19-Year-Old Kills Girlfriend's Father, Realizes His Life Is Over

At 2:30 in the morning, Gavin climbed through his girlfriend Ellie's bedroom window. He was there to help her escape her father's house. Four hours later, Ellie's father was dead in the trunk of his own car, and Gavin was confessing to detectives that he had beaten him six times with an aluminum baseball bat. "I didn't want to kill him," Gavin told investigators repeatedly during the interrogation that followed. But by the time he said it, the man was already gone.

The Plan That Wasn't

Gavin, 19, had been dating Ellie for months. Their relationship had driven a wedge between Ellie and her father, Aaron, a man Gavin described as a heavy drinker who had threatened him before. According to Gavin, Aaron had once pointed a rifle at him and told him to get off his property. He had banged on Gavin's door screaming threats. Gavin had called the police about it a month earlier.

The plan on this night was straightforward: Ellie would pass her belongings out the bedroom window to Gavin's friend RJ, who would load them into Aaron's car. Then Gavin would slip out the front door, lock it behind him, and the three teenagers would drive away. Ellie had already handed Gavin her phone, knowing her father had smashed her previous one. They communicated through Facebook Messenger on RJ's phone.