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July 9, 2024 46 mins

Six years before he became known as the Day Trader who went on a murderous rampage, Mark Barton was the suspect in the death of his first wife and her mother while they were camping at a lake in North Alabama. Today, Joseph Scott Morgan shares  personal memories of working the homicides in Atlanta, as well as breaking down the murders of Mark Barton’s first wife and her mother in the camper, and his second wife and children in their apartment.. Dave Mack fills in the back-story on how Mark Barton may have gotten away with murder and child molestation, but he couldn’t escape himself.  

 

 

 

 

 

Transcript Highlights 

00:00:08 Introduction of geography, family killer, mass murderer 

00:02:46 Discussion of Mark Barton 

00:07:21 Discussion of murderers and weapons 

00:11:44 Talk about day traders in Atlanta 

00:16:04 Discussion of murder in camper trailer on lake 

00:21:17 Discussion of “robber” that left behind cash and jewelry 

00:26:26 Talk about blood in the Camper 

00:31:02 Discussion of Mark Barton cheating on his wife 

00:35:57 Discussion of timeline of family murders and Buckhead massacre 

00:39:49 Discussion of Barton killing second wife and children with a hammer 

00:43:06 Discussion of murders at Momentum and All-Tech 

00:46:20 Conclusion, Barton shoots himself in the head 

 

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Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Body Dots with Joseph Scott More. I've always been a
fan of geography. I was a fan of maps for years.
I would look at any map, and I think that
may have translated over to my son, because now my
son is a GIS major. You know, he does the

(00:22):
geospatial information system stuff and finishing up college right now.
I'm so proud of him. And he makes maps. That's
kind of cool, I think, and he studies satellite imagery
and all of that. But one of the things I've
always been fascinated with regarding maps are looking at the
origins of things. And specifically, you say, well, Morgan, how

(00:46):
can a map have an origin? Well, the map itself
has an origin. But what I'm talking about are bodies
of water, particularly moving bodies of water, and those are
most of the time where they originate from. Those are
called headwaters. Today, I want to talk about the headwaters

(01:10):
of one of my favorite locations in the world, and
my buddy Dave Mack will attest to this, and that's
the Kusa River. The Kuser River starts way north of
where I live now, but I enjoy it all the
time of my old boat that I've got. But the
Kuser River flows through a lake and it's a world

(01:35):
famous lake actually for a very specific kind of fish
called crappy. Yeah you heard that term, right, crappy crappy
South Louisiana we call them saku day. But what I
want to tell you about is something that happened in
an R and V park many many years ago, involving

(01:58):
one of the most notorious mass killers in the history
of the South. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is
body bags. Dave always talked about it. You know, I
love my boat, man, I love my boat. I love
my wife, I love my son and my daughter. I

(02:20):
love my grandbabies.

Speaker 2 (02:22):
But your feelings for your bug go even deeper, don't they.

Speaker 1 (02:25):
I tell you what. But you know the case that
we're or literally I'm doing a disservice by saying case. Yeah, boy,
I got to use not just little plural, I got
to use gigantic plural today, man, You know, because we're
talking about cases.

Speaker 2 (02:43):
Talking about Mark Barton and the guy who pulled off
that's not the right term, but the guy who committed
the worst mass casualty shooting in the state of Georgia.
And that wasn't all he killed. That wasn't the only
time that he I mean, when we talk about a
mass killer of going in and killing a bunch of

(03:05):
people in one day or one spot, he is that guy.
But besides those that he killed in one spot or
two spots in a general vicinity in Atlanta, he had
already killed three others previous to that, and two others
previous to that, separated by a number of years. Mark Barton,
when I dug into this story, is the filthiest disgusting

(03:28):
killer I've ever seen in all of the dealings we've
had to deal with Joe. Because he doesn't kill in
just one way. I don't know if you would call
him a spree killer, because he certainly kills his own
family members, He kills the people that he's closest to,

(03:48):
and then he kills people because he believes that they
did him wrong in business. This guy, if he wasn't
already gone from this earth by his own hand, yeah,
he would have been killed in prison because of all
the damage he did to innocent people who had nothing
but love for the guy.

Speaker 1 (04:07):
Yeah, and he's look, I'm not going to diminish in
any way anyway. I'm going back to your comment about
prison if he had survived to that point. He's a
child killer too, Yes, I mean he is a child kill.
He killed Bookoo adults, but he and he possibly a

(04:28):
child molester. Yeah that yeah, I've been taking.

