Evil Student: A 14-Year-Old Arrived With GLOVES, a MASK, and a BOX CUTTER | True Crime Documentary

At the end of his stay in 2015, did you reach a diagnosis for Philip Chisum? >> I did. >> And what was that diagnosis? >> I made two diagnosis. One was a depressive state best described in my view as a major depressive state and another was a brief or transient psychotic episode. We once again had to go home as Tom talked to Dan and I told my 17-year-old daughter that her sister had been raped as I saw such pain and fear in her eye.

>> She steps into the staff restroom same as she has a hundred times before. Nothing about this walk feels different. Seconds behind her, a 14-year-old boy slips through the same door. He’s already pulled gloves onto his hands. Inside his backpack, a knife, a mask, a full change of clothes. The door clicks shut. 11 minutes pass.

 When it finally opens, the boy walks out first, alone, unhurried, like nothing at all happened in that room. Minutes later, security cameras catch him again. This time pushing a large green trash bin down an empty hallway. That single clip of footage will end up being the most damning piece of evidence in the entire case.

 Right now, though, nobody knows what those cameras just recorded. 24-year-old math teacher Colleen Ritzer hasn’t come home and her family is starting to worry, calling around asking her co-workers if anyone’s seen her. At the very same hour, across town, that same boy’s mother is standing in a police station reporting her son missing.

 Two families, two frantic phone calls, and not one person yet realizes the two are connected. But the cameras already know. They caught every second of it. And when investigators finally sit down to watch that footage, they’re going to be left with questions that don’t have easy answers. Why would a 14-year-old walk into school that morning carrying gloves, a mask, and a knife? Why did he walk out of that bathroom like he didn’t have a care in the world? And years later, why would a courtroom spend months arguing not over who did this, but over whether the boy

who did it even understood what he’d done? This is one of those true crime cases that still doesn’t sit right even a decade later. And it’s exactly the kind of documentary story I think deserves to be told in full. So stick with me on this one. Before we go further, I want to know something. Drop a comment and tell me what city you’re watching from tonight and what time it is where you are right now.

 I read everyone. Now, hit subscribe if you want more true crime documentaries like this. And let’s get into what actually happened. Rewind to the morning of October 22nd, 2013. Colleen Ritzer, 24 years old, walks into Danver’s High School just north of Boston like it’s any other Tuesday. She teaches math, 9th grade algebra, and she’s the kind of teacher who sticks around after the bell to help kids who are struggling.

 That afternoon is no different. She stays late. One of the students who stays behind with her is 14-year-old Philip Chisum. Nobody around her has any reason to think today is different from any other day. But that morning, before he ever walked through the school doors, Philip had already packed gloves, a mask, a change of clothes, and a box cutter into his backpack.

 By evening, Colleen still hasn’t come home. Her family starts making calls, trying to track down anyone who might know where she is. Danver High has more than 100 security cameras covering the building. And once investigators start pulling that footage, it becomes clear fast that Colleen didn’t just wander off after work.

 The cameras show her walking toward the second floor restroom. Seconds later, they show her student walking in right behind her. A while after that, he walks back out alone. Then the same cameras catch him pulling a large trash container through the hallway. At that point, this stops being a missing person’s case. >> Massachusetts teen accused of raping and killing his teacher.

 So, how does something like this happen in the middle of the afternoon inside a school packed with students, teachers, and cameras on every wall? How does nobody notice? To understand what happened, you have to understand who Colleen Ritzer actually was. She’d been teaching at Danvers High for 2 years.

 Every single morning, before she taught a single equation, she wrote a quote on the whiteboard, something to get her students heads in the right place before the numbers even started. Her family says she knew she wanted to be a teacher at 3 years old after watching her own preschool teacher and feeling something click. That’s not a story anyone dressed up after the fact to make her sound better than she was.

 That’s just who Colleen had always been. And then there’s Philip Chisum. He was new. Earlier that year, after his parents split up, he’d moved north from Tennessee with his mom, Diana, and his two younger sisters, landing in an apartment that belonged to Diana’s aunt because, frankly, it was the option they had.

 They started going to a local church, and Philip made a few friends through the youth group there. That fall, he enrolled at Danvers High and joined the junior varsity soccer team. He was actually good at it, and that’s where most of his friendships lived. Outside the team, almost nobody really knew him. He was the new kid, the one who exists on the edges of the social map until somebody decides to let him in.

 To his mother, that’s exactly who he was, a kid who loved soccer, had a few buddies, and was slowly finding his footing in a brand new town. Soccer practice was set to start at 4:00 that afternoon. Philip never showed. His teammates later said the last time they saw him, he wasn’t heading toward the school or the parking lot. He was running the opposite direction, away from the field entirely.

 By 6:34 that evening, Diana Chisum was standing inside the Danvers Police Department. She’d already checked the school, checked the fields, found nothing. She filed a missing person report and handed over his phone number so police could try to ping his location. They got exactly one hit. 4:28 p.m. Placing him near the Hollywood Hits movie theater in town.

 Officers went and confirmed it. Philip had bought a ticket, watched a movie, and left. After that, nothing. No more signal, no location, no contact with anybody. To Diana, none of it added up. Philip didn’t skip practice. He didn’t vanish without telling her where he was going. Soccer was his thing. His friends were there. This wasn’t him.

 That night, Danver’s police put out a missing person alert on social media and notified nearby towns. A 14-year-old boy last seen running from the soccer field. Phone gone dark after a solo trip to the movies. That was the story as it stood at 9:00 p.m. Around that same hour, the school’s principal, Sue Ambrosovich, sent an email to the entire staff letting everyone know Philip was missing.

