Mom follows dark path from icy rescue to murder charge

[crimeshot1]

Mom follows dark path from icy rescue to murder charge

Story Highlights

• Michelle Kehoe allegedly first told investigators a stranger attacked her and boys
• Authorities say she admitted buying duct tape, knife weeks earlier
• 2-year-old is one of about 300 children slain this year
• Kehoe is scheduled to be arraigned on December 2

(CNN) -- Less than a year after four strangers risked their lives to save Michelle Kehoe and her sons from an icy Iowa River, the mother is accused of slashing the two boys' throats and leaving them to die.

Michelle Kehoe was arrested November 15 after leaving the hospital where she had been since the attack.

Kehoe's 2-year-old son was found dead the morning of October 27 outside the family's van, which was parked a short distance from the Hook-n-Liner pond in Littleton, Iowa.

Her 7-year-old son was injured but still alive inside the van. He was rushed to the hospital for surgery, according to the Iowa Department of Public Safety.

Scars on his neck underscore the chilling account he gave police, contained in a police affidavit filed in Buchanan County court. The boy said his mother started with him, taking him from the van before covering his eyes, ears and mouth with duct tape, according to the affidavit. Then, he told police, she cut his throat.

She then moved on to his younger brother, he said. He could hear his brother's cries as she repeated the attack on him, the 7-year-old told police.

Kehoe initially denied involvement in the attacks, blaming them on a stranger. Eventually, she admitted to acquiring the knife and duct tape weeks earlier but could not explain why, the affidavit says.

Kehoe faces life in prison on charges of first-degree murder, attempted murder and child endangerment resulting in serious injury. She is being held on $2.5 million bail, County Attorney Allan Vander Hart said. She has not entered a plea but is scheduled for arraignment December 2.

Repeated calls to Andrea Dryer, Kehoe's public defender, were not returned. CNN was unable to find any public comments by Dryer on the case.

The attacks have rattled the community of Coralville, a suburb of Iowa City where Kehoe and her husband, Eugene, lived with their sons.

The arrest comes just three months after Iowa Gov. Chet Culver honored four men for diving into the Iowa River to rescue Kehoe and her sons on a cold December afternoon last year.

The governor's office gave the following account: Kehoe was driving the boys to the library when the car hit the curb, skidded on ice and then plunged into the river. As rushing waters filled the car, three passers-by who had watched it veer off the road plunged after it into the icy waters.

Inside the car, Kehoe dislodged her older son from his booster seat and passed him through the window to Cory Rath, who brought the boy ashore. Kehoe removed her younger son, then 14 months old, from his car seat and handed him out the window to Mark Petersen. Petersen began to swim with the boy and then passed the boy to Josh Shepherd, according to the governor's office.

Kehoe, meanwhile, had escaped from the car and was fighting the rough currents pulling her underwater. Bicyclist Steve McGuire noticed her struggling and dropped his bicycle to dive in after her.

The dramatic rescue formed a bond between the Kehoes and their four saviors, especially Rath, who befriended the family. He did not respond to CNN's phone calls but spoke recently with a local television station.

"Your heart sinks to hear that something was happening again," Rath told KGAN, a television station in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. "I mean, we just rescued these kids and mom from the river last December."

Rath told KGAN he was grateful that the older boy had survived but worried about the rough times ahead for him.

"Dying at the age of seven would have been really, really tragic," he told KGAN. "I'm also saddened that there are certainly difficulties he will have in the days and years to come that are troubling to think about."

Police have said they are not re-examining last year's accident in light of the recent attacks on the boys. Prosecutor Vander Hart would not comment on whether they were related.

The 2-year-old's slaying also marks the first homicide in five years in Buchanan County, the prosecutor said.

"Murder cases are pretty few and far in between here. We're a small rural community of 21,000 people," Vander Hart said. "Any time you have a case with these kinds of facts, it's going to draw some kind of attention. But I was not prepared for this degree of attention."

For many, the grisly nature of the attacks is compounded by the fact the boys' own mother is charged with plotting and carrying them out.

Cases of mothers who kill their children, like Susan Smith and Andrea Yates, continue to fascinate the public, even as the rates of filicide -- the act of a parent who kills his or her own child -- have remained fairly stable.

"Because these cases are so tragic, they pull at your heartstrings, but they happen all the time," said Laurie Levenson, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, California.

