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PART 1
INFERNO, 2006
“I Had the Perfect Life”
CHAPTER ONE
“Hope is patience with the lamp lit.”
—Tertullian
In 2005, Kim Crespi had what she later described as “the perfect life.” She had a husband she adored: David, a gentle giant of a man, devoutly religious, a loving father, and a proven star in the world of finance. Kim and David had five healthy, happy children—Jessica, age seventeen; Dylan, thirteen; Joshua,
nine; and two precious five-year-old twin girls, Tessara and Samantha. The Crespi family lived in a spacious house in a neighborhood they all loved, nestled in the suburbs of the booming banking capital of Charlotte, North Carolina. They had become part of the vibrant faith community at St. Matthew Catholic Church, which twelve years later became the largest Catholic parish in America. During 2005, Kim and David had taken the family to Disney World—twice.
And in a way, the Crespis were all still living in the Disney afterglow, especially the twins, Tess and Sam.
No one, least of all Kim, ever suspected that the richly textured tapestry of a life that Kim and David had lovingly woven together for eleven years could be cut to ribbons in less than forty minutes.
Early in the afternoon on January 20, 2006, my wife, Ann, received an urgent phone call at work from a dear friend named Teresa—Ann, Teresa, and Kim Crespi remain the best of friends.
At the time, I was acquainted with David, but we had not yet bonded as friends.
“C-can you talk?” Teresa asked Ann.
Ann could sense in Teresa’s voice that something was very wrong. So she immediately left her desk and found a more private place to talk.
“Sure,” Ann said. “What’s up?”
“Dave? You know . . . Dave?” Teresa said.
Ann could hear that Teresa’s mouth was dry—so dry that her lips were sticking together.
“You mean Dave Crespi?” Ann asked.
Teresa paused on the other end, trying to gather herself, and then said, “Dave . . . has . . . done away with the twins.” Teresa, a deeply religious person, couldn’t bear to use the words “killed” or “murdered.”
Ann almost dropped the phone. Today, she can’t remember much more of the conversation—she was in a state of shock.
When Ann told me what happened later that afternoon, we both flashed back to just three weeks prior, when David and Kim Crespi had been at our house for our Christmas party, and David appeared to be his normal self.
“I remember he was trying to teach me how to properly pronounce and sing the Hawaiian Christmas song ‘Mele Kalikimaka,’” Ann recalled, “and how he chuckled when I still couldn’t get the pronunciation right. He also told me how much he admired our Winston Churchill statuette.”
That evening, Ann called Kim to try to somehow comfort her and to offer any help we could give her and her surviving children.
She remembers Kim saying, “I just went out for a haircut. . . . Before I left, Dave was acting just fine.”
A few days after the tragedy, Kim Crespi decided to try journaling as a way to help her cope with the horror of what had occurred. In Kim’s first entry, she describes the hours immediately following the killings.
When I left to go get my haircut, the three of them were eating mashed potatoes and gravy. Sam and Tess had no reason to be afraid. They wanted to stay with their loving father. They had David and me all morning, so for me to go out for a quick haircut was completely fine. I said to the three of them, “See you in a little while! Love you!” No major kisses goodbye. No need for fanfare.On her way back from her haircut, Kim was stopped behind several other drivers at a police barricade two blocks from her house. Kim noticed that the officers were slowly letting the other drivers through, but when she got to the barricade and told an officer her name, he asked her to turn her van off and step onto the grass median. She did so, and when she looked around, she noticed several neighbors staring at her.
I see lots of concerned faces, and waves of anxiety are going through my body. Then I see my neighbors, Katherine and Barbara, coming toward me. They just look at me and I know that something is dreadfully wrong. Another neighbor, Betsy, says that we can all go into her house.I start to think that David has done something to hurt himself. Where are the girls? I need to get to them. I need to take care of them. I need someone to tell me what’s going on.When we are all inside Betsy’s house and sitting down, a very distraught police officer sitting next to me on my right tells me that my girls are dead, that their father has confessed, and that he is in custody.I want to see Sam and Tess. I want to hold them. Has this police officer seen the girls? Is he sure? Can I talk to David? What brought him to do this?Betsy is standing against the wall to my left, and I ask her if she knows how this could have possibly happened. She is the sweetest person and like me, she is devastated. She shakes her head and turns away towards the wall, saying, “I just don’t know how this happens.”A police detective on my left tells me that I have to be both the mom and the dad for my other three children.Another officer then told Kim that she and her surviving children needed to be transported to the police station for interviews—Josh from his elementary school, Dylan from his middle school, and Jessica from her high school. Kim was escorted to a squad car, and on the way to the station, her first call was to David’s younger brother and only sibling, John Crespi. Kim reached John at work—at the time he was a professor of agricultural economics at Kansas State University.
