TEXAS 2003 Cold Case Solved After 3 Years — Justic…
TEXAS 2003 Cold Case Solved After 3 Years — Justice for the Whitaker Family
On the evening of December 10th, 2003, the Whitaker family left Papado restaurant in Stafford, Texas after a celebratory dinner.
Bart, the oldest son, 24 years old, had just told his parents that he was about to graduate from Sam Houston State University.
His parents had given him a Rolex watch worth $4,000.
His younger brother, Kevin, 19 years old, sat next to him, smiling in the photos taken that evening.
In one photo, Bart held up his middle finger to the camera.
No one thought much of it.
That was just Bart.
When the family arrived home in Sugarland, about 20 mi southwest of Houston, Bart stopped at the entrance and said he needed to go back to the car to get his phone.
Kevin walked into the house first.
He smiled when he saw a figure in a black mask standing in the darkness.
That was the last smile of his life.
Four gunshots rang out in the quietest house on the quietest street in the quietest city in Texas.
Trisha Whitaker, 51 years old, an elementary school teacher, died on the spot.
Kevin, 19 years old, a sophomore, died shortly afterward.
Kent Whitaker, the father, was shot through the chest but survived.
Bart was wounded in the arm.
He called 911 saying he had just chased the attacker out the back door, that the attacker might have been black.
Police arrived at the scene and found the Glock used in the crime.
That gun was registered in Kevin’s name, taken from the safe in his room, which someone had broken into before the family went out to dinner.
The entire city of Sugarland mourned for Bart, the young man about to graduate, who had just lost his mother and younger brother in one night.
But Bart was not about to graduate.
He was not even attending school.
And the figure in the black mask in the house that night was not a burglar.
He was there because Bart had paid him to be there.
It took nearly 2 years of investigation, the uncovering of three previous failed murder plots, an international manhunt all the way to Mexico, and the confession of the accomplice himself before the case was fully solved.
But the strangest part of this story is not the murders.
It is what the surviving father did after learning the truth.
This is the story of the son who planned to kill his entire family for a $1.
5 million inheritance and the father who spent 14 years fighting to save the very man who killed his wife from the lethal injection.
If you are the kind of person who stays until the end of the story, wanting to know not only what happened, but also why a father would forgive the unforgivable, then you have come to the right place.
Consider subscribing to Cold Case Reopened.
We go deep into the cases that everyone else has forgotten.
To understand why a son would kill his family, you have to understand what that family looked like from the outside and why no one saw what was coming.
Sugarland, Texas, located about 20 mi southwest of downtown Houston in Fort Ben County, was one of the wealthiest and safest suburbs in the state of Texas in the early 2000s.
The violent crime rate was nearly zero.
two-story houses with neatly trimmed lawns lined streets named after lakes.
The Sugar Lakes neighborhood, where the Whitaker family lived, was exactly the kind of place people moved to when they wanted to raise their children in peace.
Detective Marshall Slaugh of the Sugarland Police Department, who would become the lead investigator on the case, later said that when he received the call about a shooting of four people that night, he thought the dispatcher was joking.
That simply does not happen in Sugarland, he said.
But it did happen and it happened in the very home of the family that everyone in the community regarded as a model.
Kent Whitaker, 54 years old, worked as a chief accountant for a construction company in Houston.
He was a hard-working man, lived by his Christian faith, and believed that family was the foundation of everything.
His wife Patricia Trisha Whitaker, 51 years old, was an elementary school teacher, a woman whom friends described as gentle, devoted, and always putting her children first.
The youngest son, Kevin, 19 years old, was a college sophomore, the kind of young man neighbors used as an example when talking about the good, younger generation.
He played sports, did well in school, and had a legally registered 9mm Glock that was kept in a locked safe in his bedroom.
Then there was Bart.
Thomas Bartlett Whitaker, the oldest son, 24 years old, was the one everyone thought they knew but actually knew nothing about.
On the surface, Bart was a student about to graduate, a good son, the older brother whom Kevin admired.
Kevin’s friends considered Bart cool.
But beneath that exterior was a history that the family had tried to hide and fix for years.
While attending Clemens High School in Sugarland, Bart had been arrested for breaking into the school and stealing computers.
His parents responded by sending him to a private Christian academy, hoping discipline and faith would straighten their son out.
They also bought him several luxury cars, paid the rent on a house near the lake in Willis, about 70 mi north of Sugarland, and covered all his tuition.
Bart began studying at Baylor University in Waco in 1998, attended through the spring of 2001, then transferred to Sam Houston State University.
His parents believed everything was on the right track.
But Bart was never on any right track.
He had dropped out or been suspended long before, yet continued to tell the family that he was attending classes normally.
