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, also known as The Wichita Horror[1], was a murder/assault/rape/robbery spree perpetrated by brothers Reginald and Jonathan Carr in the city of Wichita, Kansas in the winter of 2000. The crimes shocked Wichitans, and purchases of guns, locks, and home security systems subsequently skyrocketed in the city.[2]
The Carr brothers, 22-year-old Reginald and 20-year-old Jonathan, already had serious criminal records when they began their spree. On December 8, 2000, having recently arrived in Wichita, they committed armed robbery against 23-year-old assistant baseball coach Andrew Schreiber. Three days later, they shot and mortally wounded 55-year-old cellist and librarian Ann Walenta as she tried to escape from them in her car.
Their crime spree culminated on December 14, when they invaded a home and subjected five young men and women to robbery, sexual abuse, and murder. The brothers broke into a house chosen nearly at random where Brad Heyka, Heather Muller, Aaron Sander, Jason Befort and a young woman identified as "H.G.", all in their twenties, were spending the night. Initially scouring the house for valuables, they forced their hostages to strip naked, bound and detained them, and subjected them to various forms of sexual humiliation, including rape and sodomy. They also forced the men to engage in sexual acts with the women, and the women with each other. They then drove the victims to ATMs to empty their bank accounts, before finally bringing them to a snowy deserted soccer complex on the outskirts of town and shooting them execution-style in the backs of their heads, leaving them for dead. The Carr brothers then drove Befort's truck over the bodies. Muller was a pre-school at St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic School. Every year the school awards a deserving 8th grade student the Heather Muller Love of Mary Award.
They returned to the house to ransack it for more valuables. It was then they claimed their final victim, Nikki, H.G.'s muzzled dog who was beaten and stabbed to death.
H.G. survived (thanks to her metal hairpin having deflected the bullet), after running naked for more than a mile in freezing weather to report the attack and seek medical attention. In a much-remarked point of tragedy, she had seen her boyfriend Befort shot, after having learned of his intention to propose marriage when the Carrs, by chance, discovered the engagement ring hidden in a can of coffee beans.
The Carr brothers, who took few precautions, were captured by the police the next day, and Reginald was identified by Schreiber and the dying Walenta. Law enforcement officials ultimately decided that the Carrs' motive was robbery, despite the other aspects of the crime.
[edit] Trial and aftermath
During their trial, the defense offered weak alibis including an unused Amtrak ticket and hearsay that the judge barred.[3] The prosecution's forensic evidence and the testimony of witnesses and surviving victims, along with the testimony of the Carrs' own female friends and family members, weighed heavily against them. The brothers were convicted of capital murder. On November 15, 2002, they were sentenced to death after a penalty phase in which their attorneys argued that the brothers had had a rough childhood and deserved clemency[4]. They were also sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole for 20 years, for the death of Walenta. In addition, Reginald Carr was sentenced to 47 years in prison for his conviction on other crimes, and Jonathan Carr was sentenced to 41 years on other convictions.
In 2004, the state of Kansas paid out a total of $1.7 million to the relatives of the victims, in response to a lawsuit filed by the latter against the state, alleging that Kansas had erroneously let Reginald Carr out of prison earlier than he should have been released. A few months later the Kansas Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty in Kansas, reinstated in 1994, was unconstitutional. This decision was appealed to the United States Supreme Court, which ruled in Kansas v. Marsh[5] that the state death penalty statute was constitutional, reversing the lower court decision and keeping the existing death sentences in Kansas intact.
[edit] Controversy
The case gained notoriety among victims' advocates and conservatives because both perpetrators were black and all seven victims were white.[6] The crimes were not assumed to be race-related. David Horowitz and Michelle Malkin stated that the crime did not garner much airtime or space in the national mainstream media due to political correctness.[7][8]
Concerned observers of this incident have highlighted the races of the perpetrators (black) and those of the victims (white) to draw attention to white nationalism, black nationalism and black-on-white violent crimes. Critics of political correctness stated that had the races of the perpetrators and the victims been reversed, the reactions of the mass media would have been very different, and the hate crime angle would have been assumed outright. Local politicians began playing the case for political gain.[2]
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