A white supremacist couple in North Carolina have been sentenced to consecutive life sentences after killing a registered sex offender and his wife.
Jeremy Lee Moody and Christine Moody admitted to purposefully targeting and killing a couple in July of last year.
The couple admitted to killing Marvin Parker, 59, and his wife Gretchen Dawn Parker, 51, and said that they chose their victims because he was a registered sex offender.
They were unrepentant at the sentencing on Tuesday and even kissed after being sentenced to two consecutive life sentences each.
Initially, Jeremy and Christine Moody apologised to the judge and asked for a 30-year sentence so they could see their children and grow old together.
But after Union County Judge Lee Alford handed down the maximum punishment, they showed how they really felt.
‘See you perverts later,’ Jeremy Moody shouted at Charles Parker’s family as he walked out of court. ‘That’s what child molesters get.’
‘They got exactly what they deserve,’ Jeremy also told reporter.
‘Had to do it over again, I’d kill more.’
‘I think Jeremy and I would have done it again if given the opportunity,’ Christine Moody said to reporters.
‘I have no regrets. Killing that pedophile was the best day of my life.’
If authorities had not acted fast enough, they may have: Christine Moody said that they had another sex offender in mind as their third victim but were caught in connection to the Parker killings before they could strike again.
The Moodys plead guilty to murder, kidnapping, burglary and firearm possession.
Though they had personal connections to a local supremacist group, Crew 41, which the Southern Poverty Law Center notes has a history of targeting sex offenders, the Moodys claimed that the Parkers murder had nothing to do with the group.
Union County Sheriff David Taylor told the SPLC that Jeremy shot both of the victims while Christine slit the wife’s throat after they told Parker and his wife exactly why they were going to kill them.
A surveillance camera on Parker’s land caught them leaving, and deputies recognised Jeremy Moody from the word ‘skinhead’ tattooed on his neck and the ‘Made in America’ tattoo on the side of his head.
Lawyers said both defendants were sexually abused as children and that made them want revenge against the type of people who hurt them.
They believed they had a divine assignment to kill all sex offenders, said psychologist Harold Morgan, who analyzed Jeremy Moody.
After he was arrested, Jeremy Moody directed investigators to a sheet of paper in his home. He wrote the name and address of another sex offender, telling police he was going to kill that person the next day if he had not been arrested.
The Parkers were killed on a Sunday and he planned the next murder for that Wednesday.
Brackett said the Moodys had no right to act as a judge and a jury after Parker had already served a sentence for taking advantage of a disabled woman.
‘I’m going to tell you, she’s cold as hell,’ Sheriff Taylor said of Christine Moody.
‘She wants to get the glory.’
Crew 41 is believed to be a loosely associated group that connects largely online, but they had their first meet-and-greet scheduled for August in Nebraska, and the Moodys apparently planned to attend after the July 21 double murder.
Sheriff Taylor went on to explain that Christine Moody, who was 36-years-old at the time of the murder, said that Gretchen Parker ‘was a casualty of war’.
The victims: Marvin Parker, 59, and his wife Gretchen Dawn Parker, 51
Outside of reading the 69th Psalm from the Bible and letters from their church members, the couple showed little remorse.
They smiled and looked longingly at each other during the hearing.
Jeremy Moody smirked as members of the Parker family asked the judge for the maximum sentence. When the judge asked Christina Moody the standard question of whether anyone offered her anything for plea, she answered ‘just fame and fortune.’
The couple told authorities they had killed others, but investigators found no evidence of other crimes, Brackett said.
Defense lawyers pointed out Christine Moody was a breast cancer survivor who underwent a double mastectomy four years ago and Jeremy Moody suffered from schizophrenia and was not on his medicine when the killings took place.
When Moody, who was 30 at the time of the murder, does not take his prescribed medication, he suffers from paranoia and delusions, according to his attorney Harry Dest.
Christine Moody has her own share of medical conditions, in addition to cancer she has borderline personality disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder and antisocial personality disorder.
Parker’s family didn’t hear Jeremy Moody call them perverts because they were already being taken out of the courtroom. They shrugged off his words outside.
‘He got what he deserved. He would kill again if he was let out,’ said Charles Parker’s sister Brenda Franklin. ‘He can say whatever he wants. He’s dying in prison.’
In this particular instance, Moody believed that he was acting as ‘the right hand of God’.
According to the local Fox station, Charles Parker was listed as a registered sex offender after being convicted in 2003 of third-degree criminal sexual conduct involving a 31-year-old woman and was also convicted in a sexual assault case involving a child in 1991.