If it were only that simple.....This woman was mentally ill, and in no condition to make any wise choices. She had no support group—she was kept isolated. She was terrified of her husband, but had no place to go.
I followed this very carefully from the beginning. I lived in Dallas at the time it happened. When it first broke, I along with just about everybody else in the area, was horrified and thought the woman should go to the electric chair!
However, as we learned more and more about it over the next few months, I began to see things differently.
Since I also had 5 children, I knew what it was like to keep a lot of balls in the air at all times—but I had the loving support of a husband who came home from work and helped with the kids bath and bed time. It was then that I could relax and rest up for the next day. This woman had none of that.
Instead, she had a vicious, controlling husband that not only didn’t help her or give her any relief from the kids, he punished her for every little thing she did or didn’t do that he considered an infraction of his rules.
You can’t simply walk out the door and not go back. You especially can’t do that if your every move is being controlled and you have been reduced to a quivering mass, afraid to make any “wrong” moves.
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If your alternative is to kill five children you certainly can.
She figured out how to drown those 5 kids between the hour her husband left for work and her MIL was scheduled to arrive to help her out with the kids.
She then immediately called 911 and confessed to killing them and then called her husband to say she did it.
She was with it enough to plan and murder her children in a methodical manner. She was with it enough to wait for a time when she was alone to pull it off.