Punishing The Mother

I am so sick of hearing these stories where men cannot handle a divorce and decide to kill the children in a violent manner.

Before Eric Johnson flew his rented Cessna into his former mother-in-law's house, killing himself and his passenger, his 8-year-old daughter, Emily, he told his ex-wife in a final call, "I've got her and you're not going to get her."

The last cell phone call came Monday morning, a family member said, before the flight ended in an act of seeming deadly vengeance against Johnson's ex-wife, whom he had bitterly divorced last fall.

"Mommy, come get me, come get me," Emily could be heard screaming in the background, according to Johnson's former mother-in-law, Vivian Pace.

The white single-engine plane brushed treetops and shook a swing set on which Emily once played before it skipped and slammed into a bedroom wall of the hillside house. Inside, Pace was sure a bomb had hit.

She later learned that tangled in the wreckage were the bodies of her granddaughter-- described by teachers as "a dear little girl"--and her former son-in-law, a man she said was bent on getting revenge on his ex-wife, Beth Johnson.

"He was a very possessive person," Pace told reporters outside the house Tuesday morning. "That was the way he could hurt Beth. ... He got what he wanted."

Investigators in this small southern Indiana town are trying to piece together what they believe was a bizarre act of postdivorce rage that ended in murder-suicide. But what was truly in Johnson's mind--and why he apparently decided to take his daughter with him to their deaths--remains a mystery.