The Sugar Land Conspiracy
This story originally aired Oct. 20, 2007. It was updated on Aug. 18, 2009.
For John Flores and his best friend Kevin Whitaker, life was sweet in Sugar Land, Texas. "Sugar Land is very middle class/upper class, white collar," Flores explains. "It's a nice place, everything's new. You hang out with your neighbors. You hang out with your neighbor's kids."
But as correspondent Peter Van Sant reports, that sweet life was shattered on the night of Dec. 10, 2003, when Kevin and his family were gunned down in their home.
Marshall Slot was the lead detective assigned to the case. "It looks as if it's a burglary gone wrong. You know, family coming home from dinner. It's plausible that they could have surprised a burglar," Slot says.
But as Slot combed through the Whitaker home, he realized things weren't adding up. "In the master bedroom the dressers all had drawers open on them, but they were all open equal distance. It was very neat and orderly," Slot explains.
Slot began to suspect the burglary had been staged. "None of the items of value inside the house had been moved around; the electronics, laptops, jewelry, none of those items typically taken in burglaries," he recalls.
And then there was the murder weapon: it was the Whitakers' own gun. "The gun safe had been pried open and it was in a very isolated part of the household," Slot explains. "This is looking more and more like this person knew this gun was here and obtained it for a specific reason."
Slot turned his attention to the family's history, hoping it might provide some answers. He started with Kent Whitaker's relationship to his wife Trisha.
"We met on a blind date," Kent remembers. "Walked in her house and … I didn't know what I was expecting but she came down and I thought I've never had a blind date like this before and we hit it off very well right from the start."
Within a couple of months, Kent says he realized he was in love with Trisha. And the feeling, he says, was mutual. Later, the couple would have two sons, Bart and Kevin.
The Whitakers were doing well. Kent was a successful account, Trisha, an elementary school teacher. "Trisha had a great rapport with children. Parents adored her. The staff adored her. She was just fun," remembers Barbie Harrington.
Harrington and Peggy McLane, Trisha's close friends and coworkers, knew her true love was being a mom. "They were everything. That's all she talked about. She loved those boys," Peggy remembers.
Bart, the eldest, did well in school and had a quirky sense of humor. "He seemed like a nice kid. He was fun. He was witty. He was respectful," Peggy says. And she says he was a good son.
Bart shared a passion for biking with his dad. "It turned out to be a sport that we both loved. He and I would spend hours and hours on training rides and organized rides," Kent tells Van Sant.
Kevin was the sensitive one. "Kevin was man at a young age. He would not back down from injustice. But he would be so quick to forgive," Kent says.
Then came Dec. 10, 2003. "Bart was supposed to be graduating from college," Kent remembers. "He called and said he was through with his finals and he wanted to go out to eat and celebrate."
"We all celebrated. We laughed. We told some jokes. We teased each other and took some pictures and gave Bart his graduation gift, which was an expensive watch," Kent recalls.
After dinner the Whitakers headed home, where they were met with unimaginable horror: four shots were fired. "I start praying and I said, 'Father, you know, if it's my time to die, I'm ready. It's ok. But protect my family,'" Kent remembers. "It was just awful."
Cliff Stanley, the first person on the scene, remembers finding Kent lying down. "I went up to him and he was shot. And says, 'I'm bleeding very badly,'" Stanley says.
Stanley then went to check on Trisha. "She was still alive. She was kind of moaning," he says. "I said, 'What happened?' And Tricia said, 'He shot us.'"
But Stanley says Trisha didn't say who the shooter was. Bart was lying in the living room, wounded. Kevin, Stanley says, was dead at the scene.
Kent, Trisha, and Bart were rushed to the hospital but Trisha didn't survive.
"I lost a friend that taught me how to be a better teacher and a better mother. She was just a really good person and I miss her so much," says Trisha's friend Peggy, crying.
By the next day, grief turned to anger. "Kent, in no uncertain terms, told me he wanted us to catch whoever did this. He was upset, he was hurt," remembers Det. Slot.
And Bart seemed to share that anger. "He didn't say much. But he pulled my friend Matt and I to him and he said, 'We're gonna find who did it,'" recalls Kevin's friend John Flores.
Slot continued his routine questioning of the survivors. Bart told Slot he had just graduated from Sam Houston State University. But the next day, the detective says investigators got stunning news from the university: Bart wasn't enrolled.
"He was a freshman on academic probation," Slot explains.
