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This week's case takes us to Channahone, Illinois in June 2007. Around 5.15 a.m. on June 14, 2007, police officers were dispatched to a wooded area near the Bluff Road interchange in I-55. A motorist called 911 after spotting an adult male bleeding and limping away from a vehicle parked on the road's shoulder.
When first responders and paramedics arrived on the scene, they encountered a pickup truck and two males. One of the males was the motorist who called 911, and the other one was covered in blood. Paramedics began treating the male victim, who suffered two gunshot wounds, one to the left hand and another to his left thigh. While paramedics worked on him, additional officers arrived on the scene.
One of the officers approached the male victim and asked him, what happened? Was he in a car accident? No, the victim responded. A few minutes later, officers discovered a Ford Expedition SUV parked down the road. Inside the SUV, the officers made a horrifying discovery.
Inside were four victims. One adult female was seated in the front passenger seat and three young children sat in the back. All four had suffered gunshot wounds. Paramedics immediately began working on all four victims. They looked for any signs of life, but there were none. All four people were shot to death.
The adult female victim had one gunshot wound to the bottom of her chin, and all three of the young children had been fatally shot two times each. Each were shot with a 9mm handgun that the police found lying on the ground under the front seat. All four victims appeared to have been shot by point-blank range. The adult female suffered a contact gunshot wound underneath her chin.
One of the young female children had been shot near the right eye and in her right lower chest. The other young female was shot in the middle of her forehead and in her chest. Finally, the young boy victim had been shot in the forehead and near the under part of his left underarm, an indication that he had raised his arm in a defensive motion.
Once the four victims inside the SUV were pronounced dead, first responders transported the only surviving adult male victim to the hospital where he would receive treatment for non-life-threatening injuries to his wrist and leg. He told the police and the doctors at the hospital that his name was Christopher Vaughn and that it was his family inside the SUV.
Christopher told the police that the adult female inside the car was his 34-year-old wife, Kimberly Vaughn, and the three children were his kids, 12-year-old Abigail, 11-year-old Cassandra, and his son, 8-year-old Blake.
During the police's first interview with Christopher at the hospital, he seemed shocked that he'd been shot. He had no idea what happened and didn't understand how he'd been shot because no one was around his car and his wife didn't have a gun. He told the police officers that he and his family were going to a water park in Springfield, Illinois.
They left their house around 5 a.m. When they traveled south on I-55, he said that his wife, Kimberly, started to get sick. She'd been taking prescription medication for migraines, and sometimes the medication made her sick to her stomach. So the family decided to pull over at a rest stop so that Kimberly could get out of the car and get some fresh air. But according to Christopher, Kimberly didn't get out of the car.
When the police asked him where he pulled over, he said he didn't remember. All he remembers is getting out of the SUV to check on the family's luggage carrier because it was rattling. He said he then got back into the driver's seat, and that's when he noticed that his leg was bleeding. He got back out of the SUV and flagged down the motorist in the pickup truck, the person who called 911.
Before the hospital discharged Christopher that morning, he strangely told one of the nurses that she should call his dead wife because she, quote, gets mad when he doesn't call her. After being discharged from the hospital, the police immediately brought him to the police station for questioning. Officers broke the news that his wife and three children were all dead.
But Christopher's reaction was strange. He told the officers, no, no, no, they weren't dead. This must be a huge mistake. He even asked the detectives to bring his wife Kimberly into the police station because he needed to talk to her. But officers repeatedly told Christopher that this wasn't a mistake, that his entire family was shot to death. And they continued to ask him what happened.
But Christopher told them he didn't know. At one point during this interview, the police got frustrated. They're starting to think that Christopher is lying to them and that he knows exactly who shot his family. So they decided to show Christopher a picture of his children.
officers thought that maybe if they showed him photographs of his dead children, that they would get some sort of reaction out of him. But nothing. Christopher continued to tell the police that he didn't know what happened and that he denied killing his wife and children.
Detectives continued to question him at the station for over 14 hours. They were convinced that he had something to do with his family's murders, but without anything legally to hold him on, they had to release him. The following day, June 15th, the police brought Christopher back to the station for more questioning. This time, the police seemed to get a breakthrough.
Because during this second interview, Christopher told them that Kimberly, his wife, shot him after getting back into the SUV that morning. He told the police that he had no idea how his wife got the gun, but that she must have gotten the gun he brought to the shooting range the night before.
