know why. so michael was embarrassed at that point. michael calls april and says you need to get to my house. we ve got to deal with this. chris has a twin brother, mike, who thought madison s dad had good reason to be embarrassed. michael holton had a reputation to protect in eclectic. he was the former mayor, former fire chief. very well-known. how dare you embarrass me in this community, so i m sure he was (bleep). i don t blame him. i would be (bleep) too if my kid threw a house party. when michael holton walked into the house, he found the remnants of a teenage party, homemade bongs were scattered throughout the house, a box that smelled suspicious. that was it. and what he did, he called the sheriff s office and we sent a deputy up there. bill franklin is sheriff of elmore county, and the deputy sent to the house that day happened to be his son. when deputy franklin arrived, michael had something to say. mr. holton had actually greeted him in the yard and told him, he
became an unpleasant place to live. i wanted to go do my own thing and that included partying and smoking pot and stuff like that, so i mean, i couldn t do it at home when my parents were around, so i decided to go other places. after his parents separated, madison lived with his dad and was present when his father discovered april had a new boyfriend. he like freaked out, and then he called her and was like going off on her about it. saying what? it was like i need you, like i can t live without you, stuff like that. and whenever we got back home, i had never seen my dad cry before, but he was bawling. madison was remembering all of this sitting in jail, months and months contemplating the past. you wrote people letters? yeah. apologizing in some cases for things you had done? yeah! dear, hannah, i know getting a letter from me right now. i opened it up. it was stamped like elmer county jail in like a red stamp. so like i m reading this letter and you know, like
the only way we were able to do that is hold a gun upside down and place it upside down and then angle it because, remember, the angle is upwards. upside down and using his left hand. the thing about that is michael holton was right-handed. normally when men commit suicide, they use their dominant hand. sure. not their weaker hand. that s right. to the sheriff and his investigators, that made suicide improbable, and the pathologist agreed. he classified michael holton s death a homicide. he does not believe that that man would have killed himself or would have been able to kill himself in that manner. and so you go forward with a homicide investigation. it s not a head scratcher. you get a piece of paper that says homicide. this was now a murder investigation, and if there were three people in that house and two were victims, that simple arithmetic made madison the prime suspect.
on what they did. that, however, did not happen, not as the teenager sat in the county lockup. and not when he sat down to talk with us. did you shoot your parent? no. either one of them? no. did you hear any gunshots when you were on the way to the neighbors? on advice of counsel, madison wouldn t talk specifics about the day of the shootings. he did tell us his story about how his family started to fall apart. whenever things started to fall down, it just got worse and worse. could you tell there was tension in the house? yeah, sometimes i could. sometimes i couldn t. sometimes they would be giving each other the silent treatment. sometimes they would be arguing in front of us. most of the time it was more of like behind closed doors. he says the holton house