Tag: Richard Edgar Henderson Jr.

Man pleads not guilty to 4 deaths:

Say what now? Yesterday a grand jury handed down a four-count indictment on Richard Henderson Jr. of first-degree murder. Henderson previously confessed to the crimes. Then Assistant Public Defender Carolyn DaSilva entered a plea of not guilty. Again I say “huh?” I realize that they are probably going to try an insanity defense with Henderson but I think it’s an extreme longshot. If he had pleaded guilty it probably would have spared him the death penalty. Now it’s possible that prosecutors will seek the death penalty. But hey, it’s his funeral.

Murders in Myakka: ‘I knew he would snap someday’:

Right off the top, my site was mentioned in this article…sort of. As of the time I’m typing this they called it trenchcoat.com. Which is all well and good but as most of you know this (used to be -2018 Trench) thetrenchcoat.com. Trenchcoat.com, if I’m not mistaken, is a porn site, so the joke’s on The Herald. Anyway, the article basically states that those closest to Richard Henderson Jr. had no idea that he would bludgeon his own family to death…

Zach Anderson said he always thought Richard E. Henderson Jr. was crazy, but he never thought he would kill members of his own family.

“I figured he’d be a 35-year-old serial killer, going state to state,” said Anderson, 21, a long-time friend of Henderson’s. “He’s been crazy ever since I knew him. He’s always been out there.”

The crime has since become a hot topic in cyberspace, with everyone from strangers weighing in on sites such as trenchcoat.com, to Henderson’s most recent girlfriend writing on her personal Web site.

In her blog, Henderson’s girlfriend, Danielle Kelvin, said the young man was “broken.”

“All I want you to know is I loved him and he loved me, and I had no idea or help in this,” Kelvin wrote. “I don’t believe in any way what he did was right. He was completely wrong . . . He was a good person with a good heart, he was just broken and I couldn’t change him.”

In addition to the blog on Kelvin’s Web site, there is also a collage of pictures of Kelvin and Henderson, both alone and together. One shows Henderson’s bare back, covered in a marijuana leaf tattoo.

Kelvin recently began dating Henderson and spent the weekend in an Ellenton hotel room with him before he was arrested. She had no idea he had killed his family, according to an investigator’s reports.

“I knew he would snap someday, but why the people that cared about you – the only people in the world who truly care about you. None of us saw this coming. Rich did love his parents. I wish I could have warned his parents,” Anderson said.

I think the girl mentioned in the article has been leaving comments here since a lot of the phrases she posted on her blog match almost exactly to what someone posting as “ex-girlfriend” left on mine. If anybody has the address to her blog let me know, please. I’m not going to harass her or anything I just want to take a look at it. And since I believe Ms. Kelvin is posting here I have a question for her if she would be so kind as to indulge me. Did you know of Henderson’s previous criminal record before you started dating? And if yes why did you date him? And I’m calling off the dogs for this too. I will keep my commenters in check while awaiting your answer. And to my commenters please be polite and let’s keep the insults non-existent in this thread.

I await your reply.

A huge nod to T-Rock.

Police release list of evidence in Bradenton quadruple slaying:

In case you haven’t heard I’ve received some comments from people in support of Richard Henderson Jr. In case you’ve forgotten, he’s the 20-year-old who confessed to bludgeoning his entire family to death on Thanksgiving night. The general theme of the comments is that Henderson was a supportive, loyal, sensitive guy with a good heart. I guess he just wasn’t supportive, loyal, and sensitive to his own family and his good heart must have been as black as a thousand midnights…

A letter, metal pipes and a broken baseball bat were among evidence collected from the home of four family members who were bludgeoned to death, police documents released Tuesday showed.

Detectives found skull fragments inside and outside the house. A search warrant inventory listed bloody comforters found covering the four bodies and stained metal pipes and a broken baseball bat found in June Henderson’s bedroom, The Herald in Bradenton reported.

