There was a knock on the door.

Sandy hid, squeezing down into the narrow space between Holly’s bed and the wall. Holly put the carving knife behind her back and slipped it into the waistband of her jeans. She opened the door.

Sarah Collier, standing with her hands on her hips, immediately noticed the knife.

“What are you going to do with that?” the old lady demanded.

“I’m going to kill myself. I hate it here.”

“You’re going to end up just like your mother,” Sarah Collier retorted and turned her back to her granddaughter. Holly pulled the knife from her waistband, closed her eyes, stepped forward, and plunged it into her grandmother. The knife punched through Sarah Collier’s pastel T-shirt and cut deep into her flesh, the blade passing between her ribs and into her right lung.

Oh, my God, Holly thought. I just messed up so bad. She opened her eyes . She heard the sound of the old lady’s screams. She pulled the knife out and saw her grandfather lunging at her. A punch landed on her chin.

And then the lights went out.

“I went numb,” Holly recalls. The next thing she knew she was pinned to the bed by both grandparents. Holly began stabbing at Carl Collier, shouting: “Help me. Sandy! Why aren’t you helping me? Help me!”

Carl fell off Holly and fled from the room, heading for the kitchen, where there was a telephone. He left behind his glasses, twisted and broken on the carpet. Sandy emerged from her hiding place as the old man escaped the room.

“Go get him!” she shouted at Holly.

Holly handed the carving knife to Sandy and chased after Carl Collier, down the length of the basement, flying up the stairs that led to the house’s upper level. As Holly entered the kitchen, she saw her grand­father holding a phone in one hand, a long filleting knife in the other. I’m going to die, she thought, then charged forward.

In the next few seconds of chaos, she wrestled the knife from her grandfather’s hand. Behind her Sandy appeared, wild-eyed, shaking, and bloody. Carl Collier reached for a coffee cup and hurled it at the girls. Half-blind without his glasses, he missed, the cup smashing the wall by Sandy’s head. Sandy turned her head to avoid the impact and, as she looked back, saw Holly strike.

“I just closed my eyes and started stabbing,” says Holly. She heard screaming, somewhere way off in the distance. Later she would realize that was the sound of her own voice. Between 17 and 20 times, the knife went into Carl Collier. Holly stabbed at his face, his shoulders, and his arms as he tried to fend her off. She felt something hot splash her face. She opened her eyes. Her grandfather was walking away from her, the knife sticking out of his neck. “Oh, crap,” he said and fell to the floor. The blade had sliced across his vertebrae, cutting his aorta.

Holly returned to the basement. Bloody streaks along the length of the white walls bore testament to the old lady’s last desperate flight. Sandy had chased and slashed at her head, neck, and chest. Sarah Collier finally fell at the base of the stairs, faceup. The lovers stood over the old lady, who was still moving a little.

Sandy: “You’ve got to finish her.”

Holly: “I won’t!”

Sandy: “You’ve gotta.”

Holly stabbed her grandmother—the 22nd and final wound.

The girls moved quickly now, grabbing a change of clothes, scooping some jewelry into Holly’s knapsack. They went back to the kitchen. “We had to jump over the pool of blood,” Holly says. They squabbled briefly about pulling the knife out of Carl Collier’s neck.

“We’ve got to. It’s evidence against us,” Holly said. She pulled the knife out. Then they ran.

At 19:32 the Fayette County sheriff’s de­partment received the following call: “This is Spalding County. We need a residence checked on—to check on the welfare of two subjects in your county.”

“OK, what’s the address?”

“226 Plantation Drive. This would be the residence of a Sarah and Carl Collier.”

“OK. What’s the problem?”

“Earlier today their granddaughter was at a friend’s house…advised she had killed her grandparents…by stabbing”

“How old is she?”

“She is 15 years of age.”

Ten minutes later detectives dispatched to Plantation Drive discovered the crime scene.

Fayette County’s chief investigator, Lt. Col. Bruce Jordan, followed bloody footprints to the body of Sarah Collier. The dead woman’s shirt was torn and soaked with blood. She was still wearing her glasses, and her eyes and mouth were open. It looked like she was frozen in midscream.

Jordan walked past her to the back basement bedroom, still redolent of marijuana and in disarray, a seashell lamp smashed on the floor, bedcovers tangled up, blood on the walls. As cops sifted through evidence, one officer handed Jordan a stack of pictures of Holly at the beach, where she’d vacationed over the years. Jordan studied them and was struck by a sudden instinct.

They’re going to the beach, he thought.

Four hours and 250 miles away, Sandy steered the stolen Silverado along a quiet residential street in the resort town of Tybee Island, 18 miles south of Savanna, Georgia. The girls just made it: The needle of the truck’s fuel gauge was deep in the red.

Brian Clayton, 22, and his brother, Brent, 14, were as new to Tybee Island as the two girls driving by in a blue truck, having moved to a nearby beach house with their mother, Trish Pellerin, earlier that day. The truck stopped up the street, turned around, and pulled up alongside them.

Did they have a cigarette, asked the driver, a young girl with reddish-brown hair and a bandanna. Brian did and walked over to the truck to hand one over.

“What y’all doin’?” Sandy asked, passing the cigarette to Holly, who dragged gratefully on it. They’d run out of smokes 100 miles back.

“We’re just going for a walk on the beach,” Brian replied.

“Mind if we come?”

Leaving the truck in the parking lot of a nursing home, they walked to the beach and shared a joint, looking out at the Atlantic surf.

“I’ve always wanted to go to the beach,” said Sandy. Holly, sitting beside her, was silent.

Sandy told Brian they were runaways and asked if he could offer a bed for the night. What the hell, he thought. An hour or so later, the girls were curled up on a mattress in a back bedroom of Brian’s new beach house, their limbs intertwined, their faces touching.

“I fell asleep looking at Sandy,” Holly says.