No Regrets

Church went to the trailer home and talked with Christine. He was gravely concerned when he saw that her whole personality had changed. He found her on the verge of “being completely crazy and suicidal.” He took her to hishome and called the bishop. The two men spent the evening trying to counsel Christine, but she was too distraught to listen to them.
    The men from her church set up two appointments with psychiatrists for Christine, but when they went to pick her up to drive her to the doctors’ office, she would not answer the door.
    It was far too late. Christine Jonsen was consumed with a terrible guilt that her “evil” and her estranged husband’s “evil” would somehow contaminate the children she loved so much.
    She had tried everything she knew how to try. She had begged the bishop to find a home where someone kind could take her boys for a few months. She would work two jobs, and she would get out of her terrible financial dilemma. But he had advised her gently that the boys needed her. Their father’s desertion was enough of a trauma for them to cope with. They could not have their mother go away, too.
    The church offered to find a babysitter so that she could work afternoons, but Christine knew she couldn’t make enough money that way. They would all starve.
    At a certain point, starving no longer mattered. Christine became worried about her babies’ immortal souls.
    In her mental state, she felt that she would only become more evil, that the devil himself would drive her further and further from God. As a Mormon, she believed that if her babies died before their eighth birthday, they would be assured of a place in the Celestial Kingdom. Children could not be baptized in the Mormon Church until they reached the age of accountability, but if they died before they were eight, they would go to Heaven because they were without sin.
    Christine agonized over what she should do. What if she became increasingly a daughter of perdition—to the point where she would no longer be concerned with her sons’ salvation? She couldn’t keep them from the cold and hunger now, and every day things got worse.
    On February 4, the snow was deep and crusted with ice in the Tri-Cities area. Christine had heard that freezing to death wasn’t painful. She planned to join the boys as they went peacefully to sleep and froze. Holding them close, she sat in the snow outside the trailer home, waiting for death to overtake them. But Christopher began to cry and she realized that this plan would not be painless, and she could not bear to have them suffer—even for an instant— as she helped to free them from the wickedness that pervaded her life.
    She took the youngsters back inside the trailer house and dressed them warmly, and then she carried them to her car. They drove around the Tri-Cities area all day while she tried to come up with a plan. Periodically, she stopped and parked so that she could think. Several times, she stopped to buy food for the little boys.
    Now Christine knew what she had to do. She had decided that she must drown her two precious babies. But it was so hard to do.
    The Pasco-Kennewick Bridge is suspended by cables forty feet above the Columbia River that roars beneath. In February, the river was as icy as death itself. Back and forth, back and forth, she drove. It was midnight, and then 2:00 A.M . If she waited until daylight, it would be too late. Sometimes, there were too many cars on the bridge; sometimes there were cars just behind her. And then, finally,there was no one—no one except the desperate mother and her two sleeping sons.
    “By then,” she would say later, “I knew it had to be done. I did it.”
    Christopher, the baby, was first. She carried the still-sleeping child to the center of the bridge and dropped him into the frigid water, hearing a splash far below—and then... nothing. Tears streaming down her face, Christine walked back to the car and got Ryan. He, too, disappeared under the black water below. And then she stood alone on the empty bridge, the wind tearing at her clothing. She had made the ultimate sacrifice.
    They were gone from her, but they were entering the Celestial Kingdom.
    Several hours later, a disheveled Christine Jonsen walked into the Pasco Police Department and asked to talk to someone. She had killed her children, and she wanted to turn herself in.
    Detective Archie Pittman, horrified and disbelieving, interviewed Christine. He taped his interview