The sole surviving heir.
The traumatized son.
The victim who had barely escaped the same masked killer who destroyed his family.
Except Kent did not die.
Brashear fled through the rear of the house.
A 9mm Glock was left behind near the kitchen and back-door area.
Patricia was still alive briefly and was transported by helicopter, but she died from her injuries.
Kevin was pronounced dead at the home.
Kent survived.
Bart survived exactly as planned.
But his father was never supposed to be there afterward to remember what happened.
Bart's plan had produced the crime scene he wanted. The problem was that the crime scene itself immediately began telling police that the burglary was fake.
Detective Marshall Slot was called to the Whitaker home.
From the beginning, investigators noticed things that felt wrong.
The house had supposedly been burglarized.
Drawers had been pulled open.
A pillowcase lay near the bed.
Rooms looked disturbed.
But the disorder was strangely selective.
Expensive electronics remained.
Computers had not been taken.
Valuable audio and video equipment remained in place.
Jewelry was still visible.
Some dresser drawers had been pulled open only slightly, as though someone had wanted the room to look searched rather than actually searching it.
The intruder had also somehow located Kevin's hidden gun safe.
The safe was not sitting openly on a table.
It was in a concealed area.
Someone had forced it open.
Blue paint transfer was left behind by whatever tool had been used.
The Glock taken from that safe was apparently the same weapon used against the family.
This created an obvious question.
If the killer were a random burglar, how did he know exactly where the gun was hidden?
There was another unusual object outside.
A black leather glove near Bart's Yukon.
Slot ordered it collected.
Then investigators brought in bloodhounds.
The use of scent-lineup evidence has been controversial in other criminal cases and should not be treated as infallible science.
But in the Whitaker investigation, police said the dogs later alerted to scent connections between Chris Brashear and several items associated with the staged burglary and weapon.
At that early stage, however, no one yet knew who Brashear was.
Bart was still officially one of the survivors.
At the hospital and afterward, he could grieve beside his father.
He could attend the funeral.
He could accept condolences.
He could let hundreds of people believe that some masked stranger had destroyed the Whitaker family.
The story might have lasted much longer.
Then, only two days after the killings, police received information about Bart's college records.
He was not graduating.
The dinner had celebrated something that did not exist.
Police obtained his transcripts.
The first major lie cracked.
And once investigators knew the graduation was fake, the entire evening looked different.
The restaurant was no longer simply a family celebration.
It might have been a device.
A way to empty the house.
A way to control when the family returned.
A way to deliver three people to a waiting gunman.
Then, five days after the murders, a man walked into the Sugar Land Police Department and described almost the exact same family massacre Bart had planned years earlier.
His name was Adam Hipp.
Hipp had known Bart from school.
He was not walking into the station because detectives had already identified him as a suspect.
He came voluntarily.
What he told Detective Marshall Slot changed the investigation.
Years earlier, Hipp said, Bart Whitaker had approached him with a plan.
The target was not a rival.
Not a stranger.
Not someone who owed Bart money.
The target was the Whitaker family.
Kent.
Patricia.
Kevin.
Hipp described a plan in which Bart would arrange to take his family out.
Someone else would enter the house.
Then, as the Whitakers came home, they would be attacked near the entrance.
Bart would be wounded too.
Not seriously.
Just enough to make him look innocent.
Hipp drew a diagram for police.
A shooter positioned inside.
Bodies near the front of the house.
A planned wound to Bart's arm.
Detectives were looking at a blueprint astonishingly similar to what had happened on December 10, 2003.
The detail about Bart being wounded was especially difficult to dismiss.
That was exactly what had happened.
Hipp said the earlier plan was connected to money.
If Bart's parents and brother died, Bart would become the sole surviving immediate heir.
Investigators estimated the family estate and business interests could be worth approximately $1.5 million.
That figure would later become central to the prosecution's motive theory.
Kent Whitaker would eventually challenge the idea that wealth alone explained his son's actions.
Bart himself would later offer a different explanation, describing deep resentment and irrational hatred toward his family.
But in December 2003, detectives now had something more important than motive.
They had evidence of premeditation years before the actual killings.
They checked Hipp's whereabouts on the night of the murders.
He had been working.
He could be eliminated as the December 2003 gunman.
Then investigators found another former acquaintance.
Justin Peters.
And Peters gave them an even more disturbing timeline.
The 2001 plan had not been the beginning.
There had been another plot before that.
December 2000.
Bart had apparently been trying to construct a successful way to eliminate his family for years.
The murder at the Whitaker home was not a sudden explosion of anger. Investigators were beginning to see it as version three of a plan that kept being rewritten until somebody finally agreed to carry it out.
According to testimony later presented at trial, the first known conspiracy emerged around 2000.
Bart had recruited other young men.
Justin Peters.
Will Anthony.
Then later Adam Hipp.
Different participants appeared at different stages.
The plans changed.
But one element remained.
The Whitaker family had to die.
One proposal involved a family lake house.
Another involved creating an ambush at the Sugar Land home.
In one version, Bart would escape from a fire with injuries so that he would appear to have narrowly survived.
In another, he would take his family to dinner while an accomplice entered the house.
Then Bart would come home with them.
The shooter would attack.
Bart would be wounded too.
The family would die.
The scene would point away from him.
That second structure became almost identical to December 10, 2003.
The earlier conspiracies failed because the people Bart approached did not ultimately complete them.
Some backed away.
Some plans collapsed.
But Bart did not abandon the idea.
That persistence later mattered enormously at sentencing.
The prosecution could argue that this was not one terrible decision made in an emotional moment.
He had returned to the same goal repeatedly.
He changed accomplices when necessary.
He changed details.
He waited.
Then, in 2003, he met two men who would take the plan farther than the others had.
Chris Brashear.