A pickup truck that was near the scene of where at least three people were found dead earlier in the day is towed away after being marked with evidence tags, Wednesday, Dec. 26, 2007, in Carnation, Wash. Sgt. Jim Laing said the bodies were discovered about 8 a.m. by someone who knows the family at the home. He said the dead appeared to be two adults and a child, and he said there appeared to be more victims.
Death penalty case.
A man who identified himself as a relative of the victims slain at a Carnation-area home is grief-stricken as he is informed of the tragedy at the crime scene.
A King County Sheriff's deputy (L) lets a member of the Medical Examiner's office pass through police lines near a rural house in Carnation, Washington December 27, 2007, where the bodies of six people were found shot to death. According to a sheriff spokesperson, the victims were killed on Christmas Eve by the homeowners' daughter and her boyfriend.
A financial dispute might have led to the slayings of six family members, including Olivia Anderson, 5, and Nathan Anderson, 3, at a home near Carnation on Christmas Eve.
Seattle Times staff reporter
Joseph McEnroe shuffled into a visiting booth on the seventh floor of the King County Jail this afternoon and said he's sorry six members of the Anderson family are now gone and that he regretted cutting contact with his own family.
Dressed in a white jumpsuit reserved for "ultra security" inmates, McEnroe wouldn't talk about what happened Christmas Eve at a rural home near Carnation. There, police and prosecutors allege, he and his girlfriend, Michele Anderson, methodically shot Anderson's parents and brother, the brother's wife and their two young children.
"I'm sorry that they're gone. They were my family, too, you know?" McEnroe, 29, said of the victims. "I hope wherever they're at, they're at peace. That's all I'm going to say about them."
McEnroe and Anderson each were charged earlier today with six counts of aggravated first-degree murder in the deaths of three generations of the Anderson family.
Because his hands were chained to his waist, McEnroe had to hunch over and sit sideways to speak through a telephone in the visiting booth, where inmates and visitors are separated by a thick window. Tall and slim with a goatee and shoulder-length dark hair, McEnroe spoke softly. At times, his eyes appeared misty.
McEnroe said jail officials have placed him on suicide watch: "I was having a very hard time, but no matter how this turns out, I'm going to try and hold on... I decided I'm going to try and stay alive."
He asked about his family — his mother and siblings in Minneapolis and an aunt and cousins in California. McEnroe stopped talking to them five years ago after a financial dispute with his mother.
"I never really realized how much I need my family. God, how did I ever get in this situation, you know?" he said. "Tell them I love them, all of them."
The man who is accused of ending the Christmas Eve killings by shooting 3- and 5-year-old children in the head asked about a cousin in California who was "always like my big sister." Told she now has a 5-year-old daughter, he said, "I hope she's safe."
"This whole thing has made me realize how much I miss them," he said of his family. "It's easy enough to think they don't like you or don't care about you but I wish to God I got in touch with them before this. I would've even been able to visit them. I guess that's not going to happen now....
"You never really realize what life is worth until something like this happens."