July 12, 2010 around 6am Corrinne Peter’s was packing up her brand new 2011 Hyundai Sonata about to set out to her first-choice college, UT Austin, for freshman orientation. She was excited to finally make the near four hour trip because her plans to go down to austin earlier had been stalled time after time due to her mom and coppell city mayor, Jayne Peters, medical issues. Shed had previously vented to friends about being frustrated for missing an earlier orientation as her mom awaited results from M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.
Corrinne was planning on majoring in Health Science at UT Austin and friends have also mentioned that she expressed interest in psychiatric nursing as well. Corrinne was also very depressed though, too. Her father had recently passed away from cancer in 2008 and her loved ones mentioned that she was still having a really rough time with it. Which as someone who lost their dad at age 10, I can't imagine what it is like to lose a father to illness at an age after you truly get to learn who your parents are. I’ve also seen in a couple of articles that Corrinne was a dancer and had been in the drill team in highschool (I’m pulling the drilteam info from a picture i saw on CBS but i cant be positive). I wish I could tell you more about Corrine, but because the city of Coppell seems to want to keep this tragedy in the past, I had a very hard time obtaining any personal information on her.
About 30 minutes after Corrine was seen loading her car for the trek ahead of her, neighbors noticed Corrine’s mother Jayne unloading the car. When a neighbor asked how she was doing Jayne replied, “Good.” Jayne was seen again in her backyard, taking her dogs out at around 10am, and then around noon the mayor was seen walking down a busy street looking “uncharacteristically dishevelled” That was the last time Jayne Peters was seen alive.
Police were called to the Mayor’s $400,000 home around 7:45pm on July 13th when people grew concerned that she didn't show to a regularly scheduled City Council meeting. On the door, there was an envelope taped to it contained a key and a typed note that read:
“To our first responders:
Here is the key for the front door. I am so very sorry for what you are about to discover. Please forgive me.
Jayne”
Inside the police discovered another note on the kitchen island, next to her husbands ashes, this one also typed and printed:
“O grace of God, please forgive me and have mercy on my eternal soul. My sweet, sweet Corinne had grown completely inconsolable. She had learned to hide her feelings from her friends, but the two of us were lost, alone and afraid. Corinne just kept on asking,
Why won’t God just let me die. We hadn’t slept at all and neither one of us could stop crying when we were together.
Please ask my family to take care of my pets. The dogs, Hope and Lucy, should be kept together or put down. There are four cats:
Mystic the black cat 9 years old
Sassy Siamese 11 years old
Snowflake Siamese 11 years old
Reno brown Abyssinian 6 years old.”
Another sheet contained contained contact information of relatives and ended with this note:
“Please, please, please, no funeral, no memorial just cremate us both.”
Police found Corrine Peters’s body in the laundry room, a gunshot wound that entered the left side of the back of her neck and exited her near her right cheek bone, autopsies show that Corrinne’s attacker was several feet behind her when she was shot from behind. Corrinne’s head was wrapped in towels, police still don't know if it was to cover her face or prevent the mess.
In an upstairs bathroom police find yet another note, this one hand witten,
DNR, Do not recesitate (sic) under any circumstances.
Jayne Peters
Inside they found Jayne Peters’s body, with a self inflicted gunshot wound to the forehead. An autopsy done by Dr. Jeffrey Barnard shows that on jayne’s body there were two fentanyl patches-- a painkiller that is 50 to 100 times stronger than morphine, usually prescribed to patients with chronic pain or after major surgeries-- on her back.
"It could be that she had those patches on there for a long time, and there was nothing left in there to absorb," Barnard said. "Or, it could be that she put them on right before she shot herself and the drug didn't have time to absorb and wasn't in her bloodstream in a level that we could detect."
He said one reason to apply the patches could be to induce an overdose. "It would overdose her and she would go to sleep if the gunshot didn't kill her," he said.
Inside the bathroom with Jayne there was a pillow, blanket, and a book about coping with suicide with pictures of her deceased husband and daughter, Corrinne inside.
Autopsies would later show that Corrinne was killed up to 14 hours before Jayne committed suicide.
Not long after the bodies were found police got a call from Rob Franke, the mayor of Cedar Hill, notifying them he thinks that it might be his gun that was used in the murder suicide. It turns out that on July 8th he and Peters practiced shooting with Franke’s gun and she actually returned home with it. Franke said that Jayne had told him that she was interested in obtaining her concealed license and was going to take a class for it, so he let her borrow it (its Texas).
Jayne was described by friends as “doting, highly-organized, and a loving mother to her only daughter” (Dallas Morning News). City spokesperson said about Jayne’s death:
It's a tremendous loss not only from an employee standpoint, but a community standpoint and a personal lost that really I'm just trying to get a hold of right now, get my arms around it, figure out what's happened and what do we do next.