Speaker 2 (04:33):
Through this story. His daughter at two and a half
years old, not in the middle of a divorce or
a custody issue or anything else. She uttered to a
teacher at daycare that her daddy molested her, and there
was an investigation. Now, I know I'm putting the horse
ahead of the card is in what you say, but
that was one of the many things I found out

(04:53):
when we're talking about a child killer child. This guy
is the I did realize how bad he was, Joe.
I mean, I know we're dealing with our murderer, but sometimes, sadly,
we detach when somebody does something that just seems to
be like a shotgun approach to life. You know, they

(05:18):
just indiscriminately shoot people that they don't really have a
personal connection with. That somehow we separate those types of
killers from those who do kill a family member, somebody
they have a relationship with, or the types of the
way that they kill. Normally, when we have somebody who
has committed more than one murder. They do have their

(05:39):
own SOP. They've got their own standard operating procedure or
modus operande. However, you say these things, you know that,
I mean, they do kill. They prefer a certain method
and they stay down that path.

Speaker 1 (05:53):
They do. And you know one of the things that
and this listen, this term maybe it had been prior
to me. Listen, I don't know everything. And if you
ever come across somebody that claims they do run away,
don't walk run away as fas as you can from
somebody that says they know everything.

Speaker 2 (06:10):
And they want to be president of the United States.
When they say those two things, I know everything, I'll
think every problem for me.

Speaker 1 (06:16):
Yeah, there you go with there's a term that has
come up, and you're talking about familiarity relative to killers.
And I know you've heard this murder kit where they
have a set of tools that they operate with. And
we've heard this over and over again about serialized events

(06:37):
Israel Keys. Oh my gosh, yeah, yeah, exactly that the
and methodologies. Methodology is very dependent upon what the goal is.
And you can think about a spree killer. Could a
spree killer be could they have a murder kit. Well,

(06:57):
they put together a kit many times if they if
they've got multiple weapons with them, they won't fail safe
that sort of thing. Is that a murder kit? Yeah? Possibly,
But when you hear the term murder kit, you think about, well,
they've got tape, they've got bindings, maybe they've got things
to clean up with, and of course they've got weapons
that they prefer not something that's going to be a

(07:19):
weapon of convenience. But look, I got to take you
back in time. You know I was working. This goes
back to well, the main thing here is, you know,
we talked about the mass shooting that took place in Atlanta,
a senior investigator with the Medical Examiner's Office. Yeah, in

(07:42):
nineteen ninety nine and what in what became known as
the Buckhead massacre. And it was a weird time back
then because just the week before the Buckhead massacre, we
had worked another massive loss of life event in southwest

(08:03):
Atlanta that I think, and I'm going to get this wrong, probably,
but I think it's referred to as the Mechanicsville masker,
and we had a whole family that was wiped out
in a tiny little home with one of the children
surviving an eleven year old that had hid in a closet,
and I actually got injured on that scene. I slipped

(08:26):
pulled a groin muscle. I was wearing a taivaksuit, and
there was so much blood in that house that when
I put my foot down in the hallway and they
were old heart pine floors that were polished, there was
so much blood, Dave that I slid and split the

(08:46):
taiveeksuit and pulled a groin muscle all at the same time.
And I'm wearing like a mask over my face. I've
got a headcover on, gloves, that sort of thing. And
I had to get myself out of the house and retool,
refit and get back in because even though I'd injured myself,
there ain't nobody else to do the job. You got

(09:06):
to get back in there. And I'll never forget that.
I preached that all the time, you know, so you
got to you got to live by you preaching. Man,
If that's what you're going to do and you have
to stay on, it doesn't matter now. I mean, if
you lose lose an arm or something, you're obviously, but
if you can because no one has the mindset that

(09:28):
you do. If you're the primary investigator on a scene
and you've already seen everything.

Speaker 2 (09:34):
Every minute gets further and further away from the moment
it happened, which means it's a change circumstance. Now it's
a change situation.

Speaker 1 (09:41):
It does. And then the week the next week we
had the Buckhead masker with Mark Barton and it was
and it wasn't David. It wasn't just a single building.
He migrated from one spot to another, just raining down hell,
And we're talking about what was and most many people,

(10:02):
particularly those that are much younger in our audience, are
not even going to be familiar with this term. There's
a term called day trading.

Speaker 2 (10:09):
Oh wow.

Speaker 1 (10:10):
And you would go to you would go to a
specific location where they had dedicated computers and you had
to pay for time at this thing, and you would
sit down and you would do trades like you were
on the floor, you know, up at one and they
had the tickers everywhere and all this sort of thing.
But you were an individual doing this, and people would
do their own LLC's, you know, and just go to

(10:33):
the terminal is a dedicated terminal hardwired in and you'd
be trading all day and.

Speaker 2 (10:37):
That's what Mark Barton did. He actually was a day trader.
He didn't start out that way. He did not start
out with a goal of being a Wall Street day trader.
By the way, when this happened, I remember how it
was covered in the media by people like me a
lot of because for many of us we heard of

(10:58):
day traders. If you remember back in the late nineties,
there was a lot of fast happening on Wall Street
and on the Nasdaq. There was so much happening because
of the tech stocks.

Speaker 1 (11:10):
And oh yeah, there were everywhere.

Speaker 2 (11:11):
We were on the front hand side of the bubble,
and boy, it was like people.

