Mychal King: Angry and frustrated after arguing with his family, Mychal goes looking for revenge. His target? A complete stranger, passing on a bicycle.
Claire Miller: A 19-year-old afflicted by cerebral palsy becomes the object of her younger sister’s jealousy. It culminates in an act of incredible savagery.
John Freeman: A single mom leaves her 5-year-old in the care of a trusted babysitter. He’s always been reliable in the past. This time will be different.
Rachel Pittman: A mother and her two young children are dead, their house set ablaze. The identity of the killer is shocking, her motive even more so.
De’Marquis Elkins: A 17-year-old wannabe tough guy with a gun; a mother taking her baby for a walk in his stroller; an impending disaster.
Paris Mayo: 15-year-old Paris couldn’t bear the idea of being pregnant, nor the thought of raising a child. Her solution is both heartbreaking and evil.
Nolen Buchanan: Sixteen-year-old Nolen has a plan to take over his father’s construction business. It involves three murders.
Killer Kids Volume 17
Cassandra Bjorge & Johnny Rider
Cassandra, or Cassie, as she preferred, was born in 2000, in Duluth, Georgia. Not much is known of her early childhood, although it appears to have been chaotic. Cassie’s parents separated when she was young, and she grew up without much parental guidance. By 2016, we find her living with her mom, Amanda Sterling, in Duluth. The intervening years had seen her develop into a precocious teen, devoid of manners, boundaries, or common decency. Cassie lived by her own rules and had already racked up an extensive police record that included arrests for underage drinking, drug possession, shoplifting, and assault. She barely attended school and frequently stayed away from home for days and nights on end. Cassie Bjorge was out of control.
Amanda Sterling was ready to throw in the towel. Her teenage daughter was a lost cause, beyond saving, beyond redemption. Other members of the family were not so ready to quit. When Amanda turned to her parents for help, they immediately stepped up. That same year, they filed for custody of Cassandra and moved her to their home in Lawrenceville, a suburb of Atlanta.
Wendy and Randall Bjorge were highly respected members of their community, a quiet, loving couple who kept mostly to themselves but were nonetheless active in neighborhood affairs. Their home was a handsome and well-maintained double-story on a tree-lined street. Lawrenceville was a peaceful enclave of suburbia. If ever there was a place for Cassie to start again, to gain some perspective and equilibrium in her young life, it was here.
But Cassie had no intention of mending her ways. Right from the start, she made it clear to her grandparents how it was going to be. She lived by her own rules, not theirs. Enrolled at Peach Tree Ridge High, she simply refused to attend. Instead, she spent her days and nights wandering the streets, mixing with a bad crowd. When she was home, she frequently flouted the house rules by drinking and smoking in her room. She was rude, abrasive, and hostile to her grandparents, sometimes even physically aggressive. The local police logged over 30 calls to the house in under a year. On these occasions, Cassie was openly abusive, not just to her grandparents but to the responding officers as well.
Cassie Bjorge also continued another of her bad habits while living in Lawrenceville. She was a frequent runaway, staying away for days, sometimes weeks, on end. On these occasions, the long-suffering Randall and Wendy would paper the neighborhood with missing person posters, and Wendy would take to community forums on Facebook, asking for help. One such post appeared on April 1, 2017, after Cassie had disappeared yet again. At 11:18 that night, Wendy posted: “I’m going to bed soon. Maybe tomorrow will be better. All I can do is hope for the best and expect the worst. It shouldn’t be this hard for any of us.”
Several days after that post appeared, a concerned member of the extended Bjorge family contacted the police and asked them to conduct a welfare check on Wendy and Randall. Wendy had posted nothing since, and the family had been unable to reach them by phone. Officers were dispatched to the address but left after persistent knocking brought no response from within. The officers returned the next day and tried again, with the same result. The couple’s car was missing from the garage. Perhaps they’d gone on a trip without telling anyone.
A week passed with still no word from the Bjorges. Then, on April 8, the Lawrenceville Police received a call about a young couple who had been attacked in their home. The perpetrators of this incident were easily identified. The victim, Mindy Rider, reported that it was her 18-year-old brother, Johnny, who had assaulted her and her boyfriend. He’d been assisted by his girlfriend, Cassandra Bjorge. According to Mindy, she and her boyfriend had arrived home to find their house trashed, furniture and household items smashed beyond repair. In the midst of this carnage stood Johnny and Cassandra, smirking at them. An altercation followed during which she and her boyfriend were pepper-sprayed and then beaten with a baseball bat. The attackers then fled the scene in the couple’s car, leaving their own vehicle behind.
