Gregory Green killed both his families, he admitted by pleading guilty in a Michigan courtroom on Wednesday.
In 1991, Green pleaded guilty to murdering his wife, who was then seven months pregnant, then called 911 to report himself. After serving 16 years for the second-degree murder charge, Green was paroled with the help of a pastor—whose daughter he married after he left prison.
Green raised Faith Harris-Green’s two children from a previous marriage and together they had a son and daughter.
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Last year he murdered all four children and made his wife watch. Just as he had done 25 years before, he called the police and said he was guilty of the murders.
“He wanted to get it over with,” Green’s attorney Charles Longstreet II told The Daily Beast of Green’s guilty plea, which included four counts of second-degree murder, torture, assault, and firearm possession. Green faces 45 to 100 years in prison, Longstreet said.
At 1:15 a.m. on Sept. 21, 2016, Green called 911 and told operators he had killed his four children, he told operators. When police arrived at Green’s home in Dearborn Heights, he was standing in the driveway with his hands up, officials told the Detroit Free Press.
Inside the tidy, one-story house, police discovered a horrific scene. Green’s wife was bound to a chair in the basement, where Green had shot her in the feet and slashed her face and throat. (She survived.) Lying before her were the children from her previous marriage: Chadney Allen Jr., 19, and Kara Allen, 17. Both had been bound and shot dead.
Upstairs, police found Green and his wife’s two daughters.
Koi, 5, and Kaleigh, 4, could have been sleeping, but they were dead. Green had rigged his car’s tailpipe into the back of the vehicle and and left both girls inside the running vehicle to die, prosecutors said. Then he had carried them back into the house and placed them in bed.
They bore no visible injuries.
Before she was tortured, Harris-Green had previously warned of her husband’s violent tendencies.
“He’s trying to make me leave our home,” she wrote in a 2013 request for a restraining order, obtained by the Free Press. “He’s being beligerant [sic], kicking things. He kicked the couch while the baby was sleeping on it. Just kicking things, threatening me and saying if I don’t leave, things are going to get ugly. Jumped at me like he was going to attack me. This went on for hours.”
The restraining order was denied. When she filed for divorce later that year, Green was never served, and her case was dismissed, the Free Press reported. Then in August 2016, she filed for a second time. One month later, Green had murdered her four children.
“Words cannot describe the horrific tragedy our family is experiencing over the untimely deaths of Chadney, Kara, Koi, and Kaleigh,” Harris-Green’s sister wrote on a GoFundMe page, where the family sought funeral costs for the four children. “There is no way that a mother could fathom laying to rest one child, let alone all four of her children at once without life insurance.”
Funeral attendees wore pink. It matched the flowers on the siblings’ caskets and the teddy bears the family had placed underneath. Some 1,700 mourners attended the service, the Detroit News reported. Chadney, Harris-Green’s eldest child was remembered as a gifted artist. His sister Kara was a star student and an aspiring doctor. Koi, five, was the family’s “princess” and loved wearing dresses. Kaleigh, four, was her mother’s “Sweet Pea,” and loved to sing.
It was the second funeral of Green’s making.
In 1991, he was married to Tonya Clayton Green, who was seven months pregnant with their child. But the couple’s relationship was troubled. One of Tonya’s friends told the News that Green had changed suddenly, and that Tonya no longer felt safe at home, and that she planned on packing her clothes and leaving Green. Before she had the chance, he stabbed her 10 times with a steak knife, killing her and her unborn child.
Just as he would do 25 years later, Green called 911 to report the murder. “I stabbed her. She’s in the kitchen,” he told officers, according to a 1991 police report. He pleaded no contest to murder charges and spent 16 years in prison.
During those years, Apostle Fred Harris and members of Green’s immediate family called on the Department of Corrections to release him on parole, describing him as a changed man. By 2008, a parole board agreed, releasing Green to marry and murder again. It is unclear whether Green-Harris knew of Green’s criminal past.
Longstreet told The Daily Beast he considered filing an insanity plea for his client in his latest murder case, until a psychological analysis found Green competent to stand trial. During the Wednesday court appearance, Longstreet said Green felt remorse.
“Unfortunately I took the lives of Kaleigh, Koi, Chadney [and] Kara,” Green admitted during his Wednesday court appearance. “I shot my ex-wife.”
Green will be sentenced in March.
