On March 26, 2001, five Central Oregon teenagers hit the road.

Adam Thomas, Seth Koch and Justin Link had daydreamed of Canada throughout the past week. They had invited Lucretia Karle and Ashley Summers to join their adventure.

The age of the endless party had finally arrived. But instead of revelry, silence engulfed the car.

They had just participated in killing Adam’s mom, 52-year-old Barbara Ann Thomas.

Justin got behind the wheel of Barbara’s white Honda Civic at her Old Bend-Redmond Highway residence and drove toward Sisters. The other teens recalled tears flowing down every face but Justin’s. The boys apologized to the girls for putting them through that.

At 7:05 p.m., they got gas at the Sisters Texaco with Barbara’s credit card. The man who pumped the gas later told a detective the teens seemed weird.

They drove over Santiam Pass in darkness. They turned on Niagara Heights Road, a logging road on the lush side of the pass, to light a fire and burn bloody clothing.

The journey continued. It was dawn on Tuesday, March 27, when they parked near the ferry terminals in Seattle.

Lucretia found a pay phone. She had been away from home now for nearly two days.

The 16-year-old girl ran away regularly but always called her mother to check in.

The two were close and, in Lucretia’s mind, her mom would not worry if she called.

Lucretia’s mother, Carolyn Stezowski, answered.

“Where are you?” she demanded.

“I’m in Eugene,” Lucretia said. “I’ll be back soon.”

Stezowski told her that police banged on the door in the middle of the night. There had been a homicide and officers asked where Lucretia was.

“A homicide?” Lucretia exclaimed.

Justin ordered Lucretia to hang up the phone. The five teens knew now that they were hunted. They had never guessed the clock would already be ticking. How did the police know? The teens raced north toward the border.

They chose state highways to get them away from the thick traffic on Interstate 5. The two-lane roads took them past dairy farms framed by mountain ranges.

At Kendall, Wash., an intersection with two gas stations, a school and a fire hall, they pulled onto a dirt logging road to stash some evidence — bloody clothing, alcohol and the murder weapon, a .308-caliber rifle.

They drove on to Sumas, Wash. They went into a grocery store, bought some imitation crab and chocolate bars, and formed their plan.

They had done it all — the homicide, the theft of the car — to arrive at this threshold, the place where they would be free, where they would never get caught.

Canada.

If they could just get in.

*****

Tourists seeking scenic beauty frequent the 960-person hamlet of Sumas.

Traffic through this Northern Cascades Canadian border outpost is usually mild compared to its neighbor to the west, Blaine, Wash., which lies on Interstate 5 between Seattle and Vancouver, British Columbia.

On Tuesday, March 27, not all the Canadian checkpoint booths were even open. Rain pounded down and clouds hovered at the rooftops.

At 12:38 p.m., a white Honda Civic pulled up to the booth of Canadian Border Inspector Stephen Burnett.

A teenager with black hair and a tan hat with the word “pimp” on it was at the helm. Four kids sat silently in the car. The driver handed Burnett his license. He was the only one with any identification.

In this pre-Sept. 11 world, crossing between the United States and Canada was still as simple as having picture ID. But in addition to the lack of identification, Burnett spied odd signs.

None met his gaze except for the driver, Adam Squires Thomas. Adam seemed fidgety and animated. He uttered what Burnett called “little nervous laughs.”

“At times, he would try to act cool, and it’s difficult to explain, but he was overacting it,” Burnett said.

The inspector launched into his usual query.

“Why are you coming into Canada?”

“For fun.” Adam paused. “To visit my family in Vancouver.”

“Who?”

“My mother,” he said, and then emitted a strange laugh.

“Just everything about this automobile, these individuals, was in my estimation wrong,” Burnett later said.

He told them to pull over for an inspection.

Minutes later, the Canadian inspector was called into his boss’ office.

Adam’s driver’s license information brought up a word on the computer screen: DANGER.

These five kids, sitting quietly in the lobby waiting for assistance, were considered armed and dangerous, the suspects in a homicide.

*****

At the same time as the teens fled north, a rural home in Deschutes County transformed into a blur of police cruisers and yellow crime tape.

Lawmen later called it the most horrific and complex crime scene they’ve ever encountered.

Officers arrived at an unfamiliar residence with an unknown victim, shot in the head, dead on the floor.

Monday, 7:30 p.m.: Deschutes County Sheriff’s Deputy Tim Hernandez pulled up to the Thomas residence, a manufactured home in the High Desert countryside.