Every semester was a new lie.
Every exam was a fabricated story.
And in December 2003, when Bart told the family that he had just finished his final exams and was about to graduate from Sam Houston State, no one doubted him.
Why would they? He was their son.
The dinner at Papado restaurant in Stafford on the evening of December 10th was a family celebration in every sense.
Kent and Trisha had already bought a $4,000 Rolex watch as a graduation gift for Bart.
The whole family sat together, ate, and took photos.
In those photos, Kevin smiled next to his older brother.
In one of them, Bart held up his middle finger to the camera.
Those were the last photos of the Whitaker family with all four members still together.
But while the family was having dinner, a man named Chris Brashier, 25 years old, a former co-orker of Barts at the Bentwater Yacht and Country Club, was carrying out his part.
Brashier dressed in black from head to toe, wore a ski mask, and broke into the Whitaker house.
He went upstairs, found Kevin’s bedroom, broke open the safe, and took out the 9mm Glock along with ammunition.
He staged a burglary, scattered belongings around, then went back downstairs and hid near the front door, waiting.
Outside, in a car parked a few blocks away, Steven Champagne, another co-orker of Barts at the club, sat behind the wheel with the engine running, ready to drive the getaway.
Everything was according to the plan Bart had laid out.
When the Whitaker family drove home after dinner, Bart knew exactly what was waiting behind the door.
He stopped at the entrance and told the family he needed to go back to the car for his cell phone.
That was not forgetfulness.
That was calculation.
Kevin walked into the house first.
According to later testimony, he smiled when he saw the figure in the darkness, perhaps thinking it was a joke.
Brashier fired.
Trisha walked in right after Kevin.
Another shot.
Kent followed.
Another shot.
Then Bart walked in last and Brashier shot him in the arm before fleeing out the back door where Champagne was waiting.
Bart later admitted that the wound to his arm was intentional, arranged so that he would look like a victim rather than the mastermind.
Trisha died on the spot.
Kevin died shortly afterward.
Both were shot in the chest.
Kent was seriously wounded in the upper body, but was still breathing.
Bart called 911 just after midnight.
His voice panicked, saying he had just been shot and had tried to chase the attacker out the back door.
When the dispatcher asked for a description of the perpetrator, Bart said it might have been a black guy.
I don’t know.
That was a calculated lie meant to steer the investigation away from Brashier, a white man.
Neighbors poured out into the street.
Ambulances arrived.
Kent was taken to the ICU at the hospital.
Bart was admitted with a non-life-threatening wound.
And when the news spread throughout Sugarland the next morning, the entire community was stunned.
Family friends told police that the Whitaker home had nothing but perfection.
John Flores, a former classmate of Kevin’s, said the Whitaker family was a pillar of the community.
They loved experiencing life together.
Police were baffled.
Who would want to target a family like this? There were no known personal grudges, no debts, no enemies.
The shooting looked like a burglary that turned violent, but something did not add up.
Detective Slot found the Glock used in the crime lying in the kitchen, not where a fleeing burglar would leave a weapon.
He also found Kevin’s safe upstairs broken open where the gun had been kept.
And on the curb, right next to Bart’s Chevrolet Yukon, there was a black men’s leather glove.
Slot noted everything, but did not yet have enough pieces.
There were no suspects, no clear motive.
And while police searched for answers, Bart Whitaker played the grieving son perfectly.
When Kent was released from the hospital, Bart moved in to live with his father in the very house where his mother and younger brother had died.
The two of them stayed together, sharing the grief, and Bart told everyone that he wanted to find the person who had done this to his family.
He cooperated with police.
He appeared willing to help and all of Sugarland mourned for the young man about to graduate from college who had just lost his mother and younger brother in one night.
No one knew that the person being comforted was the one who had ordered the killings.
The facade began to crack only 2 days after the shooting.
On December 12th, 2003, the Sugarland Police Department received a call from a newspaper reporter.
The reporter had checked student records and discovered that Bart Whitaker was not enrolled at Sam Houston State University and had not been attending school for a long time.
The young man whose family had just celebrated his graduation, who had been given the $4,000 Rolex, was not about to graduate.
He was not even a student.
When this information reached Detective Marshall Slaugh, everything in the case began to shift.
Slaugh later said that from that moment on, he started looking at Bart less like a victim and more like a suspect, but lying about graduating was one thing.
Staging a murder was something entirely different.
Slot needed more than a lie to build a case, and he knew it.
Meanwhile, the physical evidence at the scene continued to tell a story that no one initially wanted to hear.
The 9mm Glock used to shoot the four members of the Whitaker family was registered in the name of Kevin Whitaker, the 19-year-old victim.
