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A pretty stay-at-home mother and her three children, shot to death. Her husband, alive, wounded in the thigh. This was the situation encountered by authorities when they were called to an SUV pulled off a highway in Channahon, Illinois early yesterday morning.
Kimberly Ellen Vaughn, 34, her daughter Abigayle, age 12, Cassandra, 11, and son Blake, age 8, were all deceased inside the vehicle. Christopher Vaughn, age 32, told the police his wife did it. According to her husband, blue-eyed blond Kimberly shot him first, and he fled. Then Kimberly allegedly shot the children, multiple times, and committed suicide.
Christopher Vaughn indicated that the family was on their way from their spacious 4-bedroom home in Oswego to a water park in Springfield, Illinois, when they pulled off the road so he could secure some luggage strapped to their vehicle's roof. Mrs. Vaughn allegedly chose this moment to go insane, opening fire as Mr. Vaughn re-entered the SUV.
After having his wound patched up at a hospital in Joliet, Christopher Vaughn spent most of the night on Thursday talking to police.
Christopher Vaughn worked from home, running StoneBridge Investigations. He'd incorporated the business in 2003, and by early 2004 he had his first website online. At the time the couple lived in Bellevue, Washington. StoneBridge's services as listed in 2004:
It appears that after moving to Northern Illinois, Christopher Vaughn simply considered the business to be in two cities, listing both Bellevue, WA and Chicago, IL on StoneBridge Investigations website. The Elgin (IL) Courier News reported that the Vaughns bought their home in Oswego (subject of this article, published May 27, 2007) , in May 2006. The same paper also reported that the Vaughns had lived in apartments in Aurora prior to buying the nearly half-million dollar house.
Neighbors of the family said that Kimberly worked part time in the subdivision clubhouse, and Christopher was often away, most recently in Mexico.
Looking at StoneBridgeInvestigations.com "About" page now and comparing it to the same page 2 as it looked 2 years ago, you see that it's barely changed. In particular, the "news" column on the center-right side of that page. No new "brags" for Christopher Vaughn's company since 2005.
This could mean a number of things -- it could mean that the business was stagnant, not doing well. It could mean it was a front for something else, but there is no real reason to suspect such a thing, at the moment. It could simply mean that Vaughn had better things to do than update the website.
A Google search for "StoneBridge Investigations," performed on June 15, 2007, yielded only six results. Yahoo Search gave back about 12 hits. Why would a business whose lifeblood was computers and computer users have such a limited online profile? To give you an idea of how strange this seems, the name of this blog, CrimeBlog.US, yields more than 53,000 results on Google alone, and not all of them point to my own sites.
Perhaps due to the no-doubt confidential nature of his work, Vaughn purposely kept things a little below the radar.
If the Vaughns had money problems due to business falling off, either parent could have been driven to the edge.
Any questions about Vaughn's business or the familys' financial stability may be meaningless beside curious details of the case as reported already by the mainstream media. Read these two quotes from the Courier News -- I've added (perhaps unnecessary) emphasis:
Why would a mother choose a completely random moment in what was supposed to be a trip to a water park to suddenly kill her family and herself? What could possibly trigger such a thing, short of a cataclysmic and sudden psychotic break?
Police are behaving as if Christopher Vaughn is all but cleared in the shootings. He left an Illinois State Police office early this morning after many hours of questioning, and they say he is not a suspect.
If Vaughn is indeed cleared, then he will be left in a living nightmare, perhaps forever wondering how the hell his wife could have snapped in a moment like that. Was there some sort of slow internal buildup that no one noticed? The questions one might ask one's self in such a situation would be endless.
One thing is clear -- nothing like the whole story has been told yet where this tragedy is concerned. Several news stories have painted the family as a whole as a kind of midwestern ideal, the parents good people, the kids well-mannered and bright. But that couldn't have been the whole truth. Something, even if it was only inside one person, was being hidden from the rest of the world.
Of course, even if the events leading up to the deaths of Kimberly, Abigayle, Cassandra, and Blake are one day explained, no such narrative will ever truly help to make any sense out of such a thing.
Any updates will be posted below.
