They didn’t notice their uncle.
Elizabeth’s two children — Ian, twelve, and Lori, nine — were thought to be already outside but were upstairs in the “toy room,” which contained, among other items, a pool table and a twenty-seven-inch color television for use with Andy’s extensive video game collection.
By the time Andy walked downstairs at 9:15, Ian and Lori were already dead, their skulls crushed by repeated blows with, first, a gun butt, then a pool cue, and, at the last, billiard balls that were crammed into their mouths after their jaws were wrenched loose.
Laying the HK53 across the top of the dinner table, Andy stuffed the Mauser and blood-spattered Walther into the waist of his jeans, then walked into the kitchen, raised the .357, and shot his sister Jessica through the back of her head. She was standing with her back to him, in the process of putting some food into the refrigerator. The hollow-point bullet blew out most of her brain and sheared away half of her face. When she dropped, she pulled two refrigerator shelves and their contents down with her.
Andy then shot Elizabeth — once in the stomach, once in the center of her chest — then turned the gun on his mother, shooting at point-blank range through her right eye.
After that, things happened very quickly. Andy left the kitchen and collided with his niece who was running toward the front door. He caught her by the hair and swung her face-first into a fifty-inch-high cast-iron statue that sat against a wall in the foyer. The statue was a detailed reproduction of the famous photograph of the American flag being raised on Mt. Suribachi at Iwo Jima.
Theresa slammed against it with such force that her nose shattered, sending bone fragments shooting backward down her throat. Still gripping her long strawberry-blond hair in his fist, Andy lifted her off her feet and impaled her by the throat on the tip of the flagstaff. (The blood patterns on the wall behind the statue indicated an erratic arterial spray, leading the on-scene medical examiner to speculate she must have struggled to get free at some point; this, along with the increase in serotonin and free histamine levels in the wound, indicated Theresa had lived at least three minutes after being impaled.)
Seven-year-old Randy saw his uncle impale Theresa on the statue, then grabbed the carrying handle of Joseph’s safety seat and ran toward the kitchen. Andy shot him in the back of his right leg. Randy went down, losing his grip on Joseph’s safety seat, which skittered across the blood-sopped tile floor and came to a stop inches from Jessica’s body. Little Joseph, frightened and helpless in the seat, began to cry.
Randy tried to stand, but his leg was useless, so he began moving toward Joseph by kicking out with his left leg and using his elbows and hands to pull himself forward.
Nine feet away, Andy stood in the kitchen entrance watching his nephew’s valiant attempt to save the baby.
Then he shot Randy between the shoulders.
And the kid kept moving.
As Andy took aim to fire again, the front door swung open, and Keith Shannon, Elizabeth’s husband, stuck his head in and shouted for everyone to hurry up and come on.
Keith saw Theresa’s body dangling from the statue and screamed over his shoulder at the other men out on the lawn, then ran inside, calling out the names of his wife and children.
He never stopped to see if Theresa was still alive.
Andy stormed across the kitchen and through the second, smaller archway that led into the rooms on the front left side of the house. As a result of taking this shortcut, he beat Keith to the living room by a few seconds, enabling him to take his brother-in-law by surprise. Andy emptied the rest of the Magnum’s rounds into Keith’s head and chest. One shot went wild and shattered the large front bay window.
Andy tossed the Magnum aside and pulled both the Mauser and the Walther from his jeans, holding one pistol in each hand. He bolted from the living room, through the dining room, and rounded the corner into the foyer just as Irv hit the top step of the porch.
Andy kicked open the front door. For the next fifteen seconds, while the sky ignited and Lee Greenwood sang how God should bless this country he loved, God bless the U.S.A., the front porch of the Leonard house became a shooting gallery as each of the four remaining adult males — at least two of whom were drunk — came up onto the porch one by one and was summarily executed.
Andy fired both pistols simultaneously, killing his father, his uncle Martin, his older brother Chet, and Tom Hamilton, Jessica’s husband.
A neighbor across the street, Bess Paymer, saw Irv’s pulped body wallop backward onto the lawn and yelled for her husband, Francis. Francis took one look out the window and said, “Someone’s gone crazy.” Bess was already dialing the police.
Andy went back into the house and grabbed the rifle off the dining-room table, picked up the Magnum as he passed back through the living room, then headed for the kitchen, where Randy, still alive, was attempting to drag Joseph through the back door. When he heard his uncle come into the kitchen, Randy reached out and grabbed a carving knife from the scattered contents of the cutlery drawer, which Miriam had wrenched free on her way down, then threw himself over his infant brother.
“That was one brave kid,” an investigator said later. “Here he was, in the middle of all these bodies, he had two bullets in him so we know he was in a lot of pain, and the only thing that mattered to him was protecting his baby brother. An amazing kid. If there’s one bright spot in all this, it’s knowing that he loved his brother enough to... to... ah, hell. I can’t talk about it right now.”
For some reason, Andy did not shoot his nephew a third time. He came across the kitchen floor and raised the butt of the rifle to bludgeon Randy’s skull, and that’s when Randy, in his last moments, pushed himself forward and jammed the knife in his uncle’s calf. Then he died.
Andy dropped to the floor, screaming through clenched teeth, and pulled the knife from his leg. He grabbed his nephew’s lifeless body and heaved it over onto its back, then beat its face in with his fists. After that, he loaded fresh clips into the pistols, grabbed Joseph, stumbled out the back door to the garage, and drove away in Irv’s brand-new pickup.
At 9:21 P.M., the night duty dispatcher at the Cedar Hill Police Department received Bess Paymer’s call. As was standard operating procedure, the dispatcher, while believing Bess had heard gunfire, asked if she were certain that someone had been shot. This dispatcher later defended this action by saying, “Every year we get yahoos all over this city who decide that the Kiwanis fireworks display is the perfect time to go out in their backyard and fire their guns off into the air — well, the Fourth and New Year’s Eve, we get a lot of that. We had every unit out that night, just like every holiday, and there were drunks to deal with, bar fights, illegal fireworks being set off — M-80s and such, traffic accidents... holidays tend to be a bit of a mess for us around here. Seems that’s when everybody and their brother decides to act like a royal horse’s ass.
“The point is, if we get a report of alleged gunfire during the fireworks, we’re required to ask the caller if anyone’s been hurt. If not, then we get to it as soon as we can. If we had to send a cruiser to check out every report of gunfire that comes in on the Fourth, we’d never get anything else done. I didn’t do anything wrong. It’s not my fault.”
It took Bess Paymer and her husband the better part of two minutes to convince the dispatcher that someone had gone crazy over at the Leonard house and shot everyone.
Francis, furious by this point, grabbed the phone from his wife and informed the dispatcher in no uncertain terms that they’d better make it fast because he was grabbing his hunting rifle and going over there himself.