GINGER: It's taken a very long time to heal
enough to be able to talk about what happened.
It's not a pretty story.
My mom was murdered by my sister.
A domestic violence situation isn't always between partners,
and I just want people to know that
it could be your child that could hurt you.
We had the same parents. We had the same upbringing.
I turned out decently,
but something within Paige was just
not -- not right from the get-go.
I mean, something was just...
rotten inside.
It just kind of festered
and got worse.
I think Paige Conley was born evil,
and I think she will die evil.
My Gran was one of my favorite people in the world.
And when I lost her because of Paige,
I feel like I lost a part of my childhood.
I think that the word evil is not quite strong enough.
I really do think that there is
a special place in hell for people like her.
[The Paper Chase's "What's So Amazing About Grace?" plays]
[strings continue playing sinister tune]
[static crackling]
-[knock at door] -[creaking]
-[banging on door] -[creaking]
[water dripping]
-[banging on door] -[creaking]
[sinister chord strikes]
This is a photograph
of myself
and my mom and Paige.
Paige is my younger sister by about seven and a half years.
My mom's name is Carlene Conley.
My mom was a very warm, loving individual,
adored all of us.
Now I know that Paige had already
been abusing my mother for a while at this point.
Paige has her fingers clutching my mother
on her shoulder pretty hard.
You can kind of see her fingers are like a claw.
Paige is desperately
clutching and holding on to my mom,
like there's no escape.
You are mine.
Paige is wearing her
private school uniform,
which puts her at about...
probably about 15 years old.
We always lived on the east side of Cincinnati.
My dad was an executive for a large corporation.
He was working sunup to sundown, six days a week.
My folks were having problems, and I think
she was looking for a way to
get attention -- both positive and negative,
it was attention.
She was only there a couple months
before she got expelled because of bad behavior
and from, uh, skipping school.
So my dad decided to send Paige to a boarding school.
Once again, Paige made sure that
it wasn't long before she was expelled.
The boarding school that my parents sent
Paige to was kind of a religious-based school.
Paige was caught smoking pot and doing tarot cards.
And, of course, they look at that and they say, "Oh,
that's the devil's work."
My parents were livid when Paige
was kicked out of the boarding school.
I think for a while, I thought that Paige's
behavior was directly associated with my parents
splitting up,
but then in hindsight, it just seems
like it was so much more than that.
Things that you think are not
distressing or worrying
can be very bad signs of something that is to come.
This photo, to me, represents the beginning of
Paige's criminal...
behavior.
She became more and more of a monster
as she got older.
She just was kind of becoming trouble with a capital T.
This is a photograph of Paige on her great adventure.
She and a bunch of her friends decided that
they were gonna head
to Lake Tahoe, broke into my dad's apartment,
took a stereo and some other things,
took all his booze, and hit the road.
She'd stolen his car,
and my dad, against my mom's wishes,
declares that the Honda is stolen, because it's his car.
They make it as far as Colorado.
Paige and her friends are arrested.
[siren wailing]
And she spent the weekend in jail.
And my dad flew out there
and was there when she was taken to court
and had to stand in front of a judge,
who reprimanded her pretty harshly,
but she was still underage,
and so there's not a whole lot they could do.
I think he's hoping that she's gonna learn a lesson from it.
But he didn't consider it to be wrong.
My mom thought that, you know, Paige is a wounded
little deer that has to be babied at all times.
Looking at how happy Paige is in this picture,
and knowing...
how much trouble she's causing in this photo,
it makes me want to punch her in the nose.
TAYLOR: I think my mom
tried really hard to
still allow me to see my aunt, and she kept trying to give her
chance after chance to,
you know, improve herself -- she still loved her,
despite everything that had already happened, and she really
wanted me to have a relationship with her.
I had this birthday dinner.
We had one of my favorite meals,
which my Gran made for me, and...
Paige became kind of jealous of
the attention that I was receiving on my birthday.
