Original subtitles

The horror cliché is that it happens on a dark,

stormy night.

And that's what this was.

I was working at the patrol division,

but the rain was so torrential, and the storm was so bad,

you couldn't drive.

I chose to take shelter in my patrol car.

This man approached my car and he said,

"Thank you for meeting me here."

I had no idea.

I said, "What are you talking about?"

and he said, "Well, I called Little Rock dispatch

"and asked him to send an officer here

'cause I was worried about my client."

"I'm the attorney and my client just called me and told me

"to rush over to his home.

"Phone went dead.

"I've tried to call, and I'm not getting him.

I'm a little concerned."

I asked him, "Was there anyone else in the home?"

And he said, "Yes, his wife and their two daughters."

I approached the home. It was very dark.

And I noticed that the front door of the home

is cracked six to eight inches, just enough for me to see.

But I'm not hearing anything.

So I called for backup.

I had only been a police officer for a year and a half.

I was nervous.

Your adrenaline is running.

We don't know what we're gonna find.

And then, I noticed...

there was blood.

This is a photo of me in 1987

as a rookie patrol officer, 21 years old.

Dispatch called me to the scene.

Walking in the door, the power was still out.

It was like something out of a horror film to me.

I was nervous.

The house just had this weird feeling.

Then I knew something was bad there.

You can smell blood, and the blood it has

a distinct smell to it.

You could really smell it there.

And then during this time, we lost radio traffic.

We could not communicate with our dispatch.

We could not communicate with other officers.

No cell phones in 1987, so we were kind of stuck

out there by ourselves.

It was pretty creepy.

It was just kind of

uh, dead silent.

The lights are off in the home.

We're using our flashlight, looking in corners

of different rooms and things.

We noticed to the right, an office area

where there was a body laying.

It was John Markle.

He was laying against a wall.

He was deceased, and there was blood on each side of the head.

After we found his body, that's the moment where we had

a concern that we had a homicide.

Now, my concern was the safety of the family.

Knowing that there were a wife and possibly

two children in the home,

so we backed out and moved on through the home quickly.

I was nervous walking up those stairs, what I might find.

We kinda said, "Who's going first?"

My pulse and my heart rate was pounding.

On the second floor it was just a TV

sitting in the middle of a hallway for some reason

on a cart.

And there were bedrooms either side of the hallway.

I was like, "Ugh, you know, this is,

you know, kind of creepy."

We go into a little girl's room.

I remember first seeing the walls were pink.

There was a record player there in the room, posters,

stuffed animals and stuff.

And then I look up,

there's blood all over those pink walls.

This is very vivid to me.

I find a young child in the bed,

and I walk around to the other side of the bed,

and there's a second child.

We found her in the same bed next to her sister.

Thirteen-year-old Amy...

and nine-year-old Suzanne.

Both been shot to death.

In the master bedroom,

we found 45-year-old Christine Markle

sprawled across the bed with gunshot wounds.

She was in her nightgown.

To me, it looked like she had woke up,

put her feet on the floor, went to sit up or stand up.

Or maybe she heard something and she was getting out of bed.

She had what appeared to be gunshots to the face

and the head.

This was an entire family that had been murdered.

Their life stopped...

at that moment for that family.

The electricity, the power did come back on.

The video was a horror movie, "Nightmare on Elm Street."

It was pretty freaky.

I remember walking down those stairs,

just kind of numb from what I'd seen.

We got our radio traffic going again.

We radioed to communications or dispatch,

letting them know at that time that we obviously

had a homicide.

So the detectives began their investigation.

They went through the house room-by-room,

taking anything that they believed

could help them in the investigation.

And they found dozens of letters

and documents.

And then I could see that there was a briefcase

sitting there with some note attached to it.

The note said basically that, "I murdered my wife,

Christine, my daughters, Amy and Suzanne."

He signed it, John Markle.

At first glance, this would seem like an open-and-shut

murder-suicide from everything that you saw right there.

But there were some things that seemed odd.

I remember vividly that there was a mask

that was laying near John Markle's body,

like an old man mask. There was blood on that mask.

The mask found at the scene, at first I wondered,

you know, why? Why is that there?

Because it was not a ski mask, not even a hockey mask.

It was a Halloween mask. So that stuck with me.

We found inside the briefcase, there was a birth certificate,

passport, car title.

But what really stood out was the cash

that was found in there.

