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The Priestess of High Chaos · 10 Minute Murder | Bingeable True Crime Stories

• 0:14
  Before his brutal murder, Robert Schwartz was highly successful and well known in the
• 0:18
  scientific community. After his wife passed away, he was left a single father
• 0:23
  to three children, Jesse, Katherine, Michelle, and the youngest Clara Jane.
• 0:29
  It was the eighth of December two thousand and one when a car full
• 0:32
  of people arrived outside the farmhouse in Virginia where Robert lived. The driver was
• 0:38
  twenty one year old Michael full and his two passengers were his girlfriend, nineteen
• 0:43
  year old Katherine Inglis, and Kyle Hulbert, an eighteen year old friend of
• 0:48
  Clara Jaynes. Clara herself was not in the car. She had chosen to
• 0:53
  remain in her dorm at college, while Michael, Katherine, and Kyle made
• 0:58
  the journey without her. Kyle had met twenty year old Clara at a Renaissance
• 1:03
  festival earlier that same year, and the two had quickly bonded over their mutual
• 1:07
  love of role playing games, the goth culture, fantasy, and the occult.
• 1:12
  They were both fascinated with magic, but by many accounts, Kyle had
• 1:17
  taken this a step too far. He was diagnosed with both by polar disorder
• 1:22
  and schizophrenia, which blurred the lines of reality for him and sometimes made him
• 1:26
  believe that he was much more powerful than he was in fact. Before meeting
• 1:32
  Clara, he had been a psychiatric patient a total of seven times for his
• 1:37
  paranoid delusions and suicidal tendencies. And Kyle's head he was a warrior, and
• 1:42
  his role was to protect Clara Jane, who he'd quickly become very close to.
• 1:48
  He described Clara as his closest, most dear friend and a sister as
• 1:53
  well. Clara, who studied computer science at James Madison University, was known
• 1:57
  on campus as someone who both dressed and acted in an alternative way. She
• 2:02
  was into the goth fashion and referred to herself as the nickname Priestess of High
• 2:07
  Chaos. This was thought to be a reference to the works of fantasy writer
• 2:13
  H. P. Lovecraft, in particular the Cthulhu mythos, where chaos magicians
• 2:19
  are magic wielding individuals who don't follow a particular moral code or set of rules.
• 2:24
  For chaos magicians, their only belief is that nothing is true and everything
• 2:30
  is permitted. This meant that in her own eyes and Kyle's eyes, there
• 2:35
  were no boundaries to Clara's power When Kyle approached the door of the farmhouse on
• 2:40
  the cold, rainy night of December eighth. Robert Schwartz recognized the teenager as
• 2:46
  a friend of his daughters and invited him inside. Shortly afterwards, Kyle revealed
• 2:52
  the two foot long sword that he'd brought with him. Quote, I know
• 2:55
  about your plans, he said, you won't get away with it. He
• 3:00
  then stabbed and slashed at Robert more than forty times, fatally injuring him.
• 3:06
  Leaving Robert's mutilated body where it fell. Kyle walked back to the car,
• 3:09
  where Katherine cleaned the blood off the sword and wrapped the weapon in its howl.
• 3:15
  It took two days for the crime to be discovered. Police were aware
• 3:19
  that an unknown person had made a call to a tow truck company in the
• 3:23
  same window of time that Robert had been killed, and the caller's car had
• 3:28
  been part close to the farmhouse. As well as this, phone records showed
• 3:31
  that Clara had called Kyle shortly before her father was killed. Although Clara had
• 3:38
  lied to the police, telling them that she had not made or received any
• 3:42
  phone calls that night, there was one other thing that Clara couldn't or wouldn't
• 3:46
  explain to the police. It was a note in her dorm room addressed to
• 3:51
  the pseudonyms that she, Kyle, Michael, and Katherine used in their role
• 3:54
  playing games, asking for true honor to be bestowed upon their souls by high
• 4:00
  Chaos. Investigators believed that the note was a thank you to her friends for
• 4:05
  carrying out the murder. The car's driver was quickly identified as Michael full and
• 4:12
  police ordered Michael, Katherine, and Kyle to come in for questioning. During
• 4:16
  Katherine's interrogation with law enforcement, she made several statements that implied that Robert's own
• 4:21
  daughter, Clara Jane, had been involved in the planning of his murder.