Only, this wasn’t their vehicle. When an officer ran the plate, it came back registered to Randall Bjorge. Now, those failed welfare checks at the Bjorge residence took on a more sinister tone. Officers returned to the address, and this time they forced open the door. The minute they stepped inside, they were overcome by the putrid stench of decay.
Wendy and Randall Bjorge were found laid out on the floor of their upstairs bedroom. The bodies were already considerably decomposed, but that could not hide the terrible deaths they’d suffered. The couple had been stabbed and beaten to death, each suffering multiple knife wounds and severe head trauma. It did not take a genius to work out who was responsible for this.
A task force was hastily assembled to track down the teen killers and take them into custody. It soon had a lead, tracking the fugitives to a nearby apartment complex. What followed was an hour-long standoff, with the couple barricaded inside and refusing to give themselves up. Eventually, a SWAT team was sent in to drag them out. They found the pair lying on the floor of the bathroom in a pool of their own blood. Rather than surrender, they’d slashed their wrists in an apparent suicide pact.
But, as with most killers, Bjorge and Rider were more adept at inflicting harm on others than on themselves. The wounds were superficial and easily treated at a nearby medical facility. Thereafter, detectives got down to the business of unravelling the double homicide. Both of the suspects seemed willing to talk. Playing true to type, each accused the other of committing the murders while they stood helplessly by.
It was Cassie Bjorge who broke first from this narrative. Cassie, the problem child, the attention seeker, the sociopath, wasn’t going to be denied credit for her most dreadful deed yet. The story she had to tell shocked even seasoned investigators. According to Cassie, she had grown tired of her grandparents trying to control her life. She’d decided to break free from their influence once and for all, roping in her boyfriend, Johnny Rider, to help. The scheme involved the cold-blooded murder of the two people who cared most for her in the world.
On the night of April 1, 2017, while Wendy Bjorge was upstairs making her last appeal for information about her missing granddaughter, Cassie was mere feet away, hiding in the shadows outside. She and Johnny were waiting for the lights to go out. Once they did, the pair entered the house using Cassie’s key. Johnny was carrying a tire iron and a hammer. Cassie was armed with a baseball bat and soon fetched a pair of knives from the kitchen.
Creeping up the staircase in the dark, tiptoeing along the hall, they entered the master bedroom. Here, they fell upon the elderly couple, Johnny raining down blows on Randall with the tire iron, Cassie clubbing her grandmother with the baseball bat. She then hauled Wendy from her bed, dragged her into the bathroom, and secured her hands with duct tape. Then she got to work with the knife, plunging the blade in to the hilt, withdrawing it, plunging it in again.
This was bloody, filthy work. It left the evil couple both exhausted and exhilarated. Afterward, they washed up and headed downstairs. They used Randall’s credit card to order Chinese takeout. The following morning, they sealed up the master bedroom door with duct tape, hoping to mask the putrid stench of death. That night, they hosted a drug and booze fueled party for their friends, who were oblivious to the brutalized bodies upstairs. The killers would remain at the house for a week before abandoning it to carry out their attack on Mindy Rider and her boyfriend.
Shockingly, these were not the only crimes they were planning. They had also decided to murder Johnny’s entire family and had even driven to his mother’s house before abandoning the plan when Johnny spotted an unknown vehicle in the driveway. But for that, more blood would have been spilled.
The savage murders of Wendy and Randall Bjorge shocked the city of Lawrenceville to its core. In fact, it went way beyond the city limits. The entire state was invested in the case. Many believed that the young couple deserved the death penalty. That wasn’t an option for Cassie Bjorge, but Johnny Rider certainly could have felt the sharp end of the needle had he not struck a deal and agreed to plead guilty. He offered a heartfelt apology at the trial in which he labeled his acts as evil and said that he “deserved hellfire” for what he’d done. As for Cassie, she made no statement but instead sat in the witness box, silently sobbing. Were those tears for her murdered grandparents or for herself? Knowing the nature of the young woman, it was likely the latter.
And Cassie had every reason to be tearful over her fate. The sentence of the court was life in prison with a minimum term of 60 years before she is eligible for parole. That puts her at 77 years of age before she has a shot at freedom, older than the grandparents she so brutally massacred.
Cassandra Bjorge is currently an inmate at Arrendale State Prison. Ahead of her lies at least six decades of incarceration. The girl who railed so fiercely against following the rules will spend the bulk of her life living under the strictest regulations imaginable. The girl who was so determined to follow her own path will now have that path plotted out for her in mundane detail. If ever there is poetic justice in the world, this is it.
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