The news made the detective suspicious. "Bells and whistles start goin' off that, 'Why is this kid lying to us?' 'What's he got to hide?'" Slot remembers.
The detective asked Bart why he had lied. Bart's response? Says Slot, "He just didn't want to disappoint his family. He had needed a break, the stress of school had gotten on him."
Then, just five days after the shooting, there was another bombshell. "It was about 11, 11:30 at night. The sergeant on duty paged me and said there's somebody here that wants to talk to you," Slot remembers.
Slot met the stranger in the darkened parking lot behind the police station. "He explained to me that he had information that was crucial to the investigation," Slot recalls.
The man told Slot that Bart wanted him to help kill his family.
Five days after Trisha and Kevin were gunned down at their home, more than 1,000 friends and family gathered to celebrate their lives.
Amid the sadness, there was also anger. "This murderer is still out there. Police need our help. For your own families for everyone's sake, let's catch him," a mourner said at the funeral.
But what no one knew was that among the mourners was a man police were closely watching: Bart Whitaker.
The stranger Det. Slot had met in the police parking lot turned out to be an old friend of Bart's named Adam Hipp. And he told the detective an extraordinary story: that Bart had approached him several years earlier with a detailed plan to kill his family.
"It called for Adam Hipp being the shooter, shooting the family members as they came in the residence," Slot explains.
According to Hipp, the plan even included a twist to fool police: Bart wanted Hipp to shoot him in the shoulder so he'd look like a victim, not a suspect.
"So what Adam Hipp was telling you was essentially the blueprint for what happened in 2003 … the real shooting?" Van Sant asks.
"The exact blueprint," Slot says.
But Bart appeared to have nothing to hide. He agreed to help detectives by re-enacting what happened the night of the shootings.
Bart's behavior at the crime scene only heightened Slot's suspicions. "Everything is very vague. It could have been this, but it could have been this," the detective remarks. "The fact that he wasn't able to give me a lot of detail on it, it was just unusual to me."
Police had indicated to Kent that his son Bart was a suspect in the case. Asked if he wondered if Bart might have actually been involved, Kent says, "I considered it but I didn't consider it seriously. He promised me there was nothing to it, that he didn't have anything to do with it, that he loved Trisha, Kevin and me. It was inconceivable."
But after Hipp's story, Det. Slot felt otherwise and decided to check out two of Bart's closest friends, Chris Brashear and Steven Champagne.
Brashear and Champagne worked with Bart at a country club just months before the murders. Slot asked them to provide what police call "scent samples." Using blood hounds, he compared those samples to evidence collected at the crime scene. Slot's hunch paid off when he got a match.
"The dogs indicated that Chris Brashear's scent was on the drawers that had been moved that night," Slot says.
More importantly, Brashear's scent was found on the gun used in the homicides.
When Slot grilled Brashear, he denied any involvement in the shootings. "We told him we had a definitive link between him and the murder weapon on the night of the shooting," Slot explains.
"What are you seeing on his face?" Van Sant asks.
"Horror. Panic," Slot says. "We struck a nerve with this kid."
Slot was now closing in on Bart.
One night, seven months after the shootings, Bart told his dad he was heading out to a club. "Bart told me he would see me the next day. Well, that was the last I saw him. He disappeared," Kent remembers.
Bart's disappearance was a setback. But Det. Slot pressed on, focusing on the suspects still in Sugar Land, especially Steven Champagne.
Eventually Champagne cracked. "He informed me that he participated in the crime and that Chris Brashear killed the family," Slot says.
Champagne confessed that he was the getaway driver, Brashear was the shooter, and that Bart was the mastermind behind the plan.
Champagne led Slot to a treasure trove of physical evidence. "He led me to the place on the bridge over Lake Conroe where he and Chris Brashear had thrown items of evidence," Slot explains.
The items included a chisel, which Slot says Brashear had used to break into the gun safe, ammunition that Slot says was the same as in the gun, and two cell phones.
"Bart Whitaker had provided those to them to use during the course of carrying out the plot," Slot says.
In Sept. 2005, Sugar Land police arrested both Champagne and Brashear for the murders of Trisha and Kevin Whitaker. But they still didn't know where to find Bart.
When Bart fled Sugar Land seven months after the shootings, he left behind a community -- and a father -- in disbelief. Like many a desperado before him, Bart headed south into Mexico, where he ended up in a tiny village called Cerralvo, about 40 miles from the Texas border.
