Shocking theory behind grandma's broad daylight murder-suicide
Warning: This article contains distressing content that some readers may find upsetting.
Court papers have revealed the sinister reason behind why a grandmother allegedly killed her daughter-in-law before killing herself.
Terminally ill ex-probation officer Kathleen Leigh, 65, fatally shot 45-year-old Marisa Galloway, who shares a child with Leigh’s son, Zachariah Reed, on a New York street before taking her own life.
Now Ms Galloway’s grieving parents, Nancy and John, have filed an emergency court petition claiming Mr Reed has run off to his “multimillion-dollar home” in Chicago with their grandchild Lili under the pretext of “mourning” his mother’s death.
He has also barred the Galloways from any contact, either in person or via technology, with the child.
“Clearly, [Mr Reed’s] mother had a deliberate plan to kill Marisa in order to provide custody for her son,” the court papers charge, according to an exclusive report by the New York Post.
“Unfortunately, [Mr Reed] has demonstrated an absolute intention to further those same goals of his mother as he has refused to provide us with any access to Lili at all in almost 3 weeks.”
According to legal papers filed on Friday, the grandparents, who live a 12 hour drive away in New Jersey, are asking a Manhattan Supreme Court judge to pass on Marisa’s parenting time, hashed out in a 2022 custody agreement with Mr Reed.
They are also asking that Mr Reed be forced to live in the New York until Lili is 18 so that she can keep a close relationship with her grandparents and with her half-sister, Mariel, the 1-year-old daughter Marisa had with a sperm donor who currently lives with the grandparents.
“While Marisa was always the best mother, we would love to be involved with all aspects of taking care of an infant, toddler, and ultimately the little girl that Lili currently is,” Nancy wrote.
Nancy said she is “extremely uncomfortable” being forced to file the petition but worried Lili would become estranged from her mum’s side of the family if they didn’t intervene.
The grandmother laid out the history of Marisa and Mr Reed’s “tumultuous relationship” since the pair split and their “contentious” custody battle while she also claimed the pair dated before Marisa became pregnant but said their relationship ended “driven by the interference of [Mr Reed’s] mother.”
On the day of the heinous crime on July 26th 2024, Marisa was loading her car and had put Mariel in her seat with plans to visit her parents for a few days.
She was approached by Leigh while she was putting something in the boot, and shot her once in the back of the head and again in the back before taking her own life.
Before her heinous crime, Leigh scrawled a seven-page letter “For Police” describing how she felt Marisa was trying to alienate Lili from her dad and saying she suspected Marisa of abusing Lili, despite child services clearing Marisa in two probes launched by Mr Reed.
“She took away the child’s mother in order to make her son happy … it’s shocking,” a law-enforcement source had told the New York Post of Leigh right after the alleged murder-suicide.
Image credits: Manhattan Supreme Court