In 2005, 555 children under the age of five were victims of homicide, compared with 544 in 1976. The rate peaked in 1991 at 778 and bottomed out in 1971 at 511, according to statistics from the Department of Justice.

Another fairly stable statistic: In more than 50 percent of child homicides, the killer is a parent.

"The natural defense to anticipate is insanity, because why would a mother kill her own child?" Levenson asked. "It certainly can be insanity, but it's not always the case. Perfectly sane people can do horrible things, and they do, every day."

Mothers can be motivated to kill their children by several factors, according to criminologist James Alan Fox, Lipman Family professor of criminal justice at Northeastern University.

Some act on genuine psychotic delusions, as jurors determined to be the case with Texas mother Andrea Yates, who told doctors she drowned her five children because God told her to do so. Others can be motivated by selfish reasons: Susan Smith's alleged motive for killing her children was that she perceived them to be an obstacle in her relationship with her boyfriend.

"It's a crazy thing to do, but crazy describes the behavior, not the mind," Fox said, adding that between 300 and 350 children have been homicide victims in 2008.

"It doesn't make sense to most of us, but that doesn't mean the state of mind of the person is mentally ill. You may know what you're doing and have very selfish motivations," he explained.

Kehoe said she couldn't explain why she did what she did, according to the affidavit. Police said she initially told a false but chilling tale of how a normal, two-hour Sunday drive to visit relatives was interrupted by a brutal attack on her family.

On that Monday morning in October, she showed up on the doorstep of a home in Littleton, claiming that a man she couldn't identify had abducted her and her children. The person who answered the door called 911, and sheriff's deputies located the van with Kehoe's help.

Initially, she denied involvement in the attacks and stood by the statement that she'd been attacked by a stranger.

When pressed by investigators, however, Kehoe said she had purchased a knife a month earlier and duct tape two months earlier, the affidavit states. The document also says that before she and her sons left home Sunday, she wrote a note detailing the abduction by a stranger.

The note was found in the van, according to the affidavit.

The document went on to say: "She stated that it all happened within five minutes and prior to 1:30 pm. She stated she couldn't explain why she had done it. She stated that she couldn't face anyone. She stated that she wanted to die or be locked up where she couldn't hurt anyone."

After speaking with investigators, Kehoe was taken to the hospital to be treated for her own wounds and trauma, said prosecutor Vander Hart, declining to elaborate. She remained there until she was arrested and taken to jail a week ago Saturday.

A plea of not guilty would open the door to a criminal trial, where Kehoe's state of mind would become a key issue, experts say.

Michael Welner, Chairman of the Forensic Panel, interviewed Andrea Yates and testified for the prosecution at her trial. He said the successful insanity defense in Yates' case made what was once an "unthinkable" strategy into a viable defense.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/11/25/kehoe.mom.charged/

[Bailey]

Michelle Kehoe has pleaded not guilty to charges related to the knife attacks on her sons

By Emanuella Grinberg, CNN
October 30, 2009 12:06 p.m. EDT

(CNN) -- A mother's plot to blame a stranger for killing her sons went awry when one of the boys survived and told police how Michelle Kehoe cut his throat, then moved on to his younger brother, an Iowa prosecutor said Thursday.

Police found the 7-year-old covered in dried blood in the family van the morning of October 27, 2008, in a secluded area near a pond east of Littleton. Beside the van, his 2-year-old brother lay dead, his throat also slashed.

"She cut me," the boy said in a high-pitched voice in an audio recording that was played Thursday in Kehoe's first-degree murder trial.

Kehoe, of Coralville, Iowa, has pleaded not guilty to charges of first-degree murder, attempted murder and child endangerment causing serious injury. Before the trial, her lawyers filed a notice of intent to present an insanity defense, according to court records.

Kehoe's lawyers chose to reserve their opening arguments for the start of their case.

Dressed in a blue and white striped blouse, Kehoe frowned as she listened to her son's voice on the recording, occasionally bowing her head.

The boy had locked himself in the van overnight after his mother slashed him and his younger brother the previous day and left them for dead, Assistant Iowa Attorney General Andrew Prosser said in his opening statement.

Kehoe then walked to a nearby pond and attempted to kill herself by slashing her throat with the same weapon, a camouflage-handle Winchester hunting knife she bought the month before, Prosser said.