John answers and I make sure he is sitting down. I tell him that the police are telling me that David has killed Sam and Tess. Can he come and help? He says repeatedly that he has to get to Charlotte and that he will call their parents.The next call is to my dad. I make sure that Kathy [Kim’s stepmother] is close, and I tell them that I want both of them to sit down. I tell my dad that the police are telling me that David has killed Tess and Sam.Dad instantly says that I must be wrong. “No, Kimmie, David would not do that. You must be wrong.”Kathy has begun to make the sounds of the way a woman responds when children are hurt. They are uncontrollable, animal-like sounds that come from such a deep place that they don’t appear to be human.I am too numb to respond to anything but the demands of the moment.I get to the police station, and I am escorted to see my children. The wonderful people from my children’s three schools who have brought Jessica, Dylan, and Joshua to the station are standing alongside the wall outside of the room where my children are waiting for me. I fall against the opposite wall for a moment under the weight of all of this. Nobody knows what to say.The police department has a counselor there for us. I am told that priests are on the way. I need to tell Jessie, Dylan, and Joshua what has happened. I want time alone with them.I go in the room, and I am looking at the sweetest faces I have ever seen. I love them and we are all in this together.The last time I saw them, all of us—including Sam and Tess—were in my van and I was taking Jessie, Dylan, and Josh to school. On our way to Jessica’s high school, I tell them that it is time for all of us to step up because Dad isn’t sleeping, and he is depressed. We all need to work together to get through this. They all agree. I say, “It’s a good thing that Dad isn’t violent when he’s depressed.”As I start talking with them, they are wondering if Dad has hurt himself. When I tell them that Dad has killed Sam and Tess, they are in shock. No one saw this coming. We cry and pray to Jesus that he will guide and protect us through this moment and in the days to come.The afternoon is filled with interviews for all of us. My children are interviewed separately from me. None of them can remember a single time when their father has ever hurt them, physically or emotionally. This isn’t the dad they know.I go into a room to be interviewed by the same detectives who have been interviewing David. The detectives have been crying; I see their red eyes. They ask questions and describe a person I cannot imagine. This is the darkest part of the day. The detectives describe to me how Sam and Tess die.The girls play hide and seek with their dad. They both hide in the pantry in the kitchen. When David finds them, they run out together and David tries to kill both of them on the kitchen floor. I am told that Sammie dies saying, “Daddy, you are hurting me.”Tessa runs upstairs to hide in her favorite spot, her dad’s closet. David finds her and drags her into our bathroom. I am told that she dies crying, “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy!"KIM AND HER SURVIVING CHILDREN CANNOT GO HOME
Once the interviews concluded, Kim and her children were free to go. But where?
Their beloved home was now a crime scene. And if they returned to their neighborhood, the media would find them there. Fortunately, a thoughtful and proactive neighbor booked a hotel room for them.
We are driven to the hotel in our van by a sweet detective named Matt. Matt reassures me that Tess and Sam are being well cared for at the Medical Examiner’s office. They are very careful with children, he says. I just want to hold them, but I can’t. I have their hot pink blankets with me. My twins were bundled up in those blankets that very morning in my van while I was taking their older sister and their two brothers to school. I still smell Tess and Sam on their blankets.In less than an hour my whole world has changed. The person I have loved most in the world has stated that he killed our daughters. My joy of five-year-old girls is shattered and their future and my future with them on earth is gone forever. My world is caving in.Matt makes sure we all get to our hotel room without any incidents, and then he leaves. As we start to get settled, I search my mind for warning signs that I may have missed this morning and all along the way. The kids all cry, then they finally fall asleep.JOHN CRESPI RACES TO CHARLOTTE
Less than an hour after speaking with Kim, John Crespi was in his car hurtling towards Charlotte, North Carolina.
John covered the 1,083 miles from Manhattan, Kansas, to Charlotte in record time, arriving by midnight at the hotel where Kim and her children were staying. “I have ten thousand questions, and I expect maybe two or three answers,” John said when he walked through the door. He also shared that he had thought back through David’s childhood and his own, and he could find nothing that might have been a warning sign that David could commit such a horrific act.