Items that somebody might have in there

if they were getting ready to disappear

or try to leave the country or something like that.

But one of the oddest things...

was the fact that John Markle was shot

with two different guns

at the same time in the head.

Found near his body was a western-style .45, and a .45

is a very large caliber.

And then also a .38 caliber revolver.

I don't know the odds of someone being able

to shoot themselves simultaneously

with a gun on each side of the head.

It seems to me like it'd be one in a million.

I wanna try to figure out, how did this happen?

What caused this to happen?

Are we sure that John Markle killed his family

and killed himself?

Is this, in fact, what happened?

Or is this what somebody wants us to see?

People start hypothesizing,

there's gotta be a crazy man out there that did this.

I later learned that "Friday the 13th" was

just a few days before the Markle murders.

So between the movie,

the old man mask,

and the evil bad luck day,

we just had some feeling that there's something going on

that we didn't quite understand.

I covered the Markle murders.

And it was all-hands-on-deck.

Everybody was trying to get the scoop

on what really happened.

Here in Little Rock,

everybody knew the Markles.

It is something that catches everybody off guard.

A whole family slaughtered like that.

I was a close friend with Amy Markle.

This is a picture of me at 13 at that time.

Amy and I met in 1986 at the beginning

of our seventh grade year.

Amy was an exceptional student and just a very caring person

about everybody.

My father had to move to Dallas,

and John was a parental figure that would listen to me

and kind of take me under his wing.

I remember Suzanne as being kind of more boisterous,

more talkative, but when she was frightened,

would turn to her sister.

But like during storms, she would often climb in bed

with her sister just so she'd feel safe.

The mom, Christine, was kind of a classic mom,

as you saw on like TV shows and such back in the '80s,

literally in the PTA, and did a bunch

of volunteering.

John Markle, he was a very loving father.

He loved his daughters dearly, and he would do

anything for them.

John was the son of Hollywood royalty.

His mother was Mercedes McCambridge,

an Academy Award-winning actress

for "All the King's Men."

Later on, she voiced the demon's voice

in "The Exorcist."

They were the all-American family.

Dad had this great job.

The girls were enrolled in school.

They were traveling in the right circles.

They were attending the right churches.

They had the right friends.

They were just a happy, all-American family.

News broke about the murder.

And it was a police officer who went inside the house

and found Markle, his wife, and his two daughters.

The city was just completely-- just shocked.

I was watching TV with my family

in the morning before school.

And I see these body bags being rolled out

of a big downtown house.

I remember Froot Loops being in my mouth

and just saying, "That's-- that's Amy's house."

Multiple bodies came out, and I just started

just bawling.

It was devastating.

I was a detective with the Little Rock Police Department

in 1987, and I had been a detective

for a little over a year.

I was assigned to the Markle murders

to investigate the financial aspects of it.

At first glance, everything appeared to be

an open-and-shut case because, you know,

the scene, the suicide note.

But nobody had ever heard of this suicide with using

two guns simultaneously.

I was directed to go out and do a neighborhood canvass.

We knocked on doors and saw if anybody

heard anything overnight.

On the night of the murders, there were reports

that John left the house

and he was followed by a white truck.

And then a short while later, his family was dead.

At that point, detectives are working on this case,

doing their background investigations into the family

and looking into everything John was involved in.

We had to see if there was anybody else out there

that may have been involved or had motivation

to hurt the Markles.

We learned John Markle was a vice president

at Stevens Inc.

He was supposedly a financial whiz.

He would work these incredibly long hours.

He was raking in $3 million in trades.

John Markle moved in a world where fortunes were made

and lost overnight.

It was said that the Markles knew the Clintons,

Bill and Hillary.

Amy Markle's friend was Chelsea Clinton.

The girls knew each other, played together.

In fact, Hillary Clinton and Chelsea Clinton both

attended the family's funeral.

And when you have an influential family,

it's gonna make it a high-profile case.

A lot of rumors, a lot of questions.

So, we'd started looking into the Markles'

financial records.

We then started to discover various red flags popping up.

The one thing that was out of the norm was

that he was writing a number of checks every week...

to cash.

This was to the tune of $600 to $1,000 a week.

With inflation today, that would be approximately

$10,000 a month.

So the fact that these checks were so consistent

really raised my curiosity as to where this money was going.

People whispered about their wealth,

their influence, and their connections,

and now they were whispering about something else.

