true crime

At 16, Erin had her family murdered because they banned her from seeing her boyfriend.

At 16 years of age, Erin Caffey organised the killing of her family.

She was angry because her parents had banned her from seeing her boyfriend, an older boy named Charlie Wilkinson.

“I was shocked, angry and hurt, this was the guy I was supposed to spend the rest of my life with and he loved me,” she told The Sun. “We were going to get married.”

At Caffey’s behest, Wilkinson and one of their friends brutally murdered her mother and two brothers in their home.

Her father survived, but only by sheer luck.

Erin Caffey and her boyfriend Charlie Wilkson.

Caffey's mother was shot, before being semi-decapitated with a samurai sword.

Her 13-year-old brother was shot in the head and her eight-year-old brother was stabbed repeatedly with the sword.

Her father was shot five times and left to die as the house was torched.

Now 24, Caffey is currently serving two consecutive life sentences in a Texan prison.

One of the most unsettling aspects of her crime was the lack of warning signs; by all accounts she was an ordinary American teenager.

"You know, I was voted when we went to youth camp ‘Most Fun Loving Person’," she told Piers Morgan in his soon-to-premiere documentary Killer Women with Piers Morgan.

"What the hell happened?" he asked.

"I guess what it all boils down to is choices," she replied.

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"When I look back on it now, this was all just stupid. I mean, for what? They weren’t beating me, they weren’t starving me to death. I had it made."

The trailer for Killer Women with Piers Morgan:

Video by ITV

A criminal therapist who worked with her soon after the murders said she was the most dangerous criminal he'd ever met.

"I’ve never come across anyone as dangerous as Erin," he says on the program.

As the murders were carried out, Caffey waited in the car with another friend just a few hundred metres away.

She claimed she had been kidnapped, but this was later revealed to be a lie.

Her father Terry is the only person who still visits her.

"I honestly believe she was not the mastermind," he told Morgan. "This was a vulnerable 16-year-old girl with a controlling, psychopathic guy."

Asked if he could forgive her, he said he could.

"I do forgive her," he said. "I have to forgive her."

Feature image: ITV