- 13 hours ago
The Friday the 13th Murders - Season 1 Episode 2 -
We All Go a Little Mad
We All Go a Little Mad
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FunTranscript
00:00The horror cliche is that it happens on a dark, stormy night, and that's what this was.
00:30I was working at the patrol division, but the rain was so torrential and the storm was
00:36so bad you couldn't drive.
00:38I chose to take shelter in my patrol car.
00:50This man approached my car and he said, thank you for meeting me here.
00:55I had no idea.
00:56I said, what are you talking about?
00:58And he said, well, I called Little Rock Dispatch and asked him to send an officer here because
01:02I was worried about my client.
01:07I'm the attorney, and my client just called me and told me to rush over to his home.
01:12Phone went dead.
01:15I've tried to call and I'm not getting him.
01:18I'm a little concerned.
01:20I asked him, was there anyone else in the home?
01:22And he said, yes, his wife and their two daughters.
01:26When I approached the home, it was very dark.
01:30And I noticed that the front door of the home is cracked six to eight inches.
01:37Just enough for me to see.
01:39But I'm not hearing anything.
01:42So I called for backup.
01:44I had only been a police officer for a year and a half.
01:51I was nervous.
01:55Your adrenaline is running.
01:58We don't know what we're going to find.
02:04And then I noticed it was blood.
02:22This is a photo of me in 1987 as a rookie patrol officer, 21 years old.
02:50That called me to the scene.
02:53Walking in the door, the power was still out.
02:55It was like something out of a horror film to me.
03:00I was nervous.
03:01The house just had this weird feeling.
03:05Then I knew something was bad there.
03:08You can smell blood, and blood has a distinct smell to it.
03:13You could really smell it there.
03:17And then during this time, we lost radio traffic.
03:24We could not communicate with our dispatch.
03:27We could not communicate with other officers.
03:30No cell phones in 1987, so we were kind of stuck out there by ourselves.
03:36It was pretty creepy.
03:41It was just kind of dead silent.
03:48The lights are off in the home.
03:51We're using our flashlight looking in corners of different rooms and things.
04:16We noticed to the right an office area where there was a body laying.
04:22It was John Markle.
04:26He was laying against a wall.
04:28He was deceased, and there was blood on each side of the head.
04:32After we found his body, that's the moment where we had a concern that we had a homicide.
04:40Now, my concern was the safety of the family, knowing that there were a wife and possibly two children in the home.
04:46So we backed out and moved on through the home quickly.
05:03I was nervous walking up those stairs, what I might find.
05:07He kind of said, who's going first?
05:10My pulse and my heart rate was pounding.
05:17So on the second floor, it was just a TV sitting in the middle of a hallway for some reason on a cart.
05:25And there were bedrooms either side of the hallway.
05:28I was like, ugh, you know, this is, you know, kind of creepy.
05:32We go into a little girl's room.
05:43I remember first seeing the walls were pink.
05:49There was a record player there in the room, posters, stuffed animals and stuff.
05:57And then I look up, there's blood all over those pink walls.
06:07This is very vivid to me.
06:09I find a young child in the bed.
06:14And I walk around to the other side of the bed.
06:19And there's a second child.
06:22We found her in the same bed next to her sister, 13-year-old Amy and 9-year-old Suzanne.
06:34Both been shot to death.
06:36In the master bedroom, we found 45-year-old Christine Markle sprawled across the bed with gunshot wounds.
06:53She was in her nightgown.
06:55To me, it looked like she had woke up, put her feet on the floor, went to sit up or stand up.
07:02Or maybe she heard something and she was getting out of bed.
07:08She had what appeared to be gunshots to the face and the head.
07:17This was an entire family that had been murdered.
07:20The life stopped at that moment for that family.
07:33The electricity, the power did come back on.
07:36The video was a horror movie, Nightmare on Elm Street.
07:41It was pretty freaky.
07:44I remember walking down those stairs, just kind of numb from what I'd seen.
07:51We got our radio traffic going again.
