The manager and his secretary thought they knew Mark Barton when he walked into the Atlanta office of All-Tech Investment Group last Thursday afternoon. They greeted the day trader by name, and he commiserated with them over the news lighting up every trader's terminal: the Dow's nearly 200-point slide. He seemed to be the old client they were familiar with. No one knew that Barton was packing two handguns; that on Tuesday he had murdered his wife, on Wednesday his son and daughter; that he had just been at the building across the street, at another brokerage, Momentum Securities, where he had also started off with small talk about the declining stock market before opening fire with a 9-mm Glock and a .45-cal. Colt, killing four people. At All-Tech, the pleasantries were about to end too.
Five shots rang out from the meeting room, and the manager and his assistant were on the floor, seriously wounded. With his Colt in one hand and his Glock in the other, Barton marched onto the main trading floor. Nell Jones, 53, looked up from her computer. "I was the first person who looked into his eyes," she says. From 10 ft. away, he raised a pistol, pointed at her and fired, missing her forehead by inches and hitting her terminal. He went on firing, was "very calm, very determined," she says. "No feeling." Except for one ghoulish aside, uttered as he departed All-Tech: "I hope this won't ruin your trading day."
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 sprees, he is a severed Gorgon's head, freezing onlookers with horrific astonishment. Who was Mark Orrin Barton? Why did he go berserk?
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 out on his first wife months before she and her mother were murdered in Alabama in 1993. The police had considered Barton a suspect, so the insurance company balked, subjecting him to six hours of questioning.