Word: bartonized
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Five people would die at All-Tech. And by dusk, Barton, 44, had turned Glock and Colt on himself as police cornered him at a gas station in an Atlanta suburb. By that time, America had seen hours of TV images of panic in Atlanta's streets and of the city's financial center under almost martial rule. As his victims are mourned, the dead murderer's grim story keeps unfolding, with details of financial folly, maudlin suicide notes, adultery, brutality, suspected fraud, even an earlier set of suspected murders. At a time of increased public anxiety over such shooting...
...Barton speaks through the notes that were found lying on the corpses of his murdered wife Leigh Ann, 27, daughter Mychelle, 8, and son Matthew, 12, shrouded in towels and sheets, only their faces showing. He wrote in another note, "I don't plan to live very much longer, just long enough to kill as many of the people that greedily sought my destruction." But Barton also speaks in a 1995 deposition, obtained by TIME, in which he narrates his life in sober and calculated tones. Barton was trying to collect the $600,000 in insurance he had taken...
...argued his case by talking about his life, appearing to discuss candidly the rootlessness of his life, the deterioration of his marriage to first wife Debra Spivey and his affair with Leigh Ann Lang. The only child of parents in the Air Force, Barton worked as a manual laborer and drifted briefly through one college before settling at the University of South Carolina, where he graduated with a chemistry degree in 1979. That same year, he married Spivey, a fellow student he had met while working as night auditor at a local hotel. After living in Atlanta, where Barton tested...
Then, in 1990, he had a mysterious parting of ways with his company. "Officially, I was fired," Barton said in his deposition, explaining that it was a way for the company to save face and not scare off suppliers. But after his last day at TLC, someone broke into the offices, stole secret formulas and erased computer files. Police went to Barton's home and arrested him on a burglary charge. However, according to a report at the time, a detective investigating the case believed the burglary "was not intended for the theft of the product formula but to hide...
...Barton moved to Georgia with his wife and, after starting up a firm he compared with a "paper route," he took a job as a salesman for a chemical company. In his new position, he got to know a young receptionist named Leigh Ann Lang. She was married at the time, but apparently not happily. "She liked older guys," Barton said. "She made that known to everybody." By May 1993, Barton and Lang were having an affair. He bought a new wardrobe and began keeping up a tan. Debra grew suspicious. "The key to the whole thing was I started...