Xmas Evil...
What drove James Bigby to murder three men and a baby just before Christmas?
At 4am on Christmas Eve 1987, Grace Kehler returned home from work in Arlington, Texas, and made a horrifying discovery.
Her husband Michael Trekell, 26, was dead on the kitchen floor.
He’d been shot in the head. Terrified, she ran to look for their 4-month-old son Jayson. This was meant to be his first Christmas.
But he wasn’t in his cot.
Grace let out a blood-curdling scream when she found her infant son drowned in the bathroom sink.
Their first Christmas as a family had been violently ripped from her grasp.
Not far away, police also discovered the body of Frank Curtis Johnson Jr on his front porch and Calvin Crane Jr on a city street.
Both men had fatal gunshot wounds.
A car at Crane’s home was traced to James Eugene Bigby, an unemployed mechanic from the nearby city of Fort Worth.
Police soon realised that the three murdered men had known each other, as well as James Bigby, who’d worked with them.
Two days later, an anonymous tip told police that Bigby had checked into a nearby motel.
A SWAT team raced there, where a stand-off ensued until police hostage negotiator Larry Ansley approached the room door to convince Bigby to give himself up. He eventually surrendered and was arrested and charged.
In his room, police found two pistols, a sawn-off shotgun, a flare gun and ammunition.
‘I know I’m guilty, and so do you,’ Bigby coldly told Ansley.
But why had these horrific killings happened?
What had driven this man to go on a murderous rampage on Christmas Eve?
Bigby was known as a moody, irritable and often unpredictable man.
In his younger days, he had been a car thief and a drug dealer.
In 1977, Bigby had served a short jail sentence for burglary.
He was sent to prison for a second time in 1983, this time for car theft and theft of over $200 (around £150).
A friend who used to help him steal cars said that he took drugs with Bigby.
He added that, at the start of the 1980s, Bigby was taking so many methamphetamines he had to use a calendar to remind him he needed to sleep.
Bigby had also been admitted to psychiatric wards on two occasions and had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.
She found her son drowned in the bathroom sink
Conspiracy theory
Around this time, he was also in the process of divorcing his wife.
‘He was under a lot of pressure,’ said his father William, but he admitted that he didn’t see his
son very often and he never told him much about his personal life.
But how had Bigby gone from being a car thief and petty criminal to a murderer?
Investigators soon learned that Bigby had filed a lawsuit for a worker’s compensation case against the company he’d previously been employed by, for injuries he claimed to have sustained while on the job.
Bigby was convinced that Trekell, Crane and Johnson were conspiring against him on behalf of his old bosses, to discredit him in the case.
He also told police that his old company sent private investigators to follow him, and that they were trying to kill him.
Police quickly realised they were dealing with a disturbed man.
Days before the murders, he’d reportedly told friends that he wanted to ‘go out in a blaze of glory’ and was willing to kill a lot of people, as well as any police officers who attempted to stop him.
They never expected him to make good on his promise, as he did in the early hours of Christmas Eve 1987.
Bigby had first gone to Trekell’s home as a friend on the night of 23 December, and the pair spent the evening together watching television.
Murder in mind?
When Trekell went to the kitchen, Bigby pulled out a gun and shot him in the forehead.
He told the police that he had then gone to little Jayson’s room, where he suffocated the infant and left him face down in the water in the bathroom sink.
Had Bigby gone there with murderous intentions? Or had the urge to kill struck him once he was inside the home of a man he thought was betraying him?
He later admitted that, while he’d been thinking about how to get back at Trekell for a while, he didn’t know why he murdered his 4-month-old son as well.
‘I regret killing the baby, but not the other,’ he admitted to police.
Consumed by bloodlust, Bigby then left Trekell’s home to seek his violent, fatal vengeance against Crane and Johnson.
Bigby never stood trial for those slayings – but, in 1991, confessed to the murders of Michael Trekell and Jayson Kehler while pleading innocent by reason of insanity.
However, psychiatrists deemed him fit to stand trial, and even testified that Bigby’s mental disorder wasn’t severe enough to interfere with his understanding of right and wrong.
During a court recess in the March, Bigby managed to break free of the bailiffs and tried to hold Judge Don Leonard hostage at gunpoint, before being disarmed and wrestled to the ground by Leonard and prosecuting attorney Robert Mayfield.
The jury rejected Bigby’s insanity plea and sentenced him to death, deeming him to be too dangerous to be reintroduced to society.
This verdict was overturned on appeal in 2005, but Bigby received the death penalty once again at his second trial.
In March 2017, James Bigby was executed by lethal injection, aged 61, and sang Jesus Loves Me to himself as he waited for death to take him.
Bigby: ‘I regret killing the baby but not the other’ He told friends he wanted to go out in a blaze of glory