18-year-old Ashlee Martinson  is serving 23 years in jail at the back of shooting her stepfather, Thomas Ayers, 37, and fatally stabbing her mother, Jennifer Ayers, 40, more than 30 times.
After which she locked her three younger siblings in a closet and took off. Police arrested Martinson in Indiana, where she fled with her boyfriend. In March, she ultimately pleaded guilty to second-degree homicide and is serving 23 years in prison.
She explains why she killed her parents to Crime Watch Daily in an exclusive interview:
“Ashlee Martinson was obsessed with horror stories, even writing stories about vampires and serial killers, but her closest friends could not imagine those dark fantasies could turn into a deadly reality.
In poems with titles like “Murder Madness,” she calls herself a “psychopath in the dark,” penning sinister words like “I can hear nothing but their screaming souls.” Reality would become much darker than any story.
According to friends, when Ashlee Martinson moved to Rhinelander, Wisconsin at the age of 16, she seemed like your fairly typical teenage girl, if not a little on the shy side.
Ashlee lived at home with her mother, Jennifer, and stepfather, Thomas Ayers.
“Thomas was the father to the three other children in the home,” said Oneida County Sheriff’s Captain Terry Hook. “I think that she considered them her little sisters, and she and they considered her their big sister, and they had been around each other long enough to have formed that relationship.”
But like a lot of girls her age, Ashlee started to go through some big changes: Dark makeup, dark clothes.
And there were her poems, disturbing words she wrote under the name “Vampchick.” The morbid blog posts, the dark sketches — were they all signs of a twisted soul, or just normal teenage curiosity? As Ashlee approached her 17th birthday, the darkness seemed to be taking over.
A friend of Ashlee’s said she was constantly getting grounded, and she was talking about leaving home. That plan became even more solidified when Ashlee started seeing a young man named Ryan Sisco, who was 22. Before long, Ashlee’s parents found out.
“I believe on March 7th, Ashlee’s stepfather Thomas and her mother Jennifer had found out,” said Capt. Hook. A big family fight allegedly ensued. According to reports, Ashlee took off, but didn’t get far.
“At the time Ashlee was sent to her room,” said Hook. “So then she goes to her room, Thomas leaves the house and then comes back in and asks ‘Where is she?’ and the mother says ‘She’s upstairs,’ and he goes upstairs and that’s when this all begins.”
It’s not until the next day, March 8, 2015, when 911 dispatchers get a series of strange calls from somewhere in Rhinelander.
“So we received numerous hang-up calls and we were trying to call and get a location,” said Capt. Hook. “But because the cellphone coverage was very bad in that area it was very difficult.”
Then, finally, a connection. Moments later, Police are racing to the home of Ashlee Martinson.
“We thought there might be a shooter in the upstairs,” said Oneida County Sheriff’s Sgt. Brian Barbour. “We also knew that there were three children that were also inside the house.”
“Downstairs you wouldn’t have known that anything had happened, but once you approached the staircase and go upstairs, it was a mess,” said Hook.
Seemingly for the first time since she was sent to prison, Martinson is telling her own story — one about a teenage girl, abused for years by her mother’s boyfriends as her mother stood by them.
“I’m not a monster,” she told Crime Watch Daily. “I never meant any of this to happen. It doesn’t make it right, what happened. But I was just a girl, an abused girl, who was forced to make a really bad decision.
“I’m not the monster that they portrayed me to be.”
Accounts from Martinson and professionals who interviewed her after the incident portray a teenage girl who, after years of alleged abuse, suffered severe depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, The Washington Post reported earlier this year.
On March 7, 2015, a day after her 17th birthday, Martinson got into an argument with her parents, she later told police.
“I was supposed to move out, in with one of my friends,” she told Crime Watch Daily. “I was all packed up and ready to go that day. But my stepdad stopped me.”
Her younger sister told authorities that Martinson’s mother and stepfather had discovered that the teenager had a 22-year-old boyfriend and sent him a message on Facebook telling him to stay away from their daughter, according to court documents.
“As her parents,” they wrote, “we can press charges.”
They took away Martinson’s keys and cellphone, according to the documents, and forbid her from seeing him again.
“Work and school was my freedom. He was going to take it all away,” Martinson recently told Crime Watch Daily. “I was going to be 100 percent imprisoned in that house, and I believed him.”
She said she grabbed her stepfather’s shotgun and went into her bedroom. She was thinking about suicide, she said.
“I was sitting on my bed. I even had the end of it in my mouth, playing with the trigger,” she told Crime Watch Daily. “Then I heard my stepdad.”
“I was scared of him. I am messing with his gun — one of his precious belongings. And I thought he was going to snap on me. And I just reacted. … I raised the gun and I pulled the trigger.”
“I start running down the stairs,” she added. “I was on the first landing and that’s when I saw my mom. She ended up grabbing this decorative knife that was on a shelf and the next thing I knew the knife was in my leg.”
That moment, her worst memories started playing like “a movie reel” in her head, she told Crime Watch Daily.
“Memories of all the bad things that happened to me, that she put me through,” she said. “And I remember stabbing her once, then twice, and then I black out and the next thing I knew there was blood everywhere.”
Then, she told Crime Watch Daily, she looked over and saw her stepfather.
“Seeing him scared me more,” she said. “I thought he was going to get up and he was going to see what I did. I was scared what he was going to do.
“I remember pointing the tip of the gun against his head and I pulled the trigger. Boom. And in that moment, I felt the chains break around me. I was free. For the first time in my life, I felt that I was free.
“He couldn’t hurt my sisters anymore. He couldn’t hurt me anymore. He couldn’t hurt anyone.”
Parts of Martinson’s story, however, vary from the account in court records. For example, witnesses told police there were two gunshots close together but Martinson said she shot her stepfather once, then stabbed her mother, then shot him a second time.
Martinson told Crime Watch Daily that her hope is that one day her siblings can forgive her for what she’s done.
“I hope that one day that they can come to me and I can tell them what really happened. The truth,” she said. “Because I do want a relationship with them. I miss them so much. ”