Speaker 1 (11:16):
It was a wild wets man.

Speaker 2 (11:18):
People were making hundreds of thousands of dollars with minimal investments.
It was a huge time. And Mark Barton in the
summer of ninety nine, this is two years before the
bubble burst, just to give you an idea, there were
ups and downs, but a lot of people were making
bank and Mark Barton, whatever he chose, was the wrong

(11:40):
way for a while, and he had had a number
of really down months financially as a day trader. That
brought him to a point of desperation. But Joe, I
don't know that that was the only reason when we
looked back at his life, this man had gotten away
with murder all before he ever pulled a gun on

(12:02):
the people he blamed for losing money. He was already
a murderer who hadn't been convicted.

Speaker 1 (12:09):
And isn't that the fascinating thing about this you talk
about you know, we go on and on about people
that walk into businesses and schools and all these horrible
just tragedies that happened, and people hold on to your
hat here, Dave, I got to tell you, even though
you're not wearing a hat, I'm looking at you right now.

(12:31):
It's almost wrote now. Because it seems like every talking
head in the media will always ask this question. They'll say,
were there warning signs?

Speaker 2 (12:42):
He was always such a nice guy.

Speaker 1 (12:44):
Yeah. In this case, Dave, Oh, let me tell you something.
There were warning signs. And those warning signs came in
the form of a double homicide at the headwaters of
the Coosa River, Cherokee County, Alabama. David, I wanted to

(13:16):
go down this road with you about Mark Barton because
I was sitting here and I was thinking how the
buckhead mask her this summer, it will have been a
quarter century since that happened, and I still I still
remember all of my colleagues that were involved, you know,

(13:39):
there physically on the scene. We were back in taking
the bodies at the morgue, you know, trying to make
sure that we could get people identified because it's a
total just for neetic mess and it was horrible, these
things that we were witnessing. But Dave, I got to
tell you when we found out about the suspect in

(14:04):
the shooting and that he also had two open homicides
that had been laid at his feet, that already thought
that and they they they had happened six years earlier.
And that's the reason, you know, I made the comment about, oh, gee,
were there any warning signs. It's not like he's you know,
running around the neighborhood nicked and howling at the moon

(14:26):
or anything. No, nothing quite that subtle. We're talking about
somebody that went to a campground, went to a campground
and killed his then wife and mother in law with
a Charlotte instrument.

Speaker 2 (14:39):
Was allegedly because he was never convicted of that crime.
He's dead now and he was only the only suspect
they ever had. And you you know, the warning sign.
I actually pulled this quote, Joe because I wanted to. Yeah,
it was. You're talking about his wife and her mother.
It's Liberty weekend there at Weis Lake up in Cherokee County, Alabama,

(15:02):
and his wife and her mother are murdered inside the
camp the trailer and his father in law says, until
the murders, Mark was the perfect son in law until
the murders. Until Mark was the perfect son in law.

(15:25):
So how did they die? Because there was no forced entry? Right,
wasn't it didn't it look like a robbery?

Speaker 1 (15:30):
Yeah, and there was, But there was even jewelry and
like six hundred dollars cash left behind. I don't know
if it's thief, No, they generally don't, and also thieves
that force You think about force entry and people, you know,
literally kicking indoors. I've had this happened. I've had people
throw stuff through windows to gain access to individuals and murdering,

(15:51):
all kinds of stuff like that that you see out there.
But anytime that we have no no signs of force entry,
and that's always our qualifying remark, no signs of fourth
century of struggle. You always hear that in every.

Speaker 2 (16:04):
One of these, Is it really that figures that a
TV thing?

Speaker 1 (16:07):
No, No, it's it's it's true the TV world took
that from us. It's something that's a canned comment that
is made throughout the country. I've come across a review
and reports. But you know your state. You're making a
very broad assertion here that upon my initial observation this
blood bath that I wound up walking into, I didn't

(16:29):
see any fourth entry, you know, or now as far
as the struggle goes, there was blood that was essentially
cast off all over the bathroom mirror, you know, in
this place. And here here's the thing. They didn't find
a weapon either, but they kept saying I've heard I've
heard people say that they were bludgeoned, and I've had

(16:53):
other people say that it was sharp force, and I've
heard hatchet. And this is from a forensic standpoint. One
of the things that you get with a hatchet or
an axe is that when you start doing these strikes
on an individual, it has a let's see, how can
I put this? It will have features sometimes of a

(17:17):
blunt force. Okay, because you're coming down if you just
imagine just imagine a hatchet right now, something you buy
a big box store or whatever. It's got a single blade,
and then you think about the backside of it. Okay,
that backstrap on it, that's very weighted. That's the reason
axes are made that way. They're like a gigantic steel
wedge that you can drive through the air and cut something. Well,

(17:40):
sometimes they get twisted, you know, as this fevers thing
that's going on. You're not always going to hit perfectly
with that leading edge, so you'll get these big nasty contusions.
Now you will get a leading edge there that's kind
of clean. If they can drive that edge through the body.
And when you see what's really impressed so is you