We were sitting down, eating dinner.
Paige decided that she was going
to excuse herself to go to the restroom,
and she was very audibly making herself sick.
When she came back to the table,
she told my Gran that she was not feeling well and that
they needed to leave immediately.
Now.
TAYLOR: We were in the middle of eating dinner.
We hadn't finished.
We hadn't had any cake.
My Gran...
got up, and she knew they had to leave,
because when Paige said it was time to leave,
it was time to leave.
She did this for several birthdays,
including my dad's, and I know that it really
hurt my Gran that she missed so
much time with us because of Paige.
Everything always had to be about her.
If everything was not about her, it was a giant problem.
Even as a kid, I knew
that this behavior was purposely manipulative.
There was something wrong with her.
GINGER: Paige resented the fact that
she was not
everything in my mother's world.
Over the next several years, Paige was causing
a multitude of problems in my mom's life.
My mom started to kind of...
kind of age before our eyes.
I didn't realize it, of course,
but -- but that's -- that's when she started hitting mom.
I remember talking to my mom
and telling her, "She's just sucking you dry."
She just said, "What do you want me to do?
You know, she's my child. I have to take care of her."
I mean, I certainly didn't really, really think
you know, Paige is gonna kill you.
I was probably around nine years old, and my Gran was
going to make a special dinner for me because that was,
you know, one of our things.
She went to the store and brought me with her,
because I loved grocery shopping with her.
I was being her little helper -- Paige called my Gran.
She told her that she had fallen down the stairs,
and that she was seriously injured, and my Gran
had to stop everything and come back to the house.
And my Gran just kind of abandoned her cart
in the middle of the store to go home immediately,
and Paige called her probably three times
in the 15-minute span that we were going
from the grocery store back to the house.
Paige was standing in the kitchen.
I thought, well if she's standing, then, you know,
she doesn't have any broken legs or anything,
she's, you know, not hurt that bad.
What took you so long?
We got here as fast as we could.
Paige and we're showing where it hurt, where she was injured.
Sweetheart.
My Gran just looked at it, and she said, "Well,
it doesn't look that bad."
Why don't we put some ice on it?
Paige did not like that answer.
And Gran just kind of walked away.
Paige wasn't very satisfied that my Gran
was not distraught about this.
There really was no reason for us
to rush home from the grocery store.
We had thought that she broke her leg or something
severe like that, and she had a few bruises, and that was it.
I do think that Paige actually threw herself down the stairs
just so my Gran had to
rush home to her and take care of her.
That's how jealous she was of
me spending time alone with my Gran.
There was no room for attention for anybody else.
It was almost, like, psychopathic.
She was purposely hurting herself
just to get attention from people.
One summer, my mom had hired Paige to babysit me
and my younger sibling.
She was somebody that always wanted to play with us
and always wanted to take us places,
always wanted to go to the park.
AS PAIGE: Don't spill, or I'm gonna get you!
[children laughing]
We were very hopeful that the summer
was gonna be a lot of fun,
and it was at first, but Paige
took it upon herself to start punishing us.
And she would spank us.
What did I say?
And she would swear at us.
AS PAIGE: You think I was kidding?
My aunt went from very fun, would take us
lots of places, would, you know, get us ice cream and stuff,
and then all of a sudden she is spanking us and punishing us.
When my sibling would get in trouble,
I would have to sit there and watch Paige spank them,
and it made me really uncomfortable that
that was a constant threat at that point.
When my mom would pick us up from being babysat,
[car door slams shut]
my mom could sometimes tell that we were kind of upset
or that we were just extra quiet,
and we weren't talking about how great of a day it was.
AS GINGER: Hey guys, how was it?
At that point, not enough of the pieces of the puzzle
had kind of, you know, locked together
as far as my sister's behavior.
So I wasn't really afraid for her to watch my kids.
Until one day, one of my kids
told me that Paige had been spanking them,
and I remember confronting her about it.
