Yesterday's report ...
Laney recounts killings on tape 
Jurors watch video; prosecutors say mother knew she was wrong
02:13 AM CST on Thursday, April 1, 2004
By LEE HANCOCK / The Dallas Morning News
TYLER – Deanna Laney said she didn't want to kill her three sons and repeatedly resisted beating them to death with rocks but could not escape what she believed was a test from God.
"I was, like, rejecting. I was trying to go 'no,' and each time, it was getting worse and worse, the way that it would have to be done,' "she told a prosecution psychiatrist in a videotaped interview played Wednesday for jurors in her capital murder trial.
"And I couldn't believe it. I just couldn't believe it. But I believed it with my heart, I believed with all my heart that it was the Lord telling," she said seven months after her arrest for killing her two older boys and maiming her youngest. "But I couldn't figure out why."
Mrs. Laney's defense played the video during cross-examination of a prosecution expert Wednesday to bolster their contention that the 39-year-old homemaker was mentally ill and that she didn't know right from wrong – and thus was legally insane – when she attacked her sons last Mother's Day weekend.
Prosecutors are trying to convince jurors that Mrs. Laney had enough awareness of the wrongness of her acts that she should be found guilty of capital murder in the May 10 killings of Joshua Laney, 8, and Luke, 6, and serious injury to a child for her attack on Aaron, who was 14 months old at the time.
District Attorney Matt Bingham repeatedly noted that Mrs. Laney hid what she was doing from her husband and others, hid one son's body when she brought another boy out to kill, and called 911 afterward. He contended those acts suggested she was deceptive and knew that she had broken the law.
He and his assistants spent the final day before resting their case challenging their own psychiatric experts, who found along with three other mental health specialists hired by the court and the defense that Ms. Laney was too deranged to know what she did was wrong.
At several points, prosecutors appeared intent on convincing jurors that even the dimmest awareness that murder is a crime would mean a mentally ill person who killed another knew he was doing wrong.
Although "know" and "wrong" are key words in the state's insanity statute, no legal definition of either can be given to jurors in Texas criminal cases involving sanity claims.
How jurors decide how to define those two words will be pivotal as they consider whether to find Mrs. Laney not guilty by reason of insanity or send her to prison for the rest of her life.
But Dr. Park Dietz, a nationally noted California psychiatrist, said Mrs. Laney was "a textbook case" of insanity.
He said her detailed description of her acts "was the most consistent accounting he had ever seen" in more than a thousand criminal insanity evaluations and decades of studying criminal insanity claims.
He also expressed bafflement that prosecutors were mounting a full-blown trial and seemed so intent on winning a conviction despite unanimous findings of five mental health experts that Mrs. Laney was too deranged to understand her acts were wrong.
But when he began telling lead defense attorney F.R. "Buck" Files Jr. that he had never seen what was happening in the Tyler courtroom occur in any other criminal insanity case, state district Judge Cynthia Kent sustained a prosecution objection and ordered jurors to disregard his comment.
The prosecution's second expert, Dr. Edward Gripon, later testified that Mrs. Laney had told him "that she did not think [what she did] was wrong. She was doing what God had instructed her to do, and it therefore could not be wrong."
Like Dr. Dietz, Dr. Gripon rejected prosecutors' suggestions that Mrs. Laney's delusions were too illogical and contradictory to be believable.
Mrs. Laney told psychiatrists that God's instructions came in the most chillingly ordinary ways. Sobbing at times and sometimes breaking down on the psychiatric video recorded in December, Mrs. Laney explained in a sad, soft voice that Aaron's play with a toy spear, a rock and a frog on the day of the attacks had told her that God wanted her to stab, stone or strangle him and his brothers.
She said tripping over a rock showed her the weapon she had to use. She prayed for more signs, asking, "Lord, is this really what you want me to do? If this is really you, I need a sign. I need a sign." She said one quickly came in Luke's afternoon reading from a storybook about a black horse and Aaron's play with a black toy horse.
"It meant death," she said.
Joshua's excited comment that something in his Bible notebook was "a test" meant she was resisting God's test that would make her one of the two chosen witnesses for the "end of days" foretold in the New Testament Book of Revelation.
The second witness had already carried out divine orders to kill her own children, Mrs. Laney explained. That was Houston area mother Andrea Yates, who drowned her five children in June 2001 and was convicted of murder after Harris County jurors rejected her insanity plea.
'I didn't want to do this'
Despite resistance to what she was seeing that last day, Mrs. Laney told a psychiatrist, she was not concerned. "I didn't want to do this. But I thought that it was – I was being told by the Lord to do this. I believed that, with all my heart."
She said she did not tell her husband, Keith. She also did not tell her brother-in-law and pastor at the First Assembly of God in Tyler where she was considered a pillar of the church, or anyone else in her close-knit Pentecostal family. She said she believed she should be silent like Mary in the New Testament and "ponder these things in her heart."
Ms. Laney said she awoke wide-eyed at 11:30 on the night of May 9 and knew "it's time."
Going for Aaron first, she said she couldn't bring herself to finish him off. So she woke Luke and took him outside. When she thought he was dead, she explained with a breaking voice, she dragged his body behind a bench and went back in the house for Joshua.
She hid Luke's body because she remembered that Andrea Yates' oldest son had struggled when she "had to kill her boys."
Asked if the boys knew she was about to hit them, Mrs. Laney said "they were sleepy, anyway. And they just – I just told them to turn their heads that away, and they didn't see it."
Asked if their eyes were closed, she said, "I don't remember seeing their faces at all."
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