[continued from previous message]   
      
   Bryant remembered “sitting on my knees crying for him because he was a   
   friend,” police testified Bryant told them. When a passerby pulled up,   
   Bryant got back in his truck and fled, he later told police.   
      
   Bryant went back to Gainey’s house and took all the electronics from the   
   living room, along with a fish tank from his bedroom. At some point,   
   Bryant started a fire, in what he claimed was an accident but prosecutors   
   said was an act of arson.   
      
   Two days later, on Oct. 11, Bryant killed 62-year-old Willard Tietjen, who   
   friends and family called TJ.   
      
   Bryant had come to Tietjen’s house several days earlier, claiming he   
   needed to see Tietjen’s phone book to try and track down a friend’s phone   
   number. Tietjen helped, and Bryant left without incident, Tietjen’s wife,   
   Millard Tietjen, testified.   
      
   When he returned, Bryant said he told Tietjen his truck had overheated.   
   Tietjen invited him in and began to talk about religion before becoming   
   hostile, Bryant told police. Bryant shot him nine times, an autopsy   
   showed.   
      
   Bryant stayed in Tietjen’s house long after killing him. He smoked   
   Tietjen’s cigarettes and used his computer. He took Tietjen’s Masonic ring   
   off his finger and cleaned off the blood in the sink. He rearranged the   
   furniture and lit candles over Tietjen’s body, police testified.   
      
   “He was there for hours, enjoying his work, admiring what he had done,”   
   solicitor Kelly Jackson told the judge during his trial.   
      
   When Tietjen’s wife and daughter called to check on him, Bryant answered   
   his cellphone, calling himself “the prowler” and telling the women he   
   killed Tietjen, the victim’s relatives testified in court.   
      
   Bryant also burned Tietjen’s eyes with a lit cigarette, set his goatee on   
   fire and used Tietjen’s blood to write messages on the wall for police,   
   according to court documents.   
      
   “Victim number four in two weeks, catch me if you can,” Bryant wrote on   
   one wall, some of the letters in blood. On another was the word “catch,”   
   also in blood, police testified.   
      
   Bryant’s note seemed to suggest he already planned to kill again,   
   prosecutors argued. Two days later, around 4 a.m., he picked up Chris   
   Burgess at a gas station, loaded his bicycle into the back of his pickup   
   truck and drove off.   
      
   A hunter found Burgess’ body on the side of the road, shot three times, in   
   a similar manner to Gaines, investigators testified.   
      
   “It was over for me,” Bryant told police he was thinking at the time.   
      
   Police arrested Bryant later that day. After initially trying to blame   
   someone else, he confessed to the police, according to court testimony.   
      
   During his time in jail, Bryant racked up more charges for threatening a   
   detention officer and severely beating another. Bryant pleaded guilty to   
   all the charges he faced.   
      
   Prosecutors sought the death penalty for Tietjen’s killing because   
   Bryant’s theft of jewelry and other items from the house qualified as an   
   aggravating offense, according to court records. He received life   
   sentences for the other slayings.   
      
   The victims   
   Most mornings, Bob Summers stopped by his friend Tietjen’s house for   
   coffee, he testified during Bryant’s sentencing hearing. The morning of   
   Tietjen’s death, Summers called to tell Tietjen a joke, as he often did.   
      
   Tietjen liked jokes, and he told good ones, Summers said. Summers liked to   
   give him gag gifts, and he planned to give Tietjen a tie that looked like   
   a bottle of Tabasco hot sauce before his death, he said.   
      
   Tietjen worked for the Air Force for 23 years, maintaining radar systems,   
   his wife of 39 years testified. After retiring in 1985, he worked at   
   hardware and electronics stores before eventually going into the insurance   
   business, she said.   
      
   Tietjen was active in the local Masonic Lodge, and he was a Shriner,   
   including driving a buggy he kept in the basement every time a parade   
   happened in the area, she said.   
      
   When asked if she understood that Bryant could be put to death for killing   
   her husband, Millard Tietjen told defense attorneys she was OK with that.   
      
   “I can’t say it would make it any better, but I feel he deserves a   
   punishment because he made the choice to do what he did,” she said during   
   the 2008 hearing.   
      
   Chris Gainey was 14 when Bryant shot his dad, Cliff Gainey, to death by   
   the side of a road. During the sentencing hearing, he recalled fishing   
   with his dad and watching movies, though he added he didn’t remember much   
   else about their time together.   
      
   “The only thing I really remember, he used to always comment on me being —   
   just always said I look just like him,” Chris Gainey testified. “My mama   
   still says the same thing.”   
      
   Chris Burgess’ family missed him every day, his mother, Christine Burgess,   
   wrote in a letter read out loud in court.   
      
   “We all loved him dearly,” the letter said. “The pain and suffering of   
   this family will never go away.”   
      
   Stephen Bryant   
   In the months leading up to the killings, Bryant tried to get help for his   
   deteriorating mental state, his aunt and grandmother told a judge.   
      
   That August, two months before his crime spree, Bryant sat down with his   
   grandmother and aunt to ask for help. At his grandmother’s home, he   
   clenched his hands on her glass-top coffee table, causing the whole table   
   to shake, she recalled during his 2008 trial.   
      
   Bryant told the two about how his grandfather, his uncle and his older   
   half-brother sexually and physically abused him throughout his childhood.   
      
   “He looked like he was being tortured,” his aunt, Terry Lee Bryant   
   Caulder, testified during his trial. “It’s like his soul was just laid   
   wide open. In his eyes, you could see he was hurting and suffering and he   
   was living the abuse over again as it was coming out, what he was telling   
   us.”   
      
   His grandmother, Shirley Freeman, suggested Bryant call a sexual abuse   
   hotline, she said. Caulder found the number and handed the phone off to   
   Bryant, who spoke to the person on the other end for a while, she   
   testified.   
      
   The hotline seemed to offer no resources. His probation officer referred   
   him to a nearby counseling center, but Bryant couldn’t afford to pay for   
   the services, so he left without getting help.   
      
   He couldn’t sleep on the nights he picked up his victims at gas stations.   
   He told police he remembered only bits and pieces of each incident, which   
   experts testified could have been a symptom of his post-traumatic stress   
   disorder, according to court records.   
      
   Bryant grew up in a troubled home, his attorneys have argued to multiple   
   courts. His parents met and conceived him in a rehabilitation facility,   
   though neither got sober. His mother drank during her pregnancy with him,   
   she told attorneys during his appeals process.   
      
   Starting at the age of 17, he spent much of his life in and out of jail,   
   always for non-violent offenses, defense attorneys said during his   
   sentencing hearing.   
      
   The trauma of his early life, combined with the developmental effects of   
   his mother’s drinking during her pregnancy, caused Bryant to snap and act   
   outside his normal frame of mind, his attorneys argued during his appeals.   
      
   During his 17 years on death row, Bryant received two disciplinary   
   sanctions, one for fighting without a weapon in 2009, and one for   
   possessing a weapon in 2023, according to prison records.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)