JOLIET – Jurors deliberating for less than an hour convicted a suburban Chicago computer specialist of murder Thursday in the deaths of his wife and three school-aged kids during what he told them was a road trip to a water park.

Christopher Vaughn, 37, showed no emotion as the verdict was read. Family members of the victims cried and hugged each other in a hallway outside the courtroom immediately afterward.

Vaughn killed his family because he saw them as inconvenient obstacles to his dream of a new life subsisting in the Canadian wilderness, prosecutors told jurors Thursday before they withdrew to deliberate. The prosecution argued he had compiled survival guides and posted wistful Internet messages about constructing a cabin and settling for good in the Yukon cut off from the world, state attorneys said.