07:54We radioed to communications or dispatch, letting them know at that time that we obviously had a homicide.
08:04So, the detectives began their investigation.
08:09They went through the house, room by room, taking anything that they believed could help them in the investigation.
08:18They found dozens of letters, documents.
08:23And then I could see that there was a briefcase sitting there with some note attached to it.
08:30The note said basically that I murdered my wife, Christine, my daughters, Amy and Suzanne.
08:38He signed it.
08:40John Markle.
08:41At first glance, this would seem like an open and shut murder-suicide from everything that you saw right there.
08:49But there were some things that seemed odd.
08:54I remember vividly that there was a mask that was laying near John Markle's body, like an old man mask.
09:07There was blood on that mask.
09:12The mask found at the scene, at first I wondered, you know, why is that there?
09:18Because it was, you know, not a ski mask, not even a hockey mask.
09:23It was a, you know, Halloween mask.
09:25So, that stuck with me.
09:31We found inside the briefcase, there was a birth certificate, passport, car title.
09:38But what really stood out was the cash that was found in there.
09:41Items that somebody might have in there if they were getting ready to disappear or try to leave the country or something like that.
09:49But one of the oddest things was the fact that John Markle was shot with two different guns at the same time in the head.
10:00Found near his body was a Western-style .45, and a .45 is a very large caliber.
10:07And then also a .38 caliber revolver.
10:10I don't know the odds of someone being able to shoot themselves simultaneously with a gun on each side of the head.
10:17It seems to me like it would be one in a million.
10:24I want to try to figure out how did this happen?
10:27What caused this to happen?
10:30Are we sure that John Markle killed his family and killed himself?
10:34Is this, in fact, what happened?
10:38Or is this what somebody wants us to see?
10:41People start hypothesizing.
10:44There's got to be a crazy man out there that did this.
10:49I later learned that Friday the 13th was just a few days before the Markle murders.
10:56So between the movie, the old man mask, and the evil bad luck day, we just had some feeling that there's something going on that we didn't quite understand.
11:26I covered the Markle murders.
11:29And it was all hands on deck.
11:33Everybody was trying to get the scoop on what really happened.
11:40Here in Little Rock, everybody knew the Markles.
11:45It is something that catches everybody off guard.
11:49A whole family slaughtered like that.
11:56I was a close friend with Amy Markle.
12:01This is a picture of me at 13 at that time.
12:06Amy and I met in 1986 at the beginning of our seventh grade year.
12:13Amy was an exceptional student and just a very caring person about everybody.
12:21My father had to move to Dallas.
12:25And John was a parental figure that would listen to me and kind of take me under his wing.
12:32I remember Suzanne as being kind of more boisterous, more talkative.
12:37But when she was frightened, Wood turned to her sister.
12:41But like during storms, she would often climb in bed with her sister just so she'd feel safe.
12:46The mom, Christine, was kind of a classic mom as you saw on like TV shows and such back in the 80s.
12:59Literally in the PTA and did a bunch of volunteering.
13:03John Markle, he was a very loving father.
13:07He loved his daughters dearly and he would do anything for them.
13:11John was the son of Hollywood royalty.
13:16His mother was Mercedes McCambridge, the Academy Award winning actress for All the King's Men.
13:23Later on, she voiced the demon's voice in The Exorcist.
13:26They were the all-American family.
13:36Dad had this great job.
13:39The girls were enrolled in school.
13:42They were traveling in the right circles.
13:44They were attending the right churches.
13:47They had the right friends.
13:49They were just a happy, all-American family.
13:51News broke about the murder.
13:52And it was a police officer who went inside the house and found Markle, his wife, and his two daughters.
14:05The city was just completely just shocked.
14:10I was watching TV with my family in the morning before school.
14:15And I see these body bags being rolled out of a big downtown house.
14:22I remember Fruit Loops being in my mouth and just saying, that's Amy's house.
14:28Multiple bodies came out and I just started just bawling.
14:33It was devastating.
14:39I was a detective with the Little Rock Police Department in 1987.