According to Christopher and his story to the police, he took his 9mm handgun to the shooting range the night before on June 13th around 5.30pm. So, this must be the gun that Kimberly used to shoot him. But once again, the police didn't have enough evidence to hold him. So on June 15th, they released him for a second time and allowed him to go back home.
Two days later, this is now June 17th, they brought him back in. They just weren't buying this whole story about Kimberly shooting him or the three kids. This time, detectives continued to ask him about his family's history and their routine of their daily activities. They wanted to get a better picture of who this family was and why four out of the five of them ended up shot to death.
After several hours of questioning, the police let him go home. This is now for the third time. But little did Christopher know that the detectives were busy building a case against him. Detectives arrested Christopher on June 23, 2007, and charged him with four counts of first-degree murder in his family's deaths. If convicted on all four counts, he looked at the death penalty.
The police and prosecution just weren't buying Christopher's story that his wife shot him and their three young kids. They believed that they had enough evidence to prove their case. Christopher's murder trial began in August of 2012, five years after the shooting.
While awaiting trial in jail, Governor Patrick Quinn signed a statewide bill in 2011. This bill essentially abolished the death penalty in Illinois, which meant that prosecutors could no longer pursue the death penalty against Christopher. Instead, they would have to settle for life in prison without the possibility of parole.
While sitting in jail awaiting his criminal trial, Christopher maintained his innocence and claimed that his wife shot him and their kids in a murder-suicide. But the prosecution argued that Christopher's story didn't line up with the forensic evidence they found inside the SUV. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp.
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Never skip therapy day with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash tails to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash tails. At trial, the prosecution argued that Christopher murdered his family because he was fed up with his life and the only way out was murder. He wanted to start his life over in the Canadian wilderness.
The prosecution called Stephen Willett to testify. Stephen testified that he lived in Ontario, Canada, and that he had met Christopher on a website in 2006. He told the jury that he and Christopher exchanged hundreds of emails about their desires to live in the woods together where they could practice their survival skills.
Although Stephen Willett and Christopher never met in person, they continued these email exchanges about their plans to live in the woods together for months. According to email records, in May of 2007, Christopher took a trip by himself to the Yukon Territories to scout out potential campsites for him and Stephen Willett to live.
Willett testified that around this time, Christopher had asked him to help fake his death so that his wife, Kimberly, could get the insurance proceeds. But Willett told the jury that he wasn't comfortable doing this and that he told his friend, Christopher, that he wouldn't help him do this. He wouldn't help him fake his death.
Now, when an email dated May 23rd, 2007, Christopher told Willett that he met a woman named Maya while out on this scouting trip to the Yukon Territories and that he was thinking about bringing her along on the next trip. The emails between Stephen Willett and Christopher eventually stopped in June of 2007, around the same time as the shootings took place.
The woman Christopher referred to in his emails to Willett, Maya Drake, also agreed to testify for the prosecution. Maya Drake, who identified herself as an entertainer at a gentleman's club, told the jury that Christopher visited her at the nightclub at least four or five times in 2007.
Christopher allegedly told her many times that he planned to leave and divorce his wife during these visits. He said he planned to leave her to live in the Canadian woods. According to the prosecution, Christopher spent almost $5,000 during two of these visits just days before the shootings.
The next person to testify for the prosecution was Dr. Larry Blum, the forensic pathologist who performed the autopsies on Kimberly and the kids. Dr. Blum testified that the bullet wound under Kimberly's chin was, quote, an angle gunshot wound. This means that the gun was in contact with her chin when it was fired.
The gun would have incapacitated Kimberly almost instantly and killed her within seconds from this angle. But Dr. Blum testified that the gunshot wounds to the kids were different. The evidence suggested that someone shot the kids farther away. For example, 12-year-old Abigail was shot below the right eyebrow and in the right lower chest.
During her autopsy, Dr. Blum noticed stippling marks near both wounds. Stippling looks like small dark dots made by a pencil. And when someone is shot with a gun held 18 to 24 inches away from the skin, the bullet usually causes stippling marks. These marks on Abigail's skin suggest that she was shot from 18 to 24 inches away.
Now, the gunshot wound to Blake's head also had stippling marks, indicating that all three children were shot at most 18 to 24 inches away. Dr. Blum's testimony about the distance of the shootings seemed to help Christopher's defense.
During cross-examination, Dr. Blum testified that he couldn't rule out the possibility that Kimberly committed suicide by shooting herself in the chin. He also told the jury that he found several different drugs in her system at the time of her death. Both of these drugs were prescription drugs. They were prescription medications that Kimberly took to deal with her migraines.
