Delilah

A mother shot her 13-year-old son twice in the head in the family van, then drove home and shot her 16-year-old daughter while she sat at the computer doing homework. She told police why. The kids were "mouthy." Her name was Julie Schenecker, from Tampa. That week her husband, an Army colonel, was deployed to the Middle East. Five days before the killings she had bought a revolver. A few months earlier police had come to the house after she hit her daughter, and nobody was charged. After the shootings she covered both bodies with blankets. When police found them, Julie was still at home. She had written a note, and in it she gave the same reason she later gave detectives: her children talked back to her. In the interview room she told Detective Gary Sandel that Calyx and Beau were "really mean" to her. "I just topped over. The last straw." She said she had planned to kill herself afterward, but she couldn't explain why she never did. In the video below, she's in prison, crying as she remembers what people used to tell her about her kids: "You raised such a beautiful person." "You're such a good mom." Then the reporter who interviewed her is asked what Julie said when she was asked if she would do it again. "She told me she would do it again." At trial in 2014 her lawyers argued insanity. The jury took less than two hours to convict her of two counts of first-degree murder, and she got two life sentences without parole. Was Julie Schenecker a sick woman nobody stopped in time, or a mother who knew exactly what she was doing when she bought that gun?