Case 1 (1982)

The Victims- the incinerated bodies of George, 66, and Edith Bentley, 59, of Port Coquitlam; their daughter, Jackie Johnson, 41, her husband, Bob, 44, of Kelowna, and their two daughters, Janet, 13, and Karen, 11.

Details of the Case

• Shearing was a pedophile and fixated on the little girls.
• He’d spotted the family the moment they set up camp and spent several days spying on them from a hillside
• He fantasized about having sex with the little girls
• At dusk on (or about) August 10, 1982, Shearing crept through the shadows into the campsite with his rifle and opened fire, ambushing the adults who surrounded the fire.
• He captured the girls and took them to his property where he kept them alive for a week, repeatedly raping the children. On August 16, Shearing shot Karen in the back of the head. The next day he killed Janet the same way.
• The adult victims were stalked for two days
• shot dead on Aug. 2, 1982, in a volley of rifle fire as they sat around a campfire.
• The sniper spared the girls
• He sexually abused the girls for a week before murdering them.
• Their bodies he stuffed in the trunk of the 1979 Plymouth.
• David Shearing drove the car, loaded with bloated corpses, into the woods not too far from his home and torched it to destroy the evidence.
• On Sept. 13, about a month later, a mushroom picker stumbled upon the charred wreck.
• Initially, when police stopped at Shearing’s home to talk about the gruesome discovery, the murder weapon a .22-calibre rifle hung on his wall.
• The Johnson and Bentley family possessions were scattered throughout the house.
• Shearing was arrested in Tumbler within weeks and during his interrogation confessed to the killings.
• He claimed his motive was robbery
• He was convicted of 6 counts of murder
• He was given a life sentence with no possibility of parole for 25 years
Case 2 (2002)
The Victims- 10 people killed 3 injured -Over three weeks (victims not named)
Details of the case
• The attacks began on October 2, 2002
• The shooters, John Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo
• They chose targets seemingly at random
• First attack- October 2, 2002, when a bullet shattered the window of a craft store in Aspen Hill, Maryland, narrowly missing a cashier. Less than an hour after that incident, a 55-year-old man was shot and killed while walking across a parking lot in Wheaton,
• October 3, five more victims had been shot and killed
• October 7, a 13-year-old boy was shot and injured in front of his middle school in Bowie, Maryland
• Weapon- high-powered .223-calibre rifle
• October 9-14 2 men and women were killed in separate incidences
• On October 19 a 13th shooting occurred at a restaurant in Ashland, Virginia. Law-enforcement officials found a second note at the crime scene, demanding money and instructing the police to call at a certain time and place. The phone number provided in the note was not valid, but technicians at the U.S. Secret Service crime lab were able to match the handwriting to the tarot card left at the scene of an earlier shooting.
• The shooters confessed their crimes to a priest at a roman catholic church and asked him to tell the police to look into a September 2002 robbery-homicide at a liquor store in Montgomery, Alabama. Evidence recovered from the Montgomery crime scene was linked to Lee Boyd Malvo, a 17-year-old from Jamaica who had been fingerprinted in December 2001 by the U.S.
• Muhammad and Malvo were prosecuted in Virginia, a state where Malvo would have been eligible for the death penalty. In November 2003 Muhammad was convicted on murder and weapons charges, and he ultimately received a death sentence for his role in the sniper killings. After all of his appeals had been exhausted, he was executed by lethal injection in November 2009. Malvo was found guilty of murder, terrorism, and firearms charges in December 2003, and he was sentenced to life in prison without parole. As part of a deal with prosecutors, Malvo later pled guilty in additional cases but was spared the possibility of a death sentence by a 2005