Murder.

In the 1980s, Arkansas was ground zero for some

of the largest scandals in the country.

They were all kinds of crazy stories that came to light.

The Whitewater bank fraud that occurred,

where corruption ran so deep that ultimately

a number of banks failed nationwide.

The cost to the taxpayers was $500 billion.

This was a time in Arkansas where all the right people

got rich and everybody else got screwed.

A fair amount of other crime was occurring within the state.

There was conspiracy theories at that time of two boys

that were found

that had supposedly died on the railroad tracks

just outside of Little Rock.

The investigation initially ruled it as a suicide.

A subsequent autopsy then led to believe that, in fact,

they were murdered.

Because the Markle murders occurred during this timeframe,

all the other deaths, suicides, murders,

it just played into the ongoing conspiracies.

And two months prior to the murders

at the Main Street residence of the Markles,

another high-profile, eerily similar case

occurred in Biloxi, Mississippi.

Judge Vincent Sherry, who was a municipal judge,

and his wife Margaret, who is a city councilwoman

in Biloxi, Mississippi.

Somebody came through the front door

and shot Judge Vincent Sherry.

This was conducted by somebody with professional marksmanship

and skill to be able to move through the house

without being detected.

And then they executed Margaret Sherry.

She was shot in the back of the head.

Neither one showed any apparent signs of struggle

and were slain where they were.

Investigators were interviewing prison inmates

several hundred miles away.

Eventually, detectives uncovered the motivations

behind the crime, that it was tied back to a financial fraud

that had occurred.

Sherrys was killed because a hit was put on them.

The primary suspects were involved with what was referred

to as the Dixie Mafia,

also known as the Cornbread Mafia.

So we wanted to explore if anybody associated or affiliated

with the Dixie Mafia was involved...

with John Markle or his family.

Was this a family tragedy or was this

something more calculated?

Everything started screaming that it was

something calculated.

Suzanne had five shots, Amy had four,

Chris had three, John had two,

and there was one bullet left in the chamber.

I can only interpret that as a message.

I have heard of a group called the Dixie Mafia

since I started at the Police Department in 1984.

They were an organized group of southern criminals

that stretched from Arkansas down to Mississippi, Louisiana.

The Dixie Mafia was bound together by one thing,

and that was money.

They would do burglaries,

armed robberies of banks or armored cars

and things of that nature.

Dixie Mafia had politicians and businessmen

in their pockets.

One of the signature moves that you get with the mafia

in this area, the Dixie Mafia, is murders that are staged

to look like suicides.

The phrase is "suicided."

If John Markle had gotten involved with some bad people,

maybe they did this to him.

Sometimes you can find yourself in trouble

with the wrong people.

Any leads, that's when the toxicology reports came in,

They noticed something a little unusual in the reports.

All of them had Elavil in their system.

Elavil is an antidepressant, and it can cause drowsiness.

It was somehow introduced to their bloodstream

in an apparent attempt to make them drowsy.

If this was a hit by the Dixie Mafia,

they could have drugged the family to incapacitate them

so they could take 'em out.

But there were some things that started to line up

and not really fit the mold.

Why so much violence?

Probably, you could have killed them with the medication.

You didn't really need the weapons.

Why do you need to shoot them so many times

with what turned out to be pretty high-caliber guns, too,

you know, that would do a lot of damage.

What happened to the Markles was totally different

from what occurred in Mississippi.

They were shot and killed in a manner that just

didn't add up.

You had different weapons involved.

And then the fact, you know, that that mask

over near the victim's body.

"Nightmare on Elm Street" movie being played in the TV

that night.

I was thinking, what's that about?

Was it left there by someone trying to leave

a message or a warning?

Was it something much more sinister?

If John Markle had gotten involved with something bigger,

then we needed to prove that.

That's when they started looking back

at John Markle's briefcase and the contents

of what was in the briefcase.

We culled through all those documents.

We then started to discover he was deeply in debt.

As detectives dug deeper, they found a secret account.

It led us to one date.

And that's the date that everything unraveled

for John Markle.

And that was Friday the 13th.

Markle was a top-earner at the company,

but it turns out he was actually involved in a big scheme

where he was manipulating money, moving trades around,

and covering his tracks while doing so.

Over $5 million had been embezzled out of the accounts

over the years.

His employer confronted him, and at that point,

he admitted to his wrongdoing.

