Chapter 1: What traumatic event did Robin Doan experience at age ten?
Do you know why you're here today? To talk about what happened this morning.
I have a question. Do I really have to talk about what happened this morning again? Because I've told people and I've told people and it just crushes me every time I say it.
I can't really talk about that again.
911, what is your emergency? There was a shootout in my house, and I don't know who's dead, and I'm scared to death.
I was 10 when all this happened. I was so young and so little. Is there anybody else in the house with you? No, I think I'm the only one alive. I don't know, but I'm scared.
I want my mom.
I lived with my mother, that's Michelle Conrad. I lived with my stepfather, Brian Conrad, and then my older brother, Zach Doan. I had a dog named Molly. And my stepdad Brian was a farmer, and then my mom was also six months pregnant.
I don't want my mom to start dead.
That night, I was having a nightmare, and I remember hearing the gunshots in my dream. But when I woke up, it didn't end. The gunshots were actually going off in my house. My mother started screaming, screaming and screaming and screaming. I jumped out of my bed, and I went and crouched down by my door. That's when I had heard footsteps. It was very loud. He was stomping.
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Chapter 2: How did Robin survive the attack on her family?
It's on Highway 70. It's about 13.3 miles out from the bowling alley. I have a purple shirt on. I have purple pants on.
It felt so long before they got there.
OK, they're coming. They're coming. They're coming. Thank you.
I just kept looking and looking and looking and hoping to see someone coming to my rescue.
All I want right now is my blanket and my pillow. I'll never forget when I turned down the driveway. This child on a phone about a shooting. She ran straight to me. I hugged her. As distraught as she was, she's very articulate, just telling me in absolute detail what was going on and what she heard and everything.
He told me everything was going to be okay. They were going to figure it out.
We're obviously not going in the house with her. I got to secure her somehow out here in the middle of nowhere. So I put her in my patrol car and locked it.
All the cops had their guns drawn, and they were going to clear out the house to make sure no one was in there. I'm going to go see who was alive and who was not alive. Any crime scene that you go into, you know, it's the ultimate whodunit. One comment we made when we first got there is, this is like the all-American family. Everything was in place. The coffee was set to come on the next morning.
Mom, dad, children getting ready for the birth of a child. The east door to the residence had been kicked in, and whoever entered that residence at that time immediately went to shooting. Brian had been shot three times, and Michelle had been shot six times, and the dog had been shot twice. I guess I kept playing games with myself in my head. When is my mom gonna walk out of there?
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Chapter 3: What details did Robin provide during the 911 call?
I just remember him helping me feed. I laughed at the amount of alfalfa hay he tried to give my goats because it was like a large amount. And I said, no, no.
She just blew me away. She completely flipped a switch and was absolutely bragging about her animal got first or second in this, and her brother got first and second with his animal. Once we leave the corrals and that moment's over, the switch flipped again, and it was right back to reality. And she's immediately back to crying and cold, and she grabbed my forearm.
Finally, like, I kind of got the courage to just come right out and say, Mom and Brian aren't going to walk out of there, are they? Broke the law enforcement people's hearts when they had to tell me no, that they weren't walking out of there. I was the only one that could walk out of there still alive. Zach never woke up, and he never knew what was going on.
So I'm thankful that he didn't have a chance to hurt. I'm really thankful for that. Right after it all had taken place, I went to my great-grandma's house. It was just family after family after friends after people, and everybody was crying. You know, people were yelling at the top of their lungs, saying, what's going on, what's going on, what's going on?
And I couldn't answer questions because I was just scared. I really don't want to go to sleep anymore. It makes me to where I'm too scared. I really don't want to go to sleep. I got put in a room with one of the advocates at the bridge. There was a microphone in the room, and there was a camera in the room. He had shot my room and missed me.
And so I had to pretend like I was dead to him.
Everything was videotaped to make sure that they had it for evidence and stuff like that. Did anybody say anything? Could you hear anybody talking? Nobody talked. They asked me, what do you remember? Can you describe what he looked like?
I don't know this for sure, but I thought I saw a white, white. White eyes, white face. OK.
My question to the other investigators was, I need to know if she heard shots. And if so, approximately how many shots did she hear? And when he shot, I saw a flash. She never hesitated in her answer of 15 shots. And through the course of the crime scene investigation, 15 fire grounds were found inside the home.
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Chapter 4: What led investigators to identify Levi King as the suspect?
So we started trying to piece stuff together. One of the family members also said that the Orly and Don McCool's pickup, Dodge Dakota pickup was gone. So it was entered into the computer system nationwide as stolen.
We had a warrant signed for Levi at, I want to say like 11 o'clock that night. And that warrant was issued in the computer for nationwide pickup. None of us knew why this had happened. It did feel completely random. Law enforcement kept us abreast of the situation and had informed us that they had identified Levi King as a suspect. He needed a way to escape the area.
And so they believed that he had targeted my grandfather's house as well as the truck for transportation.
Levi King was found in the truck by the border patrol in El Paso. He admitted having guns in the back. Well, that drew their attention. They ran the tags, found out there was a stolen truck with a possible suspect from a murder inside. So they detained him there at El Paso PD and actually interviewed him.
