The phone call came during Rod Jones’ workday.

Come home, his wife said. Your sister is dead.

The Redmond man didn’t need to be told it was murder, or that his nephew, Adam Thomas, was involved.

“The little bastard finally killed her,” he blurted. “Does anyone know where he is?”

It was just the start of a nightmare for family and friends of 52-year-old Barbara Ann Thomas and the five teens involved in her murder — Adam, Seth Koch, Justin Link, Lucretia Karle and Ashley Summers.

It began with shock.

To residents of Redmond, then a community of about 13,500, Barbara and the five suspects were not anonymous faces. Children knew the teens from school. Adults knew Barbara and the teens’ parents from jobs, activities and churches. They could not believe it had happened here.

“It was so sad,” said Connie Rey, who lived in Redmond for years before moving to the Tumalo area near Barbara’s residence. She knew Ashley and her father. “Over a car? What are these kids thinking? I just don’t get it.”

The day after the murder, Redmond High School and the alternative Brown High School went into a lockdown, fearing the suspects would show up. Later, the Redmond School District brought in counselors for teens who needed to talk about the killing. “It was a big deal,” said 15-year-old classmate Amber Legg. “I cried.”

For those directly connected to the victim and suspects, the first weeks were excruciating.

Kevin Thomas, who is stepson to Barbara and half-brother to Adam, called the period “unfathomably intense.”

The family buried Barbara and staggered with the knowledge that Adam was involved. They fielded calls from reporters.

They also coped with the house on the Old Bend-Redmond Highway.

When police examine a crime scene, they do their investigation and then hand the property back to the owners. There is no government cleanup service. Relatives went into a residence trashed by the five teens and spotted with Barbara’s blood.

After the murder, vandals painted on the house and put crosses in the front yard. Kevin Thomas said family members relied on each other every step of the way.

“We basically showed up as a family unit, arm in arm,” he said.

Then came the prosecution.

It played out in the quiet, understated courtroom of Deschutes County Circuit Court Judge Alta Brady. Family and friends of both the victim and defendants endured the painful recounting of the murder.

“This is one of the worst cases I have ever seen during my tenure on the bench,” Brady said in court. “It was such a brutal and senseless murder of a wonderful person.”

The proceedings concluded on Sept. 26, 2003, two-and-a-half years to the day after Barbara’s murder.

They ended with two girls behind bars for 25 years and three boys sentenced to spend the rest of their lives in prison.

In November, Adam filed a notice that he is appealing his sentence. Justin filed his notice of appeal Thursday.

Throughout the past two years, Barbara’s murder continued to change lives.

*****

Four days after the slaying, March 30, 2001, freedom and friendship began to fade. Police returned the teens to Central Oregon that day in chains.

All were charged as adults. All were considered equally responsible under the law. All faced the prospect of life in prison.

At first, they exchanged letters. Adam and Lucretia planned to marry.

Lucretia clipped newspaper articles for an album, her mother said.

Seth said that during those first days in the Deschutes County juvenile detention center, he continued to look up to Justin.

In a letter, Justin said Seth was like a brother, a friend when no one else was.

Then, over months of anguish, and in some cases counseling, their attitudes began to shift.

At least four of the teens had trouble sleeping and had nightmares when they did sleep. Mental health professionals diagnosed several of them with post-traumatic stress disorder. The teens in the juvenile detention center were placed on suicide watch.

One of the girls had such a difficult time at first that she only talked about the murder to a dog brought in by a counselor.

Over time, Lucretia and Ashley evolved from dating Adam and Justin to willingly testifying against them in court.

Lucretia and Ashley came to an agreement with prosecutors and were sentenced in February 2003. Soon afterward, Deschutes County Deputy District Attorney Kandy Gies traveled to Hillcrest Youth Correctional Facility in Salem. It’s the equivalent of a state prison for juvenile girls.

“We had no expectation that they would even talk to us,” Gies said.

One even sat with her back to Gies most of the time. But bit by bit, they agreed to talk.

“They both testified of their own volition,” Gies said.

Chief Deputy District Attorney Darryl Nakahira said the girls’ testimony was very consistent with what they had told police the day after the crime.

In the courtroom, Lucretia and Ashley each said that it was important to testify and relive what happened that day.

“I think Barbara Thomas’ family deserves to know the truth,” Ashley said.

Lucretia, the girl who once planned to marry A dam, remained firm throughout questioning at Adam’s sentencing hearing. Her voice wavered only when she described Barbara’s death.

