Dr. Donald Dutton
The Carnation Killers, Folie à deux

On Christmas Eve 2007 in Carnation, Washington, a small town northeast of Seattle, Joe McEnroe and his live-in girlfriend, Michele Anderson sat down for dinner with Michele’s parents, Wayne and Judy Anderson. Joe and Michele hadn’t travelled far for the Christmas meal as they lived in a trailer a short distance from the parents’ home, on the parents’ property. Before enjoying their dinner, the family, including Joe, awaited the arrival of Michele’s brother Scott, Scott’s wife Erica, and their two children, Olivia and Nathan. While they were waiting for the rest of the family to arrive, Michele drew a gun and shot at Wayne but her gun jammed. Wayne, who was large man, charged at Michele and at that point, Joe drew his gun and shot Wayne. Then, apologizing to Judy, he shot her in the chest. Both were killed. Michele and Joe dragged Wayne and Judy’s bodies into a shed and re-commenced their wait for Michele’s brother and family. When Scott and his family arrived, Michele shot her brother Scott once. Then her gun jammed again so Joe shot Scott and Erica. To finish off the destruction, Joe shot the two children.

Joe and Michele left the four bodies where they lay and drove in circles for twenty-four hours in a state of confusion; driving south in an attempt to flee to Canada, instead of heading north to the border. Finally, they were stopped by the police near the crime scene and appeared flustered when asked routine questions. When taken into custody and interviewed by the police, they both admitted to the killings. Rationalizing the killing of the children, they said, “there would be no one left to care for them.” Eventually both Joe and Michele were charged with Aggravated Homicide which can carry a death sentence in Washington State. Both Michele and Joe faced the Death Penalty and were to be tried separately.
In March of 2008, about three months after the killings, I was contacted by Katy Ross and Bill Prestia, public defenders in Seattle who were representing Joe. I am a forensic psychologist who has appeared in many homicide cases, many of which involved a potential death sentence for the perpetrators. The most high profile of these was the O.J. Simpson case, where I was an expert for the prosecution.
I saw a newspaper photo of Joe and he looked Satanic—shoulder-length dark hair and a strange look in his eye. I expected the worst. I began the first of fifteen interviews with Joe in March of 2008 and these would continue until 2015 when he was finally tried for murder in Seattle. The interviews all took place in the King County Jail in downtown Seattle. I came to know the place well; the numerous locked doors and the routine of getting to a locked interview room and then having Joe brought in with wrist and ankle cuffs by two burly guards.

Encountering Joe
My first encounter with Joe defied whatever expectations I had formed based on the newspaper photo and description of the crime. He was excessively timid and had a speech impediment—he could not pronounce the letter ‘r’. Joe was also medicated during much of his pre-trial incarceration and was on strong anti-depressants. He experienced unrelenting guilt over the killings, and found it difficult, even after some time had passed, to describe the killing of the children, Olivia and Nathan Anderson.

The first interviews focussed on his upbringing; he was raised by his mother in California and he had never known his father. His mother had a penchant for men, she would even bring them home from the streets—men who were described by Joe as having a sign reading ‘will work for food’—and have loud sex with them in the tiny bachelor apartment she shared with Joe and his two siblings. Only a blanket separated the children from the loud sex.

Joe was basically put in charge of caring for and raising his siblings, since his mother was either out working or out looking for men. Joe’s unkempt appearance at school led to an investigation, when he was fourteen, by Santa Clara County, California Child Protective Services. The investigation report read, in part, “the family appears quite dysfunctional…no parent to provide. Child left alone unattended by mother…. Home was unclean and unsafe.” In this home environment, Joe began to withdraw and retreat into himself; first to television, then to the Internet.
Over the next several years, his mother brought home a series of disturbed and sometimes abusive boyfriends, many of whom were ex-cons. The typical pattern was they would live at her place, not work, drink and/or use whatever drugs they could find, and counsel Joe on the meaning of life. The relationship would break up and Joe’s mother would go in search of a replacement. Joe was in a constant pattern of being “the man of the house,” being abandoned when the new man-hunting search began, then being replaced by a new boyfriend.

According to Joe, when these new boyfriends came into the family, Joe was shaped into a protective role; he never knew how much threat each of them presented for his mother. The family moved around the country—from California and Washington, to Arizona—all at the whims of his mother’s search for a man. Joe would try in the midst of all this to go to school but was repeatedly harassed and bullied for his cheap clothes and speech impediment. He never disclosed this to his mother—she wasn’t interested.

Joe had no memories of ever being soothed or supported by his mother. Instead, he developed a psychological response to serve that necessary function; his personality split into entities—quasi-hallucinatory experiences that became chronic and vivid and visited him during times of stress. These were ‘entities,’ that is, distinct personas who looked like Joe but were of both sexes and had names. Their names included Crowe, Melissa, Void, and God and each had distinct personalities—Melissa was playful and wise, for example, and knew Joe from a previous life.
Joe worked at odd jobs outside of school to help support the family—he had to pay all the utility bills on his five-dollars-an-hour pay. At age twenty-one, Joe saw a chance to leave because his mother had finally found a semi-respectable mate. Joe’s emancipation took him to North Carolina where he got a job stocking shelves in a Target store. He had no close friends; he had a couple of roommates but hardly knew them. He would go online and on two occasions met women who seemed interested in him. In both cases, he took time off work and flew out to other cities to meet them. Each time they rejected him, and as he described it to me, this left him depressed and suicidal. All his time away from work was spent online. His only friends were his entities who visited him during times of extreme stress and served a soothing function—calming him and, on more than one occasion, preventing him from committing suicide. Joe called them his ‘spirit guides’ but didn’t tell anyone about them for fear of being thought to be crazy.

Joe’s third try at finding a girlfriend online was with a woman named Michele Anderson. They seemed to like the same type of action flick movies, played the same computer games, and both had spirit guides. This shared spirit guide experience was a strong draw for Joe because he could now share his secret entities with someone who would not ridicule him. Joe flew to Seattle from North Carolina to meet Michele and he couldn’t help noticing that she was quite a bit heavier than in her pictures. He inadvertently let this slip to her and she never let him forget it.
Michele had a dominating personality and she had tirades against the people in the world who she felt were disrespecting her; mainly people at work but also her family. Joe noticed that Michele took every conflict as a slight and every slight as someone ‘dissing’ her. She would then ruminate on it. In fact, she took to keeping ‘hit lists’ of people she wanted to kill, as she put it, “to make the world a better place.” Joe simply placated her and tried to avoid confrontations, but she would blow up over minor conflicts like his speech impediment or his failing to clean the refrigerator. Her tirades would last for hours. Each minor conflict was a sign to Michele that she was being dissed again.