Elias

On April 1, 1984, the day before his 45th birthday, Marvin Gaye was shot twice in the chest by his own father, with a gun Marvin had given him for Christmas. When police asked the father if he loved his son, he said, "Let's say I didn't dislike him." Marvin sang "What's Going On" and "Sexual Healing," and in 2015 a jury ordered the makers of "Blurred Lines" to pay his family $7.4 million for copying one of his songs. In the video below the two of them sit side by side on a porch, laughing, in one of the rare clips of them together. The father explains why he refused to pray for Marvin to make the Detroit Lions in 1970. He couldn't stand to picture "my boy on a stretcher." By 1984 Marvin had moved back into his parents' house in Los Angeles. He was using cocaine and was sure someone wanted him dead, so he had given his father a .38 revolver for protection. That Sunday his parents argued about a missing insurance letter. Marvin went after his father and beat him, and a few minutes later the father came back with the gun while his mother Alberta watched. Seven months later his lawyer told a Los Angeles judge that Marvin was "the aggressor and the provocateur" and showed booking photos of the father's bruises. Doctors had also removed a walnut-sized tumor from the father's brain after his arrest. The judge suspended a six-year prison sentence and gave him five years of probation, after about 80 days he had spent in jail. Then he said on the record that Marvin "provoked this incident. And it was all his fault." The father sat through it in tinted glasses and barely moved his head. When he was allowed to speak, he said, "I love him right now. And I'm paying a price for it too." He never went back to prison and died in 1998, at 84. Was it a frightened old man defending himself, or a father who had waited years to do it?

Sam Cooke was shot dead by a motel manager in Los Angeles in December 1964, and five days later a coroner's jury ruled it justifiable homicide. The only witnesses were the woman who pulled the trigger and the woman who had run off with his clothes. He was 33 and one of the biggest Black stars in America, the voice of "You Send Me" and "Wonderful World," and he ran his own record label. "A Change Is Gonna Come" came out after he was gone. That night he drove a woman named Elisa Boyer to the Hacienda Motel on South Figueroa Street. She told police he took her there against her will and tried to force himself on her, so when he went into the bathroom she ran, grabbing his clothes on the way out. Cooke went looking for her in a sport jacket and one shoe. The manager, Bertha Franklin, said he broke into her office and grabbed her, so she shot him. By her account he said "Lady, you shot me," kept coming, and she hit him with a broomstick until he went down. In the video below Cooke sits with Dick Clark eight months earlier and says the best thing that could happen to him would be hits for the young singers he works with. "I will knock on wood," he laughs. Then the coroner's report, and the pathologist Cyril Wecht walking through Franklin's version. Police found $108 in a money clip in his Ferrari. Muhammad Ali, his close friend, said that if Cooke had been Frank Sinatra, the Beatles or Ricky Nelson, "the FBI would be investigating." Etta James saw his body before the funeral and wrote that "no woman with a broomstick could have inflicted that kind of beating against a strong, full-grown man." Was it self-defense in a cheap motel, or a story a jury signed off on in five days?

Marvin Gaye was beaten by his own father from the age of 7, and at 44 that same man shot him dead. His father was a preacher in Washington, D.C. Marvin's sister said he got whipped for leaving his hairbrush in the wrong place or for coming home from school a minute late. Years later Marvin told his biographer David Ritz: "By the time I was twelve, there wasn't an inch on my body that hadn't been bruised and beaten by him." He said the waiting was the worst part, because his father made him undress first and let him hear the belt buckle "just loud enough." Living with him, Marvin said, was like living with "a very peculiar, changeable, cruel, and all powerful king." In the video below, a year before his death, Marvin is asked on TV whether he once tried to kill himself. He says he hates questions that make him look weak, then answers anyway: "I really didn't feel like I was loved, and because I didn't feel loved, I felt useless." Then you see his mother Alberta smiling as she remembers the little boy who always pushed his way up to the piano in church. Marvin credited her with keeping him alive: "If it wasn't for Mother, I think I would have been one of those child suicide cases you read about in the papers." In April 1984 she was the one who pulled her husband and her son apart after a fight in the Los Angeles house Marvin had bought for his parents, and moments later the father came back with a handgun. The prosecutor said the first shot was fired from a distance and the second from close to point-blank range, which meant he had walked closer and had time to think about it. That is why the charge was raised to first-degree murder. Was it one fight that went too far, or something that started when Marvin was 7?

