HoustonChronicle.com - Law, psychiatry clash when a mother kills

DALLAS - The shocking list of Texas women accused of killing their children, brutally, by hand, grew by one last week.

Dena Schlosser, police say, cut off the arms of her infant daughter, then sat holding the knife, listening to hymns in her apartment in Plano, a Dallas suburb. A day earlier, the 35-year-old homemaker allegedly told her husband she wanted to send the child to God.

The case immediately drew comparisons with those of Andrea Yates, the Houston mother who drowned her five children in a bathtub in 2001, and Deanna Laney, who killed two of her three sons in East Texas last year by bashing their skulls with rocks.

In those and at least two other headline Texas cases in recent years, the worlds of criminal justice and psychiatry collided, and with little agreement about what should happen to the women involved.

"There are people who feel a price must be paid and those who are willing to concede there is something called mental illness," said Dr. Jaye Crowder, a forensic psychiatrist in Dallas. The idea that someone can become so ill that they do not know what they're doing "is something terribly difficult for (some) people to understand."

Although legal and psychiatric experts caution it is too early to say how Schlosser's case will develop, it appears likely to center on mental illness and the question of sanity in the eyes of the law. She has been charged with capital murder and is being held in custody without bail.

Child Protective Services officials say Schlosser was treated in a psychiatric hospital for postpartum depression after the child's birth in January. By August, the mother of three was taken off psychiatric medication and child welfare officials closed their case.

But then came Monday. After going to the child's crib in a back bedroom and cutting off the child's arms at the shoulders, Schlosser called her husband, who was at work in Arlington, to tell him what she had done, according to court papers and a 911 call.

Defining psychosis

The jury that found Laney not guilty by reason of insanity earlier this year, and the jury that convicted Yates of capital murder in 2002, were both criticized in reaching their verdicts, he said.

Psychological experts in both cases agreed that the women were suffering from psychosis, but in Yates' case, the state's expert testified she knew what she was doing when she killed her children.

Researching a disorder

"It's a truly baffling disorder that needs more attention," Hunt said. "Until more is understood, women who commit these heinous crimes will be judged in the courts, where they've been judged harshly."

Experts say postpartum depression affects about 10 percent of women after giving birth. Symptoms include emotional numbness, withdrawal, lack of joy and loss of concentration severe enough to interfere with one's ability to function. The more extreme postpartum psychosis affects about one in 1,000 and can be accompanied by thoughts of suicide, delusions, hallucinations, paranoia, and, in about 4 percent of cases, the act of harming one's children.

Lisa Ann Diaz, a Plano mother who was found not guilty of capital murder by reason of insanity in August, said a prayer — "Dear God, please take care of my precious angel" — before drowning her two daughters last fall. She told authorities she knew it was time to kill them when she spotted a pair of crows in her yard.

It comes as little surprise to experts in the field that religion has played a role in the Texas cases, including both Yates' and Laney's. Yates said she believed she was saving her children from eternal damnation. She thought Satan lived within her and the state would execute her for her children's murders and rid the world of evil.

"The content of delusions is strongly related to your culture," Brown said. Street people often clash with authorities, he explained, so their delusions tend to include police, the CIA or the FBI.

"These are women with religion in their lives," Brown said. "You also see strong themes of good and evil, which grows out of that."

Juries deciding sanity

He said Texas, with its elected prosecutors and judges, has a long tradition of letting juries, not medical professionals, decide whether someone is insane. "It's safer politically to say, 'We'll just let the jury decide,' " he said.

But legal rules in the state set a high bar for defendants pleading insanity, Secrest said. Prosecutors can use any action before or after the crime that hints that a person was cognizant of his or her wrongdoing, and that evidence often exists.

"Experts will tell you people can drift in an out of sanity from moment to moment," said Secrest, whose client told police she killed her child to rid him of demons. "They may know what they did was wrong a half-hour later, but not the moment they did it."

He said prosecutors in Houston pressed their capital murder case against Rodriquez even though their own psychological expert agreed she was insane.

"It was fortunate for us they videotaped her confession," Secrest said. "You could see how wigged out she was. She was just in a different world."

Looking into their minds

Dr. Phillip Resnick, professor of psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland, testified as a defense expert in both the Yates and Laney trials.

He noted that jurors are likely to accept an insanity defense only in cases where experts hired by prosecutors agree with those hired by the defense team.

In Laney's trial last spring, he noted, all five psychological experts agreed she was unaware of her actions, and still her eventual acquittal was not assured. The first vote by the jury was eight to four for conviction.

The Tyler jury heard a forensic pathologist testify that bruises on the victims' tongues showed they died screaming. "That kind of testimony makes jurors not want to excuse anyone," Resnick said.

Law, psychiatry clash when a mother kills

Differing definitions of sanity often collide in court

Defining psychosis

Researching a disorder

Juries deciding sanity

Looking into their minds