On the night of March 23, 1997, Dedra Lynn Mims Hunt, 29, was found dead in her Pelham, Alabama, home alongside her partner, 39-year-old Randy Gerald Duke, and her daughters Chelsea, 7, and Chelisa, 6. The killings began during a dispute over a pickup truck and were carried out by a group that included Duke’s 16-year-old son, Mark Anthony Duke, and a 19-year-old friend, Michael Brandon Samra. Hunt fled upstairs with the children, but the attackers pursued them. After ammunition was exhausted, the assailants used knives; Dedra Hunt was shot again in a bathroom and her daughter Chelisa’s throat was cut, while Chelsea’s throat was also cut.

The scene was staged to look like a robbery. Two teenage accomplices, David Layne Collums and Michael Lafayette Ellison, later pleaded guilty to murder and received prison terms in exchange for testifying against Mark Duke and Samra, who were convicted of capital murder. What details about the motive or the planning remain unclear to readers who remember Pelham in 1997?