USA: the ultimate penalty for money laundering

At various times during the night of Sunday 23 March, Sueppel wrote notes to the bank, to his father and his brother. He phoned his father and brother leaving messages saying how sorry he was. He called Hills Bank and Trust in Iowa City at 3:45 in the morning of 24 March, apologising for his actions. Then he called his own home phone where he lived with his wife and five children, first at 3:52 and then at 4:01. He used his mobille phone for at least some of those calls

Sometime between then and 6:46, Sueppel appears to have reached the point of total desperation bordering on insanity. He beat his wife to death - most likely with a baseball bat. He took the children - aged between 3 and 10 years old, three of which were adopted - to the garage and sat in the car, trying to kill them all by running the engine of the car to create carbon monoxide poisoning but that failed.

The four children were then taken back into the house. Their battered bodies were found in different parts of the house.

Sueppel's desperate state worsened: he had originally tried to kill himself by drowning in the local river, he said in one of the messages, police say. Seemingly, he was made even more desperate by his failure to do even that right.

As a vice president of the bank, Sueppel had taken USD560,000 from the bank over a period of seven years, prosecutors alleged when he was charged. He pleaded not guilty and was due to face trial in April 2008.

At 6:31 he phoned the local police using the same device as he had made some of his desperate calls from. He asked them to go immediately to the family home. Exactly 15 minutes later, police responded to reports of a serious road accident on a highway near the home. Sueppel's Toyota Sienna had crashed at high speed and burst into fierce flames which consumed all the non-metal parts of the car. Police say that there was no accellerant used - which given that the vehicle remained on all four wheels as it was run off the road, creates an impression of the extreme severity of the crash. Sueppel was either killed in the crash or by the fire, burned beyond recognition and identified by dental records.

His father and brother, as both sole family members who may be interviewed, have been besieged by reporters.

Those commenting on media coverage have been extremely supportive of Sueppel and have nothing but good words to say about him and his family who one person describes as "the happiest children I have ever met." Another makes reference to Sueppel and a drug addiction, saying he was dealing with that and the issues from the embezzlement.

Although, this being America, there was a glut of conspiracy theorists claiming with bizarre clarity of mis-thought that it is very unlikely that the body is that of the banker and that he simply substituted someone else's body for his own.

Even in such horrible circumstances, there will always be someone who will steal the last shred of the dignity you may have thought, in a cocaine-induced crazy state, that you may have been providing for your family and, maybe, yourself.

If this story has a moral, it's this: being a thief and a money launderer is a very bad thing and can have the most awful consequences.