 One of the teachers who opened that email was a colleague named Sarah, who also taught math down the hall from Colleen. And the second she read it, something clicked for her, too. Because earlier that evening, she’d gotten a call from Tom and Peggy Ritzer, Colleen’s parents, asking if she’d seen their daughter. They weren’t panicking yet, just trying to piece together why Colleen wasn’t answering and hadn’t come home.

 Sarah told them she hadn’t heard anything, but would call if she did. Then she read the principal’s email about Philip. She picked up the phone again, this time to call Sue. A student and a teacher from the same school, both gone on the exact same afternoon. And at that moment, nobody put the two together. It looked like nothing more than a rough coincidence.

Here’s what none of them knew yet. The cameras had already caught it all. Colleen leaving her classroom, walking into that second floor restroom. Philip wearing gloves following her. And only seconds later, the door stayed shut. And while Diana sat at the police station insisting her son would never skip practice, while Sarah and the principal traded calls trying to figure out what was going on, while Tom and Peggy waited by the phone for any word from their daughter, that footage was just sitting there inside the school’s server,

untouched, untwatched, waiting for somebody to press play. Danvers is a small town, the kind of place where a teacher staying late doesn’t raise an eyebrow. But a missing teenager is all over people’s phones within the hour. In a town that size, there’s no keeping two disappearances quiet for long.

 Word was already spreading before anyone understood what it actually meant. And by the time those calls were flying back and forth, by the time Diana was sitting across from a police officer, explaining that her son would never just skip out on his team, Colleen Ritzer had already been gone for hours.

 Investigators would later confirm the cause of death involved severe injuries to the neck, serious enough to affect major blood vessels, along with signs consistent with strangulation. That’s as far as I’ll go into the medical findings. It’s not necessary to say more to understand the weight of what happened inside that restroom, carried out by a 14-year-old boy who’d come prepared with a pair of gloves.

Years later, Philip’s defense would argue that voices inside his head were behind what happened that Tuesday. But what he did in the hours right after tells a very different story. He didn’t run. He didn’t hide. He didn’t try to disappear. Instead, he sat down at a restaurant and calmly ordered dinner. That single detail is part of why this case has been so hard to wrap your head around ever since it became public.

 It doesn’t line up with the picture of someone so overwhelmed by forces outside their control that they can’t process what they just did. It paints a completely different picture. And figuring out which picture was the true one is a question that would occupy courtrooms for the next decade. But that part of the story comes later.

 Right now, in these first few hours, all investigators actually had was a missing kid, a missing teacher, a single phone ping near a movie theater, a handful of teammates who saw a boy run the wrong way, and a principal who just found out two people from her building had vanished on the same day. What nobody in that building knew yet was that somewhere inside the school’s own security system, there was already footage of a boy in gloves walking into a restroom behind a 24-year-old teacher who’d stayed late for the same reason

she always did. Because she cared. Because helping her students was simply who she was. Because she’d known she wanted to be a teacher since she was 3 years old. The recording already existed. The only thing left was for someone to finally sit down and watch it. So, what actually happened between the moment those cameras lost sight of Philip Chisum and the moment the truth came out? That answer wouldn’t come from psychology or theory.

 It would come from a highway in Toppsfield, a K9 named Falco and roughly 140 cameras that had quietly recorded almost everything. Around 12:30 a.m. on October 23rd, a Topppsfield police officer named Neil High got a call about a pedestrian walking the wrong way along the highway. When he pulled up, he found a 14-year-old boy.

 Sit with that for a second. Back in Danvers, Colleen’s family had been waiting since 3:30 that afternoon. Her mother and sister had already called Sarah. The principal was already at the school. And out here, miles away on a dark stretch of road, Philip Chisum was alive, just walking, a ski mask pulled down around his neck.

 Officer High noticed it, but chocked it up to the cold. It was late October in Massachusetts, after all. Philip told him he’d come from Tennessee and wasn’t headed anywhere in particular. Said he had no address and that his backpack was full of survival gear. A quick search turned up a rock, a small pot, and then a bank card.

 The name on it was Colleen Ritzer. At that moment, the name meant nothing to him. There wasn’t yet a missing person report to connect it to. Philip claimed he’d found the card near a stop and shop. Hi put him in the back of the cruiser to warm up and drove him to the station. At the station, an officer asked a routine question before opening the bag, whether there was anything dangerous inside.

 Philip said yes, a box cutter, and it had blood on it. Asked whose blood, he said it belonged to a girl. Asked where she was now, he said she was in the woods. And when the officer asked the one question that actually mattered, if they found her, could she still be helped? Philip said no. The same backpack also held a pair of women’s underwear.

 From that point on, the search happening in the trees behind Danver’s High School was about to become something else entirely. Earlier that night, before Philip was even found, Colleen’s parents had already reached the school and were standing with the principal. Math teacher Todd Buttersworth joined them soon after.

 Colleen had been watching his one-year-old daughter, and he knew her well enough to show up in the middle of the night and start searching the treeine himself. Near the edge of the property, he found a school bag wedged between two rocks. At first, he thought the marks on it were rust. They weren’t. A few steps deeper into the woods, he stopped cold.

Lying on the ground in front of him was a pair of white gloves soaked in blood. He called the officers over. Around the same time, officer Stephanie Winnenburgger was searching inside the building. She checked the restroom near Colleen’s classroom and noticed something off. It had clearly been scrubbed down recently, disinfectant thick in the air.