He had talked to numerous teenagers in the search for Seth, Lucretia and Ashley, all reported by their parents as runaways. He had finally learned from one teen that Ashley had called from the Thomas residence. She said they were preparing to go to Canada.

Instead of runaways, Hernandez and another deputy found a dead woman.

They had arrived within an hour of the teens’ departure from the home.

Monday, 8 p.m.: Marc Mills, then the newly anointed detective sergeant for the sheriff’s office and now a captain, arrived at the Old Bend-Redmond Highway address.

Hernandez shared the information he had culled about the teens beforehand.

Mills instantly knew he needed help and called for the Major Crimes Team.

The call brought dozens of officers from Central Oregon law enforcement agencies out to help. Police knew the best chance to solve this case was within the next 72 hours.

Detectives laid the grim facts before them. Ashley’s phone call. The body. The Cadillac Seth took from his parents. The ransacked house. Barbara’s car, missing. The teens, vanished, bent on going to Canada.

Monday, 8:45 p.m.: Deschutes County District Attorney Mike Dugan and his chief deputy district attorney, Darryl Nakahira, went to the scene. They made a legal laundry list. Dugan returned to the sheriff’s office to write a search warrant.

Monday, 9:36 p.m.: Detectives gathered enough information to issue a notice to other law enforcement agencies throughout the region. Detain the teenagers. They may have information about a homicide.

Monday, 11:26 p.m.: Warrant in hand, Dugan sat in the living room of Deschutes County Circuit Judge Michael Sullivan. The judge offered him soda and cookies. He reviewed the warrant and agreed that probable cause existed. He signed it.

Tuesday, 12:05 a.m.: As soon as Dugan returned, signed warrant in hand, Mills got his team to work. They entered the house.

Tuesday, 1 a.m.: Officers started combing the family room and dining room for evidence. There was so much material that they didn’t finish with this single area until 6 a.m.

“We were on our hands and knees, literally,” Mills said. “There was paper everywhere, so we had to look at every piece.”

Tuesday, 5 a.m.: A temporary felony arrest warrant was issued. They transmitted it to areas they thought the teens might travel to, including Washington and Canada. Police now had a description of what the suspects might be wearing.

Tuesday, 9 a.m.: Just more than 12 hours into the investigation, law enforcement working the case held its first meeting.

Police knew who saw the five teens on Sunday as they drove around trying to sell alcohol. They knew about the motels Adam and Justin stayed in during spring break and when they got kicked out. They knew the teens planned to go to Canada.

They were closing in.

Tuesday, 1 p.m.: Mills was outside the home when his cell phone rang. He had been at the residence now for 17 hours straight.

The call was from Canada. They’ve got them.

*****

Tuesday, 7:30 p.m.: Blasting rain and wind rocked the small plane buzzing toward northern Washington.

The three passengers — Deschutes County Sheriff’s Sgt. Marc Mills, Deschutes County Sheriff’s Detective Dan Bilyeu and Bend Police Detective Sharon Sweet — kept their belts tight. The pilot, Deschutes County Sheriff’s Sgt. Michael Johnston, guided the craft as the storm jolted it up and down, back and forth.

The wild ride seemed on par with the last 24 hours.

Air was the quickest way for the detectives to reach the homicide suspects in Bellingham, Wash., the seat of Whatcom County. The sheriff’s office rented a plane for the task. Deputies there had already brought the five teens from Sumas to Bellingham in squad cars.

The detectives wanted to meet the suspects. They still didn’t know what exactly transpired on the Old Bend-Redmond Highway.

The pizza ordered for the teens was still warm when the detectives reached the Whatcom County Sheriff’s Office. The officers peeked in the offices where the suspects slept.

And they discussed strategy. These interviews had to be good, and they had to be tonight. When the next business day arrived, the teens would go before a judge for a detention hearing. The judge would appoint lawyers who would undoubtedly deny law enforcement access.

But who to interview first?

There was Justin Alan Link, 17. Several Deschutes County officers knew him through previous run-ins with the law, the latest being burglary and theft charges. He would be tough to crack.

Then there was the son of the deceased, Adam Thomas, 18. Besides the twisted fact that he might be involved in the slaying of his mother, he had turned up on police logs twice in the last week alone.

First, he and Justin ran his car into a fence. Then, officers listed him as a witness in a possible assault on Justin.

Lucretia Anne Karle, 16, was a regular on the Redmond Police’s runaway list. Her name also brought up a juvenile citation on the computer.

