In the quiet town of Pelham, Alabama, a dispute over a pickup truck on a March weekend in 1997 escalated into a horrific act of violence that claimed the lives of four people. On the evening of March 23, the bodies of 39-year-old Randy Gerald Duke, his 29-year-old girlfriend Dedra Lynn Mims Hunt, and her two young daughters, seven-year-old Chelsea and six-year-old Chelisa, were discovered in their home.
The initial 911 call was made by Randy Duke's son, Mark Anthony Duke, who claimed his father and others had been killed.
The investigation soon unraveled a sinister plot conceived by Mark Duke, then 16, who was enraged at his father for not letting him borrow his truck. He enlisted the help of his 19-year-old friend, Michael Brandon Samra, and two other teenage friends, David Layne Collums and Michael Lafayette Ellison, to carry out the killings. On the night of the murders, Mark Duke and Samra went to the Duke residence armed with handguns.
Inside the home, the violence unfolded in a brutal manner. Mark Duke shot his father, and Samra shot Dedra Mims Hunt in the face. Despite being wounded, Hunt fled upstairs with her two daughters, but the two assailants followed. After running out of ammunition, the attackers resorted to using kitchen knives. Mark Duke fatally shot Dedra Hunt in a bathroom and then slit the throat of her daughter Chelisa. Samra cut the throat of Chelsea as the young girl pleaded for her life. The crime scene was staged to look like a robbery.
The subsequent investigation led to the arrests of all four individuals involved. Mark Anthony Duke and Michael Brandon Samra were charged with capital murder. In exchange for their testimony against Duke and Samra, David Collums and Michael Ellison pleaded guilty to murder and received prison sentences. Both Duke and Samra were convicted of capital murder. Samra was sentenced to death and, after years of appeals, was executed by lethal injection on May 16, 2019. Mark Duke was also sentenced to death, but his sentence was later commuted to life in prison without the possibility of parole due to a Supreme Court ruling that banned the execution of individuals who were under 18 at the time of their crimes.
