Before his brutal murder, Robert Swartz was highly successful and well known in the scientific community.

After his wife passed away,

he was left a single father to three children, Jesse, Catherine Michelle, and the youngest Clara Jane.

It was the 8th of December 2001 when a car full of people arrived outside the farmhouse in Virginia

where Robert lived. The driver was 21-year-old Michael

Foll, and his two passengers were his girlfriend, 19-year-old Catherine Inglis, and Kyle Holbert,

an 18-year-old friend of Clara Jane's. Clara herself was not in the car. She had chosen to remain in her dorm at college while Michael, Catherine, and Kyle made

the journey without her.

Kyle had met 20-year-old Clara at a Renaissance festival earlier that same year, and the two

had quickly bonded over their mutual love of role-playing games, the goth culture, fantasy, and the occult.

They were both fascinated with magic, but by many accounts, Kyle had taken this a step too far.

He was diagnosed with both bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, which blurred the lines of reality for him,

and sometimes made him believe that he was much more

powerful than he was. In fact, before meeting Clara, he had been a psychiatric patient a total of

seven times for his paranoid delusions and suicidal tendencies. In Kyle's head, he was a warrior,

and his role was to protect Clara Jane, who he'd quickly

become very close to.

He described Plara as his closest, most dear friend, and a sister as well.

Clara, who studied computer science at James Madison University, was known on campus as someone

who both dressed and acted in an alternative

way. She was into the goth fashion and referred to herself as the nickname, Priestess of Hyde

Chaos. This was thought to be a reference to the works of fantasy writer H.P. Lovecraft.

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