Ashley Marie Summers, 15, was the youngest of the bunch and had no criminal record.

Lastly, there was Seth Edwin Koch, 15. He was young, had no criminal record, and his mother said he hadn’t known this group of teens very long. Everyone police had talked to said he was a great kid who couldn’t possibly have been involved in this. He must have gotten swept up.

Seth was it.

Officers brought Seth into the stark interview room. Little by little, Bend Police Detective Sharon Sweet coaxed the story out.

His hands shook. His voice became low and quiet.

He revealed the unthinkable. This bright, polite boy was Barbara Thomas’ executioner.

“I think I ended up shooting Adam’s mom.”

Seth dropped his head to his hands.

The statement shocked detectives watching the interview next door.

“You could have heard a pin drop,” Mills said.

Throughout Tuesday night and into the wee hours of Wednesday morning, the Central Oregon detectives gently pulled the story out of the haggard teenagers.

Seth knew what they were thinking. “It’s like one of these weird things you hear about on the news where this nice kid does something that killed someone,” he said. “That’s me today.”

“I’m going to go to prison.”

The girls didn’t realize yet that they, too, would go to prison.

Detectives interviewed Ashley next. The 15-year-old girl told them she wished she never had gone to the house that day.

“I didn’t really want to be there, but then again, I didn’t want them to be mad at me for like, telling them not to do it or trying to leave or anything like that,” she said.

“Do you think you’re in any trouble here?” Sweet later asked.

“I could be because I was there,” Ashley replied. “I didn’t do anything to stop it even though I probably really couldn’t have, just, you know … but I don’t know. I could be in trouble. Well, I know I’m going to be in trouble with my dad, but by the law, I don’t know how the laws work about stuff like this. I’ve never been in any trouble with the cops or anything, so I really don’t know.”

“Do you think this is a pretty serious situation?` Detective Sgt. Mills asked.

“I really do.”

“Can you tell me what you really feel about knowing that somebody’s dead?” Mills asked.

“It makes me feel like I want to throw up. I don’t want to sleep at night … when I think about it my stomach starts to hurt and there is still like the shock thing is that I can’t believe that Adam’s mom is dead. Like one of my friends that … my friend just killed his mom and this is a whole bunch of feelings wrapped up.”

When detectives interviewed Lucretia, they could hardly hear her responses. She wrapped herself in blankets and pulled her black sweatshirt hood over her head.

“What’s your biggest worry?” Detective Tracey Miller asked.

“I don’t have any. ‘Cause I didn’t do it. It was just horrible. I saw it all. Everything,” she squeaked out through her sobs.

Later, she described the scene when they left the house. “I was in the car waiting to go and I looked over and I saw Adam and he was bawling almost because he was in shock. Me and Ashley grabbed at him and put him in the middle of the car, inside, and he just lost it … Ashley rode in front. Seth rode in back. Justin was driving and it was quiet for like 10 minutes and then Seth asked … then they turned on the music and they started … and they just … Justin and Seth just acted like nothing happened. I don’t see how.”

When the detectives left the room, Lucretia sat alone and cried.

Detectives interviewed Justin twice.

He started his first interview by answering detectives with “yes, sir” and “no, sir.”

He told them that he had wanted no part in plans to hurt Barbara and left the house. “I didn’t know they were gonna kill her. I thought they were just gonna knock her out.”

“Nobody deserves to die in my book,” Justin later said. “I don’t care how big of an a______ they are. You know I’d like to go around hitting everybody that pissed me off, but I’m not gonna.”

During the second interview, then-Oregon State Police Detective Lorin Weilacher asked Justin what the three biggest reasons were that caused the murder.

“That his mom’s a bitch, Adam hates her, and pretty much she was just a bitch,” he said.

“Did she show respect to you?” Weilacher said.

“Not really. She looked right, she looked at me like I was a piece of s____.”

The detectives brought Adam into the interview room last.

Adam sat in the room alone, seemingly unaware of the video camera taping him. His arms and hands became puppets the left hand spoke to the right hand. The right hand replied.

Adam’s head moved back and forth, as if listening to the conversation.

When detectives came in, he said he was cold. Finally, wrapped in three blankets, he told them his thoughts just before the murder.