(18:02):
go down to the bone and if you do like
a microscopic section a cross section of the bone, when
you're looking at it, David things, it looks like the
V hole on a boat. It's got a perfect V
shape in there, and it kind of trenches out. But
then you'll get these little spider web fractions fractures rather

(18:22):
that run away from it. And so that and since
they didn't leave leave a weapon at seen, one was
not recovered. I think that's that's where the pathologist at
the time back in ninety three when they were doing
the autopsies on both his wife at that time and

(18:44):
the mother in law. They were thinking, hey, you know,
we don't have the weapon, but boy, this shared us
look like an axe or a hatchet here because you're
going to get these these two injuries that kind of communicate.
But here's the big question. And you know me, brother,
you know I hate the word why I do. Let's

(19:04):
say what what would have been the motivation of Mark
Barton killing these two women?

Speaker 2 (19:13):
Well they found out pretty quick, but they think it
was the motivation.

Speaker 1 (19:18):
Yeah. Well, yeah, I'll let you do this big reveal
because I got to tell you. You know what they say,
the root right, the root of what you know. So
you go back and you think about the later day
trading career that he was to have.

Speaker 2 (19:30):
The love was money, friends. He There were two things. One,
as they began investigating, okay, that no sign of forced entry. Okay,
I read this in the report on the police investigation.
They found out though immediately since there's no forced entry,
who did they know that would have access? Okay? What
kind of relationship does he have with his wife? And

(19:52):
you know they were looking at his father in law too,
because you know his wife's dead didn't, So they're looking
at these guys in Low and Bold. They find out
four days ago, four days ago, Mark Barton took out
six hundred thousand dollars life insurance policy on his wife.
Oh my goodness, there's ding ding ding number one. Deborah

(20:14):
Barton has six hundred thousand life insurance. So they talked
to the insurance company and find out, well, he actually
wanted a million, but he couldn't cover the payment, so
they settled for six hundred thousand dollars. That was their
first tip off of who their suspect might be. Now,
taking it a step further, they looked at the crime scene.

(20:37):
A purse had been dumped out of Eluise Spivey, the
fifty nine year old mother of Deborah Barton. Her purse
is dumped out, and it's made to look like a robbery.
The problem was, yes, there were a couple of pieces
of jewelry missing, but there's an envelope with six one
hundred dollars bills in it, and no robber in his
right mind is leaving cash. It just ain't gonna happen.

Speaker 1 (21:00):
No, And and most of the time when you get
these kind of robberies, these home invasion kind of robberies
like this, And there have been a there have been
these things where you will have r V parks, we'll
have like ne'er do wells, they're like camping out in
the woods adjacent to it. Lots of times their druggies

(21:20):
and these things are generally very violent. But Bubba, let
me tell you something. They're not walking out of that
scene without without everything of value. They're like vultures. They'll
pick over everything. And so when you you know, you
had pointed out, well, why would they leave cash behind? Jewelrys?
One thing? You gotta take jewelry to either somebody that
convents jewelry or somebody or to a pawn shop, and

(21:42):
that's gonna that's going to catch people's eye. Cash. Yeah,
but you've got the green bags, baby, you can go
spend that anywhere you can go. You can go to
the you can go buy a pack of gum with it.
Next thing, you know, you got you know, eighty dollars
in cash. Well, i'll say eighty that a lot of gum.

Speaker 2 (21:57):
But as you're walking, yeah, but you're spending it as
you would leave. You know, you don't have to do
anything cash is king. But yeah, when they start investigating,
and again this wasn't they didn't solve it. They had
a suspect in Mark Barton. But according to the investigators
in the share, they all everybody was looking at Mark Barton.
I mean, the family was everybody liked him for this crime.

(22:20):
And you know, I still can't find out, Joe and
I have looked for this. His alibi was that he
was home Marietta or just outside of Atlanta with the
two kids, two children very small, very small? Did he
bring them with here and go there? You go and

(22:41):
leave them asleep in the minivan while he sneaks in
the middle of the night and destroys his wife and
her mother, And then I mean, he's going to have
to be covered in blood. How does he get out
of the camper without being covered in blood?

Speaker 1 (22:53):
Joe, it's bone chilling, and he yeah, he would have
had to have had because listen, if if you're going
to attack somebody with a weapon like this, they're not
just going to sit back and allow you to attack them.
They're going to see it coming. They're gonna throw up
their arms, they're going to try to move. By the way,
it's not like a static thing where you know, like

(23:16):
if you've got oh let's just use an example of
an axe, you've got a piece of wood before you,
or maybe you're chopping down the tree. Well, you can
hit the trees manytimes, you won't. You can take chunks
out of the tree. Ain't gonna move human beings when
they're hit with an edged weapon. Trust me, those pain
centers are firing and they're trying to get out of
the way. This is something Dave that has always held

(23:50):
through in my career. I see, you know, I'll think
about it. I'll think about it when I'm in the
because you are, you're literally in the wake of these
horrific events and you're looking at it and first off,
you're thinking about the person. You're thinking, does your mind work?
You know, what were you thinking? And you see the

(24:12):
through line in it sometimes and you're thinking, Okay, you're
you're a deputy sheriff in a small rural community in Alabama.
Can you imagine showing up at that RV park and
you know, most of the time you've got people and
it's the world. It's the crappy capital of the world.

