CALYX and POWERS SCHENECKER - 16 and 13 yo (2011)/ Convicted: Mother; Julie Schenecker - Tampa FL

Schenecker's journal reveals chilling details of killings

Monday, May 5, 2014 8:45am
[Last modified: Monday, May 5, 2014 11:24pm

In the hours after police say she murdered her children, Julie Schenecker picked up a pen and confessed to her spiral-bound notebook.

"Offed Beau in the van," she wrote, referring to the bullet she'd shot at close range into her 13-year-old son's head. "Next shot was to the mouth, his mouthy mouth."

Schenecker's murder trial opened Monday, three years after she was led trembling to jail by Tampa police, with prosecutors trying to explain the unfathomable by using her own words. The gripping account, read aloud by a crime scene technician, led jurors from her nascent plans to the hours afterward, when she wrote that she wanted to have her ashes mixed with theirs.

From the outset, prosecutors used the entries to outline their case: that Schenecker, who is pleading insanity, plotted her children's deaths, methodically carried them out and seemed at peace with the outcome.

If convicted, she faces a mandatory sentence of life in prison. Her trial is expected to last two weeks.

"I was planning on a Saturday massacre," she complained to her notebook in late January of 2011. But complications arose. The revolver she'd purchased from a gun shop in Oldsmar came with a mandatory three-day waiting period.

Prosecutors used Schenecker's notebook Monday to portray her as an enraged woman who vented her frustrations on her family. Though she'd walked away from a successful decadelong career in the military to raise her two children, prosecutors said she was angry at her 16-year-old daughter Calyx and her 13-year-old son Beau for becoming "sassy" teenagers.

Calyx in particular became the focus of her ire. Like many teenagers, the girl was sometimes critical of what her mother made for dinner, the clothes she wore, and how she behaved during her low spells.

Schenecker also worried that her then-husband, former Army Col. Parker Schenecker, was about to leave her, prosecutors said. She knew he'd sent her family an email, but hadn't allowed her to see it. (The Scheneckers divorced after she was charged with killing their children.)

"So now this is in her mind," Assistant State Attorney Stephen Udagawa said. "My daughter doesn't like me. . . . My husband has turned against me, and the son is starting to follow the daughter's behavior."


In her notebook, she spelled out her priorities: "Calyx, she gets it first."

Later, after she'd shot the girl, Schenecker described how she'd snuck up behind her daughter while she was doing her homework, giving her the same treatment she'd given her son: one bullet to the head and one to the mouth.

"Beau and I are going to heaven," she wrote afterward. "Wish heaven for Calyx too."

Among the half-formed thoughts and threats contained in the notebook, there were also signs that Schenecker knew she was living out of focus.

"I just read through these last few pages," she wrote. "I just am losing my mind."

Attorneys for Schenecker described her to the jury as a mother and former soldier "who lost her chronic battle with mental illness." Molested at age 6 and sexually assaulted at 17, Schenecker managed to give the appearance of someone who had her life in line, they said. She joined the Army after college and began an intensive study of the Russian language that positioned her to become a debriefer, spending years extracting information from defectors. She fell in love and married Parker Schenecker, giving birth to Calyx in Germany and to Beau in Hawaii.

But everywhere the family moved, Schenecker experienced the same manic highs and lows that characterize bipolar disorder. She saw psychiatrists. She left the Army. She wanted to have six kids. Her husband got a vasectomy after two. She'd gamble and buy cars and then she'd collapse into bed for weeks, her attorneys said.

Defense attorney Jennifer Spradley told jurors that by the end of 2010, Schenecker was coming apart and her family was "moving on."

Schenecker was determined to commit suicide, her attorneys said. After she killed her children, she tried to overdose on prescription pills. But the combination of Lithium and the blood-thinner Coumadin that she took failed to end her life, though it likely accounted for her ghostly appearance in the arms of Tampa police officers shortly after her arrest.

