Someone heard him exclaim: "I hope I'm not upsetting your trading day". In all, four died in the office.Barton then fled across busy Piedmont Road to another four-floor office building and the offices of Momentum Securities where had also been a client. He arrived at the All-Tech Investment Group shortly after 2 pm, where he was heard to observe that it was a bad trading day (the New York stock market was indeed plummeting) and that "it was going to get worse" Shortly before 3pm he opened fire. He said he hoped to meet them in the after-life.Reading them yesterday, Mr Mercer could not hold back his own tears, and reporters were also sobbing.Of Leigh Ann, from whom he was separating, Barton said he killed her because she was "one of the main reasons for my demise".There was nothing to explain, however, what drove Barton to take the bloodshed so much further on Thursday. He already had it."In addition to the longer letter, Barton left a short note with each of the bodies, expressing his love for them. Wake up at nights so afraid, so terrified that I couldn't be that afraid while awake It has taken its toll I have come to hate this life in this system of things I have come to have no hope. I killed the children to exchange them for five minutes of pain for a lifetime of pain.

I forced myself to do it to keep them from suffering so much later .. The fears of the father are transferred to the son It was my father to me and from me to my son. Why did I?"Barton's letter continued: "I have been dying since October. He waited until Wednesday night to do the same to the two children, Matthew, 11, and Mychelle, 7. He left them under blankets on their small beds."There was little pain," he wrote of killing his family "All of them were dead in less than five minutes. I hit them with the hammer in their sleep and them put them face down in the bathtub to make sure they did not wake up in pain To make sure they were dead I'm sorry I wish I didn't Words cannot tell the agony. But charges were never brought.Barton always asserted his innocence in those murders. This week, he did so again in the first letter found by investigators at his apartment "There is no reason .. to lie now," he wrote.

But he was responsible for the unspeakable scene that awaited the police officers in the humble two-bedroom unit. He directed them to the bodies, told them how he had killed them. And, again, he tried to explain why.First, on Tuesday night, after she was asleep, he bludgeoned his wife, Leigh Ann. He wrapped the body in a blanket and stuffed it in a cupboard. But there was something else not boring about Barton: in 1993, his first wife and her mother were hacked and beaten to death in a camping resort in Alabama Barton was there and was the prime suspect. This week, he had promised to buy his son a lizard so he could earn his Cub Scouts' reptiles badge.

On Tuesday, a cheque he wrote for $50,000 to cover stock exchange losses bounced. He recently took a loss of at least $80,000.Barton might have been the quintessential, boring suburbanite He was known for his broad smile but a private demeanour He was a former Scoutmaster. Also - another first - an apparent stock market driven massacre.It left a tangle of questions and concerns. In particular about the pressures of "day-trading" on the stock exchange - a very mid-Nineties world, born of Internet technology and the bull market, to which Barton, we know, was deeply devoted. In a spray of bullets from the guns he held in each hand, he killed nine people, before fleeing and later committing suicide.What he left behind was one of the worst killing sprees in America's history and the bloodiest ever in the city of Atlanta.

But it ended in a mad and terrifying massacre on Thursday afternoon at the offices of two stocks and shares day-trading businesses on a gleaming business campus in Buckhead, a northern suburb of Atlanta. One more time, a prosperous community in America is coping with a bloody tragedy that has left 13 dead, including Barton himself, and 20 injured.The death trail began slowly and deliberately at the suburban apartment he had taken with his second wife, from whom he was estranged, and the two children from his first marriage They were his first victims. "For all intents and purposes, I think this case has been concluded," said Jimmy Mercer, the Atlanta police chief, yesterday morning, his voice still shaking from reading out the letters. But the shock of Barton's killings will not quickly dissipate Nor will the disbelief. He left a detailed letter with the bodies of his wife and children It was meant as an explanation for what he had done. It talked of his depression, of the downward spiral his life had taken, of his fear that the dark moods he had inherited from his father would be passed on to his own children. But no explanation, not even from his own hand, will be adequate to make us understand.