“When I saw Adam he had a gun pointed at his own mother,” she said, her voice tinged with anger.

Since going to jail, and then prison, both girls have pursued high school diplomas.

Seth, who blew off homework in high school, aced his classes in the Deschutes County juvenile detention center. He hopes to receive his diploma by the end of this month and is taking two courses through Chemeketa Community College, his mother said.

Seth’s attitude about the people he considered friends changed drastically over time. At first he admired Justin.

In an interview with detectives more than a year after the crime, Seth called his former role model a homicidal sweet talker who “saw himself as almost the best you could be.”

“If Justin hadn’t been around us or been there or anything like that, I probably wouldn’t have left my house in the first place and gone running around with him in the middle of the night,” Seth said. “Adam would have still been living at home … just almost everything probably would have been different.”

A city block away, the exacting rules at the Deschutes County Jail closed in on Justin and Adam.

Jail rules dictate nearly every aspect of daily life. Detention officers wrote the two up for everything from having an extra roll of toilet paper to slamming a cup down at a meal.

Punishment often meant time in disciplinary detention — an isolated cell without access to privileges.

The most serious infraction detention officers cited Justin for occurred in August 2001. They found a piece of paper folded and stuffed in a book in Justin’s possession. Inside the paper was white powder. Written on the paper was a note: “This is straight crystal you’ll zing u talk u die.”

The substance tested positive as methamphetamine, a drug Justin had used before his arrest. He told detention officers he didn’t know it was in the book. A hearings officer found him guilty following an internal investigation.

Other infractions charged that Justin intimidated others. Officers said in reports that Justin threatened to beat up other inmates if they didn’t do what he wanted and that he became angry when confronted.

Detention officers also wrote up Adam for breaking jail rules.

In January 2003, officers searched Adam’s cell and discovered a bag of “preno,” liquid with sugar, oranges and bread that he had hoped would ferment into alcohol.

A month later they caught him with orange peels. Each peel held a teaspoon of molding rye seeds. Adam believed the mold growing on the seeds could be ingested as a hallucinogen.

In the meantime, both Justin and Adam continued to communicate with the outside world.

Justin apologized to his family in a letter written two days after the murder.

“All I do is get into trouble left and right,” Justin said. “I don’t know why, but it’s bulls___.”

“I have been the most horrible son there could be. I am sorry to everybody in the family. I love you guys very much.

“Prosecutor Nakahira said at Adam’s sentencing trial that once in jail, Adam began playing the system and “immersing into the culture.”

To relatives who are devout Catholics, Adam played on their sympathies.

“I am beginning to love the people working against me as people,” Adam wrote in an early letter to relatives. “I read the Bible every day and have really been seeing a difference in my character.”

In a letter to the same relatives a year later, he expressed regret with a different tone. “I would give my own life to bring her back, if even for a day. You don’t have to hope for me to be haunted by that day, I have been since that day ended.”

In another paragraph in the same letter, he told one relative she gives off “almost the same vibe a snake gives off right before it begins to devour its prey.”

Adam also wrote to friends while in the county jail.

“I lost all track of reality and just gave in to some weird thought,” he penned a month after the crime.

In April 2003, Adam wrote to a convicted murderer he met in the Deschutes County Jail. Michael Ramone Perez killed a man with a hammer on May 10, 2001.

In a letter to Perez, Adam said he had told Justin he would testify about him in a favorable light. He became angry when he read newspaper articles about Justin’s trial. One of Justin’s lawyers, Clarinda Spencer, called Adam “one of the darkest minds probably any of us has ever seen.”

“Link can suck it,” Adam wrote. “I ain’t testifying for no one. The only way to do this thing is to stay solid, so that’s what I’m doing. Snitches get stitches.”

“I miss my mom more than anything,” he continued. “I hate myself for what I did but I am owning up to my actions. And if anyone in prison wants to see a different story and wants to kick my ass, tell them I get sentenced in August. I’ll see them soon, then they and I can handle this s___.”

He signed the letter, “A-Puppy.”

*****

In February 2003, Lucretia and Ashley pleaded to conspiracy to commit murder in exchange for prosecutors dropping the aggravated murder charges. The deal allowed them to escape life in prison.

They will spend 25 years behind bars.

