“Chad, just do what he says. ”
Those were the only words I could force out of my mouth. My son was standing there with a zip tie in his hand, looking at me with pure terror in his eyes. Greg had just told him to tie me up.
And when Chad hesitated, Greg pulled out a gun. I had never seen zip ties that big in my life. I didn’t even know they made them that big. That night started like any other.
September 20th, 2016. I had served my husband Greg with divorce papers for the second time a few weeks earlier. The first time I tried to leave him, back in 2013, I had come back. He promised things would change.
They never did. Now I was dead set. I couldn’t keep putting my children through this. I went to sleep that night in my daughters’ room, like I always did.
I remember him coming in and telling me to come to the living room. It seemed serious. So I got up. I found my 19-year-old son Chadney in the living room.
I could tell he had been asleep. Greg had woken him up. Then Greg took out those massive zip ties and told Chad to tie me up. When Chad hesitated, the gun came out.
He made my son zip tie my wrists. Then he zip tied Chad. Then my 17-year-old daughter Cara walked into the living room, looking confused, like something was wrong with her dad. She had no clue what had just happened.
He zip tied her too. Then he told us all to go down to the basement. We just looked at each other. The thoughts in my head were so loud.
Go to the basement. Go to the basement. So we went. He made us lie down on the floor.
He duct taped our mouths. He duct taped our arms behind our backs. He duct taped our ankles. He used extra tape on me.
I kept thinking he was just going to take the girls and leave. I thought he was just trying to scare me. I never thought he would do anything more than that. He sat down on the counter in the basement and told me I was going to suffer for what I did to him and his girls.
He said he didn’t want his girls raised by anybody in my family. I felt so bad because I couldn’t help us. What was I going to do? He spent the next hour going in and out of the basement.
When he came back for the final time, he turned his gun on Cara. He shot her in the back twice. She just looked at me. Blood was coming from her mouth.
I was yelling at him, “No, my baby, no. ” I was begging him not to shoot her. But once I saw that blood, I knew she wasn’t going to make it. Then he turned the gun on Chadney.
He shot him twice in the back and once in the head. I remember Chad saying, “Ouch. ” Then he rolled over and he never moved again. Then Greg aimed the gun at me.
I tried to brace myself. I didn’t know where he was going to shoot me. I just remember hearing gunshots. I felt a burning feeling.
He grabbed my face. He cut me, from my forehead down to my cheek. I didn’t feel it, but I felt the warmth of the blood. I could see it squirting.
He didn’t kill me. He wanted me to live with what I had just seen. I heard him walk up the stairs. I heard him say, “Hi, my name is Gregory Green.
” Then I heard the door close. He had called the police and confessed. I just lay there. Then I heard a knock at the door.
It was the police. They found me in the basement. I had been shot in the foot and cut across the face. They got me to the hospital.
The doctors said if he had cut me an inch further, I would have bled to death. They said my foot should have been shattered into pieces, but the bullet curved and went out the bottom. I thought the nightmare was over. I was wrong.
At the hospital, one of the doctors told me my two youngest had passed. I remember the police saying the little one was fighting. I didn’t know what was going on. But Kaye was the last to go.
They wheeled me into a room and I saw Koi. She was gone. She was so cold. Then they wheeled me into another room and I saw Kaye.
She was still warm. My two babies. Koi was five. Kaye was four.
Greg had carried them out to the garage while I was tied up in the basement with Chad and Cara. He had put them in the car, tucked them in, shut the door, and turned on the engine. He had rigged a hose to the tailpipe. They died of carbon monoxide poisoning.
One of the children briefly woke up. But her daddy was holding her, so she fell back asleep. He tucked them back into bed together after they died. When the police questioned Greg, he showed no emotion.
He said he had no choice. He said Faith had filed for divorce. He said she was going to take his house. He said he would have to pay child support and he would have nothing and he would starve.
He said something that stuck with me. He said his children were better off in heaven with God than being raised by me. The detectives asked him why he didn’t kill me too. He said, “Death would have been too good for her.
I wanted her to live with what she made me do. ”
It was only after the story hit the press that I learned the terrible truth about Greg’s past. I was on my dad’s phone and it was the first thing that popped up. His first wife.
She was about six or seven months pregnant. He had stabbed her to death. I never knew. I was just crying, balling my eyes out, sick to my stomach.
And then I found out something else. It was my own father who had helped Greg get out of prison. My father, Pastor Fred Harris, had written letters to the parole board on Greg’s behalf. He never told me what Greg had done.
He never warned me. For a long time, I didn’t want anything to do with my father. I pushed my family away. They weren’t understanding what I was going through.
I didn’t understand what I was going through. How do you wrap your head around losing four children? I was on a lot of medication. I was spiraling out of control.
Greg was charged with four counts of first-degree murder. The case was very strong. He confessed. We had the victims.
We had a live witness who saw everything. Me. The investigation showed that a week before the murders, Greg had gone to a hardware store. He bought the PVC pipe, the plastic tubing, the zip ties, and the duct tape.
He planned this. Greg’s defense attorney tried to argue that buying the items days earlier didn’t prove premeditation. But the fact that the girls died from carbon monoxide poisoning showed planning. You can’t accidentally gas your children.
The prosecutor’s office eventually offered Greg a plea deal. He would plead guilty to four counts of second-degree murder, torture, assault with intent to do great bodily harm, and felony firearm. In exchange, he would spend the rest of his natural life in prison. The plea deal took into account my wishes.
I didn’t want to relive the horror of testifying at a trial. I didn’t want to describe what I watched Greg do to my children in front of a jury. On March 1st, 2017, about six months after he murdered my children, Greg stood in court for his sentencing. I showed up.
I wanted to be face to face with him. I kept looking at him, even though I could only see the back of his head. I wanted to let him know how I felt. I wanted him to see my eyes.
I wanted him to feel my pain. I called him out in front of the judge. I told him he was a con man. I told him he was a monster.
I told him he was the devil in disguise. He never looked at me. He just sat there, staring straight ahead, no emotion on his face. He was ready to go back to prison.
It was like, I did it. I turned myself in. Can we just go now? He felt like his mission was accomplished.
He killed my kids. He did what he did. Put him in jail. There was no remorse.
No shame. No guilt. He kept talking about how God would look after him. As the judge said, a father is there to protect his children, and a husband is there to protect his wife.
Greg did neither. He was sentenced to 45 to 100 years in prison, plus another two years for the firearm charge. He was 50 years old at the time. He would not be eligible for parole until he was 97.
In effect, he will die in prison. The physical wounds I suffered have healed. But the emotional damage will never go away. It can’t.
I can’t ever let him win. So I keep honoring my children. I talk about them all the time. I have so many stories and pictures.
I did so much with them. I enjoyed my children. I enjoyed being a mom. My children would be proud of how far I’ve come.
They wouldn’t want me to stay broken. They would want me to be happy. Gregory Green murdered his family not once, but twice. He stabbed his first wife to death, killing her and their unborn child.
Then, 25 years later, after being released from prison, he shot and killed my two teenage children in front of me and gassed his own two daughters, who were just four and five years old. His name is now synonymous with unimaginable family betrayal and tragedy. He is one of the world’s most evil killers. But I am still here.
And my children would be proud of me.
