Savage Son. Corey Mitchell
had found it.
Kent and Bart’s return home was not a time for mourning and organization. They were joined by Detective Marshall Slot and two other Sugar Land Police Department officers. Slot had prepared to conduct two separate walk-throughs of the crime scene by its two surviving victims. Slot first had Bart removed from the scene so Kent could provide a videotaped narrative of the events that occurred on December 10.
According to Detective Slot, Kent was very thorough in his reenactment of what happened. He was very animated, succinct, and was easily able to recall exactly what happened, at least from his perspective. Kent was very detailed in his depiction of the murders and attempted murders.
As the two men went over the details, Kent began to discover that certain items were indeed missing from his home. One was a Ruger .22 pistol.
In addition, after he rifled through his closet, Kent informed Slot that an envelope that contained cash was missing. He knew it was gone, because it had been strategically hidden on a shelf inside a small plastic VCR tape drawer. It would not be something someone would simply stumble upon.
Detective Slot then summoned Bart and asked Kent to leave.
Bart’s walk-through was different than Kent’s. On the videotape, Bart was much vaguer about the details of the crime. Detective Slot felt that Bart “was holding back,” for some unknown reason.
Bart had his left arm holstered in a white hospital sling after his surgery. He was dressed casually in blue jeans, a brown sweater, and brown loafers. He began the walk-through videotaping session by turning off the light switch in the foyer so that the room was nearly pitch black.
Bart calmly walked out of the front entrance, where half his family had been murdered, made his way out onto the front porch, and then turned right onto the poorly lit driveway and headed toward the garage. He was reenacting what had occurred just after the family pulled into the driveway—after they returned from the restaurant, and before they headed inside.
Bart and three officers stood in the driveway as if they were seated in the car. Bart was in the back driver’s side, next to his father. Kevin was the driver and Tricia sat up front in the passenger seat. As they imaginarily exited the vehicle, Bart calmly walked back up the driveway and pointed out where his Yukon had been parked in the street.
Though the murders had occurred only four nights before, Bart did not appear distressed in any way. Instead, he looked like he was giving directions to a lost tourist by pointing out some of the town’s unique landmarks.
Bart directed the officers playing the roles of his family members to walk along the front of the house, while he made a beeline for the street to go to his vehicle. Bart turned around to the camera and replied, “I heard Bang….” The complete lack of emotion could not have been more apparent.
Bart continued the reenactment by traipsing through the fallen dry leaves in the front yard. “I paused,” he continued, “seeing my dad on the ground.” Bart moved forward and then directed the officers where to lie on the ground so as to resemble his dead mother and dead brother. As he pointed out their respective fallen spots, again not a single ounce of emotion was evident on his face. It felt more like a choreographed dance as opposed to the supposedly most traumatic experience a young man could have ever gone through in his short life.
As Bart directed the officer playing Kevin where to lie down, he said, “You weren’t that much in the way, so maybe you were somewhere over here, instead.”
Another officer played the suspect. When Bart spotted him, he said, “I saw you running,” as though actually talking to the killer. “When I ran into the door”—he recalled his alleged heroic motion—“I could see you running away. I ran in this way.” Bart headed into the dark living room. “I guess somewhere in here, I got shot. I fell back into the couch, onto the floor, and I remember I got up to use the phone to call 911.”
10
Fall 1996
Sugar Land, Texas
Adam Hipp met Bart Whitaker at Clements High School in Sugar Land, Texas, back in 1996. Hipp was a junior, and one year older than Bart. The two boys were introduced to one another via a mutual friend from a journalism class they all shared. While working on the school’s yearbook and newspaper, Adam and Bart became friendly acquaintances. They mostly hung out together on the school’s campus and in class, but they seldom spent time together away from school, at first.
The two students, however, did seem to run in the same circle of friends at Clements. The two handsome young men considered their circle to be the elite among the rest of the students at Clements, an already wealthy school, thus making them the elite of the elite—at least in their own minds.
Despite such a high opinion of himself, Hipp apparently did not do well enough in school to attend a four-year college, such as Rice, Texas, or Texas A&M. Instead, he settled for a satellite school, the Sugar Land campus of Wharton County Junior College.
Meanwhile, Bart would advance to his senior year at Clements High School.
Bart and Adam became closer friends that same year. Their main bonding experiences would come during casual weight-lifting sessions. Adam had expressed his desire to work out and talked to Bart about partnering up with him. Bart suggested that Adam move his weight equipment into the Whitaker house. He mentioned a finished-out attic space, just off his room on the second story. It was unoccupied and would serve as a great locale for a makeshift gym. Adam was excited and quickly agreed to the arrangement.
Bart and Adam spent many days together lifting weights, usually two or three times a week. In between reps, the young turks talked about life, women, and, of course, their favorite subject—money.
Hipp recalled how most of their conversations went. “It seemed to be a common subject of how we both wanted to get ahead in life and be able to do things now versus when we were fifty or sixty.” The two young men discussed “everything from the money that our parents had set away for our college accounts, and maybe different investments and monies that we had set aside for us.”
As bizarre as the image of two young teenagers lifting weights and talking about finances might seem, it was all very normal to Bart and Adam. Both young men were pampered by financially successful parents, attended one of the most academically superior high schools, and considered themselves on the top rung of the social-strata ladder of Sugar Land. Precocious and presumptuous, Bart and Adam believed they were the top dogs in the pack and carried themselves in such a manner at all times.
“We were definitely over average,” Hipp recalled in regard to his and Bart’s financial and social statuses in Sugar Land. He described his family and Bart family’s wealth as a barometer that “defines you as a class, separates you for what you have and what you don’t have.” Adam did not believe that he and Bart ever had to “portray” a wealthy and sophisticated image to their peers, because they simply just were. “I did not have to portray that, it’s just who I was,” and Bart too.
Over time, and thousands of reps of weights, Bart and Adam grew even closer. Their conversations took on a new life beyond just girls and money. They were mainly about Bart’s family. Adam had taken an instant liking to the Whitaker family, as they always graciously welcomed him into their home and treated him like one of their own.
While Adam took a shine to the Whitakers, he noticed that Bart never seemed truly happy around his parents. “He got along somewhat with his dad,” Adam recalled. “He identified himself, aligned himself, more with his father than with his mother.” Adam also noted that Bart “felt estranged from his mother for various reasons.” He just was not sure what those reasons were, because Bart would never completely open up to him.
Adam was able to glean a few reasons for Bart’s discontent with his mother. “He felt she paid too much attention to his brother,” Kevin. Hipp described this as very much “a sore spot” with Bart. According to Hipp, there were a multitude of reasons why this ticked Bart off. Number one on the list was that Bart believed he was, by far, Kevin’s intellectual superior in every