After killing her mother, her grandmother, her mother’s boyfriend, and the boyfriend’s young son, 6-year-old Lauryn Egland’s father dropped her off at a Quakertown hospital with a note that voiced concern about the custody of the child.
Hours later, after two shoot-outs with police, Leonard Egland killed himself.
"There is something in the letter [saying] that he had some concern over who would be in charge of his daughter," Bucks County District Attorney David Heckler told the Inquirer.
An 18-year Army veteran Egland was an unusual suspect, reports the Inquirer.
Domestic violence rates in the Army are much lower than the general public, especially with officers. And Egland was not clinically depressed because if he was he would have probably killed his daughter as well, Richard J. Gelles, a consultant for the Department of Defense on domestic violence speculated.
“This case probably has very little to do with deployment and service overseas, and everything to do with the husband's falling into the ‘If I can't have you, nobody can’ category," Gelles, dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy and Practice, told the Inquirer.
A divorce with Doylestown-native Carrie Egland, his estranged wife of 14 years, was set to finally go through in about a month and Carrie’s friends told police in Virginia that she was afraid of her husband.
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It all came to a head either late Friday or early Saturday, authorities say, when Egland went to his $300,000 Virginia home, where he no longer lives, with a gun, police say.
Authorities told the Inquirer that Egland shot Carrie’s boyfriend Scott Allred, 40, in the upstairs bedroom; he killed Allred’s 7-year-old son Morgan with one shot; and in the master bathroom he shot Carrie multiple times.
Then, through the hurricane rain and winds of Irene, Egland drove from Virginia to Bucks County and killed his estranged mother-in-law, 66-year-old Buckingham Township resident Barbara Ruehl.
While police in both Pennsylvania and Virginia believe that Egland took his young daughter from the Virginia home and drove with her to Bucks County, they say there is a possibility the girl was visiting her grandmother.
At whatever point Egland brought his daughter into the killing spree, the 6-year-old was aware that “Grandmom went to heaven,” St. Luke’s Hospital staff said.
