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GREENSBORO — She is the mystery woman at the center of the tragedy that took the lives of five children, all related to her by blood or marriage.

Authorities say the late Mary Ann Holder is the prime suspect in the gunshot slayings of her two sons, two nieces and a nephew on Nov. 20. The gruesome events also include shooting her ex-boyfriend, plus her subsequent suicide as a deputy approached her parked car that morning.

Friends and family struggle with that explanation for a catastrophe that rocked the close-knit Pleasant Garden community, where she lived on and off the past 20 years.

“It feels like we’re looking at a puzzle with the outside put together, but the whole inside is missing,” says Mark Couch, whose wife was a close friend of Holder. “The ballistics may line up. The physical evidence may point to it. But in our hearts, it doesn’t fit.”

The killings could not be carried out by the Holder they knew, he and others insist — not in her right mind. Either that, or she deceived them for years about her true nature — a cold-blooded killer masquerading as a conscientious parent, loyal friend and generous caregiver.

“She always said, 'My kids are my life,’” said David Stokes, who dated her for much of the past year. “After seeing her with them, she loved those kids more than life itself, I guarantee you.”

The Guilford County Sheriff’s Office continues to probe such quandaries as who got shot in what order and why. A report will be forthcoming with chemical tests and other forensic evidence that could provide a more definitive picture.

But a related mystery runs just as deep. Who was the real Mary Ann Holder?

Part of the answer lies somewhere in a web of  failed marriage and broken relationships that span two generations in several families. It centers on Holder’s efforts to fulfill a deathbed promise to a dear friend. And it involves her apparent panic about a threatened lawsuit.

Rough beginnings

Holder was born out of wedlock in June 1975. The father was a man her mother turned to as her first marriage disintegrated, said Frances “Frankie” Holder, Mary Ann’s mom.

“If you read between the lines, my first husband and I had problems,” she said, asserting he was repeatedly unfaithful.

The second man also mistreated her, she said, leaving her virtually penniless with two sons from her first marriage and six months pregnant with her daughter.

To the rescue came James C. Holder, a former Guilford County resident who “stepped up to the plate” by marrying her, adopting her three kids and helping raise them, she said.

Mary Ann Holder moved around a fair amount with her new family, but spent a lot of her childhood in and around McLeansville, her mother said.

One day at school, she met the girl who would become her closest friend and, in the end, the source of much sorrow — Carrie Beth Hunt.

“We were in gym class at McLeansville Middle School. I had already met her twin sister, Mary Leigh, in science class earlier that day,” Holder wrote in a hospital blog Feb. 27, as Beth’s life ebbed away from an unyielding lung infection.

“Beth was sitting on the bleachers and I could hear her singing a song. She had a pretty voice and I asked her what the song was. She started singing it a little louder ... The song was, “While He was on the cross, I was on His mind.”

The three girls were inseparable, visiting  each other’s homes, sharing family vacations, one knowing the other’s thought before it was spoken.

Growing up fast

Another benefit for Holder in knowing Beth and Leigh turned out to be their musician brother, Robert “Rocky” Smith Jr., who was two years older.

Rocky and the twin girls, along with two other brothers, were the biological children of a mother who was unable for medical reasons to keep up with such a large family.

The biological parents allowed the twin girls to be adopted by the Hunt family, a couple they knew through their Greensboro church, Gospel for the World Tabernacle on Pineland Street.

Similarly, Rocky was adopted by his grandparents, Tootsie and Pa, who lived in the house on Cocoa Drive where, two decades later, four of the Nov. 20  shootings would occur.

Holder and Rocky had known each other since their days at Pleasant Garden Elementary, but as she moved into her middle teens, their friendship blossomed and one thing led to another.

“I knew she was pregnant two weeks before she told me,” Frankie Holder said of the 15-year-old who came home from school in tears one day in 1991. “She said, 'Mom, I can’t tell you;  it’s bad, it’s bad.’

“And I said, 'Well, let me tell you, Mary Ann, you’re pregnant.’”

Rocky persuaded Holder’s mother to let the two teens marry. After a while, the newlyweds took up residence on Cocoa Drive with Rocky’s grandparents and their new baby, Christina Nichole, the only one of their three children not killed Nov. 20.

Life after marriage

The years went by quickly. Holder got her GED and entered the work world in roles ranging from caregiver to paralegal assistant. Robert Dylan was born in 1994, followed by Zachary Lee two years later.

The marriage to Rocky broke up about the time Zack was born in 1996, and Rocky left the Cocoa Drive house on the outskirts of Pleasant Garden so Holder could tend to his aging grandparents.

“We were too much alike,” Rocky said last week of the breakup. “And we were very young when we got married.”

They weathered some disputes in the early years of their divorce to become good friends who worked harmoniously on behalf of their kids, said Rocky Smith, who subsequently remarried. “I can’t say anything bad about Mary Ann. I don’t know anyone who could.”

After the divorce, Holder started a romantic relationship with another man she knew from school, living with him and her children in several locations after Tootsie and Pa became infirm and had to sell the Cocoa Drive house.

“She said she was never getting married again,” friend Stacy Couch said of that relationship, which lasted more than 10 years.

Holder remained close friends with Rocky’s sister, Beth, who married a man named Brian James Suttles and moved into a house in northeast Greensboro they bought from Project Homestead.

Beth introduced Holder to her pastor about five years ago as “my lifelong friend and also my former sister-in-law.”

“She said, 'Even though the marriage didn’t work out, she’s still my best friend,’” recalled the Rev. Donnie Pickeral, of Aycock Fellowship Ministries in Greensboro.

Pickeral remembers three summers back, when Beth’s adoptive mother lay gravely ill for several weeks. Pickeral arrived at the hospital in the middle of the night.

A half hour later — 3:15 a.m. — here comes Holder with Dylan and Zack in tow.

A friend in need

But the trio had dwindled to a duo: Beth’s twin, Leigh, died in a 1999 car wreck.

And Beth Suttles struggled with problems of her own stemming from fragile health and her husband’s drug addiction, according to court papers filed by Beth Suttles and Holder.

Ultimately, that addiction led him to physically abuse Beth, sending her into early labor with her third child, Holder said in court papers filed Nov. 18 —  two days before the murders.  Efforts to reach Brian Suttles for comment were unsuccessful.

Only days after the premature birth of baby Shianne, Beth would be back in the hospital with the respiratory ailment that took her life on March 9.

Holder stepped in to help orchestrate her friend’s care during the next three weeks, opening her home to Beth’s newborn and her 8-year-old daughter, Hanaleigh. The Suttles’ older child, Ricky, already had been living with Holder and her kids since July 2008.

Dozens of people who knew Beth through her church work followed her unsuccessful fight for life, which Holder chronicled on a CaringBridge website where people can document the progress of loved ones with serious medical issues.

It seems impossible to square the sensitive, caring person writing blog entries full of praise and love for Beth’s children — Ricky, Hana and newborn Shianne — with the ruthless Nov. 20 killings.

“I am heart broken,” Holder posted at 6:18 a.m. on March 9 as her friend neared death. “Beth, for the past 25 years, I have been there for you, and I will continue to be there for your kids. ALWAYS.”

Challenges at home

The fifth victim in the killings, Makayla Woods, began living with Holder in recent months at 923 Cocoa Drive.

By that time, Holder long since had moved back into the place that held so many of her kids’ earliest memories. A family friend bought it for his own use from Tootsie and Pa, but later offered Holder a lease.

Makayla was Holder’s niece — not by blood, but through the marriage of Holder’s half-brother, James Lee Holder of Liberty, to the teenager’s biological mother.

“Kayla” came seeking a haven from marital issues at home, said Rocky Smith.

“I knew James (Holder) and his wife were going through some challenges, and Makayla felt safe there,” Rocky said of Mary Ann Holder’s house, adding that he put the girl’s need for shelter above moral qualms about her living in the same house with 17-year-old Dylan.

“Next thing you know, they were girlfriend and boyfriend,” Rocky said, something that raised red flags for him. “I was 17 and Mary Ann was 15 when we got married. I had to talk to my son and give him the insight from how that affected me.”

Some of Holder’s neighbors looked on with concern. The house was lit up at all hours, people coming and going according to no apparent schedule, said Teresa Scott, who lives across the street.

“How on earth could she get those children, living the life she lived?” she asked last week, referring to Holder being guardian for so many kids. “I’m 75 years old and I have never seen a family such as this.”

The effect of an affair

Initial reports after the murders and suicide suggested the tragedy involved a recently ended love affair between Holder and Randy Lamb, a married man who served with her a few years back on the Pleasant Garden Community Center board of directors.

Not true, say Holder’s mother and friends. The affair ended at least 18 months ago, Frankie Holder said: “I know that for a fact because that’s how close me and my daughter were.”

“I want people to know Randy Lamb was not her boyfriend,” said Stokes, her boyfriend in the months leading up to her death. “I want them to know she had a man in her life that loved her, and it wasn’t him.”

Jennifer Lamb, Randy’s wife, declined to comment about anything related to the Nov. 20 tragedy, referring questions to a Greensboro lawyer who did not return phone calls.

Frankie Holder and several of Holder’s friends say the couple were harassing her with a threatened lawsuit stemming from the affair.

“She said, 'I was slapped with a $250,000 alienation of affection (lawsuit),’” Holder’s mom said of a conversation they had two days before the Sunday morning murders.

When Stokes went out to dinner that same Friday night with Holder and the children in her care, she “wasn’t herself” and finally told him about the lawsuit, Stokes said.

“She was crying. She was upset. And we talked. I know we talked for an hour and a half about this,” Stokes said. “I told her, you know, you don’t have to do this. They’ll never win this case.”

'It makes zero sense’

Her friend, Stacy Couch, thinks Holder feared the lawsuit because it could raise questions about her character, something that might prevent her from getting permanent custody of Beth’s children as she promised.

Her friends say they had no idea she gave the Lambs a check for $10,000 on Saturday, the day before the killings — a payment investigators revealed shortly after the tragedy, apparently aimed at heading off the lawsuit.

And when Stokes went swimming with Holder and the kids that Saturday afternoon at Grimsley High School, she seemed “a little tired” but not distraught like the night before, Stokes said. In fact, she bought $200 in groceries for her household during the day and seemed calm when they parted around 11:30 p.m., mere hours before the shootings, Stokes said.

It makes “zero sense” for a person to buy groceries, let alone cut someone a $10,000 check, while contemplating suicide and multiple homicides, Mark Couch said.

Yet he, Stacy Couch and Stokes acknowledge that unless some new wrinkle emerges, the evidence against their late friend is daunting — including the deputy who spotted her parked car that Sunday morning and apparently saw her take her own life.

Rocky Smith, grieving father, shares their skepticism about the official version of the tragedy.

“I have a hard time believing that’s how it went down,” he said. “But I know the Guilford County Sheriff’s Office — along with a lot of other agencies — is working hard putting it all together in a way where I can know what happened.

 “I don’t know that I’ll rest until I get that explanation.”

Staff librarian Diane Lamb contributed to this report.

Contact Taft Wireback at 373-7100 or taft.wireback@news-record.com