Bart started his new life in Cerralvo with about $7,000 in cash, money he had stolen from his father's house. He could speak a little Spanish and soon had a small apartment and a job at a local furniture store. He also had something else: a new identity.
Gabriella Gutierrez remembers her American friend named "Rudy Rios."
She remembers him as a friendly person. "He was very charming. He had a way with the ladies," Gabriella says.
Cindy Lou Salinas first saw Bart in church, of all places. "I don't know, I found him very interesting. The guys that I've known…I don't know, he just had something nobody had," she says.
After Bart and Cindy Lou began dating, her father, Omero, gave Bart a job at the family's furniture store. Omero says Bart was a good and very obedient worker. "I really liked him and held him in high esteem," he recalls.
Cindy Lou's brother, Ubaldo, befriended Bart and was impressed with his stories of adventure, like the one explaining his bullet wound. "He said he got the scar in the Afghanistan war. He said there was a surprise attack on his group by the Afghanis. Most of those in his group were killed. He shot at one with his rifle, but there was another one that got him in the shoulder," Ubaldo explains.
The entire Salinas family took Bart in as one of their own, and Bart told them they were the family he never had. "He used to tell me that he was an only child, that he never loved his mother because his mother never loved him either. And that his mother was a prostitute, he used to say that. His family never gave him the love he wanted. They only gave him money…they ignored him," Cindy Lou says.
For 14 months, Bart lived a care free new life as Rudy Rios, but it was all about to an end. Back in Sugar Land, Det. Slot got a phone call from the real Rudy Rios. "He called me, anonymously one day at my office and said, 'I know where Bart Whitaker is. I helped him get there,'" Slot recalls.
The real Rudy and Bart had worked together at a Houston restaurant.
"Bart explained to him that there was pressure on him from law enforcement. Rudy said, 'Well if you ever need any help, let me know. I've got family in Mexico that can help you out,'" Det. Slot says.
According to Rios, Bart paid him $3,000 to escort him to Cerralvo. But when word spread of a reward for Bart's capture, the real Rudy looked to get paid again.
Det. Slot was there waiting when Mexican authorities dumped Bart back across the border. "He glanced at me and then just down to the floor. I don't know if it was a, 'You got me' look, but it was very satisfying to walk into that jail," Slot remembers.
"I walk in and we're separated by the bulletproof glass. I said, 'Well, you look like you're okay.' And he says, 'Yes, I am.' And he says, 'Dad, I'm just so sorry. I'm so sorry for all of it. It's all my fault,'" Kent remembers.
What was the "it" Bart was referring to?
"The murders. That he's responsible for the murders," Kent says.
Also waiting for Bart were Fort Bend County prosecutors Jeff Strange and Fred Felcman with an indictment for the murders of his mother and brother.
Asked what he thinks a motive for murder might have been, Strange tells Van Sant, "Because that was the way he was going to inherit 1.5 million dollars."
"I think also to some extent, deep down, Bart thinks he's smarter than everybody else. And he just wanted to see if he could get away with the perfect crime," he adds.
In Fred Felcman, Bart had an adversary who is one of the toughest, no-nonsense prosecutors in Texas. Asked how he would describe Bart, Felcman says, "There's a term they use in psycho lingo, psychobabble, of sociopath. In other words, a person who knows he's doing something wrong but really doesn't care. The old time Texas thing was that he's just a mean old son of a bitch, ok?"
Because this was a multiple murder, prosecutors will seek the death penalty for Bart.
"It's a good, strong case," Felcman says.
In fact, it's an overwhelming case. So much so that Bart's defense attorney decides on a unique strategy. He will all but concede that Bart is guilty and use the trial to try and convince jurors that Bart's life should be spared. And he has a man of unshakeable religious faith in his corner: Bart's own father, Kent Whitaker.
"Even knowing that he'd be guilty and responsible for this… I just can't understand why it's so necessary to put him to death," Kent says.
In court, Kent testified that he didn't have an inkling that Bart had been lying to him.
Incredibly, Kent has forgiven Bart. "The first night in the hospital, I forgave everyone who was involved in this. It is a gift from God that allows me to do this. I think he gave me that gift so that when O found out that it was my son, that it would be a legitimate forgiveness," Kent says.
The question now is will a jury be as forgiving?
Sugar Land has never seen a trial like this. It's a case of multiple murder, where the accused is being passionately defended by one of the people he tried to kill.
"If the state pursues the death penalty and receives it, then they will kill the last surviving member of my family," Kent says.