After fitfully sleeping on the couch in the hotel room, John immediately went to work the next morning trying to find his brother a good defense lawyer. Kim had been informed that she would need to find a lawyer of her own.
THE CHARLOTTE OBSERVER DISCLOSES NEW DETAILS
In the days following January 20, new details about the tragedy emerged. On January 22 the Charlotte Observer ran a front-page story about the case, with the headline “Relative Says Twins’ Father Was Depressed—Still, Loved Ones Say Sudden, Tragic Turn in ‘Model Family’ Unexplained.”
David Crespi’s father, Lauren, told the Observer that his son had “suffered from depression for years” and that “he didn’t like a new medication he was taking.” David had been having trouble going to sleep and he was taking antidepressants, Lauren Crespi said.
David Crespi had also battled testicular cancer recently, which was now in remission, Lauren added. David was scheduled to visit his doctor for a checkup on the afternoon of the killings.
According to the Observer article,
Regardless, David Crespi’s father—along with friends, former co-workers and neighbors—said Saturday he can’t imagine why his son would have done what he’s accused of doing. Lauren Crespi said he visited his son in North Carolina for Thanksgiving. The family enjoyed a visit to Old Salem in Winston-Salem, and “there were no signs of trouble.” “I just don’t understand why he turned on the children,” Lauren Crespi said. “I just don’t know what snapped.”
The next day, the Observer followed up with another front-page story, headlined “Few Answers for Shattered Family—Court Process for Father Begins in Twins’ Slayings.”
An excerpt from the article stated:
Mecklenburg County man accused of fatally stabbing his twin 5-year-old daughters has his first court appearance today, as his family tries to piece together how the man they knew might do such a thing.
“I never imagined Dave would do anything like that to his kids,” the girls’ uncle Kalvin Vande Brake told the Observer in a phone interview from his Sacramento, Calif., home. “That guy was not my brother-in-law that did this.”
The end of the article included this bit of information, the import of which wasn’t clear at the time:
Under N.C. law, 911 recordings are public record. Police declined Sunday for a third day to grant the Observer’s request to release the contents of the 911 call in the Crespi case. A police department attorney said police will ask a judge today to seal the contents of the recording. The department says the call serves as a crucial piece of evidence and releasing its contents might violate Crespi’s rights and hurt the prosecution. (Italics added for emphasis.)
On September 14, 1989, forty-seven-year-old Joseph Wesbecker walked through the front door of printing company Standard Gravure carrying a semiautomatic rifle, two 9-millimeter machine pistols, a .38 revolver, a third 9-millimeter pistol, and more than a thousand rounds of ammunition. Wearing a blank stare and laughing intermittently, he moved from room to room blasting away at his former colleagues, ultimately killing eight and wounding twelve more. He ended the massacre by shooting his own face off.
An autopsy revealed that Wesbecker had two brain-altering drugs in his bloodstream: lithium, a “mood stabilizer,” and a new antidepressant that had been released the year before by the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly: Prozac.
Eleven of the twelve victims of the mass shooting banded together and filed suit against Lilly, saying that the Prozac Joseph Wesbecker had taken helped incite his murderous rampage. On December 12, 1995, a jury voted nine to three to acquit the pharmaceutical giant on all charges. Lilly’s CEO, Randall Tobias, told the Associated Press, “We have proven in a court of law, just as we have to more than 70 scientific and regulatory bodies all over the world, that Prozac is safe and effective.”
“I Just Killed My Two Daughters”
CHAPTER TWO
“While there’s life, there’s hope.”
—Marcus Tullius Cicero
The inescapable facts of what happened in the Crespi household roughly between 12:05 to 12:37 p.m. on January 20, 2006, are these.
Just minutes after Kim Crespi left for her haircut, David Crespi, who was at home on medical leave, agreed to play hide and seek with his twins. As the children were finding their hiding place, David walked over to the kitchen counter, took two large knives out of the butcher block, and arranged them on the counter.
He found the girls in the pantry. David then took each of them by the arm, dragged them onto the kitchen floor, grabbed one of the knives from the counter, and tried to slaughter both little girls simultaneously. He started by stabbing Samantha repeatedly in the back and the chest. He stopped only when he thought Samantha had ceased breathing.
