Killer Kids by Clifford L. Linedecker

Author:Clifford L. Linedecker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2011-06-19T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

Hell House

Sixteen-year-old Richard John Jahnke finally reached the breaking point. Years of being cursed and beaten, and of watching his sister and mother brutalized, led to his decision. He had to kill his father.

The slightly built 135-pound, five-foot-six-inch teenager, whose family members called “Richie,” changed his clothes to dark blue to help him blend into the shadows of the frosty November night. Then he lined up a .38-caliber pistol, a Marine knife, an Army belt, and a .12-gauge shotgun. Dumping the birdshot, buckshot, and slugs, which his father called “candy cane mix,” he reloaded the pump-action Smith & Wesson with three-quarter-inch deer slugs.

And he put the family pets in the basement, where they would be out of the way and safe, then securely shut the door.

As Richie moved purposefully about the house arranging the implements of murder, his seventeen-year-old sister, Deborah Ann, watched and chattered nervously. Richie selected an M-1 carbine from among dozens of weapons in their father’s collection. Then he instructed Deborah to wait in the living room with the gun. The children’s father loved firearms and almost never left the house without one. Richie wanted his sister to have a weapon for protection in case he missed or was shot by their father and the elder Jahnke went after her. Deborah asked for something without much of a kick.

At last, Richie walked into the garage to wait for his parents to return from dinner. They had eaten out to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of their first meeting in Puerto Rico, when Richard Chester Jahnke was a young soldier from Chicago, and Maria de Lourdes Rodriguez was a twenty-year-old beauty in suburban San Juan.

While Richie waited in ambush, he fingered a command sergeant major’s whistle he kept as part of his high school ROTC equipment, then put it to his mouth and blew. The piercing sound was somehow comforting, and helped keep his courage up. Much later he would state under oath, “At the last second I became a battalion command sergeant major.”

Finally, a few minutes after six P.M., he heard the putt-putt of a Volkswagen engine, and tensed. Through the blinds covering the glass window on the garage door, he watched the blue VW bug pull into the driveway and stop. The bulky silhouette of a husky man emerged from the driver’s side. Both vehicle and man were framed in extremes of black and white by the blinding driveway searchlight. Richie waited until his father, already cursing, was only a few feet away, preparing to open the garage door. Then the teenager pressed the trigger.

Maria Jahnke heard the first roar of the shotgun and turned toward the noise. She was just in time to see the five succeeding shots tear jagged holes through the glass-and-wood-paneled door. Four slugs smashed into her husband’s chest, back, and hip, driving him backward and slamming him against the side of the Volkswagen. She was screaming as he crumpled to the concrete driveway.

Moments later she was wailing and bending over the bloody body of her thirty-eight-year-old husband.

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