Love and Murder 
Flesh and Blood
Why did a small-town girl have her family brutally murdered?
waylon says: I see i’m not alone in my thoughts about terry caffey. I agree with Janna and a few more.I think he’s in a deep denial.How can anybody re-marry 7 months after a tragedy such as this.He even lives,with his wife and new family a few miles from where penny and the children are buried.I also think he’s a controlling person. I live about 10 miles from where this happen. I was surprised at how fast he remarried. He also has a page on facebook, asking for donations for his ministry!The book that was published,the tv appearances.All this does make people talk and wonder.Mr.Caffey needs to realize there were other families,good people in this town that are trying to heal too.The families of the convicted have feelings too and are trying to cope with this. He needs to take a backseat and realize this isn’t just about him.I personally see him as a person wanting in "the spotlight". And he is making money off this tragedy.A person with an agent......there’s money involved! (October 8th, 2010 at 2:24am)
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And yet, after Terry had seen every last piece of evidence, he continued to visit Erin and never wavered in his support, standing beside his daughter at each court appearance holding her hand. For the many people who puzzled over his loyalty, there were many others, in the pews of Miracle Faith and elsewhere, who understood it as the scriptural imperative of unconditional love. Terry drew particular sustenance from a passage in Romans, chapter 12: “Bless them which persecute you,” a principle that, in the end, informed his wish that his family’s killers be spared the death penalty. “My heart tells me there have been enough deaths,” Terry wrote in a letter to the Rains County district attorney, Robert Vititow, this past fall. “I want them, in this lifetime, to have a chance for remorse and to come to a place of repentance for what they have done. Killing them will not bring my family back.” He asked that Charlie Wilkinson and Charles Waid receive sentences of life in prison without parole. After consulting with the attorney general’s office, Vititow honored his wishes and offered them a plea deal. In November they each pleaded guilty to three counts of capital murder.
V.
At their sentencing hearings in January, Terry rose to address each of them in the courtroom. He spoke first to Waid, who remained impassive, and then to Charlie. “In time, God has shown me what it means to forgive,” Terry said as Charlie’s eyes shone with tears. “Charlie Wilkinson, I want to say to you today, I forgive you. Not so much for your sake, but for my own. I refuse to grow into a bitter old man. If I want to heal and move on, I must find some forgiveness in my heart, and that has been the hardest thing I have ever had to do because you took so much from me.”
Today Terry lives in a tidy brick house in Wills Point, about thirty miles southwest of Alba, just down the road from the cemetery where Penny and the boys are buried. He became an ordained minister in April, and he gives his testimony most weekends at local churches, using his family’s story as an object lesson in forgiveness. To the astonishment of many of his closest friends, he remarried last year. Terry found a good listener in Sonja Webb, a pretty divorcée he met in the course of his work as a home health aide. Webb was raising two sons on her own. She asked him to lunch last June, and they never ran out of things to talk about.
“Terry missed being a husband and a father,” Tommy Gaston says. “He needed somebody to lay down beside him at night who he could tell his troubles to.” They said their vows in October at Miracle Faith, just a few feet from where Terry’s wife’s and sons’ caskets had rested seven months earlier. Webb’s boys—Blake, who is seventeen, and Tanner, who is nine—bear a passing resemblance to Bubba and Tyler. Terry, who shares a warm relationship with his stepsons, says that, like Job, he has been doubly blessed for never faltering in his faith in God.
Once a month, Terry makes the three-hour trip to Gatesville, where Erin is incarcerated. At his urging, she received a lesser sentence than life without parole; he wanted to make sure that she had something to live for, he said. And so Erin accepted a plea deal—two life sentences to be served concurrently, plus an additional 25 years—which ensures that with good behavior she will be eligible for parole when she is 59 years old. Now that she has pled out and the specter of a capital murder trial is gone, their conversations are no longer restricted, and Terry is free to ask his daughter whatever he wants to know. Yet when I visited him, he seemed hesitant. “I’ve got so many questions, and I don’t want to hit her with them all at once,” he said. He has, thus far, chosen to accept the story line she has provided him: She was planning on running away that night, but then she changed her mind. The phone calls, she told her father, were to dissuade Charlie from coming at all. It was Charlie who had wanted the family dead, and when he came to the house, she had been powerless to stop him.
“I think she thought Charlie was just blowing smoke,” Terry said. “I don’t think she actually thought he would go through with it. I know my daughter. She cried one time when we were in my truck and I ran over a squirrel; she’s tenderhearted. No kid’s an angel, but I know what she is capable of, and I know she’s not capable of murder.”