On Friday the 13th on 1987,

Markle was fired from his job.

It was the day that he lost everything.

We wanted to explore who may have benefited

from the financial embezzlement.

So we went out and subpoenaed bank records,

interviewed a number of people that worked with him,

trying to follow the path of the money.

We started looking into where this money was going.

Some of it we were able to trace going back

to someone close to the Markles.

Someone John blamed for killing his entire family.

Everybody that knows Little Rock,

you're gonna hear about that Markle house.

It sits kind of by itself up on that hill.

And you can just look at that house and tell,

especially at night, that there's something

off there.

I read stories of the ghost of Suzanne appearing,

and that just-- that kind of thing just-- is just sad.

It's, "Oh, it's a ghost," but this is a friend,

this is somebody I cared about.

I just wanted to know, why did this happen?

As we all know, Friday the 13th is

one of the unluckiest days of the year, supposedly.

A lot of people don't wanna do anything.

They don't wanna fly, they don't wanna go anywhere.

And in November 1987, it happened to be

the unluckiest day for John Markle

of his life at that point.

John Markle had gotten caught up in an embezzlement

and stealing money from his company.

So as we started looking into where this money was going,

we were able to trace going back to John Markle's own mother,

Mercedes McCambridge, to her house in San Diego,

as well as her accounts out there.

My primary goal was to see whether or not she was aware

of what he was doing and whether or not she had

financial benefited from this arrangement.

I made contact with Mercedes.

She was guarded in her response.

She denied being involved.

She said that she provided the money to invest

in her granddaughters' education.

And I could see that as she processed that thought,

some sadness came over her.

And what we learned was she didn't know anything

about the embezzlement.

But there was never a clear and concise reason

why he did this.

When detectives searched the home again

and started taking any financial documents

that could show what was going on in his life,

they found dozens of letters and documents

that John had written.

There was one letter that stood out.

It was a 12-page letter addressed to his mother,

Mercedes McCambridge.

Based on this letter that John wrote to his mother,

his relationship with her was not very good.

In the letter that John Markle wrote to his mother,

he said, "I was conceptualized to save a bad marriage.

"I was essentially raised by live-in maids and relatives.

You were working."

He felt she was more, you know, in tune to being in Hollywood

and doing the actress/movie star role than being his mother.

He talks about the way that he tried to prove himself

to her by getting a PhD, by getting this

great-paying job, by starting his own family and prospering,

but did not feel that anything was ever good enough

for his mother.

John blamed his mother for the problems he was facing.

And he said, "She's a demon."

And in fact, she voiced the demon's voice

in "The Exorcist,"

the movie that changed her life.

"The Exorcist" isn't really just a horror movie.

There's something dark that was attached to the project.

Crew members suffered from freak accidents,

broken bones, severed fingers.

Nine people connected with the film died eerie deaths.

There was a fire.

It burned everything except the room

where the possession was to take place.

Linda Blair, the little girl that played Regan,

suffered severe spinal damage from an accident on set.

Her real screams of pain made it into the final cut

of the film.

Eventually, the director had to bring in a priest

to perform an exorcism on set.

The exorcist became more than a role.

It became an obsession for Mercedes.

It wasn't hard for me...

to imagine the rage.

She claimed to have chain-smoked and drank heavily

to bring the demon's voice to life.

That isn't hard.

As we dug deeper into John's letter,

one story stood out regarding the car accident

that he was involved in where he almost died.

He was in ICU, had a significant head trauma,

and she never once visited him.

In the letter he wrote,

"I'm released from the hospital.

"I kept calling you and the phone was always busy.

"I called a cab and I go to your apartment."

"My head is wrapped in bandages and gauze.

"I see you naked on the floor.

"Pills and bottles all over the floor,

and your suicide note."

And ends up having to call for help to save her life.

The only thing that he ever wanted from his mother was

for her to love him.

But she wasn't capable...

of being a true mother to her own son.

She kind of became the demon,

and she passed that on to her son.

So as we were looking into it, it was hard to understand

why he was sending money back to his mother.

I think that she had so much control over him

that he was just powerless.

Markle was fired from his job.

He was going to lose his license,

no doubt, lose his house.

He had been entertained the thought

of moving to Australia.

He was gonna go to jail, possibly, or have to pay back

millions of dollars.

And at this point,

John reached out with an olive branch to his mother,

asking her for help.