 But on the wall, about waist high, there was a faint reddish mark. Once word came in about the bag in the woods, she headed outside and found more. A scrap of paper, pieces of clothing, two blood soaked gloves, other items scattered across the ground. Then officer Ellington arrived with his canine, Falco, trained to locate human remains.

 Falco pulled him deeper into the trees. First to a bloodstained sneaker, then a pair of football cleat and a pair of women’s shoes buried under leaves. Clothing was scattered everywhere, hanging from branches, lying on the ground, some of it stained. Falco kept moving, climbed a slope, then dropped down into a ravine. There, on its side, sat a large green recycling container.

 Officers cordoned off a patch of woods roughly 6 feet by 10. Inside it, the ground told its own story. Leaves and branches disturbed, the earth clearly dug into and pressed back down, like someone had cut out a square of it and tried to put it back the way it was. One officer pointed silently at the ground. Years later, during court hearings, several of the officers who worked that scene had to pause mid testimony, unable to keep going without a moment to collect themselves.

 On October 23rd, prosecutors charged Philip Chisum as an adult. First-degree murder, aggravated rape, armed robbery. A grand jury would later add a fourth charge, aggravated sexual assault with an object. He was 14 years old. Danver High School had 140 cameras mounted throughout the building. Whether Philip didn’t know that or simply didn’t care, both possibilities are unsettling in their own way.

 Because the very next day, when investigators sat down and pulled the footage, they were able to reconstruct nearly every minute of October 22nd. Roughly 90% of what happened that day was caught on camera. That afternoon, Colleen had stayed behind as usual, part of a small group of teachers who worked with incoming freshmen to help them settle into high school life.

 After the last bell, she stuck around to help anyone who needed it. Two students remained in her classroom that afternoon, Philillip and one other girl. The footage shows Colleen stepping out of her classroom and walking into a staff restroom. Then it shows Philillip. He looks out from the classroom doorway, checks the hallway, steps back inside.

 A few seconds later, he’s out again, pulling his hood up, sliding on a pair of gloves as he walks. He follows her into the restroom. He stays inside for 11 minutes. When the door finally opens, another student walks in just looking for a bathroom. She catches a glimpse of what she’d later describe simply as someone’s bare back.

 Feels embarrassed and turns right around without another look. She never sees Colleen. She has no idea what she just walked in on. Seconds later, Philip walks out of the restroom alone. Think about that for a second. What that girl unknowingly walked past. She felt embarrassed, assuming she just interrupted someone in the bathroom.

 She had no way of knowing that the person she never saw was her own teacher or that the person she caught a glimpse of was the reason that teacher would never be found alive. From there, the cameras track Philip through the hallway carrying something. Prosecutors would later call this stretch of footage some of the most compelling evidence they’d ever presented in a juvenile case in the state of Massachusetts.

Because Philip doesn’t run, he doesn’t panic. He moves through the building at a normal pace, unhurried, like he’s got nowhere else to be. Investigators reviewing the tape kept coming back to the same word to describe it. Calm. That same calm showed up hours later on the highway. When Officer High found him, the box cutter was still in the backpack.

 Colleen’s bank card was in his pocket. Her underwear was inside the bag. He had the ski mask. He had the survival gear. And when asked where he was going, Philip said he wasn’t headed anywhere in a flat, even tone. Not scared, not confused, just calm. By then, he’d been walking along Route 1 for hours, putting distance between himself and Danvers, between himself and the woods where Colleen’s body lay hidden beneath a layer of leaves.

 Beside her, investigators found a handwritten note that read, “I hate you all.” They never publicly confirmed whose handwriting it was, but it was found right next to her. Nearby, inside the discarded backpack was Philip’s student ID. His DNA turned up at the scene, and the box cutter recovered from his bag was forensically linked to her injuries.

There’s one detail from that footage prosecutors kept circling back to again and again. The kind of detail that gets quieter and more disturbing the longer you sit with it. After walking out of that restroom, Philip doesn’t run. He doesn’t glance over his shoulder. He just walks at a completely normal pace, carrying what he’s carrying, heading toward the exit like any other student who stayed late and was simply heading home.

 The girl who’d opened the door was already gone. The hallway was empty. The building was quiet, and he just walked out. By the time the case reached a grand jury, the real question was never whether Philip did this. His arrest had already settled that the real question was what those 11 minutes actually revealed because the gloves were already on before he ever followed her in.

 The hood was already up. The knife had already been packed into his bag that morning before school even started. Which meant the real mystery was never just what happened inside that bathroom. It was what had been happening inside Philip Chisum long before he ever walked through the school’s front doors that day.

But before we get to that, because that’s where his defense would eventually take this case, there’s more the footage revealed. The last time cameras caught Philip that night, he was barefoot. Not because he’d lost his shoes by accident, but because somewhere between the restroom and the hallway, he’d made the decision to take them off.

 The footage shows him heading back toward the stairs. Stains on his jeans, feet bare. At first, he moves slowly. Then he ducks into another bathroom, changes into his football uniform, and walks out of the building. Stop and think about what that actually shows. That’s not someone in a panic. That’s someone following a sequence of steps he’d already planned out.

 Before that moment, the cameras had already tracked him moving through the school with an unsettling sense of purpose. through the parking lot, down the hallway, back into Colleen’s classroom to collect her things along with his own. His face was covered first by the hood, then by the ski mask. At one point, he actually pulled the mask off.

The footage never tells us why before putting it back on for what came next. What came next involved a large green recycling container from inside the school. Philip used it to move Colleen through the building and toward the woods, the cameras catching him straining under the weight as he pushed it down the hallway.

