On September 17, 2015, a house fire in rural Platte, South Dakota, revealed a far darker crime: 16-year-old Michael Westerhuis and his mother Nicole and three younger siblings, Connor, Jaeci, and Kailey, did not die in the blaze but from shotgun wounds. Investigators concluded the family patriarch, Scott Westerhuis, shot his wife and children, set the home on fire, and then killed himself. No evidence was found of a third party or forced entry and the home’s security systems showed no intruder activity.

The killings came hours after state officials told the educational cooperative where Scott and Nicole handled finances that it was losing a multi-million dollar federal contract amid an investigation into alleged embezzlement from the GEAR UP grant program. The deaths were ruled part of that murder-suicide and the case into the family’s deaths was closed.