When it became apparent she was not going to die, the prosecutor said, she staggered half a mile down the road to the nearest home and told a story she'd concocted weeks before of how a stranger abducted the family, killed her sons and tried to kill her.

But when authorities went searching for the stranger, they instead found her 7-year-old son in the car and his younger brother dead outside the driver's side.

"Do you know where you're injured at?" Deputy Stephen Peterson asked the boy in the recording.

"Just my throat," the boy said.

"Who did that to you?"

"My mom."

The boy said his mother also put duct tape over his eyes, nose and mouth, but that he pulled them off after his mother left him.

"She was hurting my baby brother," he said.

Kehoe began plotting the attack the month before with the purchase of the knife and the duct tape, Prosser said. She allegedly chose the date of the incident to coincide with when her husband, Gene, was scheduled to take a yoga class, telling him they were going to visit her mother at a nursing home in Sumner.

Police also say they found signs of a cover-up at the scene, including pieces of a first-aid kit scattered around the scene and a handwritten note documenting the attack, Prosser said.

The note detailed how a man broke into the car when the family stopped at a gas station and forced them to the area where the van was found. Kehoe tried to fight him off with pepper spray but he knocked her unconscious, the note said, according to the prosecutor.

Police said Kehoe later told them she had written the note in the midst of the attack to explain what had happened to those who would find the scene, according to the prosecutor.

"And the note, which you'll see, ends with, 'Oh no, here he comes again...' " Prosser told the jury.

Kehoe faces life in prison without parole if convicted of first-degree murder for her son's death.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/10/29/...ial/index.html

[Bailey]

Lee Hermiston • Iowa City Press-Citizen • November 3, 2009

GRUNDY CENTER – Michelle Kehoe attempted suicide at least twice and suffered from major depressive disorder for a decade prior to the attack on her children on Oct. 26, 2008, that left one of them dead.

A Kansas City psychiatrist who evaluated Kehoe after she killed her son and attempted to kill her other son testified Tuesday that Kehoe’s major depressive disorder prevented her from knowing right and wrong at the time she attacked her children.

“She really couldn’t think rationally about what she was doing,” Psychiatrist William Logan said. “She thought she was doing the right thing.”

However, Logan told the jury Kehoe was well aware of the nature of her actions afterward.

“She certainly realized after that fact that she had done a horrible thing,” Logan said.

Kehoe, 36, of Coralville, is accused of killing her 2-year-old son, Seth, near Littleton in Northeast Iowa and attempting to kill her then 7-year-old son, Sean, before also cutting her own throat. The trio had left Coralville earlier that day to visit her mother in Sumner but never arrived. If convicted of first-degree murder, Kehoe faces a mandatory life sentence.

Kehoe also has been charged with attempted murder and child endangerment causing serious injury.

Logan was the defense’s first witness after the state rested its case earlier on Tuesday. Logan told the jury about Kehoe’s medical history. Logan said Kehoe was abused by her step-father and his nephew and blamed her mother for not protecting her. She was later sent to live with her aunt when she confronted her mother about the abuse.

Kehoe went on to become a very rigid person and excelled in school, Logan said. But when she was in graduate school at Saint Ambrose University in 1996, she began to experience depression. Two years later in 1998, she attempted to kill herself by drinking Heet brand anti-freeze and carbon monoxide poisoning. In February 1999, Kehoe checked into a hotel and tried to kill herself by slicing her femoral artery.

Kehoe’s therapy over the years included in-patient and outpatient programs, medication and electro-shock therapy, Logan said.

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While her childhood abuse, issues with her mother, miscarriages and other events contributed to her mental illness, Logan said a “major turning point” was when Kehoe drove her vehicle into the Iowa River in Dec. 2007 with Sean and Seth inside. The event, which she had to relive for months when her rescuers were awarded at the Iowa State Fair, caused Kehoe to experience Post Traumatic Stress Disorder-like symptoms.

“She felt a tremendous guilt about this,” Logan said.

Logan testified Kehoe presented the incident as an accident, but told medical personnel after she attacked her sons that it was a suicide attempt.

Kehoe was further influenced by Steven Sueppel killing his wife, children and himself in March 2008, Logan said.

“When she read this article (about the Sueppel killings)…she could understand where he was coming from,” Logan said.

