50s and 60s who say, “My son committed adultery, and we never thought he was capable of being unfaithful.” So, even when you’re removed from the betrayal, it’s disturbing.

What about criminal betrayal?
I have a counseling client whose son committed a murder. He didn’t betray her, but he betrayed her belief in him.

Forensic Files has had a number of episodes concerning parents whose sons-in-law killed their daughters. Do people in those situations need counseling for life?
Not always. Their lives do divide into “before the crime” and “after the crime.” But after people start healing, their lives become less defined by the crime.

Are there commonalities within the various degrees and types of betrayal people experience?
Yes, it disrupts your internal radar.

There’s a vicarious trauma, a ripple effect even if it’s just the person who sits next to you at work or a guy who was in the church choir with you, even if he did something relatively minor. I talk to clients whose neighbor did something wrong – someone who was high on their trust meter and then it turns out the person stole money from the school district. And then they don’t know who they can trust anymore.

It makes people ask, “How can I feel safe again? How can I trust people in the same category as Joe?”

After the Whitaker murders, I found myself OCD’ing over whether my doors were locked, even after Bart was in jail.

We call it the trauma of betrayal. It erodes trust.

What is the “trust meter”?
Think of trust on a continuum. On the low end is the guy who’s repairing your dishwasher and you stay at home to make sure he doesn’t steal the furniture. Then there’s the repairman your friend recommended, so you might say, “Here’s the key, go inside.” On the high end you might have your child or spouse or parent, those you trust the most.

The higher the trust goes, the more you’ll feel violated by someone who betrays that trust.

The trauma of betrayal destabilizes people’s lives. Two of the most common symptoms are anger and sadness. People are super angry or super sad. Victims have high anxiety.

As a caregiver, I help them restabilize their lives.

That’s sounds like a project. How do you start?
You provide clients with a safe, loving environment where they can talk about guilt, shame, and trauma.

Whatever we don’t talk about in counseling is going to come out somewhere else – a hole in the lining of the digestive system or sleep disturbance or lack of appetite. “Secrets make us sick” is a saying here. Depending on how profound the trauma is, we may refer clients to a psychiatrist for medication. Sometimes they need something just to get a good night’s sleep.

I try to educate people about what’s happening to them and what triggers the anxiety related to the trauma. For some people, watching the 6 o’clock news might be a trigger. When you have several triggers at the same time, it’s called flooding.

I ask clients what they would find soothing — listening to music, reading inspirational literature, going to the symphony, sitting on a porch with friends. They come up with a list and I ask which of those things they can do today tomorrow, next week, or their whole lives. Someone might say, “I have to get on the treadmill” or “start eating healthy now.”

Do you counsel both people of faith and those who aren’t religious?
Oh, yes, you find a lot of irreligious people here. We get referrals from doctors and other people not from the faith-based community.

Churches tend to have more people who are traumatized because most people believe church is soothing. My opinion is that if a church is able to help people, it will attract people who are traumatized. A church can be warm and comforting. So can a bar where everybody knows your name.

Getting back to the Whitaker tragedy, do you know how Kent Whitaker is doing today, 13 years after the crime?
Kent wrote a book called Murdered by Family. He talks about his own healing. He’s remarried to a woman who also has a powerful tale of betrayal and together they help people who are traumatized.♣


Next: A look at another Lone Star State case, the murder of San Antonio educator Diane Tilly detailed in Forensic Files’ “Transaction Failed.”

 

The Aftermath of Betrayal

Folks Who Fooled Everybody
(“Family Interrupted,” Forensic Files)

Back when I was a teenager, a charming woman named Sylvia started attending services at the local Jewish Community Center my family belonged to. At that time, our hometown had a general population of about 18,000, which included around 50 Jewish residents.

So, naturally, everyone was delighted when a new person materialized at the center. I was away at school and only saw Sylvia once, while I was home on vacation. She was smiling and wishing everyone a nice night at the end of some Friday evening services. “It’s amazing how upbeat she can be,” I overheard my mother saying. “She’s in such a heart-breaking situation.”JCCjpg

It turned out Sylvia had told members of the congregation that she was dying of cancer and could no longer work. In addition to having financial problems, she was worried about her 11-year-old son, Noah.

