"I Was Told to Kill Him"

The 911 call begins with a woman confessing to murder. She tells the dispatcher she killed her roommate, Ricky, with an axe, then set his body on fire. When asked why, she says God told her to. "He said I needed to kill him," she explains. "Because he was a demon and he was gonna kill me." Over the course of the call, the woman—identified only as the suspect—describes the killing in fragmented, contradictory detail, cycling between religious delusion, fear, and confusion.

The Confession Unfolds

The dispatcher works to extract a coherent account. The suspect says she used an axe that was already in her bedroom, hitting Ricky while he slept around 3:30 in the morning. When he didn't die immediately—she says he made noises—she retrieved rubbing alcohol from the living room and set him on fire. "I thought the reason he was still alive was because he was a demon," she says. "Because I need you dead."

She describes licking the blood off her hands to clean them because she had no water. She threw her clothes in the bushes and tried to run away with a backpack of survival supplies—first aid, toiletries, a saw, wires, spices—but turned back. "I was afraid I was gonna be jailed," she says. "I got scared, and I turned around and I came back."

The Voices and the Belief System