He believes his son's eternal soul is at stake. "I believe as a Christian that God can and does forgive. And change people's hearts. If they are sorry, if they repent, if they ask for forgiveness for real, he will forgive them," Kent explains.
But prosecutors Strange and Felcman say their duty is to uphold Texas law, not God's law.
"Kent Whitaker's religious faith is genuine. Forgiveness is a big tenet of what he believes. And I respect that and I totally understand that. That is not my job though," Strange says.
Asked if he thinks Bart deserves the death penalty, Felcman tells Van Sant, "Yes. I find it hard to believe anybody wouldn't think he deserved it."
Three years after Trisha and Kevin's murders, Bart's trial gets underway. Prosecutors present crime scene analysis, forensic evidence, and eyewitness accounts.
But it's the testimony of Steven Champagne, one of Bart's alleged accomplices, that everyone in the courtroom is waiting to hear.
Champagne says two months before the shootings Bart offered both him and Chris Brashear a cut of a million-dollar insurance policy to help kill the Whitaker family. "The conversation was about when the family got back from dinner, Chris would be in the house and shoot them," Champagne testified.
On the night of the attack, Champagne said he was waiting in the getaway car when Brashear quickly got inside. "I asked him what happened. He said that he had shot all of them," Champagne testified.
Defense attorney Randy McDonald can do little except attack Champagne for agreeing to kill for money. "And it really didn't bother you that three other human beings would be killed so you could have a better lifestyle?" McDonald asked Champagne.
"The way I looked at it was they weren't human," he replied.
As prosecutors build their case, more shocking details emerge: that the 2003 attack wasn't the first time Bart had tried to kill his family. He made at least three other attempts, using other friends as recruits.
In December 2000, Bart approached his college roommates Will Anthony and Justin Peters. "I supposed to as they enter the home shoot the family, Sir," Anthony testified.
"Will was supposed to actually go into the house. Was he going to be given anything to hide his identity?" Prosecutor Jeff Strange asked Justin Peters.
"Yes," Peters testified. "He was given black pants and a black shirt, and a ski mask."
Asked by whom, Peters told the court, "Bart."
Peters and Anthony actually made it to the Whitaker home. As planned, Will Anthony went to open a back window. "As soon as I tried to touch it Sir, an alarm went off," Anthony told the court.
The two men fled. But Bart wasn't scared off. Two months later he approached another friend with another plan. Remember Adam Hipp, Bart's old friend-turned police informant? Under oath, Hipp publicly admits that he too once agreed to help kill the Whitaker family.
Asked why he agreed, Hipp testified, "You know, I don't know. I'm not proud of it, but for the fact that I was kind of interested to see how far he would take it."
Like Bart, all three young men came from well-to-do families.
Besides money, prosecutor Felcman believes Bart is a gifted liar and manipulator. "He would actually seek out people, ok? He would seek out the ones that were a little weaker, maybe a little weaker. That he got to know a little bit better. That had some investment in him," Felcman says.
Bart's second plan to murder his family with the aid of Adam Hipp never went beyond talk. But by April 2001, Bart had hatched a third plot.
This time, the plan unraveled after Jennifer Japhet, a college acquaintance of Bart's, found out about it. "I asked Bart if he was seriously going to let this happen," she testified.
Asked how he reacted to that, Japhet testified, "He came up to me and he gave me a hug and he whispered in my ear that everything was going to be ok."
Japhet testified that she did call police. They in turn notified Kent and Trisha.
"It was just the far-outest thing that you can conceive of and we immediately said there's no way," Kent remembers.
Bart told his parents it was all a misunderstanding. His parents believed him. "In retrospect, what an idiot. How could you possibly not see this?! But the truth of the matter is we didn't know they were lies," Kent says.
Even after his wife and youngest son were murdered two years later, Kent still refused to believe that Bart was capable of such evil.
"Aren't you putting two and two together here and saying Bart's responsible for this?" Van Sant asks.
"Perhaps I should have. But I didn't," Kent says.
And Fred Felcman says he doesn't believe the crime could have been prevented if people had paid attention to the warning signs. "Look at the actions of Bart Whitaker!" Felcman says. "You're already caught, alright? But you still proceed to it. And you still go through it."
Bart's trial lasted seven days but the jury deliberated just two hours, returning with a verdict everyone was expecting: guilty of capital murder.
But the real drama of this case would be the punishment phase. Now, for the first time, Bart Whitaker will speak openly about his obsession with killing his family.