So El Paso police held in question Levi King until the Missouri investigators could arrive. Just 15 minutes into that interview, Levi King calmly confessed to killing Orly McCool and his daughter-in-law, Dawn. But he couldn't fully explain why. Before I even realized it, I mean, I had just...
Pointing at Adam and fired. How many times did you fire? Just once. He spun and fell over.
You walk by to the door and you see this woman. Explain to me why you shot at her. I was scared. I didn't know what was going to happen to me. I was panicking. We get to El Paso PD. We are met by the detectives that are working the case. I observed Levi standing there, knew him, said his name. He knew who I was. We both acknowledged each other.
We loaded him up and the pickup up and headed back towards Missouri. During a conversation with Levi, he described that even hours later, he could still smell the gunpowder, the sweat and the blood, describing it as a feeling that was probably better than any drugs he'd ever done.
I want to say within the next week or two, I had been told by a couple of the detention officers there in the jail that Levi had asked to see me and speak with me. We got him out of the cell. took him to the outdoor exercise yard. And somewhere in that conversation, within the next few minutes, Levi made the statement, you know there's four more in Texas.
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Chapter 5: What challenges did Robin face after the tragedy?
I was going to be sitting in front of a murderer who had killed my loved ones. And to testify, I didn't want to, but I knew that I needed to for my family's sake. I was the only one that got to walk out of that house. They didn't, and they needed a voice too. Before she goes in to testify, she's absolutely scared to death. I just look at her and I said, Robin, we've got your back.
Go do what you need to do. Tell the truth and just realize we're right outside this door. He will never get to you. I tried to avoid looking at Levi King as long as I possibly could. And finally, I couldn't resist the urge anymore because I wanted to see who had actually done this. And so I looked at him, and the stare that I got back was the worst feeling of my entire life. He is very cold.
He's very blank. And essentially, it just felt like he was staring a hole right through me. When Robin testified... The hard part about Robin testifying was to see the pain that that precious little girl had to go through and endure. And then to see her say, I've endured this, but you're not taking my life away from me. I am not giving you that kind of control. I don't want to live with
being bitter and being angry all the time for what had happened. I did forgive Levi King because me forgiving Levi King, it was my sense of peace and it was my sense of this is how I was raised and this is my family coming out.
We present the evidence, the defense has their time to present their case, and we ask 12 people to make a very, very difficult decision to either take or not take a man's life. You ask the question why, and that's the question that sometimes haunts you forever. Why? Why this family? Why this day? Why this time? We may never know.
Probably the hardest part for people to deal with on these types of crimes, the randomness of it, the lack of motive, is to understand that there truly are people out there who are just plain evil. Levi King is one of those people. I'm asking 12 people to sentence this man to death.
This was a horrible crime and we knew we had to be honest with the jury. We tried to get to him and say, look, he will never walk as a free man ever. That that is punishment. And he will never harm anyone else again.
For years, I lived and breathed this case. And despite your best efforts, you don't always get it right. The jury deliberated for approximately seven to eight hours and they came back and said that they wanted to give him life without parole. One of them wanted to give him life without parole. The rest of them wanted him to have the death penalty.
I credit that with giving the eventual one holdout enough strength to hold out. I don't think we ever believed we'd get a life verdict. I thought the best we would get would be a hung jury.
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Chapter 6: How did Robin cope with the aftermath of the attack?
I'm thrilled to death every time that phone rings and I see Robin's name on it. It's always with a sense of joy because she has a special place in my heart and she always will. They treated her like their little sister. They just had big hearts. They carry big guns, but they had big hearts. When you go through things, as traumatic as this experience was, you have a bond. And I connected with her.
We did keep in contact and later on, when she turned 16, Robin invited me to her birthday party. You know, I revisit that place and I've always had this hesitation. Is seeing me a happy day or a tragic day?
I have had a really good relationship with Chad. When I hug him, every time I see him, it's that same hug I got the day that he came and he was the first one to me. And it's just the most heartwarming. It's like a safe place. I don't let what happened keep me down. No. No. Sorry. That's not me. That'll never be me.
I played basketball, I played volleyball, I played softball, ran track, I was a cheerleader. I like being a leader. We have had a lot of moments, Robin and I, that we have been together. For prom, she came and got ready at my house. I was of course there for her graduation. Just things that I know that she's gonna need a mom for.
She says that her mom won't be there for her wedding, and I just wanna be there for her. I call Denise my adopted mom. I look to Denise for everything, whether it be homework, a new boyfriend, oh my gosh, I don't know what to wear today, to school, every little thing to every major thing. That's when I look to Denise. She has this positive outlook on life.
She has one of the most caring hearts that anyone could ever see. And I believe that Robin needs to be in a field with caring and helping people. I made the statement many times back then, and I still make it today, that I hope the good Lord keeps me around long enough to see why he kept Robin Doan on this earth. Because it's got to be an incredible, special reason.
And I hope I get to witness that. I could honestly not tell you why I was left, why I was the only one that survived. I couldn't tell you. Whether it be I'm able to tell people there's nothing that you can't get through. Maybe if I get married one day and have kids, if it's to help my kids get through life or help other people in the world, I don't know.
I don't know what my purpose is, but it's going to be great when it comes.
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