7 minutes later, he reappears on camera, pushing that same container back, this time noticeably lighter. There’s one thing those cameras could never tell anyone. Investigators later raised, only as a possibility, never fully confirmed, that Colleen may still have been alive in the moment she was moved into that container.

 It was never proven either way. But once you know that question was even on the table, those 7 minutes of footage are impossible to watch the same way again. After coming back inside, still without shoes, Philip returned to the same restroom where it all started. Then he left the building entirely. The cameras never picked him up again after that.

That evening, Philip used Colleen’s bank card. And here’s where the story often gets it wrong. This wasn’t about a burger at a fast food counter, the way it’s frequently retold. What actually happened is that he used her card to pay for dinner and a movie ticket to see Gravity. He sat in a dark theater and watched a film while Colleen’s body lay in the woods behind the school exactly where he’d left her.

Police wouldn’t find her until after midnight. He was 14 years old. He was tried as an adult facing two counts of sexual assault, armed robbery, and first-degree murder. Prosecutors didn’t see his age as a reason to soften those charges, and the grand jury agreed with them. Here’s where the defense tried to take this case.

Another student had stayed in Colleen’s classroom that afternoon and was present for a conversation that happened just before Philip followed her out. According to that student, Colleen asked Philip how he was settling into life in Danvers compared to Tennessee, where his family had moved from that July. The student said Philip visibly bristled at the question.

 Colleen didn’t notice at first and when she did she simply changed the subject. That according to the defense was the trigger. One word, Tennessee. Supposedly enough to send a 14-year-old boy into a state where he lost all control. And everything that followed was a direct result of that moment. Except that same boy had walked into school that morning with gloves, a box cutter, a change of clothes, and a ski mask already packed.

 He knew exactly where the recycling containers were kept. He knew where the elevator was. He knew the second floor well enough to move through it in a mask in near darkness after most of the building had cleared out. The defense’s position was that none of that mattered, that Philip was in the grip of psychosis, hearing voices that told him what to do, and that a single word had set the whole thing off.

 The prosecution saw it completely differently. A kid doesn’t show up to school with gloves, a cutting tool, a change of clothes, and a mask because of one sentence someone says to him hours later. That was the choice sitting in front of the jury. two entirely different explanations for the same set of facts. But the verdict was still a long way off.

 First, investigators had months to dig into who Philip actually was, and what they found reshaped how the entire case would be understood. Philip had moved from Clarksville, Tennessee that July, roughly 2 and 1/2 months before the murder. People back home remembered him as an ordinary kid, well-liked, played football and basketball, skateboarded, had plenty of friends, even had a girlfriend, 14-year-old Hannah Walker, who told reporters they’d grown close over the course of a year, walking home from school together most days. Everyone

who knew him there described a normal, popular teenager with real roots in that community, the same community his mother eventually decided to leave. She drove Philip and his younger sister north in a minivan. And according to people close to the family, Philip kept holding out hope she’d turn the car around, even after they were already on the highway.

That background doesn’t explain what happened later. Nothing does, but it mattered because the defense needed the jury to see it as the whole story. It wasn’t. While Philip sat in custody awaiting trial, investigators kept digging. And what they turned up was troubling. There were reports, never confirmed with the same certainty as the school surveillance footage, but serious enough to pursue, that Philip had a history of cruelty toward family pets, allegedly more than once.

 Court records describe another incident in detail. While in custody, Philip slipped away from the people supervising him, moved through a hallway, crouched low to avoid being noticed, and followed a young female staff member into a locker room where he violently attacked her with an improvised weapon, a pencil, until other staff heard her screaming and stepped in.

 Court documents note that during his arrest for that incident, Philip showed visible signs of psychiatric distress. He was placed in a psychiatric facility for 30 days of evaluation and treatment afterward. Prosecutors pointed to that incident as a reason to tighten security during the trial. The defense pointed to the exact same incident as proof of what they’d been arguing all along, that the psychosis was real, documented, and ongoing.

And that’s really what this entire case came down to. Either Philip was a teenager suffering from a severe genuine mental illness who committed an unthinkable act during a psychotic break and then in the hours after calmly used his victim’s bank card to buy dinner and a movie ticket. Or he was someone who had been building toward this for a long time, who planned every step deliberately, carried it out with precision, and then built a legal defense asking 12 strangers to believe that none of it, not the bin, not the

mask, not the gloves, not the box cutter packed that morning, had been prepared in advance. The jury’s job wasn’t to question whether the footage was real. Nobody disputed that. Their job was to decide what that footage actually proved about the person in it. And there was a third possibility neither side wanted to fully sit with.

 That the illness could be real and the planning could be real at the same time. A person can experience genuine psychosis and still be capable of careful planning. The voices the defense described may have existed. That doesn’t automatically make them an excuse. The law doesn’t always hand you a clean answer. In November of 2015, 12 jurors were handed exactly that question.

 But before they ever reached a verdict, the case had already been delayed once by Philip himself. The prosecutor was Kate McDougall 2 years into building this case by the time jury selection began. And on the third day of that process, court broke for a short recess. When it resumed, Philip wasn’t there. A clinician told the judge Philip was on the floor of a room behind the courtroom in a state that made it unsafe to bring him in.

 A psychologist named Colleen McMillan was brought in to evaluate him. She later told the court she spent 90 minutes with Philip and for the entire 90 minutes he sat with his back turned to her, never once facing her. According to her account, he said he didn’t want to go through with the trial and no longer wanted to live.

