Will we ever know why?

Topeka Capital-Journal, The, Jul 31, 1999 by J.R. MOEHRINGER

Gunman fit FBI profile of mass murderer

Los Angeles Times

ATLANTA -- Neighbors who watched him from afar say he seemed sweet, a real Southern gentleman. Lawyers who worked closely with him for years call him brilliant. But the FBI apparently looked Mark Barton up and down five years ago and came to one prophetic conclusion: Mass murderer.

At the time, Barton was a suspect in the meat-cleaver murders of his first wife and mother-in-law. Scratching for evidence, police asked the FBI to consider everything they knew of Barton and render an opinion, according to Michael Hauptman, the Atlanta lawyer who represented Barton at the time.

"He fit the profile of a mass murderer," Hauptman said Friday. "I'd say whoever wrote the profile should get a pay raise."

An FBI spokesman wouldn't comment on what profiling the bureau may have done of Barton. Until they do, or until someone who knew Barton well comes forward, the pudgy investor who killed nine people Thursday in as many minutes -- after bludgeoning to death his second wife and two children -- will have eluded true capture.

Though he killed himself six hours after committing the bloodiest murder in Atlanta's history, many here say part of Barton will remain "at large" until some motive for his madness can be found.

He left plenty of clues, enough clues for investigators to chew on forever, including big stock market losses, a wife who may have grown weary of him and an ongoing murder investigation that apparently weighed heavily on his psyche.

But even in his carefully written, grammatically correct, flawlessly typed suicide note, printed on personal stationery and encased in a plastic sleeve, and released by police Friday, Barton didn't address the question haunting the families planning funerals, the question gnawing at the 13 people he injured, including a 38- year-old woman left blind by a bullet to the head.

"Why did I?" Barton mused to himself in the note. "I have been dying since October. I wake up at night so afraid, so terrified that I couldn't be that afraid while awake. It has taken its toll. I have come to hate this life and this system of things. I have come to have no hope."

What terrified him, why he hated "this system," why October marked a sudden downturn in his life, Barton didn't bother to explain, and police said they hadn't yet discovered if Barton suffered from some physical or mental illness dating back to last fall.

Barton left his suicide note in the apartment he shared with Leigh Ann, his second wife, and his two children by his first wife.

"I killed the children to exchange them for five minutes of pain for a lifetime of pain," he wrote of his 11-year-old son, Matthew, and his 8-year-old daughter, Mychelle, both of whom were found in bed, bundled in towels and blankets, favorite toys by their sides, skulls caved in.

"I forced myself to do it to keep them from suffering so much later. No mother, no father, no relatives. The fears of the father are transferred to the son. It was from my father to me and from me to my son."

Barton's father, Truman, died two years ago. His mother, 77-year- old Gladys, wasn't answering her phone Friday in Sumter, S.C., where Barton grew up. She sent out a four-paragraph statement, part of which read: "There is no explanation for tragedy such as this. Even though I am deeply hurt by the actions of my son, Mark, I loved him very much."

A friend of Gladys Burton, Zelma Hutchinson, said Barton suffered from depression, that he'd lost a lot of money recently and that he'd called his mother the day before his rampage, sounding awful. The conversation "kind of upset" Gladys Barton, Hutchinson said.

Other than his mother, few people stepped forward to speak up for, or explain, the 44-year-old former chemist, who attended the University of South Carolina without leaving an impression on anyone in the chemistry department, who graduated from Sumter High in 1979 without leaving a faint mark on even the yearbook, in which his name is wrong not once, but twice.

Along with the suicide note, Barton left separate notes on the bodies of his children, each one a sad, little deluded lament and request.

"I give you Matthew David Barton. My son, my buddie (sic), my life. Please take care of him."

"I give you Mychelle Elizabeth Barton. My daughter, my sweetheart, my life."

A similar note was found with Leigh Ann, whose body Barton stuffed in a closet.

"I killed her on Tuesday night," Barton wrote in the suicide note. "I killed Leigh Ann because she was one of the main reasons for my demise."

The children, he wrote, he killed Wednesday.

According to Barton's sister-in-law, Barton and Leigh Ann had separated recently, and Leigh Ann moved with Barton's children to Stockbridge, half an hour south of Atlanta. Why, no one seems to know.

Then, weeks ago, just as mysteriously, the couple reunited.

"I really wish I hadn't killed (Leigh Ann) now," he wrote, sitting in the apartment filled with the bodies of his family. "She really couldn't help it and I love her so much anyway."