Had Kehoe said this to her therapist or a medical professional, they would have recognized the statement as a warning sign, Logan said. However, Kehoe was adept at masking her feelings, Logan testified.

However, in his cross-examination, Assistant Iowa Attorney General Andy Prosser asked Logan if he was the one who had been duped by Kehoe. Prosser indicated that in several meetings with therapists, she never indicated any feelings of post traumatic stress and her therapists never indicated she seemed to be a suicide risk.

“There was no indication she was having any problems at all,” Prosser said.
Logan said Kehoe’s feelings of anxiety and suicidal tendencies increased in July, a month after her last visit with a therapist before the attack.

Prosser asked if that anxiety might have just been due to her planning to kill herself and her sons. Logan maintained, however, that Kehoe did suffer from serious mental illness.

“I just don’t know of any normal people that set out to kill themselves and their kids,” he said.

In her opening statement, Kehoe’s attorney, Andrea Dryer, said Kehoe suffered from mental illness and the events of Oct. 26, 2008 were a means to escape a life she didn’t feel was worth living.

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“To Miss Kehoe, the world was a dark place to live,” Dryer said.

Dryer said Kehoe believed her children would be better off dying with her than going on living. Dryer said to a normal person, that notion is simply illogical and wouldn’t make any sense.

“And that is why we call it insanity,” she said.

Before making her opening statement, Dryer made a motion for acquittal, but it was denied by Judge Bruce Zager.

The state called its final witness Tuesday morning, deputy state medical examiner Dennis Klein, who performed the autopsy on Seth Kehoe. Klein concluded Seth Kehoe died from blood loss caused by the sharp force trauma to his neck. Klein said the manner of death was homicide.

Autopsy photos accompanied Klein’s testimony, which caused some jurors to look away. Members of Kehoe’s family also looked away from the photos and cried audibily. Michelle Kehoe, who has been mostly emotionless throughout the proceedings, bowed her head, held a tissue to her eyes and cried during the testimony.

Proceedings ended early Tuesday after the testimony of Cory Hartmann, a Jesup Police Officer and EMT-Basic, who testified about witnessing Kehoe’s injuries at a rural Buchanan County home the morning after she killed her son and attempted to kill herself.

The defense will resume its case Wednesday with testimony from Marilyn Hutchinson, a psychologist.

http://www.press-citizen.com/article...mental-illness

[Nikki_2]

In my opinion, how was/is this woman insane? She left a note depicting that a stranger had attacked her children and herself, this is not an insane mind but someone who believed that the note and first aid items would be her alibi. Dark thoughts are what usually consume depressed people, they are the least likely to hurt others as they are themselves.

The attempted suicide that she tried many years ago will only serve her as a good alibi for this "attempted suicide" which I believe she did not harm herself to die, but had to stick to her story " a stranger did it"

People who harm children for whatever reason, should not have a choice to live but should receive the death penalty. In my mind I strongly believe she damn well knew what she was doing.

How does one even think about killing their own children and then sit and write a letter detailing a stranger? Cold blooded killer who sat and wrote a letter...

[Bailey]

Michelle Kehoe was convicted of first-degree murder and attempted murder

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

* Jury of eight women, four men deliberated for less than two hours
* Michelle Kehoe slashed sons' throats, left them for dead, tried to kill herself
* Iowa jury heard tape of surviving boy telling police his mother cut him, hurt brother
* Kehoe's lawyers argued that she was mentally ill, didn't know right from wrong

Iowa mom guilty of murdering son, 2

By Beth Karas, In Session
November 5, 2009 2:06 p.m. EST

Grundy Center, Iowa (CNN) -- An Iowa jury found Thursday that a mother with a history of depression knew right from wrong when she slashed her sons' throats, killing one and leaving the other permanently scarred.

Michelle Kehoe of Coralville, Iowa, broke into tears as the jury of eight women and four men found her guilty of first-degree murder, attempted murder and child endangerment causing serious injury. The jury deliberated for just and hour and 40 minutes.

Kehoe faces a sentence of life in prison without parole.

Kehoe's attorneys presented an insanity defense, arguing that she believed she was trying to save her sons from a life of suffering when she cut their throats and her own. Her first suicide attempt occurred in 1996, according to testimony.

Prosecutors countered that Kehoe methodically planned to kill her sons and herself, but botched it. The detailed planning showed she was not legally insane, Iowa Attorney General Andrew Prosser said.

