Tag: Kent Whitaker

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.

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.

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.

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:

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube