Rocky Barton was born on July 28, 1956, in Wilmington, Ohio, the first of Don and Wilma Barton's four children. Barton, his two sisters and brother grew up in a house on Main Street, in Springboro, Ohio, where Don Barton also ran his own insurance company. The Bartons separated in 1972, when their son was 16, and Rocky Barton eventually moved in with his father.

Growing up, Barton says he felt like the "black sheep" of the family and turned to alcohol and drugs by the time he was 13. "My mother had her hands full with my three younger siblings. I found comfort in doing drugs and the people that did the drugs was like a family," he said.

In 1974, he dropped out of high school in his senior year and married former Springboro High School classmate, Vickie Lee Carrier. The couple moved to Oregon and had a son together, but in 1976, Carrier obtained a restraining order against her husband, and the marriage ended.

Over the next decade, according to Barton, alcohol and drug abuse consumed his life, and his criminal record reflects a cross-country trajectory marked by arrests for marijuana and cocaine possession in New Jersey and drunken driving convictions in Ohio.

"I guess I thought of myself as a recreational user. Well, there is no recreational user," Barton says. "When you're using drugs and alcohol, trouble's not far behind."

He took a number of odd jobs during that time, including working with horses on a ranch in Kentucky that his father owned. While in Kentucky, he married his second wife, Brenda Johnson.

In 1991, Barton was sentenced to 15 years on charges of theft and attempted murder of his second wife in her Madison County home. Johnson claimed that Barton beat and bound her feet and hands with tape and electrical cord before ransacking her home and forcing her to lick blood from his hands and shoes. Johnson said Barton then stabbed her in the back and slit her throat before fleeing in her car. He was arrested one month later in San Diego.

While serving time at the Otter Creek Correctional Center, Barton received his GED and met his third wife, Janie Harper, while she was accompanying a friend to the prison on visiting day. The two married in the prison in 1994.

His relationship with his new wife didn't survive on the outside. Barton went to live with her in 1999, after his parole, and they divorced in 2000. Janie Barton told police that her estranged husband was harassing her on the phone and vandalizing her home. Barton was arrested for domestic violence and sent back to Kentucky for violating his probation.

While in Kentucky, he reconnected with his childhood friend, Kimbirli Reynolds Reising, who was in the process of ending her 20-year marriage to one of Barton's close friends.

The two married in prison in June 2001. Following his release in 2002, the couple moved into Don Barton's farmhouse in Warren County, Ohio, with Kimbirli's 17-year-old daughter, Jamie.

On Jan. 16, 2003, Kimbirli told her husband she was leaving him. He flew into a rage, and later that day, as she arrived at their farmhouse to pick up her belongings, he shot her. 

The crime: A farmhouse ambush and a suicide attempt