According to Dr. Blum, both of the drugs referred to as NT and TM can cause suicidal behavior and ideations. The following expert to testify for this state was Matthew Knoll, an expert in shooting scene reconstruction. Matthew Knoll testified that the 9mm handgun used in the shootings was found in the SUV with a round in the chamber.
This discovery indicates that the 9mm had fully cycled after the last shot and was ready to fire again. Knoll explained to the jury that in suicides involving a shot to the head, there is frequently not enough support of the gun after the shot to allow for proper cycling of the weapon. In many cases, this causes the gun to jam.
Because the gun wasn't jammed and had fully cycled, he believes the gun was fully supported when shot into Kimberly's chin. In other words, he believes that Christopher was the one handling and supporting the gun. If Kimberly had held the gun in a suicide shot, the gun would have likely jammed. It also meant that the final shot probably wasn't to Kimberly's chin.
Matthew Knoll also testified that he believed the bullet wounds on Christopher's body were on the wrong side of his body and inflicted by a gun barrel held flush against his skin. To him, to Matthew Knoll, this indicates that the gunshot wounds to Christopher's body were self-inflicted in an attempt to stage the shootings and make it look like his wife was the shooter.
And not to mention here that Christopher, Christopher was the only one who suffered non-life-threatening wounds. Everyone else was shot point blank. He testified that the police found a pair of shell casings on the driver's seat of the SUV. And they likely got there after Christopher got out of the car.
Now, this discovery of the shell casings on the driver's seat of the SUV, well, this directly contradicts Christopher's story that his wife shot him outside of the vehicle. But the most significant piece of evidence for the prosecution was the blood evidence. The leading expert who testified in the blood evidence was Paul Kish, an expert in blood stain pattern analysis.
Paul Kish told the jury that the blood evidence proves Christopher was the shooter. According to him, Kimberly was shot before Christopher. Paul Kish found Christopher's blood on the SUV's center console, Kimberly's arms, shorts, floorboard between her feet, and her seatbelt.
Kish testified that Christopher's blood got onto Kimberly's seatbelt by direct contact. Then the seatbelt was removed. But wait, it gets worse.
According to Paul Kish, while Kimberly would have still been bleeding from her gunshot wound, an object, quote, altered and wiped away some of her bloodstains on the SUV's center console, end quote. In other words, her bloodstains were disturbed. This would have happened within seconds after Kimberly's blood was deposited on the center console.
According to Paul Kish and the prosecution, the only other person who would have been in a position to alter or disturb those bloodstains was Christopher. So this blood evidence suggested that Christopher moved over Kimberly's body after her death. And none of the evidence indicates that there was a struggle between the two.
The prosecution used Paul Kish's testimony to argue that Christopher's story just didn't add up. If he had been shot by his wife while fixing the luggage carrier outside the SUV, why did the police find his blood inside the vehicle, especially the seatbelt and center console?
The prosecution also presented evidence that bloodstains found on Kimberly's right arm were inconsistent with back spatter. Back spatter refers to typically small droplets of blood that had been ejected from a gunshot wound and are common in cases of suicide. In most suicides, there are multiple spots of back spatter on the person's hands.
But in Kimberly's case, she only had one individual blood droplet on her left hand. Even though she's right-handed, there wasn't anything on her right hand. The police also didn't find any blood droplets consistent with back spatter on the gun or on the trigger guard.
The prosecution also testified that crime scene investigators found blood droplets on the outside of the vehicle. These droplets belonged to Christopher. Because of their shape, experts believed that Christopher was standing still when he was bleeding, not frantically trying to get away from his wife.
To them, these blood droplets suggested that he was standing perfectly still when he shot himself. To conclude their testimony in front of the jury, prosecutors introduced one last critical piece of evidence, and that was the police found two bullet holes in Christopher's jacket.
Prosecutors argued that the two bullet holes found in the jacket were created when someone wrapped the gun in it, either to silence the gun or to conceal it, or possibly even to cushion a blow. And to the prosecution, this was Christopher holding, concealing, or cushioning the blow of the gun when he held it using his own jacket.
The prosecution rested its case by telling the jury that the blood and gun evidence tells a straightforward story about what actually happened on June 14, 2007. Prosecutors argued that Christopher tricked his family into thinking they were going on a trip to a water park when really his plan all along was to murder them.
They believe that he pulled the car over once they got to a remote spot of I-55. Once the car was parked and he saw that no one was in sight, he pulled out his 9mm handgun and got out of the car. He walked around the SUV until he got to the front passenger window. He put the gun under Kimberly's chin and shot her. He then reached over to shoot his three kids.