The gun had been kept in a locked safe in Kevin’s second floor bedroom.
Someone had broken open that safe before the family went out to dinner, taken the gun and ammunition, and then used the victim’s own weapon to kill the victims.
Slot found the gun lying in the kitchen after the shooting, a detail he considered strange.
A panicked fleeing burglar would take the weapon with him or throw it along the way, not place it neatly in the kitchen.
And then there was the black men’s leather glove lying on the curb right next to Bart’s Chevrolet Yukon.
Each detail individually could be explained, but when placed side by side together with the lie about graduating, they began to paint a picture that no one in the Sugarland community wanted to see.
Still, Slot did not yet have enough evidence to act.
Bart was still living with his father in the house on Heron Way, still playing the grieving son, still saying exactly the things a real victim would say.
And Kent Whitaker, the father who had just lost his wife and youngest son, needed Bart’s presence more than ever.
The two of them leaned on each other in the house where the blood had been cleaned, but the memories had not.
Then Adam Hip walked in.
Hip was a former classmate of Barts at Clemens High School in Sugarland.
and later the two attended Baylor University in Waco together.
Hip went on his own to the Sugarland Police Station and asked to speak with the detectives handling the Whitaker case.
What he told them completely changed the case.
Hip told police that Bart had previously planned to kill his family, not once, but multiple times.
Specifically, around April 2001, when both were at Baylor, Bart had recruited Hip as the shooter for a plot to kill the entire family.
The plan was nearly identical to what happened in December 2003.
Lure the family out of the house, have someone break in, and shoot each member as they returned.
Hip even drew a diagram for the police, showing the shooters position in the dining room, and three stick figures representing the victims in the hallway by the front door.
Bart’s roommate at Baylor would drive the gun down from Waco for Hip to use.
The plan had been detailed, roles assigned, but at the last minute, it was called off.
Hip said Bart’s motive was always money.
Bart believed he would inherit the entire family estate, estimated at about $1 million if his parents and younger brother died.
Bart had offered to share a portion of that money with Hip for pulling the trigger.
The information from Hip was the turning point Slot needed.
But the testimony of one person was not enough.
Slot needed verification and he began tracking down the names Hip had provided.
Police went to Justin Peters, Bart’s roommate at Baylor in San Antonio.
When questioned, Peters admitted his role in the plot Hip had described, confirming it had been planned for April 2001.
But Peters revealed something more that stunned the detectives.
This was not the first plot.
Earlier in December 2000, Bart had recruited Peters and another Baylor student named Will Anthony to kill the Whitaker family.
That plan also failed.
Peters confirmed that in both instances, Bart’s motive was to seize the family assets.
Pause and think about this.
By the time of the December 2003 shooting, Bart Whitaker had tried to kill his parents and younger brother at least three separate times spanning three years with at least five different accompllices.
The first time in December 2000, the second time in April 2001.
Both times failed because the accompllices backed out at the last minute.
And when the recruitment pool from Baylor dried up, Bart turned to two co-workers at the Bentwater Yacht and Country Club, Chris Brashier and Steven Champagne.
The third time, they went through with it.
Through three years of planning, three separate plots, and at least five people recruited, Bart Whitaker never gave up his intention to kill his family.
Each time it failed, he did not stop and ask himself what he was doing.
He found new people.
Meanwhile, he continued living in his parents’ house, eating family dinners, receiving money for tuition, and planning the next attempt.
With the information from Hip and Peters, Slot now had the big picture.
But he needed more direct evidence linked to the shooting on the night of December 10th, 2003.
He needed the people who were actually at the scene that night, the ones who held the gun and drove the car to speak up.
Hip agreed to cooperate.
He hired a lawyer and reached an agreement for immunity from prosecution for his role in the April 2001 plot in exchange for assisting police in the ongoing investigation of Bart.
Police asked Hip to contact Bart and record the conversations.
Before each call, detectives Slot and Ba met with Hip and scripted the direction of the conversation, steering Bart towards specific topics, trying to get him to say something that could be used in court.
The trap was being set, and Bart Whitaker, who had spent 3 years setting a trap for his family, did not know that now he was the prey.
While Hip was recording the calls with Bart, detectives from the Sugarland Police Department were pursuing another line of investigation, focusing on the two men they believed had directly carried out the shooting on the night of December 10th.
Chris Brashier and Steven Champagne.
Both were former co-workers of Barts at the Bentwater Yacht and Country Club where Bart had worked.
Brashier, 25 years old, was the one Bart had recruited to be the shooter.
Champagne, about the same age, was assigned to drive the getaway car.
They were not professional hitmen.
They were not gang members.