At her sentencing, Lucretia, now 18, choked on her words as she began to cry. “Your honor, I am sorry for all the loss … that everybody has been … ”

Ashley, who turned 18 in September, asked if there was anything she could do to help the Thomas family. She said she wants to pay restitution when she is released from prison and can get a job.

Her father, Jim Summers, said Ashley is now interested in studying child psychology and wants to share her experience with others as a cautionary tale of making bad choices.

Ashley wanted to be interviewed for this story, but the Oregon Youth Authority, the state agency that is now her guardian, would not allow it. But she said in a letter to The Bulletin that before her arrest, she put partying and freedom above her family and morals.

“I would tell teens that partying, doing drugs and drinking is not worth the risks,” Ashley said. “I’m not going to say it’s not fun partying but it’s so not worth what could possibly happen.”

“My dad and mine’s relationship is tons better,” she continued. “Before I got arrested we argued all the time when we were together. I never wanted to do anything with him, I always wanted to be with my friends. Now, I always want to be around my dad. I love him so much.”

The two girls hope to remain at Hillcrest Youth Correctional Facility until they turn 25 in 2010. They then must go to an adult facility.

Their scheduled release date is March 30, 2026. They will be in their early 40s.

Both Lucretia’s parents and Ashley’s father wonder what sort of world will greet them when they leave prison.

They will have never had driver’s licenses or held full-time jobs.

Lucretia’s father, John Karle, said his daughter isn’t thinking that far ahead right now. She asked the family to move to Salem so she could see them more often.

“I don’t think that’s really become a reality yet,” he said.

Karle said the family struggled after Lucretia’s arrest.

Lucretia’s mother, Carolyn Stezowski, slipped into depression. She said only recently has she regained some of her strength.

“I’m always going to love her and she’ll always be my daughter, but I have a little resentment,” Stezowski said. “Why couldn’t she have stopped it?”

“I don’t care how many drugs Lucretia was on, there’s no excuse.”

Lucretia’s younger sister, Patricia Karle, said after the murder she endured the taunts of other teens at Redmond High. She eventually moved to a family friend’s house in John Day for a while to get away from them.

The murder, she said, scared her straight. Now 17, Patricia proudly said she hasn’t touched alcohol or marijuana since February 2002. She gets A’s and plans to attend Central Oregon Community College upon getting her diploma. She wants to become an emergency room doctor someday.

“What happened to (Lucretia) stopped my other kids from taking that path,” John Karle said.

Since Ashley’s sentencing, Jim Summers has thought often of what his daughter’s life will be like after prison.

The household was just the two of them. Although her mountain bike still hangs in the garage, they will not bike together anytime soon. He’s 47 now, and will be 70 by the time she gets out.

“I tell her, ‘You might as well get as much education as you can, because it’s going to be tough,’“ he said. “Is someone going to give her an opportunity?”

Summers visits Ashley every other week in Salem, making trips to Barnes and Noble Booksellers beforehand to feed her now voracious reading habit. When she was housed at the Deschutes County juvenile detention center, he stopped by every night on his way home from work.

“I still miss having her around,” he said.

Just before the crime, Summers had sought counseling for Ashley and him to deal with what seemed like a rebellious rough patch. He felt their relationship was improving.

“I was more worried about her getting pregnant or caught shoplifting,” Summers said. “I never thought of something like this.”

*****

Adam Thomas, Seth Koch and Justin Link were sentenced to life without possibility of parole. Adam and Justin are appealing their sentences.

All three asked for a second chance at life in Judge Brady’s courtroom, with Brady deciding the fate of Seth and Justin and a 12-person jury passing judgment on Adam. The only other sentence possible under state law would have allowed them to seek parole after 30 years in prison.

Seth, the teen who pulled the trigger, said at his sentencing that he thinks about his actions all the time. He looked toward Barbara’s family and friends seated in the courtroom as he spoke.

“I’m going to have to live with the knowledge for the rest of my life that I took someone from this world, especially someone as loved as Barbara Thomas. I’m sorry,” he said.

After leaving the witness stand, Seth sniffled and hung his head.

The Redmond High student who went to jail as a 15-year-old boy is now becoming a man at the MacLaren Youth Correctional Facility for juvenile boys in Woodburn. He hopes to remain there until he is 25, when he must be transferred to an adult prison.

Seth’s mother, Vicki Koch, said he has reached the highest level of privileges that he can at this point. He still lives in an individual cell.

“He wants to get into a dorm because it’s not so isolated,” Koch said.