Said, "It's not okay for you to do that.
"That's not your -- it's not your job to do that,
and you have no right to spank them."
And she got really angry.
I said, "Well, I don't think this is
gonna work," and so I fired her.
What?
GINGER: Her eyes got real narrow,
you know, and she got just kind of a mean, stony
look on her face.
Her hands kind of clenched.
She just looked at me with just this really vengeful
sort of a glance,
you know?
And -- and she just -- she stormed off.
I became a lot more careful about
leaving Paige with any of my kids.
I was unsure how she was gonna behave.
And I wasn't sure I wanted to find out.
If my mom was around, it was okay for my kids to be there,
because I knew that she would do whatever
she had to do to protect my kids.
Every time that I went to visit my Gran,
Paige would ruin all of my memories.
Paige had really bad insomnia.
She would stay up for days and days on end.
Paige used to try to play this game with me
where I would stay up for as long as I could.
I would be sitting on the couch, watching
the TV shows with her.
And, you know, my eyes would start to get
really heavy, and she would look over at me.
[indistinct talking on TV]
She would glare at me and look really annoyed with me.
[indistinct talking on TV]
She would, like, slam her hand down on the couch
or on the pillow to, you know, jolt me awake.
And I guess that worked, because it would scare me into
being awake for a few more minutes
until I would start to nod off again.
And this particular night, Paige got really angry with me,
like irrationally angry with me,
because I could not stay up longer.
[indistinct talking on TV]
What is going on down here?
Gran brought me upstairs,
and she tucked me in,
and that's when Paige came upstairs,
trying to keep me from spending time with her and was
just becoming really aggressive about it.
Hey, wait, wait, wait!
[door rattling]
Paige started trying to push through the door.
That's when my Gran locked the door.
[banging noises]
She started banging on the door, and she became really angry.
It's all right. I'm here.
Paige was screaming, "Taylor come out!
And I just want to spend some time with you."
And then she was screaming
and accusing me of not loving her anymore
and not wanting to spend time with her.
AS PAIGE: What? You hate me now, Taylor?
Say it to my face!
Paige started trying to break
the door down just to get to me.
I was very scared. I was crying.
AS PAIGE: Hey! Open the door!
My Gran kept telling me, "It's okay, like,
"you know, nothing's gonna happen to you.
I'm not gonna let her hurt you."
And she just laid with me and held me.
When Paige finally stop banging on the door
and stopped trying to break the door down,
there was this really eerie silence.
I really thought that she was gearing up to do
something worse, and eventually, I just kind of fell asleep
in my Gran's arms.
My Gran was scared of her.
It was weird to me to see the two different sides of Paige,
like Jekyll and Hyde.
It's like this, you know,
switch had flipped, and I had no idea who she was.
When Paige got that wound up,
you never knew what she was gonna do.
TAYLOR: One of my most vivid memories with Paige was
when she chose me to come with her to pick up a puppy
from the animal shelter.
And we got back to the house, and I could
tell that my Gran did not know that this was happening.
My Gran was starting to get really agitated with Paige,
telling her that, you know, she needed to take the dog back.
They were not prepared, she did not
have all the supplies for a new puppy.
My Gran asked me to take the puppy
outside to go to the restroom while they talked.
After a while,
I walked in the house, and immediately saw
that Paige had my Gran pinned to the kitchen counter.
[struggling noises]
And she had a ceramic bowl above her head
and was trying to bash my Gran's head in
with this bowl.
As soon as she saw me, she dropped the bowl.
My Gran tried to give me her phone
and tried to get me to call police,
and Paige grabbed the phone and threw it across the room.
All I knew was that my Gran was scared,
and that meant I needed to be very scared.
And I ran outside.
Paige's car was sitting in the garage,
and I got in the car and locked the car doors.
And I looked down in the cup holder,
and Paige had left her cellphone in the car.
