JOLIET, Ill. (MCT) — Testimony in the trial of Christopher Vaughn for the murder of his wife and three children ended today with prosecutors playing the dramatic conclusion to Vaughn’s videotaped police interview, showing Vaughn as he crumpled up a photo of his son 8-year-old son Blake.
After more than 12 hours of questioning, Vaughn had finally had enough. He asked if he was under arrest, and when told he wasn’t, he asked for State Police to unlock the interview room door so he could leave and get some sleep.
“I’ve said what I’m going to say,” Vaughn said in a barely audible voice.
Cornelius Monroe, a special agent with the Illinois State Police who had entered the room and rearranged the photos on a table in front of Vaughn, started to slide the photos closer to him. Vaughn tried to push the photos away, and Monroe screamed, “Do not touch my (expletive) pictures, dude!”
Vaughn grabbed the photo of Blake and crumpled it and threw it in the corner, then stood up. Monroe stood up quickly, flipping his chair over, and came around the table to stand in front of Vaughn chest-to-chest, daring him to leave.
“Now try it!” Monroe yelled. “I’m still talking to you.”
Vaughn sat down but refused to talk to Monroe again. Another investigator continued the interview briefly, then told Vaughn she would give him some time to think over whether he had anything else to say.
Earlier today, jurors viewed portions of the video in which photographs of Vaughn’s three children were displayed the interview room table as Sgt. Gary Lawson hammered away at him, calling him “Lucky Chris...the reborn Chris. The Chris that doesn’t have to worry about them kids any more.”
“Today I lost everything,” Vaughn said on the video.
“You lost everything, but you’re still here,” Lawson snapped back in the video, played for the second day Tuesday in Vaughn’s murder trial.
Throughout video excerpts played for jurors today, Vaughn continued to tell police he was clueless about what had happened after he pulled the family’s SUV over on a dusty frontage road near Channahon.
Lawson held each photo in front of Vaughn’s face and asked him if they looked that way when they died. Vaughn looked away, then leaned back. Lawson then pushed the photos into Vaughn’s chest and told him to “bring them close to your heart.”
Vaughn continued to deny any involvement in their deaths. With Lawson still leaning into his face, Vaughn said he was “getting very tired.”
“We can take a break,” said Lawson, standing up and arranging the photos on the table in front of Vaughn. “Think about your wife. Think about your kids.”
On the way out, Lawson said, “You want some pizza?”
Vaughn did not reply. He pushed the photographs away from him and put his face down on the table.
As he had earlier in the interview, Vaughn repeated that he didn’t understand what had happened. He said he was doing better at patching things up with his wife, Kimberly, after he’d confessed to cheating on her and was trying to be a better family man.
“What don’t you understand?” Lawson fired back at one point. “That your wife and kids are dead?”
Lawson then leaned forward toward Vaughn, who had his hand on his forehead and was staring down at the table in the tiny interview room. The sergeant tried to get Vaughn to repeat the names of his children.
“Say their names. They’re real people,” Lawson said.
Vaughn refused.
“Abigayle, Blake,” the detective continued. “They’re dead. Dead. No longer alive, Chris.”
The dramatic videotape has been the highlight of the second week of testimony at Vaughn’s trial in Joliet. He is accused of gunning down his wife, Kimberlty, and children, Abigayle or “Abbi,” 12, Cassandra or “Sandi,” 11, and Blake, 8, in the family in SUV in June 2007.
“I couldn’t have done this; she couldn’t have done this,” a weary and disheveled Vaughn told Lawson on the video at one point.
Vaughn’s attorneys have blamed his wife, Kimberly, saying she was distraught over troubles in her marriage and killed the children, wounded Vaughn and then committed suicide.
Police began to interview Vaughn about five hours after the killings, soon after he was released from a hospital following treatment for minor gunshot wounds and taken to the state police station in Lockport. During 14 hours there, Vaughn insisted he had only a vague recollection of what happened in the SUV, prosecutors have said.
A camera mounted near the ceiling and pointed down at the table captured Vaughn fidgeting with his gown and occasionally sipping water from a blue paper cup as he calmly recalled how he had awakened the children at 4 a.m. and told them to get in the SUV for a surprise trip to a water park in Springfield.
With the children asleep in the back seat, Vaughn pulled the vehicle over because his wife, taking a new migraine medication, thought she was going to be sick, he told the detectives. He exited to check the carrier on the roof, Vaughn said, and felt pain in his leg and noticed he was bleeding on returning inside the SUV.
Vaughn said in the interview that he fell “head-first” out of the vehicle and stumbled down the road until he flagged down a passing motorist. He said that when he was told at the hospital he had been shot, he was incredulous because there was no one else around and his wife didn’t own a gun.
“I’m really confused,” Vaughn said early in the interview with detectives. “I just don’t know … I think I panicked or something.”
Lawson and his partner left Vaughn in the interview room for hours between discussions, alternating between courteous questioning and intense interrogation.
At one point, Lawson, who had already spend more than an hour berating Vaughn, tried a different tack. Lawson asked Vaughn what he thought the person who had killed his family deserved.
“Whatever they did, they deserve back,” said Vaughn, dressed in a hospital gown. “An eye for an eye.”
At another point, Vaughn pushed away a bag of food from McDonalds that detectives had brought him. The bag was still sitting on the table untouched about an hour later.
“You’ve been here all day. It would make me feel better if you’d at least eat some fries,” Lawson said. “I could warm them up for you if you want.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Vaughn replied.
Lawson asked him what he meant.
“They’re gone,” Vaughn said in a gravelly voice, his head bowed. “They’re gone. I’ve got nothing to go back to.”
Prosecutors will continue playing portions of interviews with Vaughn on Wednesday.
