Pat Dollard | Young Americans

Seattle pi.com

By SCOTT GUTIERREZ

Twice wounded, her husband and his parents already gunned down, Erica Anderson huddled with her children and pleaded with Joseph McEnroe to spare their lives.

“You don’t have to do this.”

But her pleas prompted no mercy. McEnroe apologized before telling his victims, “Yes, we do.”

Then he fired the last blasts in a Christmas Eve shooting spree that killed three generations of a family in a rural Carnation home.

He shot Anderson a final time, then turned a .357 revolver on 6-year-old Olivia and 3-year-old Nathan.

The final, frantic moments of the lives of six people were outlined Friday in murder charges filed against McEnroe, 29, a Target clerk, and his unemployed girlfriend, Michele Anderson, also 29.

The defendants are in the King County Jail with bail denied, accused of killing Michele’s parents, her brother, his wife and their two children.

Each faces six counts of aggravated first-degree murder — the only crime punishable by death in Washington. King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg has 30 days from the couple’s scheduled Jan. 9 arraignment to decide whether to pursue capital punishment. The only other sentencing option under the law for the crimes upon conviction is life imprisonment without release.

“Given the magnitude of this crime, I pledge to give this case serious consideration for the state’s ultimate penalty,” Satterberg said.

Michele Anderson planned to confront her family over money that she felt her brother owed her and anger over disputes with her parents, court documents say. She told police that she was tired of “everyone stepping on her” and upset that her parents were pressuring her to start paying rent for the space where she lived on their property. She and McEnroe lived in a mobile home about 200 yards from her parents’ home.

They were intent on killing everyone if “problems did not get resolved,” court documents say. But Satterberg cautioned that authorities may never fully understand what sparked the killings.

“That is part of our investigation, but a search for a rational motive is often a frustrating endeavor,” the newly elected prosecutor said. “In the end, what motive could you find that would make sense of this senseless slaying of the Anderson family?”

After returning to the crime scene Wednesday, authorities say, the couple confessed to the killings and offered chilling details about how they gunned down Wayne Anderson, 60, and his wife, Judy, 61; Scott Anderson and his wife, Erica, both 32; and the two children.

Michele Anderson and McEnroe were armed with two handguns — the revolver and a 9 mm semiautomatic — purchased legally last summer.

The night of the massacre, Judy Anderson was wrapping gifts for her grandchildren in a backroom as the two defendants drove toward the family home, Satterberg said.

In their account of what happened, sheriff’s detectives said Wayne, a longtime Boeing employee, and Judy, a postal carrier, were the first to be killed.

Michele Anderson fired the first shot at her father and missed. Then McEnroe shot him in the head. Hearing the shots, Judy Anderson rushed into the room.

McEnroe shot her once, dropping her to the floor, screaming.

He apologized before shooting her again in the head, court documents say.

In the 45 minutes it took for Scott Anderson’s family to arrive for a Christmas celebration, the defendants dragged Wayne’s and Judy’s bodies to an outbuilding and wiped up blood with towels and rugs. They tossed potential evidence into a fire pit and burned it.

Scott Anderson entered the living room and charged at his sister when she drew the gun. She fired twice, maybe four times, striking him at least once in the neck, court documents say. Erica was shot twice but managed to clamber over a couch to call 911 on a cordless phone.

She was unable to talk before McEnroe ripped the phone from her grasp. He crushed the phone and tore out the batteries, court documents say.

Two sheriff’s deputies were dispatched to investigate the 911 call, which dispatchers noted sounded like people arguing at a party. The deputies stopped outside a locked front gate, which blocked a dirt road to the home, and opted not to go any further. The officers couldn’t see the home from the gate, but spoke with a neighbor who didn’t hear anything suspicious. They decided to leave without further investigation, a Sheriff’s Office spokesman said Friday

That decision has raised questions about whether they could have interrupted the crime or discovered the bloodbath sooner. Michele Anderson had closed and locked the gate after realizing the 911 call had gone through, court documents say.

Sheriff Sue Rahr, who joined Satterberg at Friday’s news conference, promised an investigation into the deputies’ response.

“Our priority at this point is to get the criminal investigation done first. But we will be looking into that,” she said.

Investigators doubt that deputies would have been in time to save the Andersons, but the suspects likely still were at the home, Rahr said, meaning they might have made earlier arrests.

McEnroe allowed Erica Anderson to huddle with her children before he killed her. He was designated to shoot the children because Michele wasn’t up to it, although both wanted to leave no witnesses behind, court documents say.

McEnroe apologized to each child before shooting each in the head at close range. Nathan had picked up the phone batteries from the floor and looked up at McEnroe, who told police the child gave him “the look of complete comprehension … as if he understood.”

In trying to rationalize why the couple killed the children, McEnroe explained three times that “I didn’t want them to turn us in,” court documents say.

After the slayings, the defendants first drove toward Canada to escape but changed their minds and turned around, headed for Oregon. They switched directions again and returned to her parents’ property, which by then was in the midst of a full-scale homicide investigation.

One of Judy Anderson’s co-workers at the Carnation post office had stopped by to check on her friend, who was uncharacteristically absent from work. She went past the gate and saw the bodies through the windows, court documents say.

Hours later, detectives were notified about two people outside police lines who claimed to live on the property, court documents say. Police noted that neither defendant appeared alarmed or curious about why police were scouring their grounds. In separate interviews, the couple — who met six years ago through an online dating service — initially said they were going to Las Vegas to get married and had stopped by on Christmas Eve to surprise Michele’s parents, court documents say.

The case will not be the first death penalty decision for Satterberg, who already quietly opted against it for a man accused of shooting to death a cab driver.

King County prosecutors originally charged Earnest Collins Jr. with first-degree murder in the July death of taxi driver Jagjit Singh but filed an aggravated murder charge — which carries the possibility of a death sentence — earlier this month.

The more serious charge was filed after the FBI recovered images from a camera inside the cab, which was set afire, that showed Collins wearing latex gloves as he shot Jagjit execution-style — strong evidence of premeditation, prosecutors said.

Paul Joseph Brown / P-I
King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg and Sheriff Sue Rahr announce that the suspects in the Carnation killings will be charged with six counts of aggravated first-degree murder. “I pledge to give this case serious consideration for the state’s ultimate penalty,” he said.

Satterberg has decided against seeking the death penalty against Collins, in part because he was barely 18 when the crime occurred, prosecutor’s spokesman Dan Donohoe said.

Collins maintains he did not commit the crime.

Satterberg said he would consider input from the victims’ family and any mitigating circumstances in the Andersons’ slayings.

Meanwhile, relatives, friends and residents in Carnation, about 30 miles east of Seattle, continue to struggle to come to terms with the slayings.

Mary Victoria Anderson, Michele’s half-sister, has been in seclusion, said Mark Bennett, a friend who is answering questions on her behalf.

“I think reality has kind of hit everybody, the anger has turned to pain and back to anger, and now the question of why. She isn’t in any condition to talk to anyone,” he said.

As of Friday, no public memorial service had been planned, he said.

McEnroe’s cousin, Regina Turner, who grew up with him in Santa Clara, Calif., said she couldn’t reconcile the allegations against him with the video-game-playing, eager-to-please loner she knew.

“It’s hard to put together this picture that he was this brutal person who didn’t mind shooting someone or wiping up blood,” said Turner, 31. “He wasn’t a fighter. He didn’t like confrontation. He wasn’t your aggressor at all.”

Her family is now “just trying to get through the process of what happened” and does not want to think about the possibility of the death penalty, she said.