Hers was "a tale of two mothers," Spradley said.

There had been the woman years ago who wanted a large family, breast-fed her children and shuttled them between activities as they got older. And there was the woman now who, police said, wheeled her dead daughter into her bedroom and tucked her into bed. She'd tried to do the same to her son, but she couldn't move him from the van's passenger seat.

Prosecutors said that as Schenecker came up behind Calyx, her daughter heard her and asked her mother what she was doing. Schenecker replied that she was just checking in.

But according to Spradley, that wasn't the final word. Schenecker told police that before she raised her gun and pointed it at the back of Calyx's head, she told her daughter: "I love you."


http://www.tampabay.com/news/courts/criminal/schenecker-murder-trial-opening-statements-set-to-begin/2178352

Murderous Mother Who Shot Her Teen Children To Death Finally On Trial! You Won't Believe What She Wrote In Her Journal!


5/08/2014 6:01 PM ET




Julie Schenecker spent her Monday in court, at her trial for killing her own children.

Schenecker, 53, was a military vet of ten years and average soccer mom. She seemed like a normal wife and mother.

Until the day that she shot and killed her 13-year-old son Beau and her 16-year-old daughter Calyx.

In an opening statement by the prosecution in the Tampa, Florida courtroom, they read an excerpt from her journal, detailing the premeditated murder of her kids:

"I was planning a Saturday massacre, but had to wait on the waiting period… I offed Beau on the way to practice. There was a shot to his mouth, because he became so mouthy, just like Calyx. Calyx drove me to drink."

Omg… that's so horrible. She was referencing the mandatory waiting period of five days after she had purchased a .38 revolver.

This whole, awful court case is about whether or not this woman was a narcissist whose deteriorating marriage and contempt for her children (whom she had a strained relationship with) led her to plan their murder or not.

The other option seems to be the defense's plan of attack, claiming she was not only chronically depressed, but a bipolar woman who lost her battle with mental illness and did something she can never take back.

When driving Beau to soccer practice one day, she shot him twice in the head. She returned home to find Calyx doing her homework on the family computer. She shot her once in the back of the head then again in the mouth.

That's so horrendous, we can barely stand to read it.

Her defense attorney tries to paint her in a different light, saying life at home was rough dealing with her husband Parker and her debilitating depression. The lawyer said:

"This is a tale of two mothers. She was sick. She battled depression. The disease transformed Ms. Schenecker's life. She was molested at 6 years old, and she testified in the trial. She was again sexually assaulted at age 17. She left the military after 10 years because depression was kicking in and because she wanted to start a family. She wanted to have six children, but Parker wanted to have two. After Beau was born, Parker had a vasectomy; she always wanted to have more children. It tore her to her soul. A mother and former soldier lost her battle with chronic mental illness. It took everything from her, including her children."

It's going to be an uphill battle trying to prove insanity.

This was clearly premeditated, now it's all about proving whether or not she was too crazy to know right from wrong during the killings.

We hope justice is served.

Prosecution experts: Julie Schenecker understood killing her kids was wrong

Anna M. Phillips, Times Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 14, 2014 6:00am

TAMPA — The bar for criminal insanity is high in Florida, and Julie Schenecker, the New Tampa woman accused of killing her teenage children in 2011, hasn't met it, three mental health experts testified Wednesday.

Retained by the prosecution, they trooped into the courtroom one after the other to refute testimony from the three experts hired by defense attorneys. Just as those experts were certain that Schenecker was having a psychotic episode on Jan. 27, 2011, when she killed her children, this set was equally assured that she was in control of her actions.

"I don't think this is a close call," said Randy Otto, a psychologist who teaches at the University of South Florida. "Despite the fact she was experiencing severe mental illness, she did know that she was killing her children … and she did know that that was wrong."

Closing arguments are expected to begin this morning and the case is expected to go to jurors shortly thereafter.

