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player ready...It took jurors only about 45 minutes Thursday to find Christopher Vaughn guilty of what prosecutors said was one of Will County’s most horrific slayings, the handgun murders of Vaughn’s wife and three children inside the family’s SUV.
The family of Vaughn’s wife, Kimberly, began crying softly when Judge Daniel Rozak read the four guilty verdicts. As he had throughout the five-week trial, Vaughn showed no emotion, only rubbing his mouth with his right hand while Rozak finished reading.
He said nothing before being shackled and led from the courtroom as Kimberly’s family members embraced.
Vaughn was charged with the 2007 murders of his wife and their children, Abigayle, 12, Cassandra, 11, and Blake, 8, who were shot at close range while buckled into the Oswego family’s red Ford Expedition.
Prosecutors alleged Vaughn pulled the SUV onto a frontage road off Interstate 55 near Channahon on the way to what he told his family was a trip to a Springfield water park. Vaughn then shot Kimberly once under the chin, pushed her body to the side and methodically gunned down his children, shooting each once in the head and once in the torso.
Jurors, who heard from nearly 90 witnesses and saw more than 700 exhibits, said they had no doubts about Vaughn’s guilt and did not even consider the defense theory that Kimberly Vaughn murdered her children, then killed herself after shooting at her husband.
Christopher Vaughn suffered superficial wounds to his left wrist and leg.
“This case is not just a murder, it’s an atrocity,” said Will County State’s Attorney James Glasgow outside the Joliet courthouse. “To annihilate your family, I can’t think of a more unspeakable crime.
“We’ve never had anyone kill their family execution-style like this.”
Crime scene photos showed the children amid a pile of blankets and pillows. Abigayle was asleep clutching a Harry Potter novel and a stuffed animal when she was killed, but there were signs that Blake, the last to be shot, woke up and raised his arm to try to fend off the bullets from his father’s Taurus 9 mm, prosecutors said.
Kimberly’s family, including her mother, father and twin sister, was in court Thursday but declined to comment until after Vaughn is sentenced Nov. 26. The family released a short statement thanking investigators.
David Butsch, an attorney and spokesman for Kimberly Vaughn’s family, said the jury’s quick verdict “speaks volumes” and offers some measure of closure to her parents, Del and Susan Phillips.
“They’ve been through a horrible ordeal, but they are people of faith, and that is what has gotten them through this,” Butsch said.
He said Vaughn’s claims that Kimberly was the killer “sort of added insult to injury.” The family is still wondering how Vaughn could have committed such an unspeakable act.
“There are a lot of unanswered questions,” Butsch said.
Jurors on Thursday heard more than six hours of closing arguments.
Assistant State’s Attorney Mike Fitzgerald first walked jurors through the evidence, detailing again the prosecutors’ theory that Vaughn slaughtered his family because he wanted to leave behind his suburban life for a solitary one in the Canadian wilderness.
Vaughn had considered asking a stripper he had spent thousands of dollars on in the weeks before the slayings to join him. But first he had to be rid of “four obstacles” in his life — his wife and three children, Fitzgerald said.
“They were holding him down, and he had to find a way to get out of the life he was in,” Fitzgerald said. “And the way he chose was to murder his wife and children and make it look like Kimberly did it.”
Defense attorney George Lenard spent two hours detailing Vaughn’s defense — that Kimberly, unhappy and on a mix of medicines that can increase the risk of suicide, was behind the slayings.
“That’s the problem with this case,” Lenard said. “There’s somebody else who could’ve committed the crime.”
He reminded jurors that experts found that both theories of what happened in the Ford Expedition were possible, argued that the evidence showed Kimberly had killed herself and noted flaws in the investigation — including a bloody towel found in Kimberly’s lap that was washed before being tested.
In his rebuttal argument, Assistant State’s Attorney Christopher Regis walked jurors through what he said were Vaughn’s “bizarre” statements to police after the slayings, statements Regis compared to “a bad movie script.”
The Oswego man showed no emotion when state police investigators tried to goad him over his alleged adultery and other topics, Regis pointed out, but Vaughn was bothered when investigators tried to make him look at photos of his children.
At one point, after a police investigator told Vaughn to stop sweeping the photos away, Vaughn grabbed one, crumpled it up and threw it, a video of the interview played for jurors showed.
“That’s what (ticked) him off — making him look at his kids,” said Regis, who pointed out that Vaughn couldn’t remember one of his children’s birth dates but was worried that investigators would damage his boots and fleece jacket.
Later, Vaughn was left alone in the room with the remaining photo of his son Blake, which he kept pushing away from him, video showed. “That picture is a telltale heart. It’s beating louder and louder, screaming at him, and he doesn’t know what to do,” Regis said
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Regis said Vaughn’s actions, pushing the photo away, speak volumes. Regis told jurors that Vaughn was saying, “Get away from me, leave me alone, kid. I thought I was done with you.”
“Nothing screams I’m guilty more than that man’s reaction when he’s alone in a room with that child he murdered just hours before,” Regis said.
Regis painted Vaughn as a narcissist who was isolated and miserable in his suburban existence of fenced-in backyards and mundane family life. Vaughn yearned to be free of obligations and carefully planned his exit strategy, he said.
The speedy verdict had Kimberly Vaughn’s family scrambling, leaving their lunch uneaten at a nearby restaurant where the judge hearing the case was having a drink at the bar when news of the jury’s decision arrived.
Jury foreman Dan Lachat, an attorney from Mokena with three children, said jurors never had any doubt of Vaughn’s guilt. It was not only the totality of the evidence that convinced them, but also Vaughn’s flat demeanor.
“If you watched him throughout the trial like we did … I think you’d come to the same conclusion as we did,” he said.