Sitting in the neat living room of her little house next to the railroad tracks in Griffin, a small town 40 miles south of Atlanta, Sandy’s stepmother, Beth Ketchum, recalls how “I couldn’t get Sandy to ride the school bus—they would pick on her, call her names.” Adds Tim Ketchum: “She dressed like a little boy, baggy pants, bandanna. I don’t know. Maybe she should have been a boy.”

Holly and Sandy began ditching classes to go hang out in the woods, smoking more and more weed, their fledgling romance developing into a full-blown love affair. “We’d get high, lie around, and laugh at each other,” says Holly. “We’d laugh all day.” They spent every minute they could together, and when they were apart they wrote long, impassioned letters to each other.

You give me that feelin’ when I’m with you. It’s like paradise. I figured out the word for it. It’s called Estacy [sic]—not the kind U buy. Look it up. Another word: utopia—look that up too.—Holly to Sandy

Sandy was equally passionate, rejecting any notion this was just a teenage crush, once writing, “I hate it when older people say that young people don’t know what love is… But I know what love is and how it feels cuz age ain’t nothing but a number.” They discussed the future, Sandy saying they should get married, have children with sperm bought from a clinic. “Are you serious?” Holly asked. She loved the idea, telling Sandy, “I don’t have much to give, but you can have it. You can have me.”

In the summer of 2004, Carla Harvey landed in jail again, this time receiving a three-year sentence for possessing marijuana with intent to sell. Holly moved in with her grandparents, Carl and Sarah Collier. They were now in their 70s and enjoying a comfortable retirement. But they were, as Holly had learned, unhappy people. In Sarah Collier, Fayetteville knew a devout, teetotaling woman. But she had a hidden side, one the family kept secret. Holly’s grandmother had a cruel streak, and a hair-trigger temper, which had much to do with the falling out between her and Holly’s mother years before.

Like everyone else in Fayetteville, Sarah Collier knew of her granddaughter’s romance with Sandy. And it disgusted her. She vowed to break the couple up, to “bring structure” to Holly’s life. She refused to listen to Holly’s pleas. “You’re too young to know what love is,” she told her granddaughter.

Holly lived in the basement of 226 Plantation Drive, a self-contained home within a home with a bedroom, a living room with a fireplace, and glass patio doors leading out to the lawn. Despite the relative freedom of her space, Holly felt trapped. She cut herself on the arms and legs. “I’m addicted to pain,” she would later confess. She was smoking 15 to 20 joints a day.

Sandy was 20 miles away in Griffin, but with Holly’s grandparents determined to keep the girls apart, she may as well have been on the moon. The girls were too young to have driver’s licenses. “Man I fuckin miss you,” Holly wrote Sandy. “I can’t stand this crap no more. I really need to see you.”

Holly and Sandy conspired to find ways to grab a few precious hours together. Sometimes Sandy would show up at the Colliers’ home and wait near the bushes by the Collier house. “My grandparents always went to bed by 10 p.m.,” says Holly. “So as soon as they were asleep, I’d sneak out or she’d sneak in to see me.”

Pot offered a relief from school, town, and family. They started taking other drugs, too; methamphetamine when they could get it, cocaine when they could afford it.

It wasn’t long before they were busted, Sarah Collier coming down hard on Holly. “I don’t have to put up with you,” the old lady yelled, her hands planted on her hips. “You can go be a whore like your mom.”

Tensions in the Collier house were rising to unbearable levels, especially between Holly and her grandmother. Things were a bit better with Holly and Carl Collier; the two had always doted on each other, but in the hothouse atmosphere of that summer, Collier became wary of the increasingly angry teenager in his home. She sometimes scared him, he confided to his son, Kevin.

On the weekend of July 24, 2004, Holly and Sandy packed smokes, food, a $50 bag of weed, and some meth and took off. As darkness fell, they found an unlocked car and spent their first night away cuddled up on its backseat. The girls ran out of cash and came home four days later. The Colliers told police to charge Holly as a runaway, resulting in a hearing, but there was no punishment.

After the Sarah Collier hearing, a furious Holly ground out her cigarette on the hood of her grandparents’ truck. “I’m going to kill you,” she told them. Sandy also vented her anger on paper, telling Holly, “I finally got you back and I’m not going to lose you again god dammit…I love you so fuckin’ much that it drives me crazy not to be with U every day! I mean damn! What do I have to do?”

The answer: Defy everyone—her parents, the Colliers.


Oh, my God, Sandy! I had a fuckin’ nightmare! I was walkin’ down these stairs & this old black lady was walkin’ in front of me. I pushed her …& her head hit the edge of the step & blood splattered up on my face & crap. It killed her instantly…This is not the bad part of the dream…I laid back & I took a deep breath, when I exhaled or whatever I was fuckin’ breathin’ out fire. That’s the part that’s fuckin’ w/my head! Sandy, I had the motherfuckin’ devil inside of me.—Holly to Sandy

At about 11 p.m. on the night of Sunday, August 1, Sandy slipped in through the basement of 226 Plantation Drive. The girls locked themselves inside Holly’s room. They made love, smoked some weed. At 2 a.m. they escaped to a friend’s apartment and spent three hours smoking joints laced with crack. At 5:30 a.m. their friend drove the girls back. They sneaked into the Colliers’ house and again locked themselves in Holly’s room.

They spent the day of August 2 hidden in there. They played music and smoked cigarettes, squirting air freshener into the air vents to disguise the smell, hiding the butts in Coke can ashtrays.

As the afternoon rolled around, both girls were edgy and paranoid, still feeling the effects of the crack. They had enough weed for just one more joint. Sandy wanted more. But they had no money between them and, worse, they had no way to get to any of the local dealers.

“We should take their truck,” said Sandy, referring to the Colliers’ 2002 Chevy Silverado.

“We’d have to kill them to do that,” Holly replied.

“We could hit them with the lamp,” said Sandy, indicating the seashell lamp near Holly’s bed.

“That might just make them pass out.”

“Go get a knife.”

Holly slid upstairs and returned with a carving knife. They took turns stabbing Holly’s mattress to test the knife’s sharpness. Then they laid a painting of some white puppies on the bed and took turns stabbing that too. The knife was sharp enough.

Holly scrawled a to-do list on her arm.

KEYS. KILL. MONEY. JEWELRY.

The girls lit their last joint and waited for the smell to drift upstairs, where it would reach the noses of Holly’s grandparents and surely bring them down to investigate.