Carly Gregg: Callous teen who shot mother in face then calmly showed body to friends found guilty

Killer schoolgril Carly Gregg has been found guilty of murdering her mom and trying to kill her stepdad.

The 15-year-old cried as the verdict was handed down by the jury, just two hours after they began their deliberation.

She had earlier rejected a 40-year plea deal offered by Mississippi state prosecutors after they charged her with shooting dead her mom, Ashley, inside their home on March 19.

During the trial, she shocked onlookers when she was seen stifling giggles in court.

Gregg calmly hid a Magnum .357 handgun behind her back before blasting her mother, maths teacher Ashley Smylie, three times.

An appalled court heard she then chillingly used her dead mother’s mobile to lure her stepfather, Heath Smylie, 39 – texting: “Are you almost home, honey?”

When he opened the kitchen door at their home in Brandon, Mississippi, she shot him too, although he survived and wrestled the gun from her before she fled.

Gregg, now 15, is being held in solitary confinement.

She admits killing her mother and wounding her stepfather, but denies first-degree murder, attempted murder and evidence tampering.

She even had a fit of the giggles when one of her lawyers wrote a note on a piece of paper next to her in court.

Live silent footage from the trial showed her smiling before she covered her mouth with her hand to stifle her reaction.

Bridget Todd, defending, has told Rankin County Court in Mississippi there were three victims on the day of the shootings – not just Mr and Mrs Smylie, but Gregg herself, adding: “She loved her mother.”

Rather than accept an offer to plead guilty and get 40 years, Gregg risked life without parole by pleading insanity, claiming that she cannot remember the killing in March.

The court has heard claims that she was reading the 19th century novel Crime And Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky, at the time of the shootings.

Its anti-hero, the student Raskolnikov, convinces himself he is justified in murdering and robbing an elderly female pawnbroker because it will help him, an “extraordinary” individual, achieve great things.

He gets eight years in a labour camp after being declared insane.

On the day of the killing, Gregg’s mother drove the straight-A student to Northwest Rankin high school, where Mrs Smylie had been teacher of the year.

But prosecutor Katheryn Newman said revelations about Gregg’s “secret life” – using vape pens to take marijuana, having phones to text till late – were about to lead to murder.

Friends say she began using marijuana six weeks earlier, and was taking it four times a week, as well as experimenting with cocaine and magic mushrooms.

They had dismissed as teenage talk her saying she “hated her mom” and was “gonna kill her”.

Gregg, whose social media account was entitled “Heinous war crimes”, had argued with a friend that day at school, leaving him so worried that he texted Mrs Smylie, revealing what her daughter was up to.

Ms Newman said that minutes after Mrs Smylie drove her daughter home at 3.30pm, she went into Gregg’s bedroom to confiscate her marijuana vapes.

Home security video from the family kitchen shows Gregg leave the room, apparently to fetch the Magnum from under her mother’s bed, before walking past the camera again with her hand, and presumably the pistol, hidden behind her back.

Moments later shots and a scream ring out as Gregg goes into her own room and shoots her mother twice in the face and once in the neck.

She then invited a friend over and after asking, “Are you squeamish around dead bodies?”, showed off her mother’s fresh corpse.

The friend, named only as BW, said Gregg told her: “I put three in my mom, and I got three more waiting for my stepdad when he gets home – two for the head, one for the chest.”

BW testified: “She asked if I wanted to go outside while she took care of her stepdad.”

BW was in the back yard when three more shots rang out. Mr Smylie said: “When I opened the door... the gun went off in my face before the door was three or four inches wide. It went off two more times, but my hand was on the gun after the first shot, and I twisted it from Carly.”

His stepdaughter screamed “like she had seen a demon” as she fled and vaulted a fence.

She was captured soon after.

Mr Smylie, who was grazed in the shoulder by a bullet, was horrified to find his wife’s body.

Remarkably, he said his stepdaughter remained “a sweet little girl” and “was not herself’”when carrying out the shootings.

He said he spoke to her every day, and their relationship was “good”.

He said her bipolar father Kevin Gregg had “constantly” taken drugs in her presence and given her beer when she was 12.

Mrs Smylie is said to have kept the Magnum handy in case her ex-husband turned up.

Gregg faced other childhood trauma – when she was four a sister died and her parents divorced, and at 11 she became depressed and began cutting herself.

Psychiatrist Dr Andrew Clark told the court he believed she “blacked out” for up to 90 minutes during the shootings, and was told by her she had “heard voices”.

But Michael Smith, prosecuting, dismissed Gregg’s amnesia as “convenient”, and said her ability to hide the gun from the security camera and brag of her plan to follow killing her mother by shooting Mr Smylie showed she knew “the difference between right and wrong”.