“I’m just like freaking out ‘cause I’m, deep down inside I’m … I’m, like inside I’m crying I’m like I don’t want to do this, this is too wrong, why the hell am I doing this, I never thought I’d ever be doing this in my life, I’m not this kind of person. And then she walks in and I hear her talking, like Seth walks out of the computer room and says something about being a salesman, which, freaked, was like hit me I’m like WHAT, like are you talking about, a salesman. And she goes where’s my … my mom goes ‘Where’s my son?’ and Seth goes ‘In your room,’ and she goes ‘Oh OK.’ And then all I hear is this crash and I’m like oh God, it started, I like freaked out I’m like oh crap, it started, I can’t do anything now. And then Seth walks in and he goes you have to do … you have to finish it. I’m like oh God … and I like started crying and I walked out and like her head … she was kneeling, and I just … I saw the bottle and I saw her head and I’m like, I can’t do anything now, I have to do this cause she’s already started bleeding. And then my hand came up and I couldn’t even control my own actions and it … it just smashed down on her head.”

Toward the end of the interview, Adam asked, “How is it … ah … how did the like body get reported exactly, like how was it found, or like who found it or …”

“That has to do with one of our patrol deputies that has been, that spent a couple of days trying to find Seth and the Cadillac,” Sweet replied.

“Ahhhh, the Cadillac. Did you guys ever find the keys? Did anybody find the keys to the Cadillac, we’re wondering.”

“I don’t know.”

“We searched for four hours for those keys to the Cadillac and never did find them. If we … if we … if we had found the keys to the Cadillac then nothing would have happened, we never would have done anything to my mom,” Adam said. “We would have taken the Cadillac and drove off.”

*****

The week continued for detectives in waves of adrenaline and exhaustion.

By the time of the interviews, some detectives had worked 24 hours straight. Mills recalled eating pizza sticks and taking 20-minute catnaps on the floor.

By Wednesday, the detectives and the Whatcom County Search and Rescue Team gathered on a dirt road near the Canadian border. Somewhere out on a forest thick with ferns and moss-covered trees was the rifle Seth said he used to kill Barbara.

Seth told detectives he and Justin even discussed returning by foot to retrieve the weapon.

March rain battered the searchers walking back and forth, back and forth. In their haste to get to Washington, the Deschutes County officers forgot rain gear. They wore plastic garbage bags. ”I was soaked almost to the waist,” Sweet said. “I literally poured water out of my shoes.”

After a day and a half of searching, they found the rifle.

“They took efforts to conceal it,” Sweet said. “We really had to scratch and dig and scratch.”

It wasn’t until the night of Thursday, March 29, that detectives sat down to a real meal and got a full night’s sleep. The next day, they would take the five teens home.

*****

The chaos unleashed by the five teenagers continued throughout the week in Central Oregon.

But three teenagers traveling back toward the devastation on Friday, March 30, seemed oblivious.

Adam, Lucretia and Ashley talked about cars they saw, cars they want, friends’ cars, friends’ cars they want.

The girls agreed they wanted to see rapper Eminem in concert. Adam sang to the radio.

“Lucretia said Adam could be another Marilyn Manson,” Detective Sweet later wrote in a report.

Sweet took notes as the van sped toward Central Oregon. Everything they said now could and would be used against them in a court of law.

Sweet later testified about listening to Adam and Lucretia make wedding plans. Lucretia wanted children, but Adam thought they should get a puppy first. At their wedding, they would tie Pepsi cans to their car and serve Symphony chocolate bars instead of cake.

Lucretia said of her parents, “They will s____ when they find out I’m marrying Adam.”

The convoy heading south stopped periodically for food and restroom breaks. Lucretia smiled and waved at restaurant patrons, despite the stares at her handcuffs.

“I don’t think anyone will want to beat us up again,” she told Ashley.

Once in Central Oregon, the van stopped to transfer Adam to a different vehicle. He would go to the adult jail.

Then-Sheriff’s Detective Dan Bilyeu wrote in a report that Adam talked about future careers and education. He also mused on who would get “stuck” with the Texaco bill, which came from Barbara’s stolen gas card that they used on the trip. Adam said that since Justin used it, the bill would be his “problem.”

In a separate vehicle, Seth told Redmond Detective Tracey Miller and Oregon State Police Detective Rob Ringsage about the condo his family was looking at in Hawaii and what books he had read recently. Seth liked science fiction novels. In one he mentioned, “Ender’s Game,” a world government breeds military geniuses and trains them in the arts of war to defend against alien invasion.

He also asked the officers if they believe in God.

“Yes,” they answered.

Seth said he believes in God and karma.

“For every positive thing that happens to you,” he said, “something bad has to happen to equal it all out.”

Read the conclusion of the series.