• 4:26
  According to Katherine, Clara had discussed killing Robert on multiple occasions, reportedly because
• 4:31
  Clara believed that her father had tried to poison her as well as domestically abusing
• 4:36
  her. Above all else, Clara's motive for wanting her father dead was incredibly
• 4:42
  shallow. The two of them just didn't get along that well. He didn't
• 4:46
  like the alternative goth clothing that she wore, and he didn't approve of the
• 4:49
  fact that she spent so much time alone in her room role playing and shutting
• 4:55
  herself away from the real world. On the second of February two thousand and
• 4:59
  two, Clara Jane Schwartz was officially indicted for her father, Robert's murder,
• 5:04
  and also faced charges for both solicitation of murder and conspiracy to commit murder.
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  Katherine, Michael, and Kyle were also indicted for their involvement in the killing.
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  Kyle's family members were devastated, believing that their mentally ill son had been
• 5:19
  taken advantage of and manipulated. They described the hallucinations that Kyle suffered from,
• 5:26
  as well as his suicidal ideation and desire to be accepted by others. His
• 5:30
  mother said quote, if Kyle sees someone who needs something, if he can,
• 5:34
  he gives it to them. Out of the four accomplices, Clara was
• 5:39
  the only one to go to trial. The prosecution described Clara as the ringleader
• 5:44
  of the group, a young woman who was not afraid to manipulate others to
• 5:46
  get what she wanted, and in this case, what she wanted was her
• 5:50
  father's death. She had previously tried to have Robert killed by instructing one of
• 5:56
  her other friends to murder him, but this plan had failed. According to
• 6:00
  prosecutors, Clara hated her father so much that when the initial plan didn't come
• 6:04
  to fruition, she immediately began to concoct a second plan to have him killed,
• 6:10
  and that's how Kyle Holbert became involved. Both of Clara's siblings made statements
• 6:15
  about how their father's murder had effected their lives. Her brother, twenty five
• 6:19
  year old Jesse, told the jury that he couldn't escape from daily thoughts of
• 6:24
  his father being brutally killed on his sister's orders. Clara's older sister, Michele,
• 6:30
  shared that she now had a fear of knives and suffered from nightmares where
• 6:33
  she's forced to watch her father die. Michele said, quote, It's been
• 6:38
  nothing but a nightmare since the day I found out. It's hard enough that
• 6:42
  it was my father, but on top of that, to have my sister
• 6:45
  committing such a horrible crime. Both the prosecution and defense leaned heavily on Clara's
• 6:50
  obsession with a role playing game called Underworld. According to prosecutors, Underworld had
• 6:58
  played a large role in Clara convinced Kyle to carry out their murder, but
• 7:01
  the defense disagreed, saying that Clara's instructions for her father's murder had been given
• 7:06
  in the context of role playing, Kyle had been the one to take the
• 7:12
  game too far by attacking and killing Robert in real life. The prosecution's rebuttal
• 7:16
  against this claim relied on a specific witness, Patrick, the friend of Clara's
• 7:21
  who she had previously asked to murder her father. Patrick took to the stand
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  and shared with the jury that Clara was obsessed with the idea of murdering her
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  father, talked often about the large sum of money she would inherit from his
• 7:34
  will, and on multiple occasions she had researched natural toxins and chemicals that she
• 7:40
  could use to cause his death without suspicion. Patrick had taken part in Underworld
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  role playing with Clara, where he had played the role of an assassin.
• 7:48
  Clara's character had asked Patrick's character to assassinate her father. It didn't take long
• 7:54
  for the jury to come to their conclusion. On the fifteenth of October two
• 7:59
  thousand and two, Clara Jane Schwartz was found guilty a first degree murder and
• 8:03
  was sentenced to a forty eight year prison sentence. Since then, she's tried
• 8:07
  to appeal her conviction or shorten her sentence on many different occasions, but for
• 8:13
  now her release date is set at November second, two thousand and forty three.
• 8:18
  As the accomplice who actually carried out the murder and with an actual sword,
• 8:24
  no less, Kyle Holbert received a life sentence without parole. Kyle's lawyer
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  gave a statement to the public shortly after his sentence was revealed where he said
• 8:33
  Clara was the puppet master and Kyle Holbert was the puppet a people pleased her
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  until the end. Kyle had elected to plead guilty to the charges against him
• 8:43
  so that Clara's family would not have to go through the trauma of sitting through
• 8:46
  a second trial. Michael full was sentenced to eighteen years in prison, and
• 8:52
  Katherine Inglis received the shortest sentence of the group, only one year of jail
• 8:56
  time for conspiracy to commit murder. Clara Jayne's grandfather and Robert's father summed up
• 9:03
  Clara's actions perfectly in just one sentence. She had free choice, he said,
• 9:09
  and her choices were always the bad ones. That's ten minute murder for
• 9:24
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• 9:28
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