The teens are allowed privileges like listening to music in a soundproof room or watching movies if they behave well. They attend various treatment groups in the facility, as well.

Seth said at his sentencing that he wanted to enroll in a violent offender treatment program. It forces offenders to go through their crime step by step, analyzing what they were thinking at every point.

“I haven’t yet figured out all the events that led to that and why I was in that,” Seth said.

Seth also works out in his spare time. The teen, who was 5 feet 11 inches and 140 pounds when arrested, is now 6 feet tall and 225 pounds.

He is thinking ahead to adult prison, his mother said.

”He wants to be formidable,” she said.

“Seth is very angry at himself, he has a lot of anger,” she continued. “That’s why working out is so good for him.”

Vicki Koch said Seth frequently tells her he wishes he would have listened to her and chosen different friends. He wants to tell other teens his story, but prisoners are not allowed to be brought into a public environment, so it isn’t possible, his mother said.

“It would have been an effective way to reach other kids making bad choices,” she said. “Teenagers relate to teenagers better than anybody.”

She also believes one of the teens at the Thomas house slipped something into one of Seth’s alcoholic cocktails that fateful day, altering his state of mind. Portland psychologist Dr. Linda Grounds raised the possibility in a report after Seth described how he felt that day.

Even if it’s true, Vicki Koch said, it’s not an excuse. She now places her hope for the future in changing the justice system.

She researched juvenile crime after the murder. People are praising a job well done by the justice system after the crime, she said, but not looking at what society should have done before it ever happened. She sees the situation as a series of societal letdowns, from the parents to the motel owners to juvenile justice system officials who dealt with Justin.

“We make teens responsible for their actions, the same as adults,” she said. “Yet we don’t recognize any other area of teen development as mature. They cannot legally drink, drive, smoke, vote, etcetera.”

Koch said many people expressed condolences upon hearing of Seth’s deed. But Redmond is still not the community she once knew. The family stopped going to their church due to the reception they received after the murder.

The mother intends to keep believing, however, that her son will come back to their home someday.

*****

The other two boys involved in Barbara’s slaying, Justin and Adam, went directly to adult prisons.

Justin, red-faced and voice breaking, apologized to Barbara’s family at his sentencing in September. He is now 20 years old.

Throughout the two-and-a-half years between his arrest and sentencing, Justin disputed the assertion by prosecutors and the other four teens that he instigated the crime.

But he admitted in court that he could have stopped the murder but did not.

“I would never live my life the way I did before,” he said, crying.

“Please forgive me. I did not change the outcome of that tragic day.”

Justin is now in the Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution in Pendleton, a medium-security prison.

The 57-acre institution, the former state mental hospital, holds 1,600 inmates.

Prisoners there can work in the industrial laundry or the garment factory making blue jeans. The prison contracts with Blue Mountain Community College to provide education services, and there are treatment programs for mental health and substance abuse issues.

Adam, 21, is at the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem. Of the state’s 14 centers for inmates, it’s the only maximum-security prison.

Life at the penitentiary, according to the state Department of Corrections, is like living in a tightly restricted city. The department tries to bring facets of society to life in prison. It has houses, the inmate slang for cells. It has a park, which is the recreation yard. It has laws, a store called the canteen and civic organizations. Inmates have jobs in the furniture factory, metal shop and upholstery shop.

Privacy, however, isn’t available in Adam’s new world. Inmates wear identical clothing. They dress, shower and use the bathroom in the company of other inmates.

At meals, they have 25 minutes to eat and may not have second helpings. All movement and conversation is monitored. They can be stopped and searched at any time.

At different points throughout the last two-and-a-half years, Adam has said he regrets his actions.

“He said he still talks to his mother and hopes she’s doing well where she’s at and that he’s sorry for what he did,” said Dr. William Sack, an Oregon Health & Science University psychiatry professor emeritus who analyzed Adam. “It’s not uncommon among grieving people to talk to the deceased.”

In a letter to The Bulletin, Adam said that before the crime he was a confused teenager who wanted to please people. He didn’t hate his mother, but he didn’t respect her, either.

He used writing to vent his bottled-up anger.

”What things led up to what happened?” Adam wrote. “I’d have to say drugs, the wrong crowd of people, not caring about the consequences, living to enjoy a short-lived ‘freedom’ of carnal pleasures i.e. drugs, sex, not paying attention to authority, living for myself and to hell with everyone else.”

*****

To Cathy McDaniel, sometimes the questions hurt more than the answers.