(24:32):
I think they call it up there on lake Wise.
People come there to catch this specific species of fish,
and they're.

Speaker 2 (24:39):
Everywhere panfish guys, you see, you.

Speaker 1 (24:41):
Know, yeah, and like a march yeah yeah, like a
bluegill on the gigantic. And so you've got like what's
starting in late February, March and going into April they're
going on bed and then there's another thing that happens
in the fall. I'm not completely familiar with it, but anyway,
the most you're going to you know, if you're you're

(25:01):
gonna say do you have a fishing license? Or what
are you doing here? Why are you drunk out here
in public? Because they're going to camp out and all.
But can you imagine being a deputy and you walk
into this RV and the thing is bathed in blood
and this person's a ghost. They've just vanished into thin air.
What I'm not asking you to put on Mark Barton's

(25:24):
hat here, but I got to ask you, what do
you think his motivation? Well, I mean, what do you
what do you do with the rest of your life
at that point in time.

Speaker 2 (25:32):
After you just destroyed your wife and her mother. If
I'm at the mother of your children, by the way,
you know, I believe those two children in the car.
I believe those two children were asleep. I believe that
Mark Barton hopped back in his Ford Taurus, which was
fairly new at the time, and stripped off whatever he
wore to cover himself while he was in there. He
wasn't a stupid guy, knew what it was like to
wear lab stuff, and hopped out in the car and

(25:55):
drove home. And Mark Barton was the suspect. He was
their own only suspect. And there were some things that
happened in the investigation. They brought him in. Now, father
in law he said he was great right up till
the murders. You know, great son in law. Mark Barton
would not take a polygraph. So uh, father in law

(26:15):
not happy about that. His wife and his daughter are
dead and the one guy won't take a polygraph.

Speaker 1 (26:20):
So oh they're chewed to pieces. Yeah, they're absolutely And
you know, the father in law had to go back,
he had to see that RV. Oh. You know, that's
something he had to live with. So I can only
imagine when this guy is refusing to take to take
the polygraph. And here's another thing. And I can say
this as being you know, being a papa. Now, can

(26:43):
you imagine what's going on in your mind as a
grandfather and you're like, yeah, this animal has my two
grand babies. Yep.

Speaker 2 (26:53):
And that led to a battle, Joe. Actually after the death, okay,
after police the guy took out a six hundred thousand
dollars life insurance policy. His wife's now dead. Four days later.
After he takes that out, there was a battle. There
was custody issues over the children. Mark Barton was the suspect.
They couldn't pin it on him, Joe. The thing is
he was living in Lithia Springs, Georgia, and you had

(27:16):
the Alabama officials out of Cherokee County, Alabama. They're investigating
a murder there. But now you've got the Georgia officers
are involved in the investigation because that's where he lives
and that's where evidence might be. Evidence might be in
his car. Well, here's the problem, and I'm going to
throw this out there because we've got to move on.
Alabama investigators. You know, they get a search warrant for

(27:37):
the car, They get his floormats out from his car.
But you know what, they got the formats because it
look like I have bloodstains on it. They let him
keep the car Joe, Yeah, and said just don't wash
it or anything. Oh, don't clean your car, don't do anything,
and we'll be back later. So when they did come

(27:58):
to get it, he had spilled coke and thing else.
Everything was destroyed in there that could have been any
of any value.

Speaker 1 (28:04):
And I'm thinking, you know then, you know I have
to go back and it's easy to Monday morning quarterback. Yes,
I know, but you're thinking. And here's the thing they
did find. They found blood evidence in there, and this
gives you an idea as to how far technology is
advanced blood our since then. It gives you an idea
how what size of blood these blood droplets were back

(28:27):
then during that period of time, if you wanted to
do DNA typing, you you probably would have had to
have had a sample that would have been about the
size of a quarter. Okay.

Speaker 2 (28:40):
Yeah, now this is pre OJ trial too, so we
didn't know about a lot of this.

Speaker 1 (28:44):
Yeah you didn't. I mean, we knew about it in
forensics obviously, but the sample size had to be really robust,
you know, and you compare it till to day. If
we find the most minuscule just taking something it can
be tested, and so.

Speaker 2 (29:00):
Touch DNA might come up in the coburger trial, just saying.

Speaker 1 (29:03):
Yeah, yeah, yeah gee you think, yeah, yeah, it's going
to come up, you know, Joe.