Kent hopes he can persuade the jury to forgive Bart as he has.
"The ladies and gentlemen of the jury may not have the same faith. They may not have the same beliefs about what should happen to somebody. But is it your desire that they assess a life sentence in this case?" defense attorney McDonald asks. Kent.
"It has been from the start and it still is," Kent tells the court. Asked if Trisha would feel the same way, Kent tells jurors, "I promise you, she would have been appalled that the state pursued the death penalty in this case."
But it will take more than the wishes of Kent, or Trisha, to spare their son's life. To everyone's surprise, Bart decides to put his fate in his own hands and speak directly to the jury.
"I am 100 percent guilty for this. I put the plan in motion. If I had not done so, it would not have happened," he tells the jury.
Bart tells jurors he feels remorse for the crime. Asked for whom he feels remorse, Bart tearfully says, "Everyone involved starting with my dad, my mom, and my brother… everyone I ever met in my life, I feel sorry for having come in contact with me."
Bart is finally asked the question on everyone's mind. "Can you answer the question why?" McDonald asks.
"No Sir," Bart testifies. "I always felt that whatever love they sent me was conditional on a standard that I just never felt I could reach."
"I think he came to the decision that, you know, 'I hate myself. I hate this life I'm in. If there's just some way I can get out of it -- maybe if my parents, maybe if my family was gone, I could be free of this and live a real life,'" Kent remarks.
For Bart's life to be spared, he must convince the jury he is no longer a threat to anyone in or out of prison.
"Do you have any designs on any conduct that would in any way, shape or form, hurt another individual?" McDonald asks Bart.
"No," he replies. "The only people I ever hated were my parents and my brother."
"But the irony of it all is that your dad is actually the one that's come to your rescue and put you back on track?" McDonald points out.
"He's become my best friend," he replies.
Prosecutor Fred Felcman also gets to address Bart.
"Your mother loved you, that her whole life was you and Kevin. But then you tell me you never felt loved by your parents?" Felcman asks.
"Yes Sir," Bart says.
Asked if he finds anything scary about this, Bart says, "I find something tragic about it."
"Tragic, that I've got a defendant who is that out of touch with reality?" Felcman replies.
The prosecutor wants to convince the jury that Bart's disconnect with reality makes him dangerous. "Somebody interacts with Bart Whitaker, it can be on a totally innocent basis, and you decide to perceive it different. You could kill that person?" Felcman asks.
"No, I could not," Bart says.
"But you killed your mother and brother on totally false circumstances, right?" Felcman says.
"Yes sir. I was a totally different person then," Bart says.
Bart tries one last time to convince Felcman and the jury that he has changed. "You believe a person can't be sorry for the things they did?" Bart asks.
"No, I think they can be sorry. But I don't think you are. I think you're sorry you got caught and now you're figuring out how to get out of the death penalty," Felcman replies.
It took jurors only ten hours to reach a verdict: Bart Whitaker is to die.
48 Hours gathered five members of the jury to tell us about their deliberation.
"I was holding out for a life sentence. I thought that he wanted his parents dead. He had done what he set out to do. So I didn't feel he was a threat," a female juror said.
"The picture of him and his mom and his brother sittin' there, eating. And he's sittin' there smilin', knowing that they're gonna be killed in a few minutes," a male juror said. Asked what that told him about Bart, the juror said, "Told me the probability that he'd do it again would be great!"
Kent says he felt a "great deal of disappointment" after the verdict. Despite all that he now knows, Kent says he will never abandon his son. "I mean Trisha and Kevin, I miss 'em. I miss 'em. But they're in heaven and I'm goin' to heaven. And I have no doubts about that. I want Bart up there too," he says.
"Someday in the future you're going to get a phone call from somebody to tell you Bart Whitaker has been put to death?" Van Sant asks Fred Felcman. "What will that day be like for you?"
Says Felcman, "There'll be a certain sadness. But it won't be for Bart Whitaker. It'll be for the father. It will be a sense of satisfaction too, though. Justice has been done in this case."
In June 2009, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals upheld Bart's conviction and death sentence. He can still pursue appeals in federal court.
After pleading guilty to murder, Chris Brashear, the trigger man, received a life sentence.
Steven Champagne, the getaway driver, got 15 years in exchange for his testimony against Bart Whitaker.
Friends involved in earlier plots against the Whitakers were granted immunity and are free.
Produced By Jay Young