Prosecutors believe that he shot all three kids while they were asleep. The youngest, Blake, woke up sometime during the shooting and attempted to shield himself by putting his arms up, explaining the one bullet wound to his armpit. According to the prosecution, he wanted to look like Kimberly shot him in the kids before turning the gun on himself.
He then got back into the SUV and shot himself in the left wrist and thigh before dropping the gun at Kimberly's feet. Then he unbuckled her seatbelt, leaving behind his blood, and walked away to flag down the motorist. Prosecutors believed the motive was relatively simple and was supported by digital evidence, those thousands of emails the police recovered.
Christopher killed his family and staged it to look like a murder-suicide so that he could disappear and live out this survival fantasy in the Canadian wilderness, where he didn't have to be a husband or a father anymore. He thought he could get away with it by telling the police that his wife was the killer. If there was any doubt that Christopher wasn't the shooter,
The prosecution reminded the jury that he was the only one who suffered non-life-threatening injuries. When it came time for Christopher's defense attorneys to present, they told a much different story about that day. According to the defense, Kimberly was the shooter.
He stuck to his story that although he doesn't remember much of the details, he pulled the SUV off the highway when Kimberly said she wasn't feeling well. Then she pulled out the gun, shot the kids, shot him, and then turned the gun on herself. So the first witness to testify for the defense was Michelle Pilaro, a private investigator.
Michelle Pallaro was a pivotal witness to help explain Kimberly's state of mind at the time of her death. She read emails to the jury that Kimberly sent to family and friends only weeks before the shootings. In one particular email that Kimberly sent to Christopher just two weeks before, she
She told him that she talked to her doctor about personality changes as well as anxiety issues that she'd been experiencing. Other emails suggested that she was experiencing high blood pressure, migraine headaches, and stress. Kimberly's doctor also testified for the defense, the same doctor who prescribed her those migraine prescriptions that were found in her system.
He told the jury that his last visit with Kimberly was on April 11, 2007. During this doctor visit, he said that she could stop taking the medication if her migraines were gone for at least three months.
When the prosecution cross-examined the doctor, he testified that Kimberly never once expressed to him at least feelings of being suicidal or feelings of depression. And she was not seeing him for that. She was only seeing this particular doctor and only went to him for these migraine headaches that she kept experiencing. Next up, the defense called its own blood pattern analysis to testify.
crime scene reconstructionist and blood expert Tom Bevel. Now you might remember the name Tom Bevel. We talked a lot about Mr. Bevel in last week's episode on Warren and Bonnie Horanek. Tom Bevel testified for the prosecution and presented critical blood evidence at trial.
Now, in case you haven't listened to last week's episode yet, I won't drop any spoilers here. But let's just say that Tom Bevel has been the star expert in many, many criminal cases. So Tom Bevel took the stand as an expert witness for the defense. He testified that the blood evidence suggests that Kimberly could shoot Christopher and her kids.
In his opinion, where the police found Christopher's blood inside the SUV doesn't necessarily contradict his story. One of the prosecution's key pieces of evidence was discovering his blood on Kimberly's seatbelt, suggesting that he took her seatbelt off to make it look like she was the shooter.
According to Tom Bevel, though, the discovery of Christopher's blood on Kimberly's seatbelt doesn't automatically contradict his story. According to him, he believes his blood could have gotten on the seatbelt another way, another way that doesn't mean that he's the shooter. The defense rested its case by telling the jury that Christopher was innocent,
They said that the antidepressants and her migraine headaches fueled the murders. They also argued that Christopher had recently confessed to Kimberly about a sexual affair that he had during a recent trip to Mexico.
and that between the medication and this recent sexual affair confession, this could have all contributed to her decision to carry through with this murder-suicide plot. So after five long weeks of testimony that featured more than 80 witnesses, the jury took less than one hour, less than one hour to return a verdict.
The jurors found Christopher guilty of his wife and three kids' murders. In their decision, the jury cited the blood evidence. They believed that the blood found in the SUV didn't add up with his story. Simply put, his blood was found in places that it shouldn't have been.
The court accepted the jury's guilty verdict and sentenced Christopher to four consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole. However, because the governor abolished Illinois' death penalty one year before the start of the criminal trial, they spared Christopher's life. So instead, he would spend the rest of his natural life in prison behind bars. Immediately following his conviction, Christopher filed an appeal.
In his appeal, he cited prosecutorial misconduct that violated his rights to an impartial jury. In addition, Christopher also argued that the prosecution's office improperly used his taped interviews with the police to sway the jury to reach a guilty verdict.