Speaker 2 (29:08):
I noticed that when they got the car back finally
the cops got he had the gas and brake pedals,
had been thoroughly cleaned and recently conditioned with armorole everything
in that car gone, so it was no use. But
the thing is he was still the main suspect and
the police were fighting every which way they could. It
was the police that actually helped the insurance company do
battle with him. The insurance company didn't want to pay out.

(29:29):
They did not want to pay out.

Speaker 1 (29:31):
I think they had like a negotiated settlement. They did.
They had agreed. They had agreed at least to put
like one hundred and twenty five thousand dollars in a
trust for those kids.

Speaker 2 (29:42):
I think it was a six hundred thousand dollars policy.
They negotiated it to four hundred and fifty thousand, but
one hundred and fifty thousand of this goes into a
trust for your kids. Ye, you can have access to
three hundred thousand, sign off on it, and we'll walk away.
That's what they did. So what did Mark Barton do?

Speaker 1 (29:56):
Well?

Speaker 2 (29:57):
The first thing is within a week of the funeral
of his wife, the mother of his children and her mother,
LeeAnne Vanderver, a girl that he had met on his
sales trips, you know, when he was worked as a salesman.
She starts spending days over there, nights over there at

(30:19):
his house in Lofia Springs, the home where his wife
had just been. Within six months, she moves in with him.
So the girl that they suspected he was having an
affair with police did moves in with Mark Barton within
six months of the passing of his wife. Now, LeAnn
Vanderver was considerably younger than Mark Barton at the time

(30:41):
in nineteen ninety three, he was thirty eight. Leanne Vanderver
was Let's see, she had been twenty one and him
been dating for two years, so she was nineteen when
he's in his late thirties and they're dating behind his
wife's back. She moves in when she's twenty one and
thirty eight thirty nine.

Speaker 1 (31:02):
So yeah, I'm not a big fan of the term
dating when you're married. Yeah, Yeah, it's like, you know,
it implies something else. I mean, and this guy's a
real scumback, you know, because he's running around on his
wife with these two babies, and he you know, obviously
butchers his wife and and his you know, and his

(31:24):
mother in law. And I'm thinking about this young woman,
and she's an adult. She's made this decision to be
with him, and I'm thinking, wouldn't you at least have
an inkling of what he was in? You know, what
happened to your first wife where she I know you
were married, you know what's the story. Well, now all
of a sudden, she's got an instant family, doesn't she. Yep,

(31:46):
because he's retained two kids. Yeah, she's retained these kids.
I mean, he's retained the kids. They're domiciled with him
and her to whom he gets married. And they leave
Lithia Springs, which is if you're not familiar with Atlanta,
there's Marietta, which is kind of a big area. It's

(32:07):
kind of to the northwest of Atlanta. Lithia Springs is
even further west, and so that means it's closer to Alabama.
You think about the pathway he would have taken getting
from eastern Alabama, which is where Lake Weiss is to
Lithia Springs. It's very easily done. It's not a heavy lift.
Even on back roads. You could get there really, you know,

(32:29):
pretty quickly. But you know, they leave there and they
wind up going down to Stockbridge, Georgia, which is completely
well if you think about a clock face, and Atlanta's
right in the center of it. Marietta is about at
the eleven o'clock position, Lithia Springs is at about the

(32:49):
ten o'clock position. Stockbridge is at about the five o'clock position.
So it's on the other side of the clock face
from from where they were. So he moves and again
it's another suburb. It's along the ICE seventy five corridor,
just on the south side. He lived off of the
I seventy five corridor on the north side before that. Okay,

(33:12):
so he can and it's easy. I mean, it's a
commuting distance from Atlanta. You're doing business in Atlanta. So
he sets up, they sets up.

Speaker 2 (33:20):
He uses the money, the insurance money to set himself
up as a day trader. He takes Joe, we noticed
we got it down to he had three hundred thousand
dollars in that payout. He takes two hundred and ninety
four thousand dollars of that money and puts it into
his day trading account. He's going to be a big
man on Wall Street. And oh my goodness, Joe, it

(33:42):
didn't take long after he and Leanne van Dervert when
she becomes Leanne Barton and stepmother to Matthew David Barton.

Speaker 1 (33:49):
Who is.

