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The kids were still having breakfast when she began. First was "Perfect Paul," the 3-year-old who had been her most joyful and least trouble. He died in seconds, held violently underwater by the mother whose hands had carefully washed his hair so that the soap would not sting his eyes. She carried his soaked body to her bed, tucking him beneath a maroon blanket, his head on the pillows. After Paul, she drowned Luke, 2, and moved on to John, 5. Next she killed their baby sister Mary, whom she had distracted with a bottle so she wouldn't scoot away and hurt herself while her brothers were being killed.
Noah, her firstborn, was the last to die. The 7-year-old left his half-eaten cereal on the kitchen table when Andrea summoned him. Walking into the bathroom, Noah saw his sister facedown in the water, her tiny fists clenched. He asked, "What's wrong with Mary?" and then, according to the account Andrea would give police, he tried to run away. His mother chased him down, dragged the wailing boy to the bathroom and forced him facedown into nine inches of cold water in the tub, his sister's body floating lifeless next to him. Noah came up twice as he fought for air. But Andrea held her grip. She then laid Mary in bed with her brothers, wrapping their arms around the baby. She left Noah in the tub.
WAITING FOR DEATH
Drinking a diet coke, Andrea told homicide sergeant Eric Mehl what she had done and why. She did not hate the children. Nor was she mad at them. "They weren't developing correctly," she said. The soft-spoken sergeant asked how long she had considered murder. Two years, she said. "Since I realized I have not been a good mother to them." Mehl watched her movements. She looked him in the eye. She nodded. Sometimes she answered, "Yes, sir." But she would sit in 15 seconds of stone-cold silence if he asked too much. She could give only short answers to simple questions in their 17-minute conversation as she twice recounted the order in which her children were born and died.
Later she told jail doctors that nothing could mute the patter that said she was a lousy mother. The death of her children, she said, was her punishment, not theirs. It was, she explained, a mother's final act of mercy. Did not the Bible say it would be better for a person to be flung into the sea with a stone tied to his neck than cause little ones to stumble? And she had failed her children. Only her execution would rescue her from the evil inside her--a state-sanctioned exorcism in which George W. Bush, the former Governor and now President, would come to save her from the clutches of Satan. Had not Scripture taught that the government is a minister of God, "an avenger who brings wrath on the one who practices evil?" She told the doctors she wanted her hair shaved so she could see the number 666--the mark of the Antichrist--on her scalp. She also wanted her hair cropped in the shape of a crown, perhaps the kind the Bible says Jesus will give to those who have won salvation.