Death In The Family

What could drive someone to murder their own parents?

- Saskia Murphy

It was 2am on Sunday, 9 February 2014 when 19-year-old Ashton Sachs crept into his parents’ bedroom.

Dressed in dark clothes, he’d driven for 18 hours from college in Seattle to their luxury California home in San Juan Capistrano, Orange County, California.

But Ashton wasn’t paying his parents Bradford, 57, and Andra, 54, a surprise visit. Instead, he shot them multiple times, killing them as they slept in their beds.

Ashton then shot his sleeping little brother Landon,who was just 8, and fired at his 17-year-old sister Alexis.

Alexis wasn’t hit, and their younger sister Lana, 15, was spared from the attack. But little Landon was paralysed from the neck down.

Hoping that, in the darkness, no-one had actually realised he’d opened fire on his own family, in the weeks that followed, Ashton acted shocked and hysterical, and spent every day by his brother’s hospital bed.

Ashton’sex-girlfriend described how he would cry and say, ‘I can’t believe somebody killed my parents.’

The community was shocked.

Ashton’s older brother Myles hadn’t been in the house at the time of the shootings.

Not suspecting his brother, he and Ashton even filed for custody of Landon and Lana.

News organisations speculated the slayings stemmed from the family’s business dealings.

The evidence