And it seems like he’s already setting up his insanity defense…

In telephone interviews from the county jail, Henderson told The Herald that he is severely mentally ill, and that his parents had been trying to get him help in the weeks before the fatal beatings.

And he shows his gratitude by beating them to death.

He deserves nothing less than the death penalty.

MURDERS IN MYAKKA: Aunt says Henderson should die:

How bad is it when you’re own aunt thinks you should be given the death penalty? The aunt of Richard Henderson Jr., who confessed to bludgeoning his family to death on Thanksgiving, had this to say…

The deaths of June, 82; Richard Sr., 48; Jeaneane, 42; and Jake, 11, have torn Joyce Henderson’s family apart.

“At first, when it happened, I could hear in my head Jeaneane’s voice saying, ‘Joyce, don’t kill my baby,’ ” Joyce Henderson said Saturday.

It was after a trip to the family’s home, after the cleaners did their best to remove signs of the crime, that Joyce’s compassion for her nephew cracked.

She had to hunt for documents to prove who her four deceased relatives were, because they were beaten so severely they had to be identified through dental records, fingerprints, or in Jeaneane’s case, tattoos.

“I walked outside and said, ‘No,’ ” Joyce Henderson said. “I heard Jeaneane said to me, ‘Joyce, if he killed us the way he did, he deserves to die.’ “

On top of that, I’ve already had some comments from people who claim to be friends of Richard Henderson who say he was a sweet caring individual with a good heart. (It almost made me puke to type that.) His aunt gives a different story…

Joyce Henderson and her daughter Rebekah Rogers said they remembered Richard Henderson Jr. as a spoiled and aggressive child who would hit his grandmother and always wanted his way.

Sorry but sweet individuals with good hearts don’t hit their grandmothers, threaten to slash their wife’s throat, plan to shoot up a school or bludgeon their family to death so brutally that they need to be identified through dental records and fingerprints.

If anybody deserved a date with the needle, or since it’s Florida Ol’ Sparky, it’s this scumbag.

The other day we discussed Richard Henderson Jr. the 20-year-old who confessed to bludgeoning his family to death on Thanksgiving. I had mentioned that in 2001 he was arrested on suspicion of being part of a Columbine-like plot and I asked if anyone has further information on that. Well my readers came through in spades.

First I got an e-mail from some we’ll call T-Rock…

The high school is Lakewood Ranch High School. It is located in Eastern Manatee County, in Bradenton, FL.

The plan in 2001 was to have one kid pull the fire alarms, while the other 3 kids layed in ambush in the courtyard, ready to pick off any students and faculty that were running out of thier classrooms. Luckily to say that never happened.

T-Rock also had some other choice things to say about Henderson but we’ll save that for another time.

Then reader Starviego came through big time with a plethora of news links.

Suspect named in 2001 plot:

Four teens had an ominous plan in the spring of 2001: Get guns, pull a fire alarm at Lakewood Ranch High School and shoot as many students as possible before killing themselves.

Richard Henderson Jr., now charged with killing four family members, was one of those teens, and he had taken a major step toward making it a reality: He had obtained a handgun and brought it to the school.

The local plan came to light in March 2001 when police found Henderson with a gun at a Manatee McDonald’s restaurant. They arrested him on charges of carrying a concealed weapon and possessing a weapon on school property. There’s no indication Henderson ever fired the gun.

But authorities questioned him and his friends at length. The friends gave versions of the plots that varied slightly but had consistent themes.

The group that included at least one girl talked of their plans in telephone conference calls over a period of a week, the report said. They planned to take muscle relaxers and do one of two things.

In one scenario, they would sit in a circle and shoot each other one by one. The teens all agreed that “life sucks” and that they didn’t like their parents. One girl, the report said, “did not want to grow up to be like her mother, her father or the adults that are around her.”