UPDATE 1, 8:49 a.m. EDT, 6/16/07
This article in the Chicago Sun-Times is interesting. Susan Phillips, Kimberly Vaughn's mother, speaks out in the article, and her reaction is similar to the reaction of most people posting comments on this entry and in the thread at Websleuths:
There were reports yesterday that after leaving State Police headquarters, Christopher Vaughn could not be found by his parents, who had traveled to Illinois from Missouri to see him. If the police are less accepting of his story than they seem, then surely they have some idea of where he is. One hopes.
Sources: Chicago Tribune, the AP, Websleuths, Elgin Courier News, WQAD TV, Wikipedia.
A pretty stay-at-home mother and her three children, shot to death. Her husband, alive, wounded in the thigh. This was the situation encountered by authorities when they were called to an SUV pulled off a highway in Channahon, Illinois early yesterday morning.
Kimberly Ellen Vaughn, 34, her daughter Abigayle, age 12, Cassandra, 11, and son Blake, age 8, were all deceased inside the vehicle. Christopher Vaughn, age 32, told the police his wife did it. According to her husband, blue-eyed blond Kimberly shot him first, and he fled. Then Kimberly allegedly shot the children, multiple times, and committed suicide.
Christopher Vaughn indicated that the family was on their way from their spacious 4-bedroom home in Oswego to a water park in Springfield, Illinois, when they pulled off the road so he could secure some luggage strapped to their vehicle's roof. Mrs. Vaughn allegedly chose this moment to go insane, opening fire as Mr. Vaughn re-entered the SUV.
After having his wound patched up at a hospital in Joliet, Christopher Vaughn spent most of the night on Thursday talking to police.
Christopher Vaughn worked from home, running StoneBridge Investigations. He'd incorporated the business in 2003, and by early 2004 he had his first website online. At the time the couple lived in Bellevue, Washington. StoneBridge's services as listed in 2004:
Risk Assessment - provides a quantitative or qualitative analysis of risk by assessing all of the business information assets, processes and functions, likelihood of threats, and the value of impact as it relates to the enterprise.General Security Assessment - provides a broad assessment of the common security domains to identify areas of risk within an enterprise.StoneBridge was a legitimate company, and on its policy page the company recommended prospective customers check out its credentials via a Washington State licensing authority website.
Vulnerability Assessment - provides a technical evaluation of an enterprises security defenses identifing (sic) vulnerabilities and needed security controls.
Compliance Audits - combines the general security assessment with a regulatory gap analysis. StoneBridge consultants are experienced in conducting HIPAA, GLBA, and ISO17799 compliance audits.
Forensic Analysis - provides both pro-active forensic preparedness services to ensure your enterprise has the controls to support a forensic effort and re-active forensic analysis of computer systems, computer network environments, and personnel...
It appears that after moving to Northern Illinois, Christopher Vaughn simply considered the business to be in two cities, listing both Bellevue, WA and Chicago, IL on StoneBridge Investigations website. The Elgin (IL) Courier News reported that the Vaughns bought their home in Oswego (subject of this article, published May 27, 2007) , in May 2006. The same paper also reported that the Vaughns had lived in apartments in Aurora prior to buying the nearly half-million dollar house.
Neighbors of the family said that Kimberly worked part time in the subdivision clubhouse, and Christopher was often away, most recently in Mexico.
Looking at StoneBridgeInvestigations.com "About" page now and comparing it to the same page 2 as it looked 2 years ago, you see that it's barely changed. In particular, the "news" column on the center-right side of that page. No new "brags" for Christopher Vaughn's company since 2005.
This could mean a number of things -- it could mean that the business was stagnant, not doing well. It could mean it was a front for something else, but there is no real reason to suspect such a thing, at the moment. It could simply mean that Vaughn had better things to do than update the website.
A Google search for "StoneBridge Investigations," performed on June 15, 2007, yielded only six results. Yahoo Search gave back about 12 hits. Why would a business whose lifeblood was computers and computer users have such a limited online profile? To give you an idea of how strange this seems, the name of this blog, CrimeBlog.US, yields more than 53,000 results on Google alone, and not all of them point to my own sites.