Erin told another version of her story to Israel Lewis, the mental health counselor who was hired to evaluate her for the defense. When she spoke to Lewis, Erin insisted that Charlie had a volatile temper; he had killed her family after she had broken up with him and then framed her. “I have worked with some good liars, but Erin was one of the best,” said Lewis, who has nineteen years’ experience counseling juvenile offenders. “She seemed totally sincere and genuine, and I would have put my license on the line to say that she was telling me the truth. She spoke with tears in her eyes—‘God will save me. He knows I’m innocent.’ I cried every time I left her jail cell.”
Only after learning the details of the criminal investigation did Lewis realize that Erin had been manipulating him. He continued to visit her at the county jail, but what disturbed him most, at the end of a year of counseling, was the realization that he could no more explain why she had wanted her family killed than on the day he had first met her. She remained a mystery. “You could not have paid her to say anything negative about her parents,” he said. “I still long for the day when I know what was hurting her bad enough to make such a decision.”
Erin declined my interview requests, but the three other defendants each agreed to sit down with me and revisit the early morning of March 1, 2008. They all gave similar accounts, with Erin serving as the driving force behind the killings. Johnson, who is serving a forty-year sentence, recalled how Charlie had repeatedly asked Erin to consider running away as the group had driven around before the murders. “Charlie kept saying, ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’” Johnson recounted. “And she said, ‘Why are you asking me this? If you love me, you’ll do it.’” (Explaining her own inability to put the brakes on the plan, Johnson said, “I just wanted to go home, but Charlie said it was too late, that I was already involved. He said that if anybody said anything to anyone, that person would be taken care of. I was scared shitless.”) Erin had seemed elated after the killings, Johnson explained, and said that she was “free.” In fact, Johnson said, Erin had wanted to get out of the car to make sure that everyone was dead. And it was Erin who had insisted that her brothers be killed, according to both Johnson and Waid. The boys picked on her, Erin had said, and she didn’t want them to be left in foster care. “They were ridiculous reasons—not even reasons—just an excuse,” Waid told me. “When we pulled away from the house, she was happier than a kid on Christmas morning.”
One afternoon this spring, I visited Charlie at the Polunsky Unit, in Livingston, the imposing, maximum-security prison that is best known for housing death row. Now nineteen, he looked impossibly young for someone who will never step beyond the guard towers and concertina wire again. He wore a starched white inmate’s uniform, a buzz cut, and a doleful expression. He was frank about the horror of what he had done and made no excuses for himself. “If I was sitting on my jury, I would have stuck the needle in my arm,” he told me. At the same time, he said, Erin was given ample opportunity to call off the plan. “It was her idea,” he said. “If at any time she would have said, ‘Well, we’re not going to do it after all,’ it never would have happened.”
He had no ill words for the people he had so viciously attacked. Of the Caffeys, he painted a nostalgic portrait. “You know them family pictures that they print in movies and stuff?” he said. “The old-timey ones with the white fence? When I was at their house, that was what the family was like. They were perfect.” When I visited the subject of his role in Tyler’s murder, he grew quiet and studied his hands, his eyes slowly filling with tears. “I don’t really like to talk about that,” he said.
It was when he spoke about Erin that his voice softened and grew sentimental. “I would have done anything for her,” he said. “She was very smart. Very caring. I don’t know why she wanted it done, why it had to be like that, but she was a very nice person.” Weeks after the killings, when he was being held at the county jail on $1.5 million bond, he had been devastated to learn from his defense attorney that Erin had, in fact, asked a previous boyfriend to kill her parents too. Sergeant Vance had interviewed the boy whom Erin was caught kissing at Miracle Faith, and he had told the Texas Ranger that Erin had spoken to him about her desire to have them killed—several months before she had started dating Charlie.
“It made me question a lot of things,” Charlie said, his voice trailing off. “After months of pushing me and convincing me and all this, I got to thinking that maybe all I was was just a tool.” He had not spoken to her since the morning of the crime, and he is barred from communicating with her ever again; he will forever have to wonder if she wanted her parents dead so that she could be with him or simply so that she could be free of her family’s control. “I don’t know what’s wrong with her head,” he said. “She needs to have it looked at.”
But Charlie was more bewildered by Erin’s behavior than bitter. Knowing everything he knew, I asked him, did he still love her? He thought for a moment before answering my question, and I studied his face behind the Plexiglas. “Once you love somebody, you can’t quit,” Charlie said. “You always will.”
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