14:43And I had been a detective for a little over a year.
14:48I was assigned to the Markle murderers to investigate the financial aspects of it.
14:56At first glance, everything appeared to be an open and shut case.
15:00Because, you know, the scene, the suicide note.
15:05But nobody had ever heard of this suicide with using two guns simultaneously.
15:13I was directed to go out and do a neighborhood canvas.
15:20We knocked on doors and saw if anybody heard anything overnight.
15:24On the night of the murders, there were reports that John left the house and he was followed by a white truck.
15:34And then a short while later, his family was dead.
15:38At that point, detectives are working on this case, doing their background investigations into the family and looking into everything John was involved in.
15:52We had to see if there was anybody else out there that may have been involved or had motivation to hurt the Markles.
15:57We learned that John Markle was a vice president at Stevens, Inc.
16:05He was supposedly a financial whiz.
16:08He would work these incredibly long hours.
16:12He was raking in $3 million in trades.
16:16John Markle moved in a world where fortunes were made and lost overnight.
16:21It was said that the Markles knew the Clintons, Bill and Hillary.
16:31Amy Markle's friend was Chelsea Clinton.
16:35The girls knew each other, played together.
16:38In fact, Hillary Clinton and Chelsea Clinton both attended the family's funeral.
16:42And when you have an influential family, it's going to make it a high-profile case.
16:49A lot of rumors, a lot of questions.
16:54So we'd started looking into the Markles financial records.
16:58We then started to discover various red flags popping up.
17:02The one thing that was out of the norm was that he was writing a number of checks every week to cash.
17:13This was to the tune of, you know, $600 to $1,000 a week.
17:18With inflation today, that would be approximately $10,000 a month.
17:23So the fact that these checks were so consistent really raised my curiosity as to where this money was going.
17:30People whispered about their wealth, their influence, and their connections, and now they were whispering about something else.
17:45Murder.
17:46In the 1980s, Arkansas was ground zero for some of the largest scandals in the country.
17:54There were all kinds of crazy stories that came to light.
17:59The whitewater bank fraud that occurred, where corruption ran so deep that ultimately a number of banks failed nationwide.
18:07Cost of the taxpayers was $500 billion.
18:12This was a time in Arkansas where all the right people got rich and everybody else got screwed.
18:18A fair amount of other crime was occurring within the state.
18:22There was conspiracy theories at that time of two boys that were found that had supposedly died on the railroad tracks just outside of Little Rock.
18:34The investigation initially ruled it as a suicide.
18:41A subsequent autopsy then led to believe that, in fact, they were murdered.
18:46Because the Markle murders occurred during this timeframe, all the other deaths, suicides, murders, it just played into the ongoing conspiracies.
19:00And two months prior to the murders at the Main Street residence of the Markle's, another high-profile, eerily similar case occurred in Biloxi, Mississippi.
19:15Judge Vincent Sherry, who was a municipal judge, and his wife, Margaret, who was a city councilwoman in Biloxi, Mississippi.
19:35Somebody came through the front door and shot Judge Vincent Sherry.
19:41This was conducted by somebody with professional marksmanship and skill to be able to move through the house without being detected.
19:55And then they executed Margaret Sherry.
20:00She was shot in the back of the head.
20:02Neither one showed any apparent signs of struggle and were slain where they were.
20:13Investigators were interviewing prison inmates several hundred miles away.
20:19Eventually, detectives uncovered the motivations behind the crime, that it was tied back to a financial fraud that had occurred.
20:27Sherry was killed because a hit was put on them.
20:31The primary suspects were involved with what was referred to as the Dixie Mafia, also known as the Cornbread Mafia.
20:40So we wanted to explore if anybody associated or affiliated with the Dixie Mafia was involved with John Markle or his family.
20:50Was this a family tragedy or was this something more calculated?
21:00Everything started screaming that it was something calculated.
21:04Suzanne had five shots, Amy had four, Chris had three, John had two, and there was one bullet left in the chamber.