The other plan, which the teens each denied when confronted by sheriff’s investigators, involved pulling the fire alarm at Lakewood Ranch High and shooting students who had wronged them. The teens said “the rednecks” picked on them and treated them like “freaks” and deserved to be shot, the reports say.

Henderson had written a suicide note and will, and signed it on Feb. 28, 2001. He was caught by police with the loaded handgun on Friday, March 2, 2001.

“She felt that Richard Henderson Jr. was serious about this,” the report quoted one girl as telling authorities. “She also felt he would have done the shooting on Monday morning at school. She felt this because she understands how Richard Henderson Jr.’s mind works. When he sets his mind to something … he would continue to think about it until it became serious. Then he would really do it, and it would become reality.”

What did Henderson get for his troubles? Five years probation…

Though he was 15, Henderson was tried as an adult in the 12th Circuit Court. Records show he was sentenced to five years’ probation.

But, according to the state attorney’s office, Henderson violated his probation when he committed another crime at the age of 19. Henderson, according to court records, was charged with aggravated assault and violation of an injunction after he went to his wife’s home in Bradenton on Dec. 5, 2004. There, he threatened to cut her throat if she didn’t go into the house with him. His wife was not injured, but Henderson cut his left wrist with a steak knife, according to the warrant.

What did he get for that? Only four months behind bars…

Henderson pleaded guilty to assault in the incident, said Dawn Buff, a prosecutor who worked on the case.

A judge allowed Henderson credit for time served for the assault and violation of probation charges, Buff said. He had spent four months in jail by then.

But that’s not all…

Earlier, on May 5, 2004, Henderson was accused of domestic battery and aggravated assault charges. But the charges were dropped on Oct. 12, 2004, court records show.

“The reason we didn’t proceed with that is because the victim reported the incident very late,” Buff said.

And it seems like that this kind of behavior is nothing new…

“Even when he was a kid, he’d grab animals out here and rip their legs off and just laugh about it. So he was kind of troubled in the first place,” Henderson’s uncle, Jeffrey Stringer, said.

So it should be no surprise to anyone that this psychopath murdered his family on Thanksgiving and slept next to his dead mother in her bed that night.

So after all the crimes that Henderson committed why was he allowed to walk the streets? Do any of the judges that previously sentenced Henderson have any regrets? They should.

Family bludgeoned to death:

Earlier today I read the story of Richard Edgar Harrison Jr., the 20-year-old accused of bludgeoning his family to death on Thanksgiving. If you haven’t heard the story yet here are the details…

Police say Henderson told them he killed his 11-year-old brother Jake first in a bedroom.

Then he went to his 82-year-old grandmother’s bedroom, asked her to fetch something from a drawer and killed her.

He lured his father, Richard, 48, into the living room to play video games, and killed him there before beating his mother, Jeaneane, 42, as she sat playing poker on a computer in her bedroom.

“Henderson said he put the pipe in his bedroom, took a shower, wrote a note and spent the rest of the night lying in his parents’ bed staring at the ceiling,” a detective’s report said.

“Henderson said that he killed his family because they wouldn’t let him leave.

“He said that he was not angry at his family and that after he had hit his brother, he had to kill everyone.

“Henderson planned to collect money to buy enough drugs or poison to kill himself,” according to the report.

Henderson was arrested on Sunday night walking along a busy road and charged with murder.

But here’s the part that caught my attention…

In 2001, Henderson was part of a Columbine-style murder-suicide plan that was to have taken place at a local high school but was foiled by police, sheriff’s officials said.

Henderson, who was 16 at the time, was among four to six students involved in the plot, and was arrested on concealed weapons charges.

I couldn’t find anything else on the web about this without knowing the name of the school. And since Henderson was a minor at the time I doubt his name would have been mentioned in the press. If anyone has any information about this alleged plot from back in 2001 please let me know.

In the meantime maybe they’ll start dealing out harsher sentences for would be school shooters in order to avoid another situation like this.