I called my mom and told her what was
going on, and I asked her to call the police.
Paige is attacking Grandma.
She's got her pinned against a table.
She won't stop hitting her.
My mom
told me that everything was gonna be okay.
She was gonna get there before the police could.
I needed to go back in the house
to see if my Gran was okay.
When Paige saw me, she grabbed me by the arm.
And she had me sit on the couch.
She pulled up a chair,
and she was just staring at me.
Paige had this really
feral look in her eye that made
her look like -- it's like wild animal.
My Gran told Paige leave me alone.
You know, you're scaring her.
Please just let her go. Leave her alone.
Paige, she didn't do anything wrong -- stop it!
TAYLOR: Paige looked at me
with these, like, really dead eyes and asked me
if I was scared of her yet.
I really thought that Paige was gonna
hurt me or even kill me.
And that's when I heard my mom's voice.
AS GINGER: Taylor? Where are you?
GINGER: Paige is threatening my kiddo.
I'm not sure what I would have done in that instant
if the police hadn't knocked on the door
and announced, "Police, let us in."
That stopped everything.
My daughter runs to me.
Paige just looked angry.
I just remember her slammin' down to the basement.
My mother refused to press charges.
The police left. Mom just looked exhausted.
Sighing and sort of hanging her head
and saying, you know, "You probably
should just take Taylor home now."
Paige is beyond just troubled and needy.
She's a very dangerous problem
and that we all are in danger from her.
I am not sure what -- what's gonna happen.
[phone ringing]
One Sunday evening, the phone rings,
and it's my mom,
and she's sobbing into the phone.
She's saying
"She -- I can't get her to stop hitting me."
And I just... looked at my husband.
He knew something was wrong.
I said, "We will be right there."
My husband and I rush into my mom's house.
You see Paige, and she's kind of walking back and forth,
sort of pacing, and she's sort of...
wild-eyed and kind of talking to herself,
and she looked absolutely bonkers.
She, with a knife, was hitting
a countertop over and over and over again,
gouging the countertop on the island
and just leaving just these giant cut marks in it.
Hey, hey, hey. It's me.
My husband said to her, you know, "Put the knife down.
Let's go talk," and she kind of realized that we were --
we were there and intervening.
My husband, you know, took the knife out of her hand
and was trying to get her
to sit down, and he was trying to take care of her.
I ran upstairs to check on my mom and make sure she was okay.
She's sitting in her little chair next to the bed,
and she just...
she's cowering.
She just looked terrified.
She told me that Paige had been
hitting her and had threatened her with a knife.
When Mom had run upstairs and locked the door,
Paige kept banging up against it and was trying
to break the door down.
I don't know what would have happened if she hadn't
been able to put that door between herself and Paige
and managed to call me.
AS PAIGE: Mom! Mom! [door rattling]
GINGER: My mom was being terrorized in her own home.
I said, "You can't have her living here anymore."
I said, "It is just not safe for you."
Paige has got to go.
GINGER: She's like, "You guys go on home.
I'm sorry I called -- I bothered you."
That's what she said to me. "I'm sorry I bothered you."
I'm like, "You were under attack in your home,
and that's not okay."
My mother would not let me call the police.
She would not let me take her to the hospital.
You feel like your hands are tied.
It's a sickening feeling.
This is a photograph
of the countertop that Paige
was stabbing the night that, um,
Mom called and said that Paige was hitting her.
I was shocked
when I saw what Paige had done to the countertop.
What if that wasn't a countertop?
I mean, what -- what's next?
This picture...
is Paige's...
Paige's anger, her hatred,
her rage,
her evilness.
It was
a scary prelude to what was to come.
GINGER: It's a Saturday afternoon.
Mom calls, and she's crying,
and she says, you know, "I need you to come over.
I've called the police."
I get to the house, and the police are already there.
Mom's got bruises and welts on her face.
Oh, my God. Mom.
