- Carly Gregg and her mother Ashley shared a close bond growing up
- However, in her teens Carly began acting out, putting a strain on their relationship
- Things took a horrifying turn in March 2024 when Carly Gregg shot her mother to death after Ashley discovered vapes in her bedroom
Carly Gregg smiled sweetly as she held up another school award certificate.
Her delighted mother Ashley Smylie, a maths teacher, was proud of her hardworking daughter.
Life hadn’t always been plain sailing for the pair though.
When Carly was four, her sister tragically died from a health condition.
And her biological father had gone through some difficulties around the same time he and Ashley divorced.
It had been tough.
But the mother and daughter were devoted to each other.
And when Ashley met and married Heath Smylie years later, life seemed on the up and up.
‘[Ashley] would do anything in the world for [Carly], ’ Heath would later say, adding his stepdaughter was a ‘sweet little girl’.
The teen had been struggling a little and had been seeing a counsellor.
She’d also had a few appointments with a psychiatric mental health nurse, who’d prescribed Carly antidepressants.
On March 19, 2024, Ashley, 40, drove home with Carly, 14, as usual after school ended.
Ashley went into her daughter’s room and Carly let her two golden retrievers out the back of the house.
Just after 4.15pm, Heath received a text message from his wife.
Are you almost home, honey? it read.
No, I’ll be [at work] for a little bit, Heath replied.
When he got back around 5pm, he opened the kitchen door to find Carly behind it. To Heath’s horror, his stepdaughter was holding a gun.
Before he had a chance to react, Carly fired the weapon, and the bullet grazed Heath’s shoulder.
As he wrestled with her to get the gun, it went off two more times.
‘Stop it, Carly!’ Heath screamed. Finally, Heath managed to overpower the teen, confiscating the gun, as Carly raced out of the house terrified.
Maybe there’s an intruder somewhere? Heath thought.
It was so out of character for his usually sweet and studious stepdaughter to behave so erratically.
Could she have been acting in self-defence?
Frantic, Heath searched the house for any signs of danger, also looking for his wife, who was nowhere to be seen.
But when he reached Carly’s room, he found Ashley lying on her back on the floor, with a bloody towel over her head.
Horrifically, she’d been shot three times, including once in the face.
Heath called police, who raced to the scene.
Shortly afterwards, police discovered Carly nearby in a drainage pipe, soaking wet, and dazed and confused.
But when the kitchen surveillance camera was found hidden in the fridge, the CCTV footage told a shocking story.
Carly could be seen walking past the kitchen with her hands behind her back. Just a few seconds later, three shots rang out and Ashley’s dying scream was heard.
The teenager went back to the kitchen, still concealing the gun behind her back, then texted her stepdad from her mother’s phone, in an attempt to lure him home.
Carly Gregg was promptly arrested and charged with one count of murder, one count of attempted murder and tampering with evidence.
Could a baby-faced teen like herself really be capable of such depraved violence? And if so, what could have prompted her to lash out so viciously?
The picture portrayed during her trial at Rankin Court, Mississippi, in September 2024, showed she was far from the perfect child.
As well as being the high-achieving bookworm her family knew and loved, Carly’s diary entries revealed she also had a sinister side.
You don’t need a family, and it’s okay to be evil, Carly had written.
She also wrote in her diary that she’d been hearing voices.
As more witnesses took to the stand, the teenager’s secret life began to unravel in court.
It was revealed her mum had sometimes taken Carly’s phone away as a punishment, but she’d instead used an iPad to text friends.
She’d also used ‘burner phones’, had a stash of vapes containing marijuana, and a history of cheating at school.
On the day of the shooting, a friend of Carly’s was so worried about her that he confided to Ashley about Carly’s drug use, and the phones.
It’s believed Ashley had found the vapes in Carly’s room when her daughter fatally shot her.
Instead of calling for help, Carly then texted her friend and invited them around to the house.
Prosecutor Kathryn White Newman told the court that when the friend arrived, Carly asked, ‘Are you squeamish around dead bodies?’ before leading them to her mother’s bloody corpse.
The defence argued that the teen was experiencing a state of psychosis in an episode of acute stress when she’d pulled the trigger that day.
But it took jurors just two hours to find Carly Gregg, then 15, guilty of first-degree murder, attempted murder, and tampering with evidence.
‘Carly Gregg is evil and that’s not easy to say, but the truth of the matter is that sometimes evil comes in young packages,’ said Rankin County lawyer Bubba Bramlett.
Judge Dewey Arthur sentenced the teen killer to life in prison without the chance of parole.
The following month an appeal for a new trial was rejected.
Despite her twisted actions, Carly’s stepfather Heath continues to stand by her, revealing that the two speak every day.
