Back in Fayetteville, the U.S. Marshals’ Fugitive Task Force was on the girls’ trail, using GPS technology to track Holly’s cell phone. But at 1 a.m. the phone’s signal disappeared. In Tybee Holly had turned the phone off.

Through the early hours of the morning, marshals fanned out through Tybee, searching the coastal town for the blue Chevy. At 9 a.m. they found it abandoned at the Oceanside Nursing Center, just a few yards from the beach. By the time Jordan arrived, at 11 a.m., the hunt had narrowed to a two block radius on Bright Street.

Inside one of those houses, Trish Pellerin was meeting the two strays her sons had brought home. Holly and Sandy sat in the living room, Because the phone company hadn’t yet connected their home phone, Pellerin asked to borrow Holly’s cell. Without knowing it, she was about to bring Holly and Sandy’s flight to an end.

Outside, the U.S. Marshals’ GPS came to life, pinpointing the phone’s location. They moved in to surround the area. At about 2 p.m. Brian heard a commotion and stuck his head out the door. Coming toward him, guns raised, were at least a dozen cops.

It was over in seconds. Holly and Sandy were found in the upstairs bedroom, pinned to the floor by the cops, arrested, and handcuffed. Detectives found two knives in Sandy’s pockets. As he got on his cell phone to inform Fayette County of the arrest, Jordan saw Holly trying to pull her hands free of the cuffs. He dropped a knee into her back. “You’re not fighting with your grandmama now,” he said.

Holly was led out first. Jordan pulled Sandy to her feet and walked her to a waiting patrol car. “Are you going to tell the truth about what happened?” he asked her.

“Yea,” said Sandy, “I’ll tell you the truth”

Tearfully, Sandy told Jordan everything. She said they had killed Holly’s grandparents so they could “be free”—so they could be together forever. She talked and she cried for about an hour, describing the killings in detail.

“Those people didn’t deserve to die,” Sandy told Jordan.

Sandy and Holly sobbed through the indictment hearing. Swaddled in bulletproof vests, hands shackled to their waists, they sat just a few feet apart, separated by their lawyers. During the first hearing, Holly turned to her lawyer, Judy Chidester, and whispered, “I can’t believe they are dead. I can’t believe I did that. I feel like it’s a bad dream.”

Sandy agreed to testify against Holly, but in the end both girls cut deals. In return for guilty pleas, Sandy was sentenced to life for the murder of Sarah Collier; Holly received two life sentences for the two killings. During Holly’s lengthy allocution, Judge Paschal English demanded, “Why did you decide to kill them?”

“For Sandy.”

“Why?”

“So we could be together. We could leave.”

“Where would you go?”

“Anywhere.”


Drowning inside her oversize prison “browns”—the standard uniform of state prisons in Georgia—Holly is soft-spoken and occasionally tearful, twisting her hair and looking down at the table when she speaks because she is shy and still, really, just a little girl. Yet out of this little girl’s mouth come the gruesome details of the killings, described as though she is recalling the plot of a movie she has just seen.

But mostly she tells me about Sandy, incarcerated hundreds of miles away. Her passion remains undimmed, even though Sandy agreed to testify against her. “I understand why,” says Holly philosophically. “She was just trying to save herself. I would probably have done the same thing.” She had even made two engagement rings, woven out of thread pulled from her prison blanket. “I love her so much it hurts,” Holly says. “I miss her so much.”

Sandy will be 30, Holly 35 before they are first eligible for parole. Holly says they still plan to marry. “Sandy says she’ll be waiting for me at the gates when I come out,” Holly says and smiles.

And for the first time, she looks truly happy.