GINGER: And she's got a great big, huge bruise on her arm.
There's a broom nearby with, like, a metal handle,
and she tells the police officer and me that Paige
had been hitting her with this broom handle.
I asked Mom, I said, "Do you want to press charges on her?"
And she said, "No, I'm not gonna press charges on her."
Everything's okay. She's just kind
of bruised and battered and sore.
Meanwhile, there's paramedics coming to
take Paige to the hospital.
[As Paige, struggling] Let go of me!
GINGER: Paige is
acting crazy, for lack of a better word.
She was very combative. She would kind of lash out.
She's trying to get loose.
She's got her head whipping every which way.
Everybody is a S.O.B.
and this, that, and the other, and, you know, just...
just acting absolutely bonkers.
AS PAIGE: Let go of me!
They told us they will keep Paige in
the psych ward for a minimum of 24 hours.
We felt pretty confident that we at least
had a reprieve of a day from Paige.
I was gonna do everything
I could to convince my mother to not let her back in.
I told my mom,
"I can't let her back in here.
"She's gonna keep hurting you,
and it's just -- it's not gonna stop."
Paige was in her early 30s
when these sort of episodes were occurring.
I was
really frustrated by the fact that Paige
could basically get away with anything she wanted.
There were very little consequences, if any.
She's a fully grown adult who should be
out of the house, have a job, have a life.
But she believed that Paige was dependent upon her
and that Paige needed her more than anything.
And Paige took advantage of that.
[phone ringing]
AS GINGER: Hello?
GINGER: Then we get the phone call from Paige
saying, "Come and pick me up."
I just remember being shocked and saying, "I thought you were
on a hold, and it would be at least 24 hours,"
and she's like, "Oh, no, they've let me go already."
I remember telling her, "We are not coming to get you.
You're not welcome here right now."
I called my husband, and I had him
bring me some stuff, including a gun.
I felt safer knowing I had one
if something were to escalate.
Paige had actually broken down and contacted my dad
and asked for money to be put up in a hotel.
And that's where she was staying was in a hotel.
I was nervous that somehow or another
that Paige might try to come home.
If I could have protected my mom,
I would have shot her in a heartbeat.
Mom gave in. She let her back in.
I'm like, "Why did you do that?"
Mom just told me, she's like, "She's my child,
and I have to take care of her."
It was a horrible, codependent relationship.
It was just an ugly, vicious cycle
that just went on and on and on.
We couldn't get Mom to stop
caring about and for Paige -- her love, and her devotion,
you know, they were her greatest faults.
Paige was proving herself to be more dangerous
and unhinged even.
It was getting
more frequent and more horrific all the time.
My son's birthday and Paige's birthday are one day apart.
We kind of always, you know,
combine the two of them and have just a big birthday
dinner celebration.
We're back at our house, and Mom and I are
talking about the birthday dinner,
and Mom just had the oddest thing to me,
because I was asking her,
I said, "I know your car lease is coming up soon."
I said, you know, "What are you gonna do with that?"
Have you given it more thought?
To the car?
GINGER: And she just kind of looked at me and just said,
"Yeah, I don't -- I don't think I'm gonna
need that car much longer."
But you need a car, Mom.
GINGER: And I said, what do you mean?
She's like, "I just don't think I'm gonna need it."
And it was just kind of an odd, weird kind of thing to say.
And I was like okay, you know,
and I just kind of brushed it off.
It's getting late.
GINGER: We just chitchat a little bit more,
and then Mom is getting ready to go,
and she's kissing and hugging everybody goodbye.
Taylor, come give Grandma hug.
And I thought that my Gran seemed
particularly adamant about everybody
coming to give her a hug and saying goodbye and everything.
Looking back,
I really think that she knew that something
was gonna happen to her that night.
GINGER: And it just felt really strange.
I kind of feel like she was saying goodbye to all of us.
Like a goodbye-goodbye.