 He claimed a voice had warned him not to trust his own lawyers. said he’d been in contact with an imaginary man who wouldn’t give his name because, in Philip’s telling, McMillan herself was part of a group that had put him in prison. He described burning sensations across his body brought on by the stress of the hearings, said he was afraid of people walking behind him in the courtroom, and indicated he’d already worked out how he intended to end his life, though he wouldn’t say how.

 Take a step back and look at that whole list. Not because it’s automatically convincing, but because of how complete it is. Voices, paranoia about his own attorneys, an undisclosed plan to hurt himself, physical symptoms no one could verify, fear of the people around him. Every single item on that list is exactly the kind of thing that could stall a trial.

The prosecution didn’t let it go unanswered. Kate McDougall argued directly to the court that the real question wasn’t whether Philip was capable of sitting through his own trial. it was whether he wanted to. She said he was effectively holding the entire process hostage and that what had happened over the previous 24 hours wasn’t genuine.

 It was staged and that the state had records to back that up. Philip had already undergone a full 96-page psychiatric evaluation. The doctors who wrote it did not conclude he was genuinely hearing voices. In fact, they found his behavior didn’t match the pattern of real auditory hallucinations. According to prosecutors, the report used one specific word to describe him.

Manipulative. Still, the judge didn’t have much room to maneuver. Even with the 96-page report in hand, even with the prosecution pushing back hard, the court couldn’t risk moving forward if there was any real doubt about Philip’s ability to participate. A conviction handed down under that kind of doubt wouldn’t survive an appeal.

 So, Philip was sent to a specialized facility for a formal competency evaluation. The trial paused for nearly 3 weeks. When it was done, the conclusion came back clear. Philip was competent to stand trial. Jury selection resumed. Kate McDougall opened her case without softening anything. She told the jury Philip hadn’t come to school that day, lost in psychotic confusion.

 He’d come with a plan. gloves, a mask, a box cutter. Those aren’t things a person having hallucinations accidentally happens to gather and carry with them. She described him as focused, deliberate, a boy with a terrible goal who carried it out in the woods and didn’t care what came after. Then she revealed something that hadn’t been made public before.

>> What is this case about? This case is about why did this happen? Why did a 14-year-old boy, well behaved, quiet, one month into high school do these terrible things? The answer is he was severely mentally ill. He had been suffering from a psychotic disorder since the age of 10. According to the prosecution’s theory, when Philip moved Colleen out of the school inside that recycling container, she hadn’t died yet, meaning part of what happened afterward happened while she was still alive.

McDougall also returned to the moment the other student had walked into the restroom. Her argument was that Philip hadn’t finished what he set out to do inside that bathroom, and that’s exactly why Colleen ended up in the woods. that the attack continued there. And that’s where the injuries described by the medical examiner occurred.

Of everything in this entire case, this is the detail that stuck with me the most. The defense never denied that Philip killed Colleen. His own attorney said so plainly in open court. They weren’t fighting the facts. They were fighting over his state of mind. Their argument was that Philip had been in the grip of psychosis during the attack, following commands from voices he genuinely believed were real, and that a thoughtful, well-raised 14-year-old doesn’t do something like this unless something has gone catastrophically

wrong inside his mind. >> At the end of his stay in 2015, did you reach a diagnosis for Philip Chisum? >> I did. >> And what was that diagnosis? >> I made two diagnosis. One was a depressive state, best described in my view as a major depressive state, and another was a brief or transient psychotic episode. >> Their expert witness was Dr.

 Richard Dudley, a psychologist with decades of experience evaluating severe psychiatric disorders in children and teenagers. He testified that in his professional opinion, Philip had been hearing voices since he was 10 years old and that on the day Colleen died, Philip wasn’t fully himself. He was responding to hallucinations, not making a choice.

 And here’s the real problem at the heart of this case. The prosecution had its own experts. The defense had theirs. One side said Philip was pretending. The other said he was genuinely severely ill. Both sides were backed by credentialed professionals. Both sides were paid for their testimony. And both sides flatly contradicted each other.

 In the end, 12 jurors with no medical training were the ones tasked with deciding which set of experts was telling the truth about what was really happening inside a 15-year-old’s mind. That’s not a flaw in the jury system. It’s just an honest description of the impossible question this case handed them.

 Nobody can see inside another person’s head. All anyone can really do is look at behavior before, during, and after. Before the crime, Philip gathered what he needed and brought it to school. During the crime, when he was interrupted, he adjusted his plan on the fly. After the crime, he went to a movie, used the victim’s bank card, sat down for dinner.

 That’s what decision-m looks like. When something terrible happens, people will often say it could always be worse. It is difficult for this to this court to imagine what could be worse for an individual or a family to endure than the brutal and senseless murder of Colleen Ritzer. Colleen Ritzer lived a life of quiet heroism. That’s what most teachers do.

Henry Adams observed that a teacher affects eternity. She can never tell where her influence starts. Colleen Richard’s parents, more than most, have learned the reach of their daughter’s influence, but at a cost no parent should have to endure. While the extent or lack of extent of the defendant’s mental health was the subject of exhaustive testimony at trial, the Commonwealth presented overwhelming evidence that the defendant had substantial capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness of his conduct and had the

substantial capacity to conform his con conduct to the requirements of the law. I will punish the defendant for the murder of Colleen Ritzer and I will punish him for the rape as well as the armed robbery of the underpants she put on on the morning of her death. But I may not utilize the horrific rape and robbery of Colleen Ritzer to punish the defendant for this unspeakable murder more than the law allows.

>> But the defense pushed back on exactly that point. Psychosis, they argued, doesn’t always look the way people assume it does. And the jury had to carry that contradiction with them the entire trial. They didn’t get much breathing room before it came up again. On the second day of the actual trial, not jury selection, the trial itself.

 Philip refused to enter the courtroom. The same pattern as before. This time, the prosecution wasn’t just frustrated, they were alarmed, especially given the timing. This was the day the jury was set to see the green recycling bin in person. >> This court will impose the mandatory life sentence for the murder of Colleen Ritzer and set a parole eligibility date of 25 years, the highest level our law allows.

This court will impose a concurrent sentence of 40 years to 40 years in one day for the rape of Carlen Ritzer and a concurrent sentence of 40 years to 40 years in one day for the arm. >> The bin was wheeled into the courtroom so jurors could see it firsthand. McDougall pushed the judge hard not to let Philip keep dictating the pace of his own trial.

 This time the judge agreed. He told the defense that if Philip chose not to be present, the trial would proceed without him. No delays, no exceptions. And then something unexpected happened. The moment Philip understood the trial would move forward with or without him, he changed his mind and decided to come in.

 No explanation was given, and none was needed. Once the judge took away the one thing this move was designed to buy, time, there was no reason left to stay on the floor. What both of these moments reveal is someone testing the system, looking for where it would give. During jury selection, it gave. The judge ordered an evaluation and it worked, buying nearly 3 weeks.

So, Philip tried the same play again during the trial itself. This time the system didn’t bend. >> As a mother, one of your worst fears for your daughter is that she could be assaulted. He would now, in addition to the original three charges, be charged with sexing in the bathroom. This charge added to the horror of the crimes.

 We once again had to go home as Tom talked to Dan and I told my 17-year-old daughter that her sister had been raped as I saw such pain and fear in her eyes. The emotional and physical pain was intensified when we received a phone call on Christmas Eve of 2013 following the Supreme Judicial Court’s ruling that changed sentencing for juveniles convicted of first-degree murder by ruling that they could no longer be giving a life sentence without the possibility of parole.

 It was devastating to hear that news knowing that the legal battle would never end for our families. Instead of following the federal court’s appropriate and respectful decision to extend discretion to the judges, Massachusetts took that law one step too far and took away your right to sentence him to life without parole.

Because of that immoral and unjust ruling, our family will be forced to publicly go through this pain again as we have to fight to keep such evil person in prison where he belongs for life. As Tom and I age, that burden will fall to Dan and Laura, a burden that they should not carry. As we have sat through this very long trial and this very long judicial process, the horrific details of that day have been made known to all.

 You have heard and seen all the evidence, including statements he made that night to the police that clearly demonstrates that he knew exactly what he was doing. He deserves the sentence of death for the brutal crimes he committed, but that is not an option. He deserves life in prison without the elig eligibility of parole, but that is not an option.

 You do though have the option to set consecutive life sentences with parole eligibility at the highest level that the court allows for each of these crimes. Please begin the long and painful process of writing the wrong of the SJC and legislators. You have the responsibility for Colleen, for our family, and for the community to put him away for the rest of his life.

 Even after 50 years, he could still have a life, a family, children, which cannot happen. He is pure evil and evil can never be rehabilitated. You need to consider the safety of our family and the rest of the community as we live in fear if he ever gets out of prison. Colleen and our family will never get a second chance and neither should he.

 I will never forgive him for what he did to Colleen and for what he took away from our family. Today, you need to make the right, just, and brave decision to give him three consecutive sentences with the maximum number of years before full elig eligibility for each crime. >> What the jurors actually made of all this, we’ll never fully know.

 They watched Philip refuse to enter the courtroom twice. They heard the prosecution call it a performance. They heard the defense call it a symptom. They listened to two sets of doctors give completely opposite testimony. and they heard McDougall lay out plainly exactly what a 14-year-old boy carried into his school that morning and what he intended to do with it.

 The defense’s entire case rested on one idea, that no ordinary teenager could do what Philip did unless something beyond his control was driving him. The prosecution’s answer was quieter but far more precise. Court will impose a sentence in this case without emotion, passion, sympathy or pity.

 But one cannot see and hear what this court has during the course of this case without feeling that the crashing waves of this tragedy will never. There is no quote right and quote sentence. No amount of prison time would ever be enough to be commensurate with this crime and no math will ever erase the reality that this crime was committed by a 14year-old boy.

 While this court is constitutionally required to consider that there is always the possibility of redemption, even if the defendant were to live a perfect life from this moment on, his repeated stab wounds to Colleen Ritzer’s young body will remain indelible with Colleen Rich’s family, friends, and community until the last person who knew Colleen Ritzer takes his or her last.

>> They weren’t arguing about what kind of boy Philip was. They were pointing at what he actually did hour by hour, before and after. The gloves, the mask, the box cutter, the movie ticket, the meal, the stolen bank card. None of that required a medical degree to evaluate. It just required looking at it honestly.

And there was still one more piece of evidence the jury hadn’t seen yet. Something that would leave a very different impression than anything the expert witnesses had said. For years, the defense had staked everything on one argument. Philip wasn’t a killer who made a conscious choice. He was a sick child who never really had one.

 And for a stretch of the trial, that argument almost seemed to be working. His attorneys kept steering things back toward his mental health, pushing to bring in brain scans, additional expert testimony, documentation of the voices he claimed to hear. The judge turned most of it down, and the defense was already laying groundwork for an appeal before the jury had even reached a verdict.

