Making a killing in Atlanta

Mark Barton, the man who killed his family, gunned down nine people at two Atlanta brokerage firms last week and then took his own life,was consumed by financial anxiety and seethed with anger. But according to psychologists he was not a serial killer of the type that has come to haunt America. He was a paranoid depressive who killed people like himself. Investigators are convinced that the two worlds of home and trading collided in Barton's crazed mind.

It now appears that insurance money he gained by hacking to death his first wife and her mother back in 1993 was then invested and lost in the fraught world of day trading. Barton, 44, seemed to have his life under control in the days before his last exit. He was newly reunited with his second wife and the two children he often missed appointments to be with. He was trying to patent a chemical solution. As a chemical salesman he was earning £85,000 year and was worth £750,000, according to a file he lodged with a day-trading brokerage.

The truth was very different. As one of a new breed of day traders born of the Wall Street bull market and the Internet but caught out by sagging stock prices he had lost $105,000 in seven weeks. On Tuesday, after a trading day that a brokerage source said cost him $20,000, he drove to his apartment and bludgeoned his wife to death. The next day he killed his two children to spare them a 'lifetime of pain,' according to a note .

Inquiries by The Observer yesterday suggested that behind the facade of domestic normality he carefully maintained who played with the lay acute tensions. A neighbour's child who played with the family recalled that Barton could suddenly become angry with his children for no apparent reason and 'took them upstairs and hit them with a belt'.

Only last weekend the family was the picture of suburban placidity, splashing about together in the swimming pool of their apartment complex. And on Tuesday, only hours before Barton killed his wife, one woman who asked not to be named said she saw him returning home carrying a large bag from the 'Toys R Us' store, apparently 'stuffed full of gifts for those poor children'.

The murdered woman, Leigh Ann Barton, had become afraid. Joe Vandiver, Leigh Ann's father, told reporters that on the afternoon before she was murdered she had had a ferocious argument with her husband. It was then that he told her he had lost not just the $105,000 on which the authorities are working, but $150,000.

Vandiver said he had 'always known my daughter had married a killer', but that he had convinced himself she was safe because of the love he demonstrated, most of the time, towards her and the children.

Neighbour Graham Mellish recalls Leigh Ann as a woman 'who was afraid to be herself when her husband was around. He intimidated her, he wanted his way with her.' After killing her he hid her body in the two-storey suburban house 16 miles south-east of Atlanta. She had been bludgeoned in the face with a claw-hammer. The next day Barton took his 11-year-old son Matthew to scouts and played with his seven-year-old daughter Michelle.

That night, the bodies of Matthew and Michelle lay in their beds 'as though in sleep' said the police. Blows had been rained on their faces with the same hammer. Beside their bodies Barton had placed their favourite toys - a Game Boy for Matthew, a cuddly toy for Michelle. Next morning Barton headed for the offices of Momentum Securities and All-Tech trading where a mixed bunch of people were chasing their dreams in the burgeoning new industry of day trading - a fraught mixture of betting, Wall Street brokering and a video game. By Thursday afternoon, the offices were scenes of carnage: nine lives lost, 12 people badly injured. Walls, desks and computer screens sprayed with blood.

Barton left a letter and three notes at the scene of this crime. These are gateways into a madman's mind which, in stark words, speak louder than any analysis. The letter is on personalised stationery, dated 29 July and timed: 6.38am: 'I killed her on Tuesday night,' it says, blandly. 'I killed Matthew Wednesday night... It just seemed like a quiet way to kill and a relatively painless way to die... All of them were dead in less than five minutes. I hit them with a hammer in their sleep then put them face down in the bathtub to make sure they did not wake up.'

He continued: 'I forced myself to do it to keep them from suffering so much later. No mother, no relatives. The fears of the father are handed on to the son. It was from my father to me and from me to my son.' Of his wife he wrote: 'I killed Leigh Ann because she was one of the main reasons for my demise. I really wish I hadn't killed her now. She really couldn't help it and I love her so much anyway.' ' He added:'There may be similarities,' he wrote, 'between these deaths and the deaths of my first wife. However, I did not kill her and her mother.'

The carnage in Stockbridge threw light on the 'unsolved' murder of Barton's previous wife, Debra. The police always suspected Barton because he had taken out an insurance policy weeks beforehand. But they failed to charge him. Barton was, however, immediately accused by Debra's father, Bill Spivey, who repeated his charge to reporters on Friday: 'The man who it appears killed my wife and daughter,' he raged, 'has also killed my two granchildren. If what I have heard is true, that man has destroyed nearly my whole family.

'That bunch in Alabama ,' he continued, 'bungled things and waited so long until they couldn't make a case, even though I think they had a ton of evidence. If those people had done their job, 12 people would be alive today.' Robbery was clearly not a motive in the murders: jewellery and credit cards were left with the bodies, along with an envelope containing six $100 bills. The coroner, Larry Tucker, was present at an interrogation of Barton by the local police: 'I was in the room when Mr Barton was being questioned. And that time the investigators suspected him. I remember him being a cool character.'

After Debra's death the insurance company initially refused to pay the dividend to Barton because it was convinced he had committed the murder. But Barton's lawyer, Robbie Hughes, helped secure a settlement from the company. And that gave Barton what he needed to get trading.

Barton - a chemist by trade - spent most of his first marriage with Debra on the move, drifting aimlessly between Georgia and Texas. They eventually settled near her family home in Lithis Springs in 1991. Barton formed a corporation, Highlander Pride, but police have little clue what it was. For much of his marriage to Debra, Barton had conducted an affair with Leigh Ann Vandiver, whom he married within two years of Debra's death, in 1995, after winning custody of his motherless children.

The newly-weds moved to the town of Morrow and last autumn they began to row - about domestic issues and about the fact that Barton had begun gambling vast sums on Internet brokerage. Barton had become obsessed by day trading, on the Internet and at the branch office of New Jersey-based All-Tech, which insists on a $40,000 balance of account. Twice recently Barton lost his entire balance, according to staff at the branch.

They talked about divorce, but the relationship ebbed and flowed, largely because of Leigh Ann's affection for the children. They tried a fresh start, moving to Stockbridge in June. It was a reunion that cost Leigh Ann and the children their lives.

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