21:13I can only interpret that as a message.
21:16I have heard of a group called the Dixie Mafia since I started at the police department in 1984.
21:34They were an organized group of southern criminals that stretched from Arkansas down to Mississippi, Louisiana.
21:47The Dixie Mafia was bound together by one thing, and that was money.
21:51They would do burglaries, armed robberies of banks or armored cars and things of that nature.
21:58Dixie Mafia had politicians and businessmen in their pockets.
22:02One of the signature moves that you get with the Mafia in this area, the Dixie Mafia, is murders that are staged to look like suicides.
22:14The phrase is suicided.
22:17If John Markle had gotten involved with some bad people, maybe they did this to him.
22:23Sometimes you can find yourself in trouble with the wrong people.
22:27When he leads, that's when the toxicology reports came in.
22:31They noticed something a little unusual in the reports.
22:38All of them had Elavil in their system.
22:42Elavil is an antidepressant and it can cause drowsiness.
22:51It was somehow introduced to their bloodstream in an apparent attempt to make them drowsy.
22:56If this was a hit by the Dixie Mafia, they could have drugged the family to incapacitate him so they could take him out.
23:08But there were some things that started to line up and not really fit the mold.
23:18Why so much violence?
23:20Probably you could have killed with the medication.
23:25You didn't really need the weapons.
23:26Why do you need to shoot them so many times with what turned out to be pretty high caliber guns, too?
23:34You know, that would do a lot of damage.
23:39What happened to the Markles was totally different from what occurred in Mississippi.
23:45They were shot and killed in a manner that just didn't add up.
23:54You had different weapons involved.
23:57And then the fact, you know, that mask over near the victim's body.
24:02Nightmare on Elm Street movie being played in the TV that night.
24:09And I was thinking, what's that about?
24:11Was it left there by someone trying to leave a message or a warning?
24:16Was it something much more sinister?
24:20If John Markle had gotten involved with something bigger, then we needed to prove that.
24:26That's when they started looking back at John Markle's briefcase and the contents of what was in the briefcase.
24:33We culled through all those documents.
24:36We then started to discover he was deeply in debt.
24:43As detectives dug deeper, they found a secret account.
24:47It led us to one date.
24:50That's the date that everything unraveled for John Markle.
24:55And that was Friday the 13th.
24:58Markle was a top earner at the company.
25:01But it turns out he was actually involved in a big scheme where he was manipulating money, moving trades around, and covering his tracks while doing so.
25:12Over $5 million had been embezzled out of the accounts over the years.
25:21His employer confronted him.
25:23And at that point, he admitted to his wrongdoing.
25:25On Friday the 13th of 1987, Markle was fired from his job.
25:36It was the day that he lost everything.
25:41We wanted to explore who may have benefited from the financial embezzlement.
25:46So we went out and subpoenaed bank records, interviewed a number of people that worked with him, trying to follow the path of the money.
26:00We started looking into where this money was going.
26:03Some of it we were able to trace going back to someone close to the Markles.
26:11Someone John blamed for killing his entire family.
26:15Everybody that knows Little Rock, you're going to hear about that Markle house.
26:28It sits kind of by itself up on that hill.
26:33And you can just look at that house and tell, especially at night, that there's something off there.
26:42I read stories of the ghost of Suzanne appearing, and that kind of thing is just sad.
26:54It's, oh, it's a ghost, but this is a friend. This is somebody I cared about.
26:59I just wanted to know, why did this happen?
27:05As we all know, Friday the 13th is one of the unluckiest days of the year, supposedly.
27:10A lot of people don't want to do anything. They don't want to fly. They don't want to go anywhere.
27:15And in November, 1987, it happened to be the unluckiest day for John Markle of his life at that point.
27:23John Markle had gotten caught up in an embezzlement and stealing money from his company.
27:28So as we started looking into where this money was going, we were able to trace going back to John Markle's own mother, Mercedes McCambridge, to her house in San Diego, as well as her accounts out there.