Attorneys for Schenecker, 53, are waging an insanity defense, an infrequently used and rarely successful tactic that requires jurors to believe that because of her mental disorder, she couldn't distinguish right from wrong. By the time court came to an end Wednesday, jurors had heard from a total of six psychologists and psychiatrists, all of whom had spent hours with Schenecker and her writings but came away with divergent conclusions.

If jurors find Schenecker guilty as charged of two counts of first-degree murder, she will face a mandatory life sentence. If they side with the defense, she would likely spend years, if not the rest of her life, in a Florida psychiatric facility.

As they flipped through the armfuls of documents they'd brought with them to court Wednesday, the experts for the prosecution explained how they'd reached the same conclusion: Though she was deeply depressed and struggling with the worsening effects of her bipolar disorder, she was not so sick as to be legally insane.

In the days before she killed her children, Schenecker wrote in her spiral-bound notebook that she was planning "a Saturday massacre." She complained that her daughter had called her an "evil soul." She wrote: "The evil starts Thursday."

After she'd shot each teenager, once in the head, and once in the mouth, she picked up her pen again, writing an apology to her husband and saying she planned to commit suicide. "Beau went first, Calyx went second, I sure as hell would like to go third."

To forensic psychiatrist Dr. Donald Taylor, Schenecker's language couldn't have made her intentions plainer.

"She knew beforehand that what she was going to do would be considered wrong, as well as afterward," he told the jury.

Schenecker also lied to the clerk at the gun store in Oldsmar, where she purchased a revolver and ammunition several days before the killing. She told the man at the counter that she needed the gun for self-defense, as there had been several recent break-ins in her Tampa Palms neighborhood. Later, after she used the gun, she left Post-it notes on the front of her house telling people she and her family had gone to New York. Experts said her repeated attempts to deceive people were proof that she knew killing her children was not only morally wrong, it was also illegal.

Earlier this week, the mental health experts retained by the defense said that Schenecker believed she was killing her children to protect them. She thought her daughter was starting to show signs of bipolar disorder, though there was no evidence to support that. And she told doctors who interviewed her that she was convinced her son was going to be sexually molested, as she'd been when she was 6 years old. They were all going to heaven, she told police. After shooting her daughter, she'd tried to manipulate the girl's mouth to form a smile.

Countering their claims Wednesday, Otto told jurors that Schenecker was not psychotic on the day of the killings: "I'm not aware of any credible professional authority that says, essentially, every person who kills his or her children is insane," he said.

http://www.tampabay.com/news/courts/criminal/prosecution-rebuts-insanity-defense-in-julie-schenecker-murder-trial/2179682

Parker Schenecker testifies for hours in ex-wife Julie Schenecker's murder trial

Anna M. Phillips, Times Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 13, 2014 6:00am

TAMPA — Sitting straight-backed on the witness stand three years after his ex-wife killed their children, Parker Schenecker recalled the tough love he had offered her.

"It was her illness," he told a jury on Tuesday, referring to his then-wife's bipolar disorder. He had never looked at her prescription medications, kept track of whether she was taking them, or seen to it that she was meeting with her therapist and psychiatrist during their 20-year marriage. "It was her responsibility to follow up with her doctors' appointments."

On Tuesday, the day defense attorneys for Julie Schenecker, 53, rested their case, they portrayed her ex-husband as a man who intentionally kept his distance from his wife's escalating problems. While the Army had trained him in suicide prevention, he said, it didn't prepare him for life with a chronically mentally ill spouse.

And his wife's condition was particularly challenging. As a young woman, her bipolar disorder presented itself as episodic depression, but as she aged, it left her immobilized or fueled her recklessness. By 2010, she was taking the pain killer Oxycodone, which had been prescribed for her, but which Parker Schenecker didn't know she was abusing. She was also gambling away thousands of dollars at Tampa's Hard Rock Casino, losses that her husband only learned about after she was in jail.

