Merced massacre -- dad kills 4 kids, self

Ex-wife finds grisly scene on return from walk

Elizabeth Bell, Janine DeFao - San Francisco Chronicle

Wednesday, March 27, 2002

Merced -- A retired Santa Clara County sheriff's deputy, distraught over the breakup of his marriage, fatally shot his young daughter and three stepchildren yesterday in their Merced home before turning the gun on himself, authorities said.

The killings of the four children stunned Merced, a suburban Central Valley town where schoolmates remembered the victims as fun-loving siblings who excelled in school and sports.

Early yesterday morning, John P. Hogan, 49, entered his former home while his ex-wife, veterinarian Dr. Christine McFadden, was taking her daily walk with a neighbor through their upscale neighborhood, according to investigators.

McFadden returned home shortly after 7 a.m. to find her ex-husband's truck in the driveway and her elder daughter, 17-year-old Melanie Willis, lying dead in a hallway of the sprawling gray ranch house. She ran to a neighbor's house to call police.

Within minutes, police found Stanley Willis, 15, and Stuart Willis, 14, dead in their beds with gunshot wounds to the head.

Hogan was found in the master bedroom with his daughter, 5-year-old Michelle Hogan, on his lap. Both were dead.

"Who knows what goes through people's minds when they kill their own offspring? I can't even begin to speculate what thoughts were going through his demented head," said Mark Pazin, area commander with the Merced County Sheriff's Department.

McFadden, described by friends as a devoted mother who always found time for her children's activities, emerged from her neighbor's home later in the morning, sat down on the edge of the sidewalk outside her home and cried inconsolably, rocking back and forth.

"That poor woman -- she was just devastated," said a neighbor, who declined to give her name.

Pazin said Hogan had left an eight-to-10-page typed letter in the master bathroom. The letter expressed his distress the end of his marriage to McFadden, Pazin said.

The couple had married in late 1995, but McFadden filed for divorce and a restraining order less than three years later, claiming that her husband was verbally abusive and used foul language around the children, according to papers filed in Merced Family Law Court.

"My husband has a very bad temper, and when he gets angry, he explodes," McFadden wrote in her application for a restraining order in June 1998, three months after filing for divorce. The divorce was granted last year.

Friends of the teenage children said Hogan was "extremely moody." They said he did not have a close relationship with his stepchildren but doted on his own young daughter.

However, friends added, the three older children had remained close to their father, Dr. Tom Willis, a Bakersfield veterinarian, who arrived at the crime scene yesterday afternoon.

Hogan had worked as a deputy for the Santa Clara County sheriff's office from 1983 to 1993, when he retired for an undisclosed medical reason. In recent years, he had worked as a private investigator.

The killings shocked Our Lady of Mercy School, a close-knit Roman Catholic school where Stuart was in eighth grade and Michelle was in preschool. The older children also had graduated from the school, which they attended from age 3.

Yesterday afternoon, former students joined current ones and community members in a memorial Mass for the children, where Stuart's class sang "Amazing Grace."

"I've cried so much I have no more tears left," said Coby LaMattina, Melanie's friend.

"They were fun children, well-liked by everybody," said Principal Brenda Feehan. "The three older ones had great senses of humor and a dry wit. They had great spirits of adventure."

Melanie, a junior at Golden Valley High School, was ranked second in her class of 467 students with an unusually high 4.5 GPA and was involved in speech and student government, said Principal Ralf Swenson.

She was running for vice president of next year's senior class in an election scheduled for Friday.

Monday night, Melanie was at school hanging campaign posters. Yesterday, her friends took them down and instead hung a banner filled with classmates' messages of love and grief.

A ballet dancer who loved to shop and dress up, Melanie wanted to attend Stanford University and become a geneticist.

Her younger brother, Stanley, was a freshman who played on both the high school football and baseball teams. A lanky boy, he liked to dress in camouflage and play paint ball.

Stuart, most valuable player on his school soccer team this year, also dabbled in acting and last week played a knight in a school dinner show.

Friends said the children all loved their little sister, Michelle, who always wore bows in her hair. She would spend afternoons at her mother's veterinary office, pretending to care for "sick" stuffed animals.

McFadden opened her own veterinary practice two years ago. She reportedly met Hogan several years ago when he brought a sick animal to her. The family had nine cats and dogs and numerous exotic birds.

Officials with the Santa Clara Sheriff's Department had little recollection of Hogan, who had worked in the patrol, parks, courts and jail division during his decade there.

A retirement resolution from the county Board of Supervisors said, "He was admired by his peers . . . . His judgment was usually sound, and his decisions were logical and appropriate."

Yesterday's quadruple slaying is the third in a string of high-profile crimes involving children in Merced County.

In the summer of 2000, a Delhi teenager beheaded his mother and was found sitting naked in her blood, reading the Bible.

Three weeks earlier, an intruder with a pitchfork broke into a rural farm house and stabbed three children, killing a boy and girl and injuring one of their older sisters. The attacker was gunned down as he lunged at sheriff's deputies.