27:45My primary goal was to see whether or not she was aware of what he was doing and whether or not she had financially benefited from this arrangement.
27:56I made contact with Mercedes. She was guarded in her response. She denied being involved. She said that she provided the money to invest in her granddaughter's education.
28:11And I could see that as she processed that thought, some sadness came over her. And what we learned was she didn't know anything about the embezzlement.
28:23But there was never a clear and concise reason why he did this.
28:29When detectives searched the home again and started taking any financial documents that could show what was going on in his life, they found dozens of letters and documents that John had written.
28:45There was one letter that stood out. It was a 12-page letter addressed to his mother, Mercedes McCambridge.
28:51Based on this letter that John wrote to his mother, his relationship with her was not very good.
29:00In the letter that John Markle wrote to his mother, he said,
29:04I was conceptualized to save a bad marriage. I was essentially raised by live-in maids and relatives. You were working.
29:14He felt she was more, you know, in tune, being in Hollywood and doing the actress movie star role than being his mother.
29:23He talks about the way that he tried to prove himself to her by getting a PhD, by getting this great paying job, by starting his own family and prospering.
29:33But did not feel that anything was ever good enough for his mother.
29:39John blamed his mother for the problems he was facing.
29:42And he said that she was a demon.
29:48And in fact, she voiced the demon's voice in The Exorcist.
29:53The movie that changed her life.
29:55The Exorcist isn't really just a horror movie. There's something dark that was attached to the project.
30:03Crew members suffered from freak accidents, broken bones, severed fingers.
30:08Nine people connected with the film died eerie deaths.
30:13There was a fire. It burned everything except the room where the possession was to take place.
30:23Linda Blair, the little girl that played Reagan, suffered severe spinal damage from an accident on set.
30:31Her real screams of pain made it into the final cut of the film.
30:35Eventually, the director had to bring in a priest to perform an exorcism on set.
30:40The Exorcist became more than a role. It became an obsession for Mercedes.
30:48It wasn't hard for me to imagine the rage.
30:55She claimed to have chain-smoked and drank heavily to bring the demon's voice to life.
31:05That isn't hard.
31:07As we dug deeper into John's letter, one story stood out regarding the car accident that he was involved in, where he almost died.
31:18He was in ICU, had a significant head trauma, and she never once visited him.
31:24In the letter he wrote,
31:28I'm released from the hospital.
31:30I kept calling you, and the phone was always busy.
31:34I called a cab and I go to your apartment.
31:37My head is wrapped in bandages and gauze.
31:40My head is wrapped in bandages and gauze.
31:50I see you naked on the floor.
31:54Pills and bottles all over the floor, and your suicide note.
31:59And ends up having to call for help to save her life.
32:05The only thing that he ever wanted from his mother was for her to love him.
32:09But she wasn't capable of being a true mother to her own son.
32:18She kind of became the demon, and she passed that on to her son.
32:22So as we were looking into it, it was hard to understand why he was sending money back to his mother.
32:33I think that she had so much control over him that he was just powerless.
32:41Markle was fired from his job.
32:45He was going to lose his license, no doubt lose his house.
32:48He had entertained the thought of moving to Australia.
32:52He was going to go to jail, possibly, or have to pay back millions of dollars.
32:57And at this point, John reached out with an olive branch to his mother, asking her for help.
33:07It was a very humbling situation for him.
33:11Because here, he had always been in that role of trying to impress his mother.
33:15And now he had to reach out in a very, very embarrassing situation and ask for help.
33:23Markle is groveling with his mother, begging, pleading, almost on his hands and knees, to get money, to get out of this trouble.
33:32She essentially told him that, you made your bed, you're going to have to sleep in it.
33:38And I think for John, this was the ultimate betrayal from a mother who he had always hoped would help him out.
33:48Mercedes McCambridge was a malignant narcissist.
33:52The one time that he really needed her, she just wasn't there for him.
33:56That's when his anger turned to something much darker, much more sinister.
34:04But we still didn't know about how his death had come about.
34:10You know, there was no way that one individual could have shot himself simultaneously with both handguns.