GINGER: I woke up that morning to Taylor,
she was basically shaking and yelling me --
at me to wake up, "Mom, Mom,
"the police are here, you know, wake up.
You have to come downstairs."
Open the door, and...
there is an officer standing there, and he says,
"I -- I need to speak with you."
I remember even asking the officer,
you know, "What did Paige do now?"
I knew in my gut and my heart
that Paige had finally killed her.
Then he, as gently as
you can ever tell anybody, told me that --
that my mom was -- was gone and that
my sister had been arrested for murdering her.
I just remember just sitting there,
just crying, and Taylor's crying and...
I didn't know what to say or do or think or feel.
I just felt sick.
Paige answered the door, said that she had been taking a nap
and came upstairs from the basement and found
her mother dead on the floor.
My sister is completely covered -- mouth,
shirt, arms, legs, everything in blood.
No one understands
why this person would be completely covered in
blood if they were coming upstairs from a nap.
Then she backtracked and told them that drug dealers must
have broken in and hurt her mom,
because they couldn't find Paige.
DETECTIVE: Drug dealers?
DETECTIVE: Former drug dealers?
First of all, I don't know how those poor detectives
could bear
to sit in that room and listen to her
make up these absolutely ridiculous stories,
one after another.
That doesn't work, so then she tells them that
there were three girls trick-or-treating,
and it's March.
No way, no how that that could happen.
You know, trick-or-treat and all this...
I don't think a single person in that room believed a word
she was saying.
She just flat-out lies.
Did you do this? No.
Makes me just want to throttle her.
You know, I mean...
that's the Paige I knew, right there.
This is a picture of Paige
right after she murdered my mom.
I feel sick.
She looks like someone who slaughtered...a person.
This is my mother's blood.
That is my mother's blood.
And this person is the one who killed her.
There's nothing behind those eyes.
I've never seen this photograph before.
It's sickening -- I don't ever want to see it again.
Later on, I learned, you know, what had happened
that evening.
Mom had returned to her house after leaving all of us.
And Mom had asked Paige what
she wanted for the combination birthday dinner,
and Paige wouldn't give her an answer.
So my mom made lasagna, which at
the time was my son's favorite meal.
Paige was very, very
upset about it,
that it wasn't what she had wanted.
And so she and my mom got in a verbal argument.
Paige grabbed the knife block,
and hit my mother in the head with a knife block,
and then proceeded to stab her 79 times.
And she bit her dozens of times.
My sister obliterated
my mother.
She broke off knife tips in my mother.
How much do you hate someone
to do that, to stab them 79 times?
Paige is an absolute monster.
I think it's hard to imagine any human
being able to act that way,
especially somebody that you knew, and somebody
you loved and were close to.
When Paige
killed my Gran,
she took away possibilities,
you know, of my Gran seeing me
graduate from high school and college and me getting married
and her seeing her great-grandchildren.
I still have nightmares.
I'm on PTSD medication
that is specifically for having night terrors.
I would be dreaming that Paige was standing in my room,
watching me sleep.
It really felt like she was haunting me,
like I was
never going to escape her, and even though she was locked up
in prison, she was still tormenting me.
I think that
she could kill again -- she's done it before,
and she probably holds a lot of anger towards us now.
She would have absolutely nothing to lose
if she came after us.
The worst that could happen is she goes back to jail,
where she has friends and she has meals and she has a bed
and she has everything that she needs right there.
I think that if anybody
were to be a target, it would be my mom.
GINGER: I'm not afraid for myself.
I have never been afraid of Paige.
I fear for anyone who comes across her.
I have absolutely no desire
to see Paige or hear from her.
And actually, she's not allowed to contact us.
I think that she already knows that
she disgusts us,
disgusts me,
that I think she's an animal.
I think whenever you're subjected to any kind
of tragedy, it changes you,
and I think you have to eventually choose
for yourself
if you're gonna let that destroy you
or let it make you stronger.