Chris Watts stood on his porch in Colorado and told TV cameras he just wanted his pregnant wife and their two little girls back. The next day he asked police to let him talk to one person first, his father, and the camera in that room kept recording: he told his dad that his wife had choked their daughters and that he "freaked out" and killed her, and when his father asks, "Did she kill 'em?" he answers "Yeah" and then "They were blue." In the video below you see him on the porch on August 14, 2018 and in that room the next day. It ends in prison in February 2019, when he finally told investigators that he had killed the girls himself. Shanann Watts was 15 weeks pregnant with a boy they were going to name Nico, and their daughters Bella and Celeste were 4 and 3. He buried his wife in a shallow grave at the oil field site where he worked and put his daughters' bodies inside oil tanks on the same site. On November 6, 2018 he pleaded guilty, and in exchange prosecutors did not seek the death penalty. Two weeks later he got five life sentences without parole. The first person he lied to after the police was his own father, and the camera got all of it. Was that the last bit of shame in him, or just one more person he needed to fool?

In 2008, the man who planned Tupac's murder told police exactly how it happened. They promised that nothing he said that day could be used against him, and for 15 years nobody charged him. Then he started telling the same story to anyone who would pay for it: on BET in 2018, on VladTV in 2019, and in his own book, "Compton Street Legend." Prosecutors said going public is what cost him that protection, and at trial his own lawyers argued he only said it all for the money. In the video below Duane "Keffe D" Davis reads a passage from that book on camera, in sunglasses and a polo shirt. Tupac "made an erratic move," he reads, and "one of my guys from the backseat grabbed the Glock." On September 7, 1996, after the Tyson fight in Las Vegas, a white Cadillac pulled up next to Suge Knight's BMW at a red light on Flamingo Road. Tupac was hit four times and died six days later, at 25. In that 2008 interview Davis named the shooter: his nephew Orlando Anderson, sitting in the backseat. Hours earlier Tupac and his crew had beaten Anderson near the elevators inside the MGM Grand. Anderson denied any part in it and was killed in 1998. In July 2023 police searched his home outside Las Vegas, and that September he was arrested. At trial the jury listened to two and a half hours of his 2008 interview and found him guilty of first-degree murder in less than three hours. At his sentencing on October 13 the judge told him, "I've heard you say some variation of the same thing to law enforcement, to BET, in your book." She gave him 40 years to life. He is 63. He is the only person ever charged with killing Tupac. The other three men in that Cadillac are dead, and the gun has never been found. Was it guilt that kept him talking for 15 years, or the money?

Ed Kemper killed 10 people, including his grandparents when he was 15 and his own mother when he was 24. In a 1981 prison interview he describes the moment he almost stopped: he picked up two girls, let them go, and a week later went home and murdered his mother. The footage was shot for The Killing of America, a documentary made for Japanese audiences that never got a regular release in the United States. Most people know Kemper from Netflix's Mindhunter, and this is the real man on a couch next to a barred window, 6 foot 9 and calm. In the video below he starts with his fingers pressed together and talks about sitting with a severed head in his hand, telling himself he wasn't insane because Viking heroes did the same. "Part of our heritage," he says. Then he gets to the two girls. He says they looked so much like his first two victims that it was "unbelievable," and that everything in him "went towards killing them." He let them out of the car. "They never even knew what was going on." "I said, 'No, it's got to stop.' And a week later I murdered my mother." In April 1973 he killed his mother, Clarnell Strandberg, and her friend Sally Hallett in Santa Cruz, then drove to Pueblo, Colorado, and called the Santa Cruz police on himself from a phone booth. California had no death penalty at the time, so he got life in prison. Near the end of the clip he says, "I am an American, and I killed Americans." He is 77 now and still locked up in Vacaville, California. He let two girls walk away because he decided it had to stop. Was that the last piece of a conscience, or was he just choosing who came next?