 But instead of brain scans, what the jury actually had was the video. When a beautiful life such as Colleen’s is taken with such brutality, callousness, and premeditation, that individual needs to be in prison for life. It doesn’t matter how old he was when the crime was committed. And it doesn’t matter that in 30 years he might be rehabilitated.

 He does not deserve to have a life outside of those prisons. >> Every step Philip took on the evening of October 22nd, 2013 had been captured and preserved. The prosecutor walked the jury through it piece by piece. Philip checking his pocket for the box cutter, pulling on his hoodie, sliding on his gloves, opening the bathroom door, wheeling the trash bin out into the hallway.

 Each action in that exact order said something, not about voices, but about preparation. The footage, she argued, showed a conscious decision and a plan already in motion. But the image that mattered most wasn’t from inside the school at all. It was from the woods. The scene Philip himself had created. The prosecutor described what investigators found there plainly without exaggeration.

Clear signs of a violent, prolonged attack. That was the image jurors were asked to carry with them as they weighed what Philip Chisum had done. They didn’t sit with it for long. On December 15th, 2015, the jury came back guilty on every count. First-degree murder, aggravated rape, armed robbery. >> It was a force, like this amazing positive force in so many people’s lives.

 She was that person when you were having a bad day, she’d be the first person I’d reach out to. >> Jennifer Burgerer was Colleen Ritzer’s best friend for 19 years. October 22nd is a day she’d rather not have to mark. We wanted to shift it into something positive. >> So instead, she chooses to market showing kindness for Colleen, holding a door, a single flower from a stranger, donuts for the school faculty, or in Jennifer’s case today, a generous tip.

We were witness to the cause. >> Gentleman was charged for two sandwiches. And when I tried to stop him in his assistance, he said, “No, please buy somebody else a lunch for me.” And he left the $20 gratuitity that he wanted us to force forward also. and the effect this afternoon. >> That voice really hurt. >> I know, right? >> And how just being nice is nice.

>> Hopefully the next person comes in and keeps it going throughout the rest of the day. >> Jennifer knew Colleen better than almost anyone. And she’s pretty sure it’s what Colleen would want. >> She’s the sunshine in I think a lot of people’s lives. She brought so much every day to my life.

 And not having her here is hard. it will always be heard. And I think what I can do as a friend is make sure she’s not forgotten. >> Then came sentencing and that’s when Colleen’s family finally got to speak. Her mother, Peggy, stood up and described having to sit her younger daughter down and explain what had happened to her sister.

 Just think about what that takes, finding the words, watching a child’s face change as it sinks in. Peggy stood in that courtroom and described exactly that moment, then asked the judge for the harshest sentence the law would allow. The judge didn’t need much convincing. He described the crime in terms that left no room for doubt, then handed down the sentence.

 Life in prison with the possibility of parole after 40 years. Philip sat through the entire hearing without any visible reaction. No tears, nothing. The same blank expression he’d worn through the whole trial. People can read that however they want. But at no point during any of these hearings did Philip Chisum ever appear to grasp that because of what he did, another person’s life was simply over.

 Boring of grief and compassion at the wake of a beloved teacher. Hundreds turning out to honor the memory of Colleen Ritzer. She is the young math teacher who was murdered at Danvers High School last week. Our Julie Lanchek is live in Andover tonight where that wake is happening. Julie, Heather, at times the line of mourners wrapped around St.

 Augustine’s church here in Andover. Hundreds coming to pay their final respects to a beloved daughter, sister, friend, and teacher. She’s an inspiration to all of us. She was an inspiration to me to live my life to the fullest every single day. Colleen’s favorite color was pink, a color that dotted the crowd in ribbons and flowers, a crowd that included many of her students and her former roommates at Assumption College.

 Colleen was a wonderful person. Her our room was decorated with inspirational quotes everywhere. It was such an uplifting place to live. A math teacher at Danver’s High, Ritzer was murdered last week at the school she loved, allegedly by one of her own students. But friends say she wasn’t just a victim. She was a vibrant young woman with an infectious smile and outlook on life.

>> And that mattered because sentencing wasn’t actually the end of this story. Even before the Colleen Ritzer trial had wrapped up, Philip had already attacked someone else. Years later, with a clear pattern of behavior now on record, the mental illness defense hadn’t spared him in Colleen’s case.

 But it had given his attorneys a playbook and they ran it again for the attempted murder trial tied to that second attack. Voices, diminished responsibility, insanity rooted in mental illness. Same foundation as before. Then the victim in that case got to speak. She told the court that even more than 10 years after the attack, she still had nightmares and that some days she couldn’t bring herself to leave her room for hours because she was afraid Philip would be waiting outside her door.

She said this under oath in open court, and that’s when something happened that hadn’t happened once in the 10 years since Colleen Ritzer died. Philip changed his plea. Guilty. His attorney went further, asking the court for the maximum possible sentence and stating that Philip wanted to take responsibility for what he’d done.

Sit with that for a second. This is the same Philip Chisum who for a full decade never once accepted responsibility for killing Colleen Ritzer. The same Philip who sat through his own murder trial with the same flat, unreadable expression the entire time. The same Philip who never reached out to Colleen’s family with a single word.

 And suddenly he wanted to take responsibility, just not for her, for the second victim. The court sentenced him to 17 to 20 years for the attempted murder charge, plus another 9 to 10 years on the remaining counts. All of it running concurrently with the sentence he was already serving for Colleen’s murder.

