No Regrets

know right from wrong at the time of her crime.
    The state would not, however, seek the death penalty— a penalty that Christine herself was fully prepared to accept. She
wanted
to die so she could be with her children.
    As the trial progressed, the six-man, six-woman jury were not immune from the overwhelming sense of grief that gripped the courtroom. There were many, many tearsthere. Christine wept quietly as her defense lawyers, J. D. Evans and Greg Lawless, described what her life had been like since her husband had walked out on her the prior Thanksgiving.
    “She just broke,” Evans said. “She thought she was evil and her husband was evil. She thought the children had no chance in life other than to go to hell.”
    Christine’s plea—innocent by reason of insanity— seemed the most cogent plea ever heard in a courtroom. “It’s our position,” Evans said, “that no mother in her right mind, who loves her children, could take them to a bridge in the middle of winter and drop them into the water. There’s a motive for every crime. The only reason or motive for what she did is insanity.”
    Christine, her soft, dark hair parted in the middle and her face virtually expressionless beyond a consuming sadness, had only one dress, a dress she wore each day to the long trial. Clothes mattered nothing to her; indeed, life itself seemed to mean nothing to her. Whatever the verdict, it was patently clear to observers that she herself had “died” on that windswept bridge in February, all hope and dreams gone for her as surely as they were for the smiling little boys she had adored.
    Friends came forward to testify in her behalf, waitresses who had worked with her, women with little money themselves who had given up two days’ work and paid their own fares to travel across the Cascade Mountains. They told of Christine’s metamorphosis from a happy young wife to a desperate woman who had been deserted. They had watched her disintegrate as she was left penniless and stunned when her world evaporated. Neighbors from the trailer park took the witness stand and told of a Christine who had hugged baby Ryan two days before hedied and crooned, “I love you.” No one had ever seen her hurt her children, or even raise her voice to them.
    Dr. Thomas Corlew, a psychiatrist from Eastern Washington State Hospital, testified that when he examined Christine in June, he had found her “the most profoundly depressed person I have ever seen.” Corlew felt that she met both tests of legal insanity: In his opinion, she was unable to tell right from wrong on the night she killed her babies, and she was unable to perceive the nature and quality of her actions.
    “The day after she killed her children, she seemed to be under the severe influence of an outside force [something] that seemed to be controlling her.”
    “Did she say what that influence was?” Evans asked.
    “She said it was Satan.”
    Even the husband who had left her testified for the defense. He had left Christine, yes, but he had always found her to be a loving mother whose one concern was to see that their sons were happy and healthy. His eyes, too, were haunted. He had to be thinking that if he hadn’t left his family the tragedy would never have happened.
    The Mormon leaders testified, castigating themselves for not realizing how profound Christine’s mental aberration was.
    Dr. Claude McCoy, a Seattle psychiatrist, testified for the prosecution. McCoy, who agreed with the defense lawyers when they pointed out that he had never personally examined Christine, said his diagnosis that she was legally sane at the time of her crime was based on his conclusions after reading police reports and medical documents. “People who have a mental illness usually know what they are doing,” he said somewhat obscurely. “I believe Christine Jonsen is no exception.”
    The defense asked Dr. McCoy if he had
ever
concluded in court that a defendant was criminally insane.
    “No, I have not,” he admitted.
    The tape of Christine Jonsen’s confession to Detective Pittman played in the hushed courtroom. For twenty-five minutes, we heard the quavering voice of a mother who had killed her babies—to save them from hell. Several jurors wiped tears from their eyes as she relived the moments on the bridge, relived hearing the “kerplunk” as the children hit the water. Then she told how she had driven around for a while before going to City Hall. She thought that that was