Remember, the police interviewed Christopher three separate times before they arrested him. In each of these police interviews, the detectives, the police, audio and video recorded the interviews and played them at trial in front of the jury.
And by doing this, by playing these taped recordings of the interviews, the prosecutor's goal was to essentially show the jury that Christopher rarely showed emotion during these interviews, even after learning that his entire family was dead and that this lack of emotion pointed towards his guilt.
So besides the blood evidence, certainly the jury would have been swayed by these interview tapes that really showed Christopher just being stoic. He was a statute throughout these interviews. He rarely cried. He rarely showed any emotion, even when his wife and three kids had been shot, whether it was him or whether it was his wife. These videos would have been very, very damning at trial.
So that was essentially his argument, was that these videotapes swayed the jury and that he didn't have a fair impartial jury. But in this case, in his appeal, the appellate court disagreed with Christopher and they upheld his conviction.
The court didn't believe the use of the tapes amounted to any type of misconduct. In all of the interviews, the police read him his Miranda rights and he was never under arrest at any point he was free to go. So the prosecution simply used the tape to build their case to show his lack of emotion as well as show his demeanor right after the shooting.
the end of the Christopher Vaughn story. Through his new defense attorney, he's making another push to get the court to overturn his conviction. This time, he even has the support of the organization Investigating Innocence, an organization with one mission in mind, freeing the innocent and wrongfully accused.
According to the Investigating Innocence website, they argue that the bullet trajectory evidence in this case is consistent with a murder-suicide. Using the defense's experts, they reconstructed the scene and found evidence to suggest that Kimberly was the one who shot and killed the kids while sitting in the front passenger seat.
They also point to the known side effects of the prescription medications that Kimberly was taking at the time. In May of 2009, the FDA released new warning labels for Topamax. Topamax was one of the drugs that Kimberly was taking.
And these new labels that the FBI released in 2009 advise patients to immediately contact their doctors if they begin experiencing suicidal thoughts or behaviors. And they also tell patients to look for new or worsening feelings of stress and anxiety.
Investigating innocence also points to other high profile cases where the Will County State's attorney's office wrongfully convicted someone. The most notable case is Kevin Fox, a father who was mistakenly arrested by the county for allegedly murdering his daughter. Kevin Fox turned out to be completely innocent.
So the Investigating Innocence Organization is saying, hey, the authorities need to look at Christopher Vaughn's case because the county has a history of wrongfully convicting innocent people. Waukegan's defense attorney, Jed Stone, has recently signed on to be Christopher's lead counsel to pursue a new criminal trial.
In an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, Jed Stone told reporters that he and his team have, quote, been looking down many avenues, all of which lead to actual innocence, end quote. He also told the Chicago Sun-Times that they're starting by seeking clemency for Christopher from the state's governor early next year.
Christopher Vaughn's story had been recently kept alive by the iHeartRadio podcast Murder in Illinois, Who Killed the Vaughn Family? The podcast claims to explore alternative theories and new forensic evidence that prove Christopher's innocence.
But the podcast has received a ton of backlash for its interpretation of the evidence and how the victims are portrayed, specifically how Kimberly is portrayed in the show. Now, Kimberly's family has openly, very openly criticized this podcast and has denied to participate in its production altogether.
Bill Clutter, the Illinois Innocence Project co-founder, and the Investigating Innocence Organization participated in the podcast. Dr. Phil also covered the case in a recent episode that aired on October 11, 2021. In the episode, Christopher's parents talk with Dr. Phil about the case and still proclaim his innocence.
Christopher Vaughn is currently serving his four consecutive life sentences at the Pickeninville Correctional Center. On September 26th of last year, he turned 47 years old. I'll continue to follow any updates because this case is ongoing and Christopher maintains his innocence in his family's murder. If and when they are made public, I'll be sure to bring them to you. Stay tuned.
To share your thoughts on Christopher Vaughn's case, be sure to follow the show on Instagram and Facebook at Forensic Tales. Do you think the blood evidence was enough to convict him? Or do you agree with the Investigating Innocence Project and think that he's innocent? To find out what I think about the case, sign up to become a patron at patreon.com slash Forensic Tales.
After each episode, I release a bonus episode where I share my personal thoughts and opinions about the case. This is where I get the opportunity to say what I think about the blood spatter evidence and whether I think Christopher Vaughn is guilty or innocent. To check out photos from the case, be sure to head to our website, ForensicTales.com.
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