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Man who killed his family up for parole
Clay Shrout in 1989 and a more recent photo. THE CINCINNATI ENQUIRER
Clay Shrout has spent 25 years in jail since 1994 convictions for murders Cameron Knight | Cincinnati Enquirer | USA TODAY NETWORK
Clay Shrout has been in jail for the past 25 years, all of his adult life. This month, the man who killed his entire family and took a classroom full of students hostage could be released on parole. Shrout was 17 in 1994. By all accounts, he was smart, gifted even. He excelled as a student at Ryle High School, but there were signs he was in a spiral. His friends said he had become depressed and obsessed with death and gore. He inexplicably quit his job at Rally’s, jumping out of the window mid-shift. He brought a stun gun and bullets to school. His parents took away the keys to his truck, his phone privileges and insisted he stop listening to heavy metal and alternative rock. The stories about Shrout from the time have all the buzzwords that would later sprinkle coverage of school shooters: Anarchist Cookbook, black trench coat, combat boots. It would be another fi ve years before the Columbine school shooting in Colorado. “He wrote grotesque stories for creative writing class and began collecting knives, brass knuckles and making pipe bombs,” one reporter wrote. Shrout even has his own entry on the website schoolshooters.info, but he never hurt any of his fellow students. No shots were fi red at Ryle High School that May 25. What happened is really a tale of two crimes: the fi rst was horrifi c, but the second was, in some ways, more memorable. Today, it is easy to see the classroom takeover as a foreshadowing of things to come.
Four dead in their bedrooms Walter and Becky Shrout were college sweethearts meeting while they were both at Georgetown College. They were in their mid-20s when their son was born. In the following years, they had two daughters, Kristen and Lauren. The churchgoing family lived in a two-story house on Tiburon Drive in Florence. There was a pool in the back and fl owerbeds in the front. They owned two horses. Kristen, 14, and Lauren, 12, were both involved in gymnastics and rode the family horses at shows. They played with the family pets: Cleo the black Labrador, Lady the poodle and a gerbil.
The Shrout family lived in a two-story house on Tiburon Drive in Florence. ENQUIRER FILE PHOTO
On Tuesday, May 23, Walter and Becky were attending a school concert to watch Lauren play the xylophone. That’s the last time most people ever saw them alive. The sole account of what happened that Wednesday morning comes from Shrout’s best friend, Richard Brown. Shrout called him around 6 a.m. Brown said Shrout woke up with the intent to kill his parents. The rest of the conversation he recounted to reporters at the time: Shrout said he got up at 5 a.m. armed himself with a .380 caliber pistol and walked into his parent’s bedroom. He shot his mother fi rst, then his father. The noise brought Kristen to the doorway of her own room where she was also gunned down. Shrout didn’t say how he shot and killed his sister Lauren, but did say he shot his father a second time as he crawled toward the door of his bedroom. “He told me, ‘I wish it was a dream; I wish I could wake up,’ “ Brown said. It was the murder of his family that sent Shrout to prison. The charges related to his actions at the school were dropped as part of a plea deal, a deal that Shrout accepted to avoid the death penalty. There was no trial. The judge declared he was guilty, but mentally ill. Shrout never had to explain why he did what he did. The courts sealed his psychological evaluations.
For Gale Sams Sipple, whose son attended Ryle at the same time as Shrout, the slaying of his family outweighs anything that happened at Ryle. She thinks Shrout should stay in jail. “He has none of the things that parolees who are successful in re-entering life outside prison have; most importantly, a support system,” Sipple said. “He killed his support system that day in 1994.”
‘I could come face to face with him’ After his phone call with Brown, Shrout called another friend, then his prom date, Danielle Butsch. He drove to pick up Butsch, who went to a diff erent school, and headed for Ryle. Police later called it an abduction. Teacher Carol Kanabroski didn’t know Shrout had a gun when he walked into her trigonometry class that Wednesday. She just knew he was late and had brought a girl with him, and she wanted an explanation. When Shrout encountered his math teacher, he explained someone was holding a class hostage. Kanabroski asked who. “It was me,” Shrout said, according to students in the room, and he pulled out the gun. See SHROUT, Page 4A
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