“I’m so fuckin’ tired of always havin’ to walk away or drive away. It’s like my world falls apart. U mean everything to me. U R my whole world, the only thing that matters to me is U! U R all I care about & I can’t wait for the day when we are together & will never have to leave each other again. That is, if we even have a future.”

—Holly Harvey (left), in a letter to Sandy Ketchum, June 29, 2004

Holly Harvey thought she was free at last.

A petite girl, not much more than five feet tall and just over 100 pounds, Holly burst out of the kitchen door of the ranch-style house. Her brown hair framed a pretty face that made her look younger than she really was—15 years and four months old. Holly ran under the carport, across to where a dark blue Chevy truck was parked. She was slippery with blood, giddy with adrenaline, panic-stricken.

Reaching the passenger side, Holly opened the door and threw in a seven-inch carving knife, smeared from point to handle with fresh blood. She slid onto the seat as her best friend and lover, Sandy Ketchum (right), climbed in through the driver’s door. Sandy, a year older but just as slight and baby-faced as Holly, held the truck’s key but was shaking so violently that all she could do was stab at the ignition.

“Oh my God, oh my God…”

Holly leaned over and took Sandy’s slick hands, holding them tight. Keeping them cupped in hers, she guided Sandy’s fingers toward the ignition. The key slid straight in. As the car backed out of the driveway, Holly took one last look at the house that held so many bad memories. Then Sandy gunned the Silverado’s engine and they were gone, down onto Plantation Drive, a long road running through Fayetteville, a small town that pushes up against the northern Fayette County line in Georgia.

Chain-smoking Newports, they tried to think what to do next. They had nowhere to go and they had to get cleaned up. The truck’s extended cab filled with the sweet, coppery smell of blood, which coated Holly’s face, hair, hands, and arms. Her T-shirt and jeans were soaked through; when she later undressed she found blood in her underwear, her socks, and even inside her shoes. They hit the GA-92 highway and minutes later were out of Fayetteville, constantly reassuring each other:

“I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

“We’re together now.”

“Forever.”

Before they met each other, the most extraordinary thing about Holly Harvey and Sandy Ketchum was just how ordinary they appeared to be. They were both bright, sensitive kids who liked all the things many teenagers like—listening to music, hanging out at the mall, smoking weed. They came from chaotic, dysfunctional families, not rare in the environs in which they grew up.

But after they met, these two unremarkable girls became something else altogether. Friendship turned into love, love became obsession, and obsession mutated into paranoia, then madness. Extreme crimes are usually born of extreme circumstances and this one was no different. Still, for the residents of Fayetteville, the crime’s genesis seemed far removed from the town’s clean-cut image. Even before the bodies the girls left were removed from 226 Plantation Drive, Fayetteville residents were swapping rumors and gossip over church pews and beers at Applebee’s, reveling in the shocking details: Lesbians. Drugs. Murder.

Mostly, though, they shared a sense of disbelief that this could have happened in their modest, conservative Southern Baptist town, so firmly anchored to the trinity of God, Country, Family.

It was the most brutal crime in Fayetteville’s history.

Now Holly Harvey and Sandy Ketchum were together, on the run, and armed with knives. And they were desperate. One local newspaper dubbed them a “teenage Thelma and Louise.”


Holly Harvey was born into trouble. Her mother, Carla, was a high school dropout who’d run away at the age of 17 with Gene Harvey, a petty crook with a long record who was wanted by the police. Dodging the law, the couple spent four years on the road, bouncing all the way to California and back again. “We must have lived in 16 states in those years,” recalls Carla Harvey in a cigarette-roughened Southern drawl that is part Marlene Dietrich, part Dolly Parton.

She remembers Harvey as a violent, jealous drunk. Once, while staying at a Texas motel, he saw Carla talking to another man while she sunbathing by the pool. He dragged her to their room and, as she recalled later, “beat my ass so bad he broke my nose and both my eyes were swollen shut.” When he was finished beating her, Harvey went to sleep.

“Why did I stay with him? I don’t know,” says Carla. “I loved him. I was desperate for someone to love me and for a family of my own to love. I wish I’d known it takes more to be a parent than just having a baby.”

The day after the police caught up with Harvey, Carla discovered that she was pregnant. With nowhere to go, she turned to her parents.

If there is such a thing as the Fayetteville establishment, Carla’s parents were part of it. They knew most everyone, and most everyone knew them. “They were kin,” says Randall Johnson, who has been Fayette County’s sheriff for 30 years and knew the Colliers for 40. Married since 1951, Carl and Sarah Collier lived in an understated white brick house in the Newton Plantation subdivision on the edge of town. Carl, a house painter, was unable to father children, and so he and his wife Sarah adopted—a boy, Kevin, in 1965 and then Carla in 1967. Like many in Fayetteville, a town of 14,000 located just 15 miles south of Atlanta, the Colliers were devout Christians. They were prominent figures in the First Baptist Church, one of more than 100 congregations in the town.