It was a very humbling situation for him,

because here he had always been in that role of trying

to impress his mother, and now he had to reach out

in a very, very embarrassing situation and ask for help.

Markle is groveling with his mother, begging,

pleading, almost on his hands and knees, to get money

to get out of this trouble.

She essentially told him that, "You made your bed,

you're gonna have to sleep in it."

And I think for John, this was the ultimate betrayal

from a mother who he had always hoped would help him out.

Mercedes McCambridge was a malignant narcissist.

The one time that he really needed her,

she just wasn't there for him.

That's when his anger turned to something much darker,

much more sinister.

But we still didn't know about how his death had come about.

You know, there was no way that one individual could have

shot himself simultaneously with both handguns.

This all just makes it that much more strange.

On Friday the 13th, 1987, a switch was thrown.

Was that the trigger in John Markle's mind?

The house of cards essentially toppled down.

He was consumed with the darkness of despair.

The only thing he was going to run from or escape from

was life in itself...

and take his wife and children with him.

This wasn't a spur-of-the-moment,

spontaneous rampage that he went on.

It was thought out and planned.

That night, those two young children and Christine

were probably thinking of, you know, going to school,

meeting up with their friends, whatever activities

that they were looking forward to the next day.

No idea that this was their last day on earth.

Their father had introduced Elavil into their bloodstream.

That night, John also rented "Nightmare on Elm Street"

for the whole family to watch.

The movie "Nightmare on Elm Street"

is about a man who killed people who were sleeping.

So after the family watched the movie

and the kids were in bed, his wife went to bed

and John waited until they were in a deep sleep

from the medication.

And after he was assured of that is when he began.

That video that was playing in the hallway upstairs

may have been a ploy to scare the children?

To encourage both girls to sleep together,

to be able to console each other through the night,

both tucked in bed, you know, with covers

pulled up around them.

He wouldn't have to go to a separate bedroom

to kill each one.

And then he put his mask on

and went to his children's bedroom.

This is the actual mask that John Markle wore

when he killed his entire family.

He couldn't bear for them to see his face,

to know that he was the person behind the mask

pulling the trigger and taking their lives.

He planned the firing of those bullets

to coordinate with the horrible thunderstorm

in Little Rock that night.

The thunder, the lightning would probably cover up

the sounds of the gunshots

and any screams that may have happened.

Christine might have been startled awake

and sat up because maybe she heard the gunfire

in her daughter's room.

You Know, what is it that Christine experienced

that night?

Did she see him with the mask on?

How horrific it would have been to be asleep in your bed

and someone shows up with two guns and a mask on.

After he went back downstairs to his study,

and he started writing these letters,

He called the attorney to the house.

There was gunshot residue on John's hands.

They were in contact with a weapon.

The fact that he was able to shoot himself twice

you know, at the same time with two different guns,

I guess it all just makes it that much more...

um, strange.

I believe that I may have been across the street

when the shootings occurred.

You know, I was there for an hour or longer

with that storm.

Did I hear the final gunshots?

Did he see me pull up?

I don't know.

The big question was why he struck out

against his own family instead of striking out

at the person he was really angry at,

which was his mother.

And in my mind, I think that she had so much control

and power over him, he couldn't strike out

against that monster.

So John Markle slaughtered her entire family.

Out of all the scenes that I've been to,

it's the one that stuck with me the most over the last,

you know, almost 40 years.

I've never forgotten those pink walls

with all the blood and everything splattered

all over it.

In my mind, I go back to the drawing

on the refrigerator,

on like, the colored construction paper.

"Love you, Daddy. Love you, Mommy."

And, uh, that was-- that was pretty...

devastating.

The Markle house has kind of taken on a life of its own,

as things like this do.

It will always be recognized as the murder house.

It's there and it's livable, but it's vacant.

Nobody wants to live there.

I would think...

it would take a special person to live there very long.

Somebody recently referred to that house

as a scar in the city.

Even decades later, people still remember

because some nightmares don't die.

Some stories don't fade, like this one about a woman

who gave a voice to a demon

and the son who became one.

[eerie music[

There is a history of Cape Fear being cursed.

Barbara Ann Lewis was strangled to death.

On Friday the 13th it started happening again.

Is it going to be tonight?

Is it going to be tomorrow night?

You didn't know when he was going to strike again.

It's not safe to be alone.