Early on New Year's Day, Bill Clark, a long distance trucker who was picking up cargo from Maine, decided to let his wife, Mary, sleep in, instead of calling her, knowing that she would call him when she woke up.
When he did not hear from her by 9 a.m., he called their White Bluff, Tenn., home, where his mother, Gail, 66, of Orange, Mass., had been visiting with the couple and their two teenage foster children.
Instead, a detective picked up the phone and told him that his 38-year-old wife and his mother had been fatally shot. Later, Clark learned that the couple's foster children, Jeffery Byrd Johnson Jr., 15, and James Earl Garrett, 17, had been charged with first-degree murder in the shootings.
The women, he said police told him, had been shot execution-style.
"I drove from Maine, and hell came with me," Clark, 50, said yesterday in a telephone interview at his home in Tennessee, where he arrived early yesterday morning after driving for 22 hours. "I'm angry. I'm hurt. I'm upset. I've got emotions I don't even know what they are. I don't know what I'm doing."
District Attorney General Dan Alsobrooks said he has filed a petition in court to have Garrett and Johnson, whose names police released yesterday, tried as adults. The teenagers will have a detention hearing Friday, said Alsobrooks. If convicted as adults, they face a maximum punishment of life impris onment.
In a second blow, Clark learned yesterday that the father of his wife's 16-year-old daughter, who had been living with the couple in Tennessee, wants his child back immediately.
"Worst part is, I lost two, and now I'm losing a third," Clark said.
Clark, who said he has not slept since police told him of the shootings, spent yesterday cleaning up his modular home, where the carpets were soaked with blood.
He said he understood that his mother had been shot in the back and that his wife appeared to have been shot in the head.
Police declined yesterday to describe the deaths. Alsobrooks declined to give a motive.
Clark said he has no idea why his foster children would have shot the women.
Johnson had a rocky start when he came into the Clark household. He had problems at school and was locked up in a juvenile facility for assault after a fistfight with a classmate.
Mary Clark went to court and pleaded with a judge to let him come home.
"She fought for that kid," Clark said.
Things were better for a while, he said. Johnson improved at school and was respectful to his foster parents, calling them Mr. Bill and Ms. Mary.
"Very polite," Clark said. "It was 'Yes, sir. No, sir.' "
After Garrett moved in a month ago, Johnson adopted his penchant for wearing baggy pants and shirts, Clark said. The teenagers, he said, sometimes stayed out too late and often sneaked out of the house, to the couple's chagrin.
But neither youth seemed violent, Clark said.
"James was quiet," he said of Garrett. "He talked, you could hardly hear him."
Clark, however, was relieved when Garrett asked to leave the home. He was scheduled to leave Dec. 27, but his departure was delayed by the Tennessee Department of Children's Services, Clark said.
Now, the widower said he is furious with the agency, which he said never warned him the youths were dangerous.
Rob Johnson, a spokesman for the department, said officials are conducting an internal review, but it appears that caseworkers had been checking in regularly with the family. He declined to say why the youths had been placed in state custody or if they have a criminal past, citing confidentiality rules.
"It looks like things were running smoothly," Johnson said. "We didn't have any indications of problems. . . . It's very tragic. It's very sad. Our caseworkers are shocked."
Clark said he is planning a candlelight vigil for his wife and mother, who will be cremated and whose remains he will take to his father, Bruce, in Orange. Gail Clark, who had been visiting for the holidays, was supposed to arrive home Monday.
"I bought her a new car," Bruce Clark said yesterday. "I was going to take it to the airport and pick her up in it. Now she'll never see it."
Maria Cramer can be reached at mcramer@globe.com.