While David was focused on killing Samantha, Tessara wrested herself free, and she ran upstairs to hide. Once David was finished with Samantha, he returned to the kitchen counter, picked up the second knife, and walked upstairs. He found Tessara hiding behind some clothes in his walk-in bedroom closet, pulled her out, dragged her into the nearby master bathroom, pinned her down on the ceramic tiles, and stabbed her multiple times—again in the chest and the back, never in the face—until it seemed clear to him that she, too, was dead.
Afterward, David took off his bloodstained clothes and left them in a pile in his upstairs closet. He then washed up, changed into clean clothes, and at 12:37 p.m. he picked up his cell phone and dialed 911.
Following are excerpts from the transcript of David Crespi’s 911 call.
CHARLOTTE 911 OPERATOR: Police department.
DAVID CRESPI: Yes, I just killed my two daughters.
[Pause.]
CHARLOTTE 911: You just what?
CRESPI: I just killed my two daughters.
MATTHEWS 911 OPERATOR [breaking in on the conversation]: Matthews. That’s ours. Sir, tell me what happened. What’s going on now?
CRESPI: I just freaked out and killed them.
MATTHEWS 911: Are you on medication?
CRESPI: Yes.
MATTHEWS 911: Are they breathing or anything now?
CRESPI: They’re dead.
MATTHEWS 911: What did you do to them?
CRESPI: I stabbed them.
MATTHEWS 911: You stabbed them?
CRESPI: Yeah.
MATTHEWS 911: What’s your name, okay?
CRESPI: My name is David Crespi.
MATTHEWS 911: Okay, tell me what happened.
CRESPI: There’s two dead girls. I killed them. [David emits a winded moan.] I just lost it. [Same moan repeated.]
MATTHEWS 911: Okay, who are these girls?
CRESPI: They’re my daughters.
MATTHEWS 911: Your daughters?
CRESPI: Yes.
MATTHEWS 911: Okay, how old are they?
CRESPI: They’re five.
MATTHEWS 911: They’re twins?
CRESPI: Yeah.
MATTHEWS 911: How did you kill them?
CRESPI: With a knife.
MATTHEWS 911: What kind of meds are you on, sir?
CRESPI: I’m on antidepressants.
MATTHEWS 911: Keep talking, because you sound like you are a little bit tired…and we’re wondering if maybe you took too much medication.
CRESPI [winded]: This is real.
MATTHEWS 911: I know. I know. Everyone’s on their way.
The recording of David Crespi’s 911 call was not unsealed and released until October 4, 2006, almost three months after a superior court hearing was held in Charlotte to determine David’s fate. The police department and the prosecution had successfully fought to suppress the recording even though, under North Carolina law, 911 recordings are public record.
DAVID’S POLICE INTERVIEW
Once David Crespi was in custody, he was interviewed by the police for more than nine straight hours. The interview was videotaped, and no defense attorney was present.
In the videotape (which I have viewed multiple times; Kim gave me a DVD of the entire interview), David’s hair is unkempt. Several times, he sounds like he is out of breath—much like he sounded during the 911 call. And his speech is occasionally halting, confused.
At one point, the detectives ask David what was going through his mind prior to the killings. David tells them that over the years, he has fought through several bouts with depression—and it was during those bouts that he had thoughts of killing his wife, his children, and his parents. This is important because the district attorney’s office later asserted that David Crespi had entertained thoughts/“fantasies” about killing family members for more than a decade—both when he was depressed and when he wasn’t.
But David had always been able to fight off the idea of hurting his loved ones—until he was left alone with Tess and Sam.
“They wanted to play the game [hide-and-seek], and then I said, ‘I just. . . I’ve got to do this because I don’t want things to go on. . . And that would stop the. . . stop the thoughts,’” David said.
When asked what brought on his bouts with depression, David says, “It’s always been kind of when I’m struggling at work, and I can’t concentrate. I can’t see out of it. . . . I can’t take care of things. I’m like a zombie.” This inevitably caused him to worry that he was going to lose his job and that he wasn’t going to be able to support his family.
David also tells the detectives that he had not shared his dark thoughts with his therapists. When asked why, he says that he was afraid someone would take his children away from him. He also says, “I thought I could control it, you know, and I thought it wasn’t real. I thought I’d never actually do it.”
But on January 20, his dark, intrusive thoughts overwhelmed him. “I was home, I was typing. And then I said, ‘If I do this, then I won’t have to take care of everybody anymore.’”
