Delia D'Ambra

A brief obituary for Troy indicated a private funeral service was held for him after the murders as well, but it's unclear who attended.

At the time of his suicide, he had a surviving sister, grandmother, and a son and daughter.

I imagine even though he'd made some terrible homicidal decisions in his final days, Troy's family members still grieved his death in their own way.

But there was another family connected to his violent history who felt a strange sense of deja vu about everything that had unfolded in March 2014.

And those folks had not kept silent about how they felt.

According to the coverage in this case, in early February 1996, so 18 years before Jason Crisp and Levi and Rhonda Wisnett's murders, Troy, who was just 20 years old, walked into the Burke County Sheriff's Office with his dad and stepmom and confessed to murdering a man.

He claimed that he'd shot his best friend, 21-year-old William Shane Newton, in the head the night before while the two of them had been hanging out inside William's trailer.

Now, from what I read in the source material, William seemed to go by his middle name, Shane, most often, so that's what I'll be referring to him as from here on out.

Anyway, after confessing to Shane slaying and turning himself in, Troy was charged with murder.

But at his arraignment in late May 1996, he pleaded not guilty.

In February 1997, after the one-year anniversary of the crime came and went, the case had still not gone to trial, and Shane's mother, Shirley, was frustrated by that.

She took it upon herself to gather nearly 800 signatures petitioning the district attorney's office for the case to move forward to trial.

She specifically did not want Troy to be offered a plea deal because she was worried he would receive a very low prison sentence.

She and the rest of Shane's family could not understand why Troy had done what he did.

According to Shirley, Shane had sort of taken Troy under his wing and been a person who'd stood up for him when others wouldn't.

There had been times when Troy had stolen from Shane, but Shane didn't make a big deal of those incidents because he believed Troy had no one else in his life to turn to.

Shirley never got a good vibe, though, from Troy, and she'd asked Shane to stay away from him, but Shane voiced that he thought abandoning Troy as a friend wasn't the right move.

Shirley described her son as a very friendly, loyal, and kind person, at one point stating, "'If you just knew Shane, he was so wonderful.

Everybody claimed him.

He made friends with everybody.