Perhaps due to the no-doubt confidential nature of his work, Vaughn purposely kept things a little below the radar.
If the Vaughns had money problems due to business falling off, either parent could have been driven to the edge.
Any questions about Vaughn's business or the familys' financial stability may be meaningless beside curious details of the case as reported already by the mainstream media. Read these two quotes from the Courier News -- I've added (perhaps unnecessary) emphasis:
Channahon police received a 911 call about 5:25 a.m. Thursday from a passerby who found Christopher near the scene with a gunshot wound to his thigh, police said...If you look at a wider view of the basic area where the SUV was parked, you see there is indeed a housing development there. If the reports of gunshots at 2:30 a.m. were accurate, and those were related to the Vaughn murders, what happened in the 3 hours between the shots being fired and 911 being called?
(...)
Residents in the area told investigators they heard gunshots about 2:30 a.m. Thursday, but law enforcement sources were still trying to nail down a timeline...
Why would a mother choose a completely random moment in what was supposed to be a trip to a water park to suddenly kill her family and herself? What could possibly trigger such a thing, short of a cataclysmic and sudden psychotic break?
Police are behaving as if Christopher Vaughn is all but cleared in the shootings. He left an Illinois State Police office early this morning after many hours of questioning, and they say he is not a suspect.
If Vaughn is indeed cleared, then he will be left in a living nightmare, perhaps forever wondering how the hell his wife could have snapped in a moment like that. Was there some sort of slow internal buildup that no one noticed? The questions one might ask one's self in such a situation would be endless.
One thing is clear -- nothing like the whole story has been told yet where this tragedy is concerned. Several news stories have painted the family as a whole as a kind of midwestern ideal, the parents good people, the kids well-mannered and bright. But that couldn't have been the whole truth. Something, even if it was only inside one person, was being hidden from the rest of the world.
Of course, even if the events leading up to the deaths of Kimberly, Abigayle, Cassandra, and Blake are one day explained, no such narrative will ever truly help to make any sense out of such a thing.
Any updates will be posted below.
UPDATE 1, 8:49 a.m. EDT, 6/16/07
This article in the Chicago Sun-Times is interesting. Susan Phillips, Kimberly Vaughn's mother, speaks out in the article, and her reaction is similar to the reaction of most people posting comments on this entry and in the thread at Websleuths:
"Does that even make sense?" Phillips said of the version of events authorities say the sole survivor -- Phillips' son-in-law, Christopher Vaughn -- gave police investigating the bizarre Thursday crime scene."I don't believe it."Later in the same story:
Phillips said her son-in-law had planned the weekend outing as a "romantic retreat" and a "romantic getaway," and it was something her daughter "was looking forward to."But Phillips said her daughter never mentioned anything about going to a water park, particularly one in Springfield.A man who was professionally qualified to investigate cybercrime, do cyber-forensics, a man who also purported to investigate missing persons cases -- a man like Christopher Vaughn, that is... wouldn't he be pretty sure he understood the ins and outs of the criminal mind? Wouldn't a man like that be fully capable of thinking through scenarios where a criminal might just outsmart investigators? He'd have to, being a kind of investigator himself.
With so many water parks in the Chicago area, "Why would anyone go to that crummy place?" Phillips said.
"I don't know what he said [to police]," Phillips said of her son-in-law. "All I know is what we knew ahead of time. . . . The water park -- that was the first I heard of it. ... They were going back there [to the bed and breakfast] for a romantic retreat so going [to a Springfield water park] made no sense," Phillips said.
The night before her death, Kimberly was working on things that were important to her, Phillips said. She was completing an online criminal justice degree and was doing online work involving it as late as 9 p.m. Wednesday, the mom said...
There were reports yesterday that after leaving State Police headquarters, Christopher Vaughn could not be found by his parents, who had traveled to Illinois from Missouri to see him. If the police are less accepting of his story than they seem, then surely they have some idea of where he is. One hopes.
Sources: Chicago Tribune, the AP, Websleuths, Elgin Courier News, WQAD TV, Wikipedia.