 In practice, that meant the new sentence added exactly zero extra time behind bars. Colleen’s case still determined when he could ever become eligible for parole. His attorneys understood that math perfectly well. 2 months after telling the court he wanted to take responsibility in the second case, his team filed an appeal in Colleen’s.

 They argued the convictions for aggravated rape and armed robbery weren’t legally sound and that the judge had wrongly kept out evidence about his mental state. Brain scans, additional expert testimony. The implication was clear. knock out even one conviction and the whole structure of his sentence could shift.

 Colleen’s family responded publicly. They pointed out that Philip had never once shown remorse, that they didn’t believe he was capable of rehabilitation, and that Colleen and their family would never get a second chance. So, if this was a society that truly believed in justice, neither should he. In the years since Colleen’s death, her family has built something out of that loss.

 The Colleen Ritzer Memorial Fund runs on the idea of spreading kindness and compassion in her name. Yearly charity 5K runs a scholarship for students who want to become teachers just like she did. They also started a campaign called Kindness for Colleen where people share stories of good deeds done in her memory. That’s how her family chose to spend the years Philip Chisum took from them, turning grief into something that keeps giving back.

 In February of 2025, the Massachusetts Supreme Court reviewed that appeal and found no errors in the lower court’s rulings. The conviction stood. The sentence stayed exactly as it was. Philip won’t be eligible to even request parole until at least 40 years have passed since his sentencing. And even then, there’s no guarantee he’ll ever walk out.

There’s still one question this case never fully answers. Philip Chisum was 14 years old when he killed Colleen Ritzer. And Massachusetts law, like most modern legal systems, recognizes that a teenage brain is still developing, still capable of real change, which is why the door to rehabilitation stays open.

That’s not leniency. That’s decades of research into how adolescent brains actually work. But Philip wasn’t a kid who made one terrible decision in a sudden moment of chaos. The footage showed something else entirely. The gloves, the box cutter already in his pocket, the recycling bin. Each one a separate deliberate choice made with a clear sense of what would come next.

 And then more than 10 years passed, and in all that time, he never said a single word to Colleen’s family. The defense built its entire case around the idea of voices. But investigators and the courts ultimately concluded that mental illness wasn’t what drove this. The note found near Colleen’s body, the one that read, “I hate you all,” was determined by prosecutors not to have been written by Philip and to have had nothing to do with the motive.

 Which means the voices were the only explanation the defense ever really offered. And courts rejected that explanation at every level, including the state’s highest court back in 2023. you know, that that was it. She was going to be a teacher. Um, and she never I don’t think she ever thought about doing anything else cuz we’d be like, you know, teachers don’t necessarily make a lot of money.

>> I used to give her a hard time. You sure that’s what you want to do? Cuz you know, you’re not going to make a lot. >> You’re going to work a lot and >> it’s a lot of work. And she gets so mad at me like it’s what you want to do. Don’t discourage it. And like just asking. She would create a test and she’d be like, “Hey Laura, can you take my test to see if to see if it’s too hard or too easy or if they’ll like it or if they won’t understand it.

” So, I used to have to take some of her math tests to see how her students would react to it. >> So, you two were like guinea pigs with her sometimes. Oh, yeah. >> I don’t think she ever asked me to do it. She probably knew I wouldn’t succeed at it regardless. >> Colleen was sharp enough to know who might have needed some help.

 jump right in and would help those that uh were in need of help. >> She would have these huge binders um like the biggest ones, you know, the like really big ones full of lesson plans. She started bringing the fun aspects of it in. So, she was, you know, saying when it was pi day and like where she would find like a just a funny math like joke type of geeky thing.

 every day in class would share like a quote or a little picture of the day um depending on whatever season it was when the math was tough or hard or like didn’t seem to make any sense. Um it didn’t feel like something that we couldn’t figure out. These people never knew her, but they so understand who she was and they want to be supportive.

 That’s to me that says it. That says it all. I mean right there. The system still leaves the door open for parole after 40 years. If Philip is ever released, he’ll be just past 50. The woman he attacked in that juvenile facility will still be carrying her nightmares. Colleen’s sister will be in her 40s. Her parents, if they’re still living, will be in their 70s.

 Rehabilitation isn’t just a concept on paper. It comes with a real cost. And the people who end up paying that cost are rarely the ones who get to decide whether it actually worked. After 10 years of silence, a person can change their legal strategy. They can shift their plea once the evidence is undeniable and a victim’s testimony is already part of the record.

 But there’s one thing that’s almost impossible to fake for 10 straight years. Through every hearing, every statement made through lawyers, every appearance in that courtroom, and that’s genuine remorse. Its absence has a way of showing, whether you mean for it to or not. Colleen Ritzer stayed after school and helped her students for free because she wanted to. No other reason.

 There was never any conflict between her and Philip. No argument, no grudge, nothing. By every account, investigators, colleagues, the court record itself, she was exactly the kind of teacher people carry with them for the rest of their lives. The kind of person who genuinely changes where a kid’s life ends up going. She was 24 years old.

 In the years since, her family’s foundation has kept that legacy alive. Scholarships in her name for future teachers, small acts of kindness shared online and dedicated to her memory. That’s the mark one person’s life left on everyone around her. Philip Chisum will be eligible to request parole once he’s just passed 50.

And when that day comes, the parole board is going to have to answer one question. Is the man sitting in front of them actually different from the 14-year-old who back in 2013 pushed a green recycling bin down a school hallway? Is there any evidence anywhere that he’s ever thought about Colleen Ritzer and felt something beyond discomfort over what it cost him personally? If that evidence exists, it hasn’t surfaced yet.