Speaker 2 (33:51):
He's looking up to his You know, they were both
the kids were too young when their mother passed away.
Michelle was two and a half, Dave was five, so
they were very young. Matthew David rather very young when
their mother passed away. Now they've got a stepmother and
their dad and stepmom is young now. In their first

(34:13):
couple of years together, Joe neighbors said, it was pretty
routine for her to leave and there to be a
fight on the neighborhood street. Now that's why I read
some comments from neighbors the week of the massacre talking
about what kind of person Barton was. Go back and
talk to him later on, and they're like, no, man,
They were constantly fighting. She was always threatening to leave

(34:36):
or leaving. She spent a lot of time. There was
even discussion that by the time of July twenty seven,
nineteen ninety nine, Leam Vanderver was no longer living with
Barton all the time. And that's where he wakes up.
July twenty seventh, nineteen ninety nine. Mark Barton wakes up
in his bed. His wife Leanne is there, and according

(34:57):
to his own actions, his own words here, Mark Barton
begins the killing spree. He kills his wife in her sleep.
It says he bludgeoned her. He bludgeoned his second wife
in her sleep. He stuffs her body in a closet
in the master bedroom yep, and goes on about his

(35:18):
married way. Nobody knows about this on July twenty seventh.
That morning, the next day, July twenty eighth, nineteen ninety nine,
Mark Barton kills his children from his first marriage, Michelle

(35:39):
who was eight and Mark David, who was eleven. He
kills both of them by beating them in the head
with a hammer and then dunking their bodies in bath
of water to make sure they were dead.

Speaker 1 (35:53):
They were drowned. Yeah, Can I interject something here? There
was Yeah, when this occurred, and remember this occurred, it
was like a two and a half day period relative
to relative to the murder of his second wife, these kids,
and then leading up to the Buckhead massacre and eventually

(36:14):
his own death. You come through an event like the
Masker and Buckhead where you've got nine people that are
essentially shot to death in two separate locations. And for
those that aren't familiar with Buckhead, Buckhead is like the
upscale area of Atlanta. Okay, you're young, you think that

(36:38):
you know you're going to be, you know, the top
of the heap, and that's that's where you would want
to move. It's where all the clubs are and all
that sort of stuff. So these two businesses are up
there and they're both day trading businesses. They're kind of
across the street from one another. It was during that
period I remember talking to a colleague of mine that

(36:59):
was like the lead on to these bodies, and I
remember them saying at the time, Dave, that when we
got the news, after we had spent all day out
at the scene processing these scenes, and these scenes are surreal,
you know again.

Speaker 2 (37:19):
Talking about at the Buckhead, at the Okay, at.

Speaker 1 (37:22):
The yeah, at the at the scene, there was like
this moment in time after they're done with this where
they're told, Oh, by the way, the bodies of his
current wife and his two children have been found beaten
to death and stacked in a closet. And it's like,

(37:47):
I'm just talking about from an investigative perspective here, Dave,
when when this occurred. If you if you didn't think
that the wind had already been taken out of your
you're emotionally drained because you are after working scene because
they're very intense. And keep in mind when the shooting
took place, this is hours and hours before Mark Barton

(38:09):
would die himself. You think that you still have a
mad and they did. You still got a madman on
the loose. You're going to have to push this through
all the way through, work the scene, do the autopsies,
collect all of the evidence that you can, and then
hopefully they can catch this guy in prosecuting. Well, that's
the mindset they were in, and they're thinking, you know,
oh my god, we've got there's three more bodies down

(38:31):
in Henry County, which is where Stockbridge is, and that
was worked by a separate agency along with the GBI.
So it's hard to take the measure of it, is
what I'm saying.

Speaker 2 (38:41):
We know that. So he kills his wife one more
in her sleep, then he kills the children while they're sleeping,
and then he So the twenty seventh is wife, twenty eighth,
the kids. Then the twenty ninth is when he goes
into town and where he has by the way, he's
lost his money. Every money's gone. He had blown one
hundred thousand dollars in the last couple of months. He

(39:03):
shows up at the first place that he did a
lot of trading at was Momentum Securities. At Momentum Securities,
he had been there twice that week and they were like,
you had a margin call, you got no money. He
writes a fifty thousand dollars check to open up his account,
so they get trading again and it bounces, so they're like, no,
you can't do that. Well, when he shows up, they

(39:26):
know him because he has been trading with them. When
he shows up on the day of the twenty ninth,
he walks in and he's talking, he's talking to people
like everything's just fine, just normal, and then he pulls
out guns. Joe. Now so far we know that allegedly
he kills his first wife and her mother with a
hatchet or something in a very confined area and leaves.

(39:50):
He's killed his second wife and his own children with
a hammer and leaves. So you would think he would
stay along that same line, that he would use a
hammer or something to start beating people, but he doesn't.
He actually breaks out the guns when he gets at
momentum securities.

Speaker 1 (40:09):
I think that this is evidence of and this is
kind of obvious, I know, but it's evidence of an
escalation relative to how much have it and how much
hell can I can I reek upon this world that
I hate so badly? Wow, because I have been robbed,
So I'm gonna try. And you know, look, blunt force

(40:29):
is brutal. We know that sharp force is brutal, but
it's hardly efficient. Okay, medieval times they fought with with
with blunt objects, and they fought with swords. We've moved
now to firearms.

Speaker 2 (40:44):
He shows up to you're in a camper, We're in
a neighborhood home. Right, people are going to hear a
gunshot and remember it, Yeah, not going to hear a
hit to the head with a hammer trying to cry.

