An Atlanta man who killed nine people in a rampage that ended with his own suicide also murdered his two children, to save them from "a lifetime of pain", and the wife he blamed for his misery, authorities said yesterday.
In a neatly typed letter left for authorities in his suburban Atlanta home, Mark Barton indicated revenge was his motive in the shootings at two area day-trading firms on Thursday and urged police to kill him if they could.
"I don't plan to live very much longer, just long enough to kill as many of the people that greedily sought my destruction. You should kill me if you can," Barton wrote in the letter, read to reporters by Henry County police chief Jimmy Mercer.
Barton listed the names of three people, including the father of his first wife, who he was suspected of killing in 1993. Mr Mercer said the three were apparently named as next of kin, not as further targets for retribution.
Barton carried out the shootings in two Buckhead day-trading offices where he may have racked up tens of thousands of dollars in losses playing the stock market, authorities said.
Barton first killed five people at Momentum Securities, then crossed busy Piedmont Road and killed four people at All-Tech Investment Group, another day-trading firm.
"I hope this doesn't ruin your trading day," he said as he fired 9-mm and .45 calibre handguns. Seven people were wounded by gunfire and five were hurt. Barton said in the letter and handwritten notes left on each body that he bludgeoned his children Matthew (11) and Michelle (8) and his wife Leigh Anne (26) in their apartment in Stockbridge, Georgia, a suburb about 35 miles south-east of Atlanta.
Police found his wife's body in a closet and the children wrapped in blankets and lying in their beds, with toys placed around them, Mercer said, tears welling as he read Barton's letter.
"There was little pain. All of them were dead in less than five minutes. I hit them with a hammer in their sleep and then put them face down in the bathtub to make sure they did not wake up in pain," Barton wrote.
"I killed the children to exchange them for five minutes of pain for a lifetime of pain. I forced myself to do it to keep them from suffering so much later," he wrote.
"I killed Leigh Ann because she was one of the main reasons for my demise . . . I really wish I hadn't killed her now."
Barton in the letter he dated early Thursday morning denied killing his first wife and her mother, who were found in 1993 beaten and slashed to death at a camp site about 100 miles from Atlanta.
Barton, who had taken out a $600,000 life insurance policy on his first wife before she was killed, was the chief suspect but never charged in that crime, authorities said. His two children were from that previous marriage.
Mr Michael O'Dell, an Alabama prosecutor, said prosecutors had only been able to piece together a circumstantial case against him.
Barton had recently settled his claim with the insurance company for an undisclosed sum.
President Bill Clinton avoided calling for increased gun control measures in the wake of the shooting, citing the ongoing investigation.
"In terms of what could or should have been done or what this means for other issues, I think let's wait until all the facts are in," he said.
Hollywood actor and pro-gun campaigner Charlton Heston yesterday insisted that the latest US gun massacre would never persuade Americans to give up the right to bear arms.
Mr Heston (75), who is president of the pro-gun group the National Rifle Association said: "The right to bear arms is enshrined in the American constitution. It is not a question of taking peoples' guns away, but of making sure that those who commit crimes are prosecuted and punished," he said in London.