The cell phone reception was not very good in the hallway of the school, so Laura [not her real name] decided to go into the bathroom. It was not the first time that she opted for this solution and it had always worked for her when she needed to talk on the phone. She opened the door absentmindedly and, when she looked up, she saw a boy on his back completely naked, who gave her the impression that he was changing his clothes to train.
Next, the student ran out of the place without giving much importance to being caught red-handed. Hours later, Laura found out that, if she had stopped a few more seconds to look, she would have discovered the mutilated body of her mathematics teacher and her classmate Philip Chism, 14, stabbing him a dozen times with a cutter.
Philip Chism was born on January 21, 1999 in Clarksville (Tennessee) and, shortly before committing this atrocious murder, he had moved with his mother to Danvers, a small city in the American West and close to Boston, after his parents’ divorce. .
The change of life and school, but mainly the conflictive separation from his parents, was an emotional blow for this adolescent with a solitary and shy character. This is how his own classmates describe him, who saw in Philip an apparently normal boy with the sole objective of integrating.
However, classes were difficult for him and he preferred to spend time drawing and listening to music, instead of paying attention to the lesson. One of the school’s most beloved teachers, Colleen Ritzer, 24, noticed Philip’s difficulties and tried to help him. She knew that the teenager was going through a tough time personally and that he just needed a helping hand. And that made her unique.
That is why she was so admired by her students. That positive and enthusiastic personality of hers made everyone look forward to her algebra classes. Colleen conveyed excitement to those around her. Everyone except the new student.
On the morning of October 22, 2013, Philip arrived at Danvers High School with several bags that he left in his locker. Inside it were gloves, spare clothes, a mask and a cutter. Nobody knew the contents of those bags nor what would happen at the end of the day.
At the end of math class with Colleen, the teacher urged her to stay. She offered to give him remedial lessons so he could pass the exam. However, Philip began yelling at her without Colleen being able to calm him down. “He probably got upset when the teacher asked him about her family, and this reminded him of the bad times he was going through with her parents’ divorce,” declared one of the murderer’s classmates who witnessed the fight.
Minutes later, the teacher went to the bathroom without realizing that someone was following her. It was Philip who, stealthily, entered the cabin with a cutter in his hand and gloves on. It was shortly before three in the afternoon, once the school day had ended. Once inside, the teenager pounced on the woman, violently raped her and stabbed her with the weapon up to sixteen times.
At one point, an absent-minded student who was looking for cell phone reception entered the bathroom and caught her classmate completely naked in the act. However, faced with the shame of seeing him without clothes, she ran away without noticing that, a little further away, there was a completely mutilated woman, and that this was her teacher.
Next, the young man left the bathroom with a hoodie covering his head and a bloody hand and headed toward the school parking lot. His objective: to find a garbage container to put his body in to get rid of it. As captured by security cameras, on the way to the exit, Philip saw and greeted several friends, but his behavior did not raise any suspicion. He acted normally, despite having murdered his teacher.
Two minutes later, the cameras again recorded both their movements and their changes of clothing. First, she put on a white t-shirt and then put on a red hoodie over it. After entering and leaving the bathroom with the container, Philip reappeared before the cameras in a white T-shirt and a black mask and headed to the elevator.
Once outside the building, Philip dragged the container to a wooded area behind the school and raped the teacher’s limp body with a tree branch. He then hid Colleen’s naked body under some dry leaves and placed a note. “I hate you all,” read the message found next to him.
Finally, Philip returned to the school dressed in a black shirt, glasses, and bloody jeans, gathered his things from the locker, and fled. The following hours, the families of the victim and the perpetrator desperately searched for them and reported him missing.
Initially, police interviewed both students and staff at the center to find possible witnesses. Several students pointed out the last steps of the teacher and the classmate, commented on the discussion between the two and the investigators reviewed the security cameras.
The images showed how Colleen entered the bathroom and did not come out, while Philip did it several times, wearing different clothes, and even pushing a garbage container. When inspecting the sink, the agents came across blood stains. The teenager had just become a suspect.
The important thing now was to locate the young man and to do so they followed the trail of the security cameras outside and on the street, in addition to monitoring the movements in the teacher’s bank account. By this time, they had already discovered that he had stolen Colleen’s wallet with the credit cards.
The payments for a hamburger, some fries and a drink at a fast food establishment, as well as a movie ticket to see the movie Gravity, were what gave away the murderer and led investigators to arrest him when he ended up on a nearby street. to the room.
Once at the police station, officers searched his backpack and found two crucial incriminating pieces of evidence: the murder weapon, a bloody box cutter, and Colleen’s underwear. Added to this was that she was wearing jeans completely stained with blood and that her underwear had both traces of semen and red liquid.
When they asked him about the origin of the blood during the interrogation, Philip responded with “it’s from the baby”, alluding to his teacher, and pointed out with disdain that the woman was buried in the forest. The next day, scientific police recovered Colleen’s body and charged the minor with aggravated rape, armed robbery and first-degree murder.
During the two years it took for the trial to take place, two important events occurred in the teenager’s life. On the one hand, Philip attacked and tried to murder a doctor at the juvenile detention center, although he was never convicted for it.
And, on the other hand, his defense lawyer tried to ensure his immunity from prosecution by alleging that, at the time of the teacher’s murder, he was in the middle of a psychotic break. The court rejected his request and Philip was charged and tried as an adult. Nobody believed that the minor had impaired cognitive and volitional abilities.
On December 15, 2015, a jury found Philip Chism guilty of first-degree murder, aggravated rape, and armed robbery. The security cameras were a key piece in the hearing, since they dismantled the defense strategy of a possible psychotic break. The images spoke for themselves: the young man acted coldly before and after committing the crime.
As Judge David Lowy read the sentence aloud, Philip stood, handcuffed, his face expressionless. Again, he was as impassive as he was lacking empathy. He had not even shown an iota of emotion when listening to the heartbreaking statements of his own colleagues on the stand.
“He is pure evil and evil can never be rehabilitated. We’re never going to get a second chance and neither should he,” Peggie Ritzer, Colleen’s mother, said angrily. “I will never be able to walk Colleen down the aisle for her wedding… I lost my beautiful girl,” her father, Tom, also said, completely devastated at the end of the hearing.
On February 26, 2016, the court set the student murderer’s sentence at 40 years in prison, and it will not be until then that Philip will be eligible for parole. By then, he will have already turned 54 years old.