Speaker 1 (40:57):
Yeah, yeah, you would. And I think they you know,
with his his children and his second wife he ran
that risk because they were living in an apartment. If
you've ever I'm sure everybody in our you know, sound
of the voice, have at least been in an apartment.
You can hear what's going on on the other side
of the wall. I hated living in apartments anyway, you know,

(41:17):
but that's the nature of it. Look, when you show
up with firearms like this and you're going into a business,
uh establishment here, your purposed at that point. And you know, listen,
I don't want to I don't want to forget people
in this because we've got nine victims of the shooting

(41:38):
by itself, but Dave, there were like I think there
were like double digit people that were injured. And you know,
in addition to this, in the office parks here, so
he's he's raining, you know, he's raining down havoc. In
this environment, people are scurrying everywhere. There's a classic image
you can see him leaving on a cc TV camera footage.

(42:01):
You know, he's like it's a still shot. It's black
and white. Yeah, and he's wearing like a white T shirt,
pair of shorts, pair of tennis shoes or whatever. Very
you know, like if you saw him, he's not going
to look like you know, some some kind of ogre
coming out of the past, you know, or you know,
somebody lives in their bridge and each billy goes, you're

(42:23):
talking about somebody that just looks like John Key public
that walks in here, and it's Satan incarnate at this
point in time, I think. You know, later that same night,
you know, they they tracked him down. You know, he
tried to kidnap. He tried to kidnap a girl. So

(42:45):
he goes into momentium securities. He kills four, wounds others.
He then walks across the street to an all Tech
investment group, makes him a small tech with the small
truck with the receptionists there, nobody knows what just happened
in momentum, nobody knows his wife and kids are dead,
nobody knows any of that's going on. And he breaks
out the guns and starts firing. Now, this all happened

(43:05):
very quickly.

Speaker 2 (43:06):
The murders a momentum and then the shooting that takes
place at all Tech Investment Group where five people are
murdered there. Right, Yeah, because he had a total of
nine people murdered. I don't know totals on how many
people were wounded, people that are still mentally, emotionally scarred
for life, for life. So he leaves there. Now this
is when he hops in his mini van and takes

(43:27):
off and they get him. Are they chasing him right
off the bat Joe.

Speaker 1 (43:31):
They're looking for him, and everybody knows what he's driving.
And I remember that going out on the air. You
know they're looking for this minivan. I think it was white,
and so you're going to put out an APB, the
all Points bulletin, and you know that he's not going
to stay in the city.

Speaker 2 (43:48):
They knew his name though, didn't they, because people that
survived knew him.

Speaker 1 (43:52):
That's that's Mark Barton, mark O Barton, I think it's
or and or something like that, And so they, you know,
they know who this guy is. It's not like he's
somebody that walks into I don't know, into a big
department store just off the street. He's gone to a
place that he's familiar with and that is familiar with him, right,

(44:13):
and he's he begins to rain down this terror and
it's at that moment time as he's fleeing and I'm
not really clear about the dynamics but I know that
I have, if memory serves me correctly, from that day
he had made an attempt to kidnap a girl to

(44:36):
get her into the vehicle with him, you know, to
kind of take a hostage, I guess as a shield
or something like this.

Speaker 2 (44:42):
And she funny when you mentioned the apb Okay. Yeah,
there was four hours of searching for him from the
time he left All Tech Investment Group. They knew who
they were looking for, they knew what he was driving.
Four hours of metro Atlanta and surrounding areas terrorized by
a guy who has just shot up two different businesses.
They don't know what's coming next. They're looking for him,

(45:05):
and that's when he ends up in Kennesau. And where's
Kennisau in relation to Buckett?

Speaker 1 (45:08):
Yeah, if you think about Kennisau kinnisaw Is you remember
how I mentioned Marietta earlier, Well, you have to go
pasted on. If you think about seventy five that runs northwest.
As you're leaving out of Atlanta, you're going to first
pass Marietta and then you're going to go up even
further and you're going to get to Kennesau. Okay, And

(45:28):
so kennisauw Is further north and so he's cruising along.
The police are on him. He pulls over into a
service station. It's already dark outside by this time.

Speaker 2 (45:39):
He tries to take that young girl hostage.

Speaker 1 (45:41):
He did, and they wind up surrounding She bought to
think against She.

Speaker 2 (45:46):
Got away and she called police that they didn't know
he was there, They didn't know they were looking. They
were all looking for Mark Barton in a white mini van.
They didn't know where he was exactly until that girl.
She's a hero because there's no telling he was trying
to take her hostage to maybe be a negotiation, a shield,
I don't know. But she calls the police and say,
I got him. Here he is and they they were there.

Speaker 1 (46:09):
Right right on top of it, and they did surround him.
That night, They've got police surrounding the vehicle and he
makes the decision, you know, to put the weapon to
the side of his head and kill himself. I'm Joseph
Scott Morgan and this is body bags
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Joseph Scott Morgan

Joseph Scott Morgan

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