When she became depressed and took to bed for eight weeks, her husband communicated with her mainly by email, sometimes signing off with the letters "VR," shorthand for "very respectfully."

He traveled often for work and was in Qatar on Jan. 28, 2011, when his then-wife was accused of killing their 16-year-old daughter Calyx and 13-year-old son Beau. Charged with two counts of first degree murder, Julie Schenecker faces life in prison if convicted.

Her attorneys are waging an insanity defense, arguing that she did not understand her actions were wrong. As evidence, they called Dr. Wade Myers to testify, making him the last of three mental health experts retained by the defense, all of whom concluded that Julie Schenecker was insane when she shot her children.

Parker Schenecker, his family and friends have allied themselves with prosecutors, who say Julie Schenecker planned to shoot her children out of anger mainly directed at her husband and teenage daughter. During his four hours of testimony, he often characterized his ex-wife's actions as choices she had made, whether it was refusing to get out of bed, or picking fights with her daughter. His wife was a grown woman who acted like a 10-year-old, he wrote in an email to her family members.

He preferred to email her, he said. When he tried "verbal communications," as he termed it, he sometimes felt as though he wasn't getting through.

"I always felt it was better to have things in black and white for her, unemotionally, where she could read them over and over if she needed to," he said.

But Schenecker showed a slightly softer side Tuesday, as he described his efforts to help his wife. In 2002, when his career moved the family to Germany, the former Army colonel sought out a doctor familiar with the special type of depression treatment she had begun receiving at the National Institute of Mental Health.

Later, as fights with Calyx grew worse, he arranged family counseling sessions and guided his daughter's search for a boarding school. It wasn't his job to dig through the trash and count his wife's empty wine bottles, he said, but he did try to alert her psychiatrist that she was mixing alcohol and Lithium. He had asked his wife to waive her privacy rights, allowing him to talk to her doctors, and she had refused.

In late 2010, when Julie Schenecker crashed her Mercedes on her way to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, she told her husband she'd had a few glasses of wine before she left. He told her he would no longer allow her to drive their children around.

"I MUST protect them; they are telling me that they feel unsafe — this is the basic responsibility of a parent, especially a father," he wrote to her in an email, adding, "the hard part of this is that they've asked for protection from their mother."

Neither prosecutors nor defense attorneys asked him the question that has hung over this case since his children were found dead: why he had trusted his wife to take care of them. "Julie and I talked about suicide many times over the years," he said on Tuesday, but as he packed his bags for Afghanistan, he didn't think she was on the verge of acting.

http://www.tampabay.com/news/courts/criminal/final-defense-witnesses-expected-in-julie-schenecker-murder-trial/2179507

Transcript: Julie Schenecker interview:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/222898998/Transcript-Julie-Schenecker-interview

Julie Schenecker Murder Trial - Live link: http://new.livestream.com/wildabouttrial/events/2958531

Trial Video Archive: http://new.livestream.com/wildabouttrial/events/2958531/archives

Jury: Julie Schenecker guilty of first-degree murder

Anna M. Phillips, Times Staff Writer
Thursday, May 15, 2014 6:00am

Less than two hours after getting the case to deliberate, jurors found Julie Schenecker guilty of two counts of first-degree murder for killing her children, Beau, 13, and Calyx, 16.

She faces a mandatory term of life in prison.

One of four alternate jurors, James Holmes, had predicted the verdict earlier Thursday to a scrum of reporters, saying he was "positive" Schenecker would be found guilty of first-degree murder.

"She was sane when it happened," he said. "She's like a train in a tunnel – in a tunnel it's dark and when you come out of it, there's brightness. She was in and out of it at the time."

Holmes said Schenecker's journal entries detailing her plans to kill her children and her thoughts afterwards had a "big impact" on him. "She was well aware of what she was doing," he said.