A story they couldn’t refuse. Sylvia planned to have a non-Jewish relative raise Noah and his sister after she died, she said, but there was a problem. “Noah still wants to be Jewish after Sylvia’s gone,” my mother related. “Sylvia doesn’t know what to do.” Mom looked heartsick whenever she talked about her.

Sylvia’s family couldn’t help her financially, although she had a brother who was building a coffin for her, Sylvia let it be known.

The lady knew how to tell a good story, and soon members of the center convened a meeting at which each person donated $100 for her. One member paid for a cleaning woman to do some work at Sylvia’s place.

The cleaning woman reported back that Sylvia’s house was filthy and in disarray. There were pieces of clothing stuck to the floor.

Lone doubter. Of course, people figured Sylvia was too ill to keep up with her cleaning — despite that she herself appeared well-groomed and healthful. (The time I met her she looked like someone you’d see hosting a morning coffee-and-news TV show.)

One member of the congregation didn’t buy any of Sylvia’s story. “She’s full of crap,” said Mr. Cohen, a local junkyard owner. But Mr. Cohen had always been a bit callous. No one entertained his theory.

He didn’t have to wait long to be proven right. A radiologist who belonged to the congregation bumped into Sylvia’s doctor and started commenting on what a shame it was that this poor mother of two was dying.

Apparently, the other doctor didn’t take patient-physician confidentiality too seriously because he immediately said, “What are you talking about?” — and then gave the real story of Sylvia’s health problem. I forget the details, but basically it was something benign that didn’t require any treatment. She wasn’t dying or even sick.

Multiple cons. Once the truth about Sylvia hit the local word-of-mouth communication waves, she left town with her kids and a hastily acquired boyfriend. No one ever saw her again. This was in pre-Internet days, so there was no easy way to track her down or warn others about her.

But people didn’t want to find her. They weren’t mad but rather in sad shock, especially as more of the truth began leaking out. It turned out she’d been telling a sob story to the local Mennonite community as well. She’d dumped off Noah and her daughter, who was just a toddler, on a sympathetic Mennonite family for a few weeks.

In additional to that, she’d conned at least one other church in town, probably with the same story but with the denomination blanks filled in differently.

And the authorities were looking for Sylvia on charges of child abuse and welfare fraud.

The whole Sylvia saga, from the time she showed up as a stranger to the day she disappeared, unfolded over just a few months. But the sting of the betrayal stayed with my mother for years. About a decade after it all happened, she wrote an essay about it as a way to reconcile her charitable nature with the fact that there are convincing con people out there.

So what does a minor case of fraud like this one have to do with Forensic Files?

I’m curious about how victims of deadly deceptions contend with their sense of betrayal.

Homicides. A number of episodes — two I can think of off hand, “A Welcome Intrusion” and  “Horse Play” — featured interviews with parents whose daughters had been murdered by their sons-in law. In both cases, the parents had loved their sons-in-law and considered them assets to the family.

How did they process that kind of betrayal? And what about parents who have survived attempted murders by their own children? “Family Ties” tells the story of Christopher Porco, who attacked both his parents with an ax in a bid to inherit their wealth. He succeeded in killing his father, but his mother survived.

The Whitakers, Bart third from left
The Whitakers, Bart third from left

Bart Whitaker, the subject of “Family Interrupted,” arranged for a friend to gun down his mother, father, and brother in hopes of making himself a sole heir. Kent Whitaker, Bart’s father, recovered from the shooting and lived to see Bart convicted of double homicide.

Professional weighs in. How can people survive psychologically, with the knowledge that their own kids wanted them dead?

I turned to Matt Barnhill for some insight. Barnhill appeared on the “Family Interrupted” episode of Forensic Files to discuss the aftermath of the Whitaker murders. He’s a pastor who established Barnhill & Associates Counseling, a Texas firm that offers therapy and life-coaching. He agreed to answer some questions about helping people contend with betrayal.

But this blog post is already a bit long, so the Q&A with Matt Barnhill will appear next week.

Until then, cheers. — RR

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