Last night, at approximately 10:15 pm, one of our young neighbors entered his house, argued briefly with his mother, Victoria, then shot her in the head at point blank range. He left his mother on the living room floor, then drove south to West Chester where he shot his brother's girlfriend twice in the chest as she answered the door. As she staggered backwards into the house clutching her chest, he returned to his car and continued driving south towards Ocean City, Maryland where his brother and a friend had rented a house for the weekend.

At a tollbooth in Maryland, he realized he had no money to pay the toll. The toll collector directed him to the side of the road where he could complete the necessary paperwork. As he sat alongside the tollbooths, he picked the .32 caliber handgun he had used on his previous two victims and he shot himself once in the head. He died of the self-inflicted wound this afternoon.

We met Victoria once last year while we were still working on the house. Walking back to my parents' house one weekend afternoon, she came running off her porch as we passed. Her cat, a huge male Bengal, was missing. He liked to sit in a special chair her husband had made for him that hung in the front window. When she came down that afternoon, the cat was missing and the screen by his perch had been cut open.

She was quite upset about the cat, as you might expect, and for the next few weeks, signs hung all over town with a picture of the cat and the word MISSING written in heavy black lettering across the top. We never saw Victoria again, or her cat for that matter, but I always noticed the hole in the screen where the cat used to sit.

The neighbors were all visibly shaken this morning as the detectives double parked in front of the house and ran up and down the front steps. Photographers shot the house and its contents for the record. As we stood across the street, I noticed the hole in the screen. She had obviously never found her missing cat.