“If you do what?” one of the detectives asks.
“I kill Tess and Sam. And the thoughts kept going.”
Asked why he’d stabbed Samantha so many times, David replies, “I wanted it to be over. I wanted it to be over for both of them.”
One of the detectives asks him if he could have stopped himself from killing the twins.
DAVID: “Probably—no. Had to happen today.”
DETECTIVE: “It had to happen today?”
DAVID: “It had to happen today because the thoughts weren’t—the thoughts weren’t stopping. . . . I didn’t want to go to the doctor this afternoon.”
DETECTIVE: “Why could you not kill just one?”
DAVID: “Because they’re twins. They go together.”
Toward the end of the interview, the detectives leave David unattended for a few minutes. Now alone, he utters the word “pride” out loud and then proceeds to repeat the word forty-nine times. Still alone, he next says, “You got in jail.” He repeats that sentence fourteen times. Then he says, “Mecklenburg County” and repeats those words thirty-nine times.
Two detectives then reenter the room, and the interview is terminated about ten minutes later.
INCARCERATED AND EXAMINED AT THE MECKLENBURG COUNTY JAIL
Contemporaneous notes written by a doctor who examined David at the Mecklenburg County jail capture details of David’s state of mind minutes after his arrival.
The doctor began by asking David, “What happened?”
“I lost track of my joy,” David replied.
After writing down David’s reply verbatim, the doctor noted that such a response was “irrational.”
The doctor subsequently observed in his notes that David exhibited “slow thinking”; that he had “psycho-motor difficulties” and was experiencing “confusion”; that he had “slow speech”; and that he was “delusional in his thinking”—and the doctor put two pluses beside this latter observation for emphasis. The doctor also wrote that David’s judgment and his insight were decreased.
The diagnosis: “Depression with major psychosis, rule out possible bipolar disorder.”
David was soon transferred to the mental health section of Central Prison in Raleigh for observation and treatment. The psychiatrist who evaluated David on January 25, 2006, noted that he was drowsy, that his speech was clear, that he still had psychomotor retardation, and that he was still confused. “He thought that he had come from a jail in Sacramento, California. . . . And when he was reminded that he had come from the Mecklenburg County jail, he agreed that that was the case,” the doctor wrote.
The doctor added: “In the past week he [also] thought he was a religious leader, and he thought he was in Florida and [that] he could transport himself away from there just by willing it.”
In a subsequent interview with another state-appointed psychiatrist, David talked of being told to murder his children by the lawn sprinklers, and he said he was convinced that Kim could bring the twins back to life.
NEW DETAILS EMERGE ABOUT DAVID' CRESPI’S MENTAL STATE LEADING UP TO THE KILLINGS
A Charlotte Observer article revealed that for ten years, David and Kim Crespi had repeatedly sought treatment for David’s insomnia and depression from the best physicians and psychiatrists they could find. “They followed every treatment plan given to them, and David took every medication prescribed to him,” Mecklenburg Assistant Public Defender Jean Lawson told the Observer. “[H]is prior treatment and medication were completely inadequate to control his mental illness.”
According to the same article, David had taken Paxil for his depression for several months prior to the tragedy. However, he had gained almost fifty pounds while he was on the drug. He consequently told his doctors that he no longer wanted to take Paxil. The doctors acceded to his request, and he was in the process of withdrawing from the antidepressant just weeks prior to the tragedy. David was also taking Trazodone for anxiety, and Ambien to help him sleep.
Seven days before the killings, David’s psychiatrists started him on a course of Prozac. He was increasingly anxious, and he still had trouble sleeping. As a result, David was taken off Ambien and put on Lunesta the day before the tragedy.
Following is the sequencing of the cocktail of drugs David was ingesting in the days leading up to January 20, 2006: ten days of Trazodone, ten days of Ambien, seven days of Prozac, and one night of Lunesta.
On February 19, 1997, Patricia Williamson, sixty, of Beaumont, Texas, stabbed and slashed herself more than one hundred times in the bathtub while her husband ate breakfast in their kitchen. On the advice of a psychiatrist, she had started taking Prozac six days earlier to help her through a depression that had arisen just a few months before. Her husband, hearing strange noises coming from the bathroom, pried open the door and found his wife of twenty years semiconscious in a pool of her own blood. She died the next day in the hospital.
Lawyers for Eli Lilly reached an out-of-court settlement with the Williamson family in the case.
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