Traditionally, people exchange candy and flowers with their loved ones on Valentine’s Day. The day isn’t hearts and roses for everyone. Instead of professing their love, these murderers left their lovers broken hearted.
Card Exchange Gone Wrong
Richard and Stacy Schoeck made a tradition of exchanging cards on Valentine’s Day every year at Belton Bridge Park.
On Valentine’s Day, 2010, Stacy called police around 9:00PM, saying she had found her husband lying outside of his truck with three bullet wounds in his stomach and two in his face. Blood was everywhere.
Officials later found out that there was three pending life insurance claims totaling $560,000, one of them activated on Feb. 1, with Stacey as the sole beneficiary. On top of it all, Stacey was also having an affair.
Stacy plotted her husband’s murder and sought the help of her former employee, Lynitra Ross, and her personal trainer, Reginald Coleman. All three were indicted on murder charges. Coleman was the one who surprised Richard and shot him repeatedly, leaving him for dead.
Bad Breakup
On Valentine’s Day, 2011, Gibson Paul was living with Tomicka Peterson in West Palm Beach when Tomicka decided she no longer wanted to be with Gibson. She told him she was moving out of their shared apartment.
Tomicka was worried how Gibson would react so she arranged for a car to be waiting for her after she told him her decision to leave.
After she broke the news, Gibson grabbed his semiautomatic pistol, followed Tomicka to her getaway car and opened fire on the car. The getaway car contained a male driver, two female passengers, a 3-year-old girl and Tomicka.
Tomicka was shot five times and died at the scene.
Gibson was arrested and charged with first-degree murder, aggravated assault, 5 counts of shooting into an occupied vehicle and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon.
Snapped
When John Hamilton, a big time doctor in Oklahoma City, gifted his wife with a brand new Porsche on their wedding day, everyone thought this was only the beginning to a long and beautiful marriage.
But on Valentine’s Day 2001, Hamilton came home between surgeries to find his beautiful wife lying on the bathroom floor in a pool of her own blood, strangled with two of his ties and with her head smashed so badly that parts of her brain were exposed.
Hamilton reportedly attempted to perform CPR several times, and frantically called 911. Once paramedics arrived, he was hysterical, but managed to tell police the accounts of his whereabouts that morning.
Hamilton was not a suspect until police investigators found dozens of calls from Hamilton to a topless dancer in his call history. Friends of Hamilton’s wife said she had spoken about filing for divorce after finding the phone records. They think this is what drove Hamilton to snap.
On the day of the trial, Hamilton’s defense team had hired a respected crime scene investigator, Tom Bevel, as an expert witness. Under oath Bevel could not deny that he had found some blood spatters on Hamilton’s right sleeve that the prosecution had not seen, consistent with patterns that indicated that the wearer of the shirt had been the one to strike the woman in the head with a blunt instrument. These blood patterns were not likely to have gotten on Hamilton’s shirt from performing CPR.
It took the jury less than two hours to convict Hamilton of first-degree murder, and he was sentenced to life in prison. Convicted by his own expert defense witness.