In the small city of Glendive, Montana, a place where families often left their doors unlocked, the approaching Thanksgiving holiday of 1987 was irrevocably shattered by an act of shocking violence. The Brooks family had moved to the railroad town just over two years earlier after the Burlington Northern Railroad closed its shops in their hometown of Livingston.
James Joseph Brooks Jr., a 42-year-old machinist, and his wife, Sharon Louise Brooks, 40, were making the best of the move, raising their family hundreds ofmiles from where they'd built their lives. On the frigid night of November 19, 1987, their new home became a scene of unimaginable horror.
That night, James and Sharon were in their house with their eight-year-old son, Sean, and his friend, Scott Miller. Also present was James's mother, 60-year-old Ora Virginia Whitney Brooks. Around midnight, a neighbor heard someone yell, “God damn it, let me in,” followed by James Brooks saying, “Put the gun away.” The pleas were followed by the sound of five gunshots. The family's next-door neighbor, 16-year-old Douglas "Doug" Duane Turner, had come to their door with a.30-30 rifle and forced his way inside. Turner, who had never met the Brooks family before, had been drinking heavily at a party after his recent release from a juvenile alcohol treatment program.
Inside the home, the attack was swift and brutal. Turner first shot and killed James Brooks Jr. as he tried to protect his family in the living room. He then moved through the house, shooting both Sharon and his mother, Ora. As Ora attempted to flee the house screaming, she was shot. Sharon stumbled out into the street, where she collapsed. Hearing the commotion from the basement, young Sean and his friend Scott ran upstairs. Turner aimed his rifle at the boys, but the gun misfired. He then viciously clubbed them with the rifle butt before leaving the scene. Sean ran outside to find his dying mother, and a passing neighbor pulled the boy into her car and called the police.
The senseless triple homicide stunned the state of Montana. The investigation quickly led to Douglas Turner, who was arrested at the scene. In April 1988, Turner pleaded guilty to three counts of deliberate homicide, two counts of felony assault for the attacks on the boys, and one count of aggravated burglary. He claimed to have no direct memory of the killings but accepted responsibility. His attorney stated that Turner wished to spare the Brooks and his own family further pain by avoiding a trial. He was sentenced to three consecutive life sentences in prison.
Turner's violence did not end with his incarceration. He became one of Montana's most prolific murderers while in prison. In 1990, he and another inmate, William Gollehon, beat a fellow prisoner to death with a baseball bat. A year later, during a deadly prison riot in September 1991, Turner was involved in the murders of five more inmates. For these additional crimes, he was convicted of multiple counts of deliberate homicide and kidnapping, and he received a death sentence.
The legal appeals in his case were still pending when, on July 8, 2003, Douglas Duane Turner was found hanging in his maximum-security cell at Montana State Prison. The 31-year-old, who had spent nearly half his life behind bars, committed suicide before the state could carry out his execution. For the surviving members of the Brooks family, the trauma of that November night left a permanent scar. The attack's youngest survivor, Sean Brooks, struggled for the rest of his life with the severe psychological trauma and brain injury he sustained, ultimately dying in 2019 as a result of the demons that haunted him from that night.