34:15It's all just makes it that much more strange.
34:30On Friday the 13th, 1987, a switch was thrown.
34:34Was that the trigger in John Markle's mind?
34:42The house of cards essentially toppled down.
34:47He was consumed with the darkness of despair.
34:51The only thing he was going to run from or escape from was life in itself.
34:57And take his wife and children with him.
35:00This wasn't a spur of the moment, spontaneous rampage that he went on.
35:07It was thought out and planned.
35:10That night, those two young children and Christine were probably thinking of, you know, going to school, meeting up with their friends, whatever activities that they were looking forward to the next day.
35:22No idea that this was their last day on earth.
35:25Their father had introduced Ellaville into their bloodstream.
35:32That night, John also rented Nightmare on Elm Street for the whole family to watch.
35:38The movie Nightmare on Elm Street is about a man who killed people who were sleeping.
35:48So after the family watched the movie and the kids were in bed, his wife went to bed and John waited until they were in a deep sleep from the medication.
35:59And after he was assured of that is when he began.
36:05That video that was playing in the hallway upstairs may have been a ploy to scare the children.
36:13To encourage both girls to sleep together to be able to console each other through the night.
36:20Both tucked in bed, you know, the covers pulled up around them.
36:25He wouldn't have to go to a separate bedroom to kill each one.
36:32And then he put his mask on and went to his children's bedroom.
36:36This is the actual mask that John Markle wore when he killed his entire family.
36:47He couldn't bear for them to see his face, to know that he was the person behind the mask pulling the trigger and taking their lives.
36:55He planned the firing of those bullets to coordinate with the horrible thunderstorm in Little Rock that night.
37:09The thunder, the lightning would probably cover up the sounds of the gunshots and any screams that may have happened.
37:25Christine might have been startled awake and sat up because maybe she heard the gunfire in her daughter's room.
37:47You know, what is it that Christine experienced that night?
37:51Did she see him with the mask on?
37:56How horrific it would have been to be asleep in your bed and someone shows up with two guns and a mask on.
38:09After he went back downstairs to his study and he started writing these letters.
38:14He called the attorney to the house.
38:35There was gunshot residue on John's hands.
38:39They were in contact with a weapon.
38:41The fact that he was able to shoot himself twice with, you know, at the same time with two different guns.
38:49I guess it's all just makes it that much more strange.
38:55I believe that I may have been across the street when the shootings occurred.
39:00You know, I was there for an hour or longer.
39:03With that storm, did I hear the final gunshots?
39:07Did he see me pull up?
39:10I don't know.
39:13The big question was why he struck out against his own family instead of striking out at the person he was really angry at, which was his mother.
39:21And in my mind, I think that she had so much control and power over him, he couldn't strike out against that monster.
39:30So, John Markle slaughtered her entire family.
39:40Out of all the scenes that I've been to, it's the one that stuck with me the most over the last, you know, almost 40 years.
39:48I've never forgotten those pink walls with all the blood and everything splattered all over it.
39:58In my mind, I go back to the drawing on the refrigerator.
40:04I like the colored construction paper.
40:07Love you, Daddy. Love you, Mommy.
40:09And, uh, that was, that was pretty devastating.
40:18The Markle House has kind of taken on a life of its own as things like this do.
40:25It will always be recognized as the murder house.
40:29It's there and it's livable, but, but it's vacant.
40:33Somebody wants to live there.
40:35I would think it would take a special person to live there very long.
40:42Somebody recently referred to that house as a scar in the city.
40:47Even decades later, people still remember because some nightmares don't die.
40:52Some stories don't fade, like this one about a woman who gave a voice to a demon.
41:00And the son who became one.
41:03There's a history of Cape Fear being cursed.
41:16Barbara Ann Lewis was strangled to death.
41:18On Friday the 13th, it started happening again.
41:22Is it going to be tonight? Is it going to be tomorrow night?
41:25You didn't know when he was going to strike again.
41:27It's not safe to be alone.
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