After sitting for countless hours in the courtroom, McDaniel knows the smallest of details about the murder of the woman she called “the sister of my soul.”

She can even play the scene in her mind — hear Barbara’s voice as she pleaded with her attackers, see her domicile destroyed, know her anguish that her own son, Adam, was involved.

Tears still come to her eyes when she thinks of Barbara and the boy she considered a surrogate son. She still can’t answer why.

”I’m still speechless when it comes to Adam,” she said. “There are not even words.”

The events of March 26, 2001, on the Old Bend-Redmond Highway left so many questions and so much unresolved.

Kevin and Addie Lou Thomas said they wished the justice system offered more options. Addie Lou Thomas said she agrees with Vicki Koch that these teens could visit high schools and share their experience with others.

“The legal system did its job,” Kevin Thomas said. “But it also seems like there’s something missing.”

“It just seems a bit hollow to throw these kids away,” he said.

That is not to say the family favors light punishment.

“I don’t want what we have endured as a family to be lost,” Kevin Thomas wrote in a letter to the judge. “My memories of Barbara are like a scratched record: They are stuck on the graphic image of her death.”

Jason Thomas, who is serving in the Army in Baghdad, said he loves his brother, Adam, but misses his mother every day. He favored a sentence of 30 years in prison for all the teens with the possibility that they may someday earn parole.

The brother thinks about how his two children will never know their grandma. He wants to ask his mother if his children are like him as a child.

His father is dead. There is no one left to ask.

“The last link to my past is gone,” he said in court testimony. “That hurts my heart.”

Others favored life behind bars for the boys.

Deborah Palmberg, a close friend of Barbara’s, said she doesn’t want the judge or members of Adam’s sentencing jury to lose sleep at night.

“They did the right thing,” she said, adding that she believes the psychiatrist only saw Adam’s “wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

“I don’t know how old and gray I’ll have to be before I’ll find any forgiveness,” Palmberg said.

Another of Barbara’s friends, Sisters resident Cindy Richartz, said she still feels anger and fear. She misses the friend she talked to nearly every day. She planned to teach Barbara to ride a horse that summer.

”Enough about these kids who did a horrible, hideous crime. Who would Barb be right now?”

“It’s one thing to have your best friend murdered,” Richartz continued. “It’s another thing to know (the killer) personally and have loved him like a son.”

“I can’t even meet a teenager now without wondering what they’re capable of.”

The teens showed no mercy to Barbara, said Rod Jones, Barbara’s brother. His family also asked for life in prison for the three boys.

All of Barbara’s relatives feel relieved that the criminal proceedings, at least, are over.”When Adam was sentenced, there was a weight lifted off our shoulders that’s almost indescribable,” Jones said.

“The sentences, they’re just, but there was absolutely no joy in hearing them.”

Friends of the teens still dwell on the murder, as well.

Ed Payne, 18, is one.

Before the murder, he and Seth were so close, Payne said, that they almost read each other’s minds. He was with Seth and Justin for a while two nights before the murder, but didn’t like the feeling he got from Justin. He asked them to take him home.

The crime taught him to walk away at the first sign of trouble. Payne now believes you can’t hang out with troublemakers without potentially getting involved.

“(Seth) was usually the one who had more common sense,” Payne said.

“A lot of people sit back and say, ‘I wouldn’t do it,’” he continued. “I’ve learned that things can happen no matter what. I can’t say I wouldn’t — we’re a lot alike.”

*****

Barbara’s spirit lives on for family and friends, even through the darkest days.

Doris Brouilette, 80, thinks about the kindness of the woman she considered a surrogate daughter. Barbara reached out to everyone, the Sisters resident said.

In the end, the only connection Barbara could not forge was with her son.

“Everybody fed off that positive attitude but her son,” colleague Ron Audette said. “Everybody loved Barbara Thomas but her son.”

Brouilette said she can’t yet do the Christian thing. But she knows Barbara would.

“I think she would look down and forgive him. I can’t yet. But she would. That’s the kind of person she was,” she said.

Barbara Thomas’ final resting place glows every morning in the sunrise. It lies in a cemetery with rimrock above and horses grazing nearby. It’s a rural refuge, just as her home on the Old Bend-Redmond Highway once was.

She and her husband share a tombstone. It depicts mountains, trees and a couple sitting on a log, admiring the scene.

At the bottom, forever etched in stone, it says, “Loving parents.”