After Holly’s birth, Carla moved in with her parents, but the joy the baby brought was short-lived. The Colliers discovered Carla had visited with Gene Harvey and, after a furious row, disowned her. Carla left, taking with her a bitter resentment that Holly was eventually to inherit.

When Holly was 10, Carla found a job waitressing at the Crazy Horse Saloon, a few minutes from Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson airport. “It’s a titty bar,” Carla says. “Girls dancing there were earning $400 on a bad night.” Soon she graduated from waiting tables part-time to dancing on them full-time.

An unusual relationship evolved between mother and her preteen daughter: Carla became less a parent and more a friend to Holly. “I wanted to be the kind of mother I wish I’d had,” she says. “Maybe that was a mistake.” One night the bond between the two unraveled. After dancing a shift at the Crazy Horse, Carla returned home drunk and began arguing with her daughter. According to Holly, Carla suddenly grabbed her by the throat. “You make me sick,” she shouted, throwing her daughter onto the bed. Holly fled screaming from the room: “Mama tried to choke me! Mama tried to kill me!”

In 2002, Carla was sentenced to three years in jail, but was out within months. She sent Holly to live with an old high school friend, Anita Beckom, near Peachtree City, a small town 20 miles from Fayetteville.


I’m glad I found U. God sent U to me (I don’t care what it says about gay people in the Bible).—Holly Harvey to Sandy Ketchum

“Sandy!”

Holly Harvey couldn’t help herself. She had to shout the name out, and to this day she has no idea how she knew the girl standing in front of her was Sandy Ketchum. She just knew. She was 13 and like Sandy was attending Fayetteville Middle School. She’d been friends with a boy named Walt, Sandy’s cousin. Walt had told her about Sandy, but the two had never met. But on that day, walking toward the school bus, Holly had an instinct that the girl with the burgundy hair was Walt’s cousin. She suddenly had the urge to call out. It was a defining moment for her, one she relived in a letter to Sandy:

U turned around and U looked like an angel! I didn’t even kno who U were, but I fell in LOVE w/U! I used to think lesbians were like the nastiest thing on earth. But yet, here I was ‘fallin head over hills’ 4 U in a matter of 2 seconds.

Both girls felt an instant connection. Holly, reeling from her mother’s jail sentence, discovered in her new friend someone who felt as disconnected from her family as she did. Sandy had been abandoned by her natural mother when she was one. Now 14, she was on her third stepmother: the first died after a series of aneurysms, the second physically abused her. She lived in an apartment complex in downtown Fayetteville.

Sandy introduced Holly to her small group of friends—Kitten, Amanda, and Lacey—who, like Holly, felt like outcasts at Fayetteville Middle School. Together the gang would go to the $1 showings at the Movies 10 theater on Thursday evenings. They’d raid the Hobby Lobby for spray paint and leave their tags all over town—Sandy’s trademark PEACE OUT FOREVER is still visible on the walls behind the cineplex.

Sandy confided to Holly she’d had boyfriends and girlfriends before. But she preferred girls.

“You’re so pretty,” she told Holly.

Holly struggled to resolve her feelings for Sandy. “I was falling in love with her, but I didn’t understand it,” she recalls. “I’d never felt this way about anyone before. And certainly not about a girl.”

Sandy began inviting Holly to her house, where she met Tim and Beth Ketchum. Tim was impressed by Holly, whom he remembers as “possibly the nicest kid I’ve ever met.” When Sandy asked if Holly could sleep over, Ketchum didn’t give it a second thought.

On April 20, 2002, Holly sat with Sandy on her bed listening to music. Sandy’s parents were asleep in the next room. In the privacy of her room, the door closed and Sandy made the first move, asking Holly, “You wanna go with me?”

“You’re just saying that to mess with me,” Holly replied.

“No,” said Sandy. “I really do like you.” They kissed, shyly at first and then with more confidence. To Holly it felt right: the smell of Sandy’s skin, the way her hipbones poked Holly as they held each other.

“I love you,” she whispered to Sandy.

But for both girls the elation of that first night was soon snuffed out by the realities waiting for them outside the closed door of Sandy’s room. In a town like Fayetteville, secrets are difficult to keep. Sandy and Holly’s relationship quickly became the subject of gossip and rumors. Within a couple of weeks the whispers turned to shouts:

“Dykes!” “Queers!” “Lesbians!”

It became a daily refrain unleashed as Sandy and Holly walked up the aisle of the school bus, a gauntlet that soon became unbearable.