They were ordinary young men working at a suburban club.
Persuaded by a co-orker friend that killing three people was the easiest way to make money.
Bart had promised to pay them from the inheritance after the family was dead.
That was the deal.
But after the night of December 10th, Bart did not pay them a single scent.
When police began closing in, Champagne was the first to break.
Detectives had built enough connections between Champagne, Brashier, and Bart through phone records, HIPS testimony, and the physical evidence at the scene.
When brought into the interrogation room, Champagne faced a simple choice.
tell the truth or face the death penalty under Texas law for capital murder.
He chose to talk.
The next day, Steven Champagne gave a videotaped confession and for the first time, the entire plot was laid out from beginning to end by someone who had directly participated.
Champagne stated that Bart Whitaker was the mastermind of the entire plan.
Bart had recruited both Champagne and Brashier, assigned specific roles, and mapped out the detailed script for the night of December 10th.
Chris Brashier would break into the house, take Kevin’s gun from the safe, stage the burglary, and shoot each family member as they walked through the door.
Champagne would park a few blocks away with the engine running, and drive Brashier away from the scene as soon as the gunshots stopped.
Bart would be the last one to enter the house and be shot in a non-life-threatening location, creating a fake wound to make him look like a victim.
Everything had gone according to plan.
Champagne stated that after Brashier jumped into the car, the two of them drove away in silence.
There was no celebration, no sense of victory, only silence and the smell of gunpowder on Brashier’s clothes.
But Champagne did not only confess about that night, he also led police to the place where he and Brashier had disposed of the evidence.
After leaving Sugarland on the night of December 10th, Brashier and Champagne drove north to Lake Conroe, about 70 mi from Sugarland.
They stopped at a specific spot on the lake shore and threw into the water a bag containing evidence related to the murders.
When the police dive team went down to the location Champagne indicated, they recovered the bag.
Inside were clothes with gunpowder residue, gloves, and most importantly, Bart Whitaker’s cell phone.
The phone that Bart had told his family he needed to go back to the car to get before walking into the house that night.
The phone he used as an excuse to separate from the family at the exact moment Brashier opened fire.
That phone was at the bottom of Lake Conroe in a bag with the murder evidence.
It had not been lost.
It had not been left in the car.
It had been deliberately disposed of along with everything else that could connect Bart to the shooting.
By this point, Detective Slot had Champagne’s videotaped confession, the physical evidence from the bottom of Lake Conroe, Hip’s testimony about the previous plots, Peters’s confirmation of the December 2000 plot, and Bart’s web of lies about his schooling.
Every arrow pointed to the same person.
Police went to arrest Bart, but Bart Whitaker was no longer there.
About 7 months after the shooting in mid 2004, Bart disappeared from Sugarland.
He left no message for his father.
He told no one where he was going.
He simply vanished.
Police later determined that before fleeing, Bart had taken about $7,000 to $10,000 in cash from his father’s house.
Money that Kent kept at home.
Bart did not pay Brashier or Champagne a single dollar for their work as hitmen, but he took money from the very father he had tried to kill to fund his escape.
The trail led Bart to Mexico.
A friend named Rudy Rios helped Bart cross the border and allowed him to use his identity.
Bart Whitaker became Rudy Rios.
He settled in Mterrey, a major industrial city in northeastern Mexico about 150 mi from the Texas border.
There he began a new life under the false name, blended into the crowd, and hoped that distance and time would do the rest.
But while Bart was building an anonymous life in Mterrey, the justice system in Texas was building the case against him.
Brashier and Champagne were both arrested and charged.
Both confirmed the same story.
Bart was the mastermind, the one who planned, recruited, and ordered the killings.
On September 15th, 2005, nearly 2 years after the shooting, a grand jury in Fort Ben County formally issued an arrest warrant for Bart Whitaker on charges of capital murder under Texas law, a crime that could carry the death penalty.
Bart’s name and photo were sent to the FBI, federal law enforcement agencies, and through diplomatic channels to Mexican authorities.
The manhunt was no longer limited to Sugarland or Texas.
It became an international manhunt for Kent Whitaker.
This period was a chain of compounding pain with no end.
First, he lost his wife and youngest son in one night.
Then he learned that his oldest son, the one who had lived with him in the house where his wife and son died, the one he had hugged and comforted through sleepless nights, was the one who had ordered their deaths.
Then that son fled, took his money, and disappeared.
Each new layer of truth tore open another wound.
Kent later said that at first all he could think of was revenge of inflicting as much suffering as possible on the person who had taken his family.
But that person turned out to be his own son.
And that hatred when directed at his own flesh and blood became something more complicated than anything Kent had ever faced in his life.
