dead in their beds

One man knew what happened – but could his testimony be trusted?

To the outside world, the Criado family was a happy and loving one.

The four adorable children – Elijah, 7, Isaac, 6, Andrew, 5, and Aurora, 2 – seemed to be the apple of their parents’ eyes.

Elijah amazed his teachers with his art projects, Isaac loved Thomas the Tank Engine, Andrew played with Hot Wheels, and Aurora, like many little girls, was crazy about Barbie.

Four typical kids, growing up in Oregon, USA. But their family had secrets...

It was 2003 when their parents Tabasha, then 21, and Jordan Criado, then 43, met at Bakersfield College, California.

Despite the 22-year age difference, they fell in love and started a family a year later.

But smitten Tabasha didn’t know Jordan had a dark past.

He had past convictions for molesting three young girls in the 1980s.

He’d served 11 years in prison.

When it came to light, Tabasha’s family asked her to leave him.

Tabasha refused, and moved the family to Medford, Oregon. But the couple’s relationship

wasn’t out of the woods.

Tabasha had an affair, and wanted to leave Jordan, and d this often caused d heated arguments.

In early July 2011, neighbours heard the couple rowing loudly late at night.

‘Hey, you need to calm down, the kids are asleep!’ Jordan reportedly shouted at his wife.

Then, on 17 July, mechanic Jordan reported his wife missing to the police. Officers found her a few blocks away and drove her home.

But the following day, at 9.23am, the police received another call from the same neighbourhood.

This time, it wasn’t just the police who were needed.

Firefighters and ambulances raced to the scene, too.

The Criado house was on fire, smoke billowing from the roof.

Little did the emergency

services know, but a few minutes later they would carry a child’s limp body out of the house. In fact, within the next 30 minutes, the bodies of four children were brought out of the home, and laid on the lawn. A woman’s body, too. The firefighters desperately performed CPR on the family.

But, as neighbours gathered, the situation worsened.

It became apparent that deep wounds punctured the mother and children’s bodies.

They hadn’t just been in a fire – they’d been stabbed.

The emergency team searched for pulses, pulled aside bloody clothing, pumped the children’s tiny chests, breathed air into their lungs.

The efforts were in vain. Four children and a woman were pronounced dead at the scene.

Elijah, Isaac, Andrew, Aurora

and their mother Tabasha.

So terrible.

A man was brought out, still fighting for life, and taken to the local medical centre.

‘The front yard looked like it was a plane crash or something, the people working on these folks,’ said Police Chief Tim George.

The children’s and mother’s deaths were listed as being the result of smoke inhalation.

But for Andrew and Isaac, additional causes were stab wounds to the neck.

Post-mortems showed Tabasha had been knifed multiple times in the neck and abdomen.

Dad Jordan was in hospital unconscious, on a ventilator, for days.

But the police had a suspect in the case – and that was Jordan Criado himself.

Finally discharged from hospital, Criado was taken straight to jail. Charged with aggravated murder. In 2013, the trial began. In fact, Jordan Criado was facing 36 charges – 24 counts of aggravated murder and four counts each of murder, first-degree manslaughter and first-degree arson. The various charges were connected to the five victims – his own family – and the different legal theories relating to their deaths. In an emotional plea hearing, Criado admitted the murder of his wife, but strongly denied claims he’d killed his four children. He said that he didn’t know whether he’d set fire to their home. Criado claimed that he was the primary carer for the children and that his wife Tabasha suffered from mental illness. He alleged that he was outside fixing a car at the time of the fire, and said Tabasha had returned home that morning. He claimed that she’d been out all night and he’d been looking after the kids. ‘She was a broken woman. I had no right to take her life. But I did not kill my babies,’ he claimed.

‘When they needed me the most, I wasn’t there. I knew she was not well. But I never thought she would hurt the babies.’

But lawyer Beth Heckert had other explanations of what happened that fateful day.

She, alongside the investigators, claimed that Jordan Criado had killed the family in their beds.

Then, Heckert claimed, he’d locked the house doors, and barricaded the front door shut with a couch.

Lighting several fires around the house, next Jordan doused himself and furniture with oil.

Turning on the oven, he sliced his wrists and then lay down on top of the children.

‘He was attempting to commit suicide after killing his family,’ Heckert said.

She believed that he’d been a good father, but also that he’d killed the entire family.

She described Criado as selfish, controlling, jealous.

Criado – often emotional throughout the trial – was clearly dealing with the grief of the loss of his children.

‘I killed my wife because she killed my babies – my life,’ he told the court, never wavering from his story.

And now, the jury had to decide who had killed the Criado children. Their father, or their mother…