Grim testimony opens Laney trial
Defendant, officers weep as boys' deaths detailed
07:08 AM CST on Tuesday, March 30, 2004
TYLER – Aaron Laney was first, a toddler in Thomas-the-Tank Engine pajamas who wailed when his mother lifted him from his crib and bashed his skull with a 4-pound wedge of sandstone.
Six-year-old Luke was next, following Deanna Laney into the family's rock garden and lying down in his Scooby Doo pajamas "to do what his mommy told him." Eight-year-old Joshua asked "where are we going, Mom?" as Ms. Laney led him into the night. He struggled after the first blows, so she had to pin his arms with her knees to finish what she later said was God's will.
The attacks were reconstructed in gruesome detail Monday as the 39-year-old homemaker went on trial in the deaths of her two oldest boys and the serious injury of Aaron, now 2.
Ms. Laney winced and sobbed, her husband, Keith, often buried his head, and even veteran police officers broke down and cried as they told stunned jurors about the carnage at the Laneys' rural home last Mother's Day weekend.
Within the opening minutes of the trial, prosecutors read jurors signed agreements or "stipulations" in which Ms. Laney admitted all of the attacks.
She has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. If acquitted, she would be sent to a mental hospital for treatment; if convicted, she would go to prison for life.
Lead defense attorney F.R. "Buck" Files Jr. conceded in his opening statement that Ms. Laney killed her children and told jurors that her only defense would be insanity.
Mr. Files sometimes choked up as he described a devout, devoted mother with a "tiny universe" of family and friends and a life that revolved around her Pentecostal faith. He said Ms. Laney was such a private woman that she told no one as her mental state deteriorated into such severe psychotic delusions that four psychiatrists found that she did not know right from wrong at the time of the attacks – the legal definition of insanity in Texas.
"She believed in all her heart and with all her heart that the Lord had told us to do this," he said.
Ms. Laney saw her boys playing with a spear, frogs and rocks and thought God was ordering her to kill them with spears, rocks or her own hands, Mr. Files told jurors.
"Does she follow what she believed to be God's will, or does she turn her back on God?" Mr. Files asked the jury of eight men and four women. "It was insanity that caused her to do what she did to those children."
But District Attorney Matt Bingham said jurors alone must decide Ms. Laney's criminal culpability. Apologizing for what he was about to show them, the prosecutor said the jury needed an exhaustive understanding of the crime to be able to fairly decide whether Ms. Laney is guilty or insane.
"The issue of sanity is tried in the courts, not the hospital," he said.
"If you disagree with the mental health experts' findings based on all of the evidence – all of it – then the system has also worked," he said. "The evidence will show that the last thing that Joshua and Luke Laney ever saw on this Earth was their Mom with a rock over their head, and the last thing they felt was that rock crashing down."
Mr. Bingham began the trial with a narrative of the May 10 tragedy. He said the day began much like any other, with Keith Laney going to work at his air compressor shop and the boys staying with their mother for home schooling. The children played outside when Mr. Laney came home after work and mowed the yard. The family then met relatives at an El Chico restaurant for dinner.
Ms. Laney went to bed before her husband but woke up about 11 p.m., Mr. Bingham said. As she went toward Aaron's room, the prosecutor said, she tried to lock her sleeping spouse in their bedroom.
Ms. Laney pulled the sleeping boy from his crib and retrieved a rock she'd brought in earlier that day. But when she struck him on the head, his cries awakened Keith. Mr. Laney assumed his wife was changing the baby's diaper when he saw her in the darkened room, and he went back to bed after she called out, "everything's OK."
The prosecutor said Ms. Laney was unnerved by the baby's gurgling noises, so she stopped hitting him, left him in his crib and went to get her other sons. She led one, then the other, out into the yard and told them to lie down and turn their heads on large, sandstone rocks.
Luke kept breathing after repeated blows from a 16-pound rock, so she laid it on his chest and pressed down until his breathing stopped, Mr. Bingham said.
She dragged the 6-year-old's body 60 feet into the bushes and then went for Joshua. After bashing his head in on a rock within a foot of the rock where she killed his brother, she waited for about an hour before getting a cellphone from her Chevrolet Suburban and calling 911.
The first evidence brought into the drab, second-floor courtroom was a 35-minute cassette recording of the 911 call. On it, Ms. Laney could be heard softly and precisely telling a baffled dispatcher how to find her house, where to find her dead boys in her yard and how she'd managed to killed them while her husband slept.
"I just killed my boys," she began the call, her East Texas twang hinting of tired, sad resignation. "I just did what I had to do."
"Who told you to do that?" Deputy B.J. Williams asked.
"God," Ms. Laney responded.
Prosecutors then called Smith County Sheriff's Deputy James Finch to describe his frantic search for the boys after arrived at the Laneys' home. The deputy said the sound of his police radio brought Mr. Laney stumbling out of his bedroom, clearly startled from sleep.
On the witness stand, Deputy Finch wept and had to struggle to regain his composure as prosecutors showed him large photographs of the boys' broken bodies and poster-sized photos of Aaron's bloody crib. Ms. Laney covered her head and shook, weeping. Behind her, her husband bowed his head.
The deputy said Ms. Laney seemed "calm" and "rational" when he and another sheriff's deputy went to the woods behind the house and found her walking in circles and talking to 911.
He and the second deputy, Don Rathbun, testified that they had to physically restrain Mr. Laney when he rushed from his house in his underwear just as the boys' bodies were discovered.
"He was highly emotional. He kept screaming, 'What did you do? What did you do? Oh no!,' " Deputy Rathbun testified.
Jurors leaned forward, some stared grimly, and a few appeared to wince as Mr. Bingham displayed the bloodstained rocks used in the attacks. He lifted and swung the largest of them to show how Ms. Laney might have swung it.
Detective Joe Rasco testified about interviewing Ms. Laney's family and friends.
"Everyone I talked to described this family as very happy," he said.
The defense attorney, Mr. Files, later asked, "It's fair to say that after it was all over, you couldn't come with any logical rational reason for her behavior?"
"That's a fair statement," the detective responded.
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