Posted on 06/17/2010 2:05:52 PM PDT by raccoonradio
WOBURN - Authorities say a man charged with killing his wife, two young children and mother-in-law left behind notes in their suburban Boston home admitting to slayings.
District Attorney Gerry Leone said today two identical letters found in Thomas Mortimer IV’s Winchester home said: "I did these horrible things. What I did was extremely selfish and cowardly. I murdered my family."
Police in western Massachusetts captured the 43-year-old Mortimer on Thursday afternoon after a day-long search. He faces four counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of his family, who were found slain Wednesday in their Winchester home.
Leone said the victims appeared to be killed by blunt trauma and wounds caused by sharp objects.
He declined to give details on the weapons.
How tragic. Reminds me of John List.
On Tue he called in sick to work. He also called his son’s (pre)school (I think I heard) to say the boy wouldn’t be in
Oddly worded for a confession note, and extra-odd that there were duplicate copies. Unless they can tie him to the crime with physical evidence, or he can pass a polygraph while confessing he did it, I think they should be seriously investigating the possibility that somebody else did it and put him up to writing the confession notes, by threatening him and/or other close relatives of his with the same treatment.
Who writes a pair of identical confession notes and leaves them in the same place? And if what’s quoted in the article is the full text of the notes, it gives no hint of a reason for the murders, not even an irrational one. Just sounds suspiciously as if designed to point suspicion at him, and accomplish nothing else, and he hardly needed to leave a note to do that — he could just have turned himself in, or if he was originally planning to kill himself, he could have made a 911 call to get his confession recorded.
Other articles on this atrocity mention that there was physical evidence that he tried to kill himself and failed. The interview with the police didn’t mention that but I had to stop listening when they were describing the location of the bodies as I have kids right around that age.
He apparently had serious money stress and serious issues in his marriage and he was depressed, on meds and in therapy for it. None of that validates killing your whole family over anything. Since he’s still alive we will learn more but lets keep the conspiracies to a minimum till we actually do, ok?
I haven’t come to any conclusions, but it *is* a very odd note and very very odd to have duplicates. Also very odd that he’d manage to refrain from doing something like this through 18 months of unemployment, but then snapped right after starting a new job.
A total mental breakdown does not have to make any sense.
No, but all murders of this type (slaughter the spouse and children, with or without slaughtering oneself too) obviously involve a total mental breakdown. Yet all the other notes I’ve seen reported offered some sort of “reason”, and certainly weren’t prepared in duplicate. Of course, many don’t leave notes at all, because in their mentally broken down state they either can’t articulate anything or just don’t care what anyone thinks. I wouldn’t expect anyone who did something like this to leave a “rational” sounding note, but if there’s a note at all, you’d think even an irrational mind that had enough energy to commit such a horrific crime would be able to come up with something beyond the “I did it; I suck” theme of this one.
OH THAT HEADLINE! Amazing how those things come together some times.
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