Balentine fatally shot Mark Caylor Jr., 17; Kai Brooke Geyer, 15; and Steven Watson, also 15, in January 1998. Caylor was the brother of Balentine’s ex-girlfriend, and prosecutors said a feud between Caylor and Balentine led Balentine to kill the teens in the house where he once lived. All three were shot once in the head with a .32-caliber pistol as they slept. In a tape-recorded statement to police played at his trial, Balentine said he moved out of the Amarillo house because of drug use there. Other evidence showed he was kicked out. He said he learned later that Caylor was looking to kill him because he had “jumped on his sister.” Asked why the shooting occurred, he said Caylor had threatened him, his brother and his girlfriend, “waving a gun and talking about what he was going to do to me.” 

He told police he snuck into the house through a crawl space under a closet, saw Caylor sleeping and fired but his gun jammed. He went outside, fired a test shot in an alley and climbed back into the house through a window he had left unlocked. He said he shot all three, including Geyer and Watson, whom he didn’t know. Balentine fled to New Mexico and was arrested months later in Houston, 600 miles southeast of Amarillo, where he was pulled over for driving a car with a broken tail light. He gave the traffic officer a false name that showed up as an alias for the suspect wanted in the Amarillo slayings.

One page (front and back) handwritten letter. Letter is general content and is signed John. Original matching handwritten envelope is included.