- The Daily News
All of that would come crashing down, however when police would continue their investigation on Jayne’s motive. Why did Jayne do this?As it turns out, Jayne was in what friends called “acute financial difficulty” after her husband had passed away in 2008. The Peters’ home had been foreclosed on 3 times within the past year leading up to their deaths, and Jayne came under suspicion of the city attorney when her city credit card had a charge from a Plano clothing store. Apparently the charges started from November 2009 up to the deaths in July of 2010. There were 68 charges on the card, and they’d racked up to be over $6,300 The personal charges included restaurants, pet supplies, and rental car charges for a 2011 Hyundai.
That’s right. Jayne Peters wasn’t putting up this facade to just her coworkers and friends, but to her own daughter. Jayne peters never bought her daughter that car. Jayne peters never planned on buying her daughter that car because this was a premeditated crime. When police looked deeper into Corrinne and Jayne’s life they also found out that UT Austin, nor Corinne’s second choice school TCU, had never even received applications from Corrinne. Friends say that it was in Jayne’s character to take care of things like this for her only daughter and it is believed by friends and authorities that Corrinne really did think she was going to college at UT, that she did get accepted. She trusted that her mom had it handled.
Police also looked into the Cancer thing and found that Jayne had no signs of cancer. Jayne was just stalling Corrine so she couldn’t go to school.
I want to go back to the timeline
I want to know what Jayne Peters was doing for 14 HOURS before she finally killed herself after killing her daughter. Police think that shortly after Corrinne was seen loading her belongings into the rental car when she returned inside the home she was fatally shot by her mother who was seen minutes later unloading the car, as previously stated. I left something out if Jayne’s timeline out though- her call to Avis- a rental car company- remember that Jayne was seen unloading Corrines car at around 630 am? Presumably Corrine was shot in that 30 minute window between the two of them being seen at the car. Within minutes of shooting her own child Jayne Peters called avis, didn't get through, and when the owner of that avis got there at 7am the sonata was already dropped off. We know she was seen taking her dogs out at 10am, but what was she doing on a busy street? I can't find any information on this. It's actually what made building this time line so hard for me in the beginning of researching this case. We know she was typing notes, we know she wrapped Corrinne’s head in a towel, she called the rental car company, and then it gets fuzzy. She took the dogs out at 10 am but was walking down a busy street at noon? I dont know, maybe its Not That Deep and some of the sightings were nosy neighbors wanting to interject in the case.
Because of the charges to Jayne’s city credit card, it was announced on July 23rd that the city was going to look into the inappropriate charges on Jayne’s City credit card, and that the money to pay for it would probably come out of the Peters’s estate. That changed when an anonymous man came to the Town Center that same day and donated $10,000 in cash to cover all of Jayne’s credit card charges. The video of the man donating was quickly recognized by a city staff worker as David Murph, husband of the publisher and editor of the town’s weekly newspaper, Jean Murph. Officials officially announced David as the donor publicly and it was only hours after that Jean Murph stated that it was a donation from her. Murph sent an email to journalists that day that said
"The reason the donation was anonymous was for it to be representative of the many people in Coppell who cared about Jayne Peters and her family, I have no further comment."
Now dont get me wrong i absolutely love that Jean Murph did this, it was a very kind and compassionate thing to do, but i do take issue with one thing in this whole entire story i’ve told you:I cannot find one negative thing about Jayne Peters online. The only SLIGHTLY negative things I see are things that Corrinne’s friends said. Now, I'm not looking for a character assassination here but what Jayne did was wrong and bad. This is no different than the Chris Watts case, or Zankou Chicken Murders, this is familicide. I found more information on Jayne being a fantastic woman than I could on Corrinne. The CHILD victim in this case. I found a small Facebook page for Corrine, a Youtube slideshow, and very few quotes from her friends online. Fine. I’ll chalk it up to not having a Facebook and not being able to see the things that were said about Corrine on her Facebook page, but that is absolutely no excuse for the little remembrance the media had for Corrine.
I cant say it as eloquently as Dallas Observer Writer Jim Shutze, so I’ll close with his article- I would like to add that there are some Hot Takes here so hit that 15 fwd if you dont want to hear them.
The only people quoted in The News story who objected to the joint rites were the teenage friends of the murder victim, 19-year-old Corinne Peters. No kidding. What's the lesson? "Kids, sometimes really wonderful parents who are great people and fine members of the community may have to put a cap in your head. Try not to piss us off."
- Jim Shutze
If you or anyone you know has been dealing with suicidal thoughts or attempts, please know that the National Suicide Prevention Hotline number is 800-273-TALK (8255), and they currently have an online chat available at suicidepreventionlifeline.org
Sources: CBS News, CBS Local, Dallas Morning News, Dallas Observer, WFAA, Star