A bailiff escorted jurors out of the courthouse and said jurors did not wish to discuss the case.

http://www.tampabay.com/news/courts/criminal/closing-arguments-begin-in-julie-schenecker-murder-trial/2179870

Julie Schenecker found guilty, sentenced to life in prison



Julie Schenecker has admitted to shooting and killing her teenage children, 16-year-old Calyx and 13-year-old Beau in January 2011. 
She is charged with two counts of first-degree murder and has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.



By Rod Gipson, Bay News 9 Web Writer/Reporter
Last Updated: Thursday, May 15, 2014, 8:25 PM

TAMPA --  Julie Schenecker has been found guilty on two counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of her two teenage children.

The judge sentenced her to life in prison without parole on both counts.

Schenecker had admitted to shooting and killing her teenage children, 16-year-old Calyx and 13-year-old Beau in January 2011. She was charged with two counts of first-degree murder and plead not guilty by reason of insanity.

Schenecker addressed the judge after the verdict was read.

"Your honor, I’m prepared and I accept your sentence," she said. "I apologize to everybody in this courtroom who I have broken. The lives I have destroyed. I hope that they can collect themselves as best as possible. All of us...

"Everyone has been so deeply affected and I understand there are people who are affected by this, that may have just read in the paper, maybe a child who looked at their mommy and said 'mommy are you ever going to shoot me?' I know that this could have happened and I apologize for what happened, what I did. I take responsibility. I was there. I know, I know I shot my son and daughter. I don’t know why, but I have a period of time to try and understand that...

“I know our children are in Heaven, I want people to try and find comfort in believing as I do that they are in no pain, and they are alive and enjoying everything and anything Heaven has to offer--Jesus protecting them and keeping them safe until we get there. Their loved ones, all of us, to join them.”

The judge responded by saying, "it's almost too much to comprehend what brings us here. Regretably there is nothing that this court can so or do that is going to bring comfort to those that have been touched by this tragedy."

Col. Parker Schenecker also addressed the media after the sentencing was read.

"First of all I would like to thank the greater Tampa Bay community for their love and support of Calyx and Beau over past three years.It's been a trying time for all of us and you have continued to show us your kindness...

"Today's decision for many reasons gives my family a great sense of relief. As I've consistently mentioned over the past three years, the most important thing in all of this is Calyx and Beau: my lovely children. My smart, beautiful, loved and missed daughter and son. Giving voice to them has been my priority throughout this entire process. And their voices have been heard due to the efforts of many...

"While this decsiion doesn't bring my children back, it does give our family a chance to move forward."

Prosecutors present the jury with hard evidence

James Pruner spent his closing arguments going over previous evidence introduced in court. Still, he meticulously and emphatically went through Schenecker's movements in the days before and of the killings.

"The overwhelming evidence I suggest to you," Pruner said to the jury. "Proves beyond a reasonable doubt that this defendant committed first-degree premeditated murder."

Defense attorney Jennifer Spradley spent more than an hour telling jurors of Julie Schenecker's descent into the "claws of bi-polar illness."

"In this case, what your focus is going to be is my client's state of mind because this is not a who done it, this is not a what happened, this is not a cause of death, a self defense," Spradley told the jury. "This is my client's state of mind."

In closing, Spradley asked the jury to find her client not guilty by reason of insanity, taking into consideration her mental illness and psychosis.

"A healthy Julie Schenecker would have never shot her children," she told the jury.

In his rebuttal, Pruner said the entry "the evil starts Thursday" Schenecker wrote in her journal shows she knew what she was doing was wrong.

Schenecker's fate hinged on whether jurors believed she knew what she was doing when the teenagers were shot. Since being convicted of first-degree murder, Julie Schenecker will receive a life sentence, since prosecutors chose not to seek the death penalty.

To be found criminally insane under Florida law, a jury would have to find that either didn't know what she was doing when she killed her children or didn't understood that it was wrong.

http://www.baynews9.com/content/news/baynews9/news/article.html/content/news/articles/bn9/2014/5/15/closing_arguments_se.html