The trial's dramatic highlight came as prosecutors played an audiotape of the surviving son's police statement. The boy, now 8, described how his mother slashed his throat, then moved on to his younger brother.

"She cut me," the boy said in a high-pitched voice.

Police found him covered in dried blood in the family van the morning of October 27, 2008, near a pond east of Littleton, Iowa. Beside the van, the boy's 2-year-old brother lay dead, his throat also slashed.

The boy had locked himself in the van overnight after his mother slashed him and his younger brother the previous day and left them for dead, Prosser said.

Kehoe then walked to a nearby pond and attempted to kill herself by slashing her throat with the same weapon, a Winchester hunting knife she bought the month before, Prosser said.

She later told a defense mental health expert, Marilyn Hutchinson, that she had tried to pull out her windpipe, according to testimony.

When it became apparent she was not going to die, the prosecutor said, Kehoe staggered half a mile down the road to the nearest home and told a story she'd concocted weeks before of how a stranger abducted the family, killed her sons and tried to kill her.

But when authorities went searching for the stranger, they instead found her 7-year-old son in the car and his younger brother dead outside the driver's side.

"Do you know where you're injured at," Deputy Stephen Peterson asked the boy in the recording.

"Just my throat," the boy said.

"Who did that to you?"

"My mom."

The boy said his mother also put duct tape over his eyes, nose and mouth, but that he pulled them off after his mother left.

"She was hurting my baby brother," he said.

According to testimony Kehoe began planning the attack the previous month, buying the knife and the duct tape. She told her husband she was taking the boys to visit her mother at a nursing home.

Police found a handwritten note laying out details of the the attack. It said a man broke into the car when the family stopped at a gas station and forced them to the area where the van was found. Kehoe tried to fight him off with pepper spray, but he knocked her unconscious, the note said.

Police said Kehoe later told them she had written the note during the attack to explain what had happened to those who would find the scene.

According to testimony, Kehoe also told Hutchinson, the defense expert, that an incident a year earlier in which her car plunged into the Iowa River with the boys inside was actually a suicide attempt.

She and her sons were rescued by passers-by, who were hailed as heroes.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/11/05/...ict/index.html

[Bailey]

the Press-Citizen • December 15, 2009

INDEPENDENCE — Hands shaking and eyes red with tears, Michelle Kehoe professed her love for her children and expressed her sorrow for the crimes she committed against them.

“I am truly sorry for what I have done,” Kehoe said. “I love my children with all my heart. I deeply regret what I have done.”

Kehoe, 36, of Coralville, was sentenced to life in prison for the death of her 2-year-old son, Seth. Kehoe was found guilty last month of first-degree murder, a class-A felony that carries a mandatory life sentence in Iowa.

A Grundy County jury found Kehoe was guilty of taking Seth and her other son, Sean, who was 7 at the time, to a remote area near Littleton in Oct. 2008. Police and prosecutors said Michelle Kehoe then placed duct tape over her sons’ eyes, mouths and hands and cut their throats with a hunting knife she had bought a month earlier. She then cut her own throat. Seth died as a result of his injuries, but Sean survived.

Judge Bruce Zager said he has received approximately 20 victim-impact statements from Kehoe’s family, friends and former coworkers, but only her husband, Eugene, chose to read his for the court.

Fighting back tears, Eugene Kehoe said “great sadness” summarizes his feelings about the events of the last year. Michelle and other family members in the courtroom sobbed as Eugene described the pain of losing his son.

“He is gone, but he will not be forgotten,” Eugene said. “His potential we will never know. The bright sparkle in his eyes will live with us forever.”

Despite the crimes she committed, Eugene said his wife was an “excellent mother” and deserving of forgiveness. Eugene said while Sean’s physical injuries have healed; the emotional ones remain.

“Not only has Sean lost his brother, but he has lost his mother,” he said. “I have lost my wife and my best friend.”

Eugene asked Zager to lift the no contact order imposed between Michelle and Sean and any of Sean’s relatives. He said both his and Sean’s therapists have said that some form of contact between the three surviving family members would be beneficial to their well being.

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Eugene asked Zager to permit him to have written contact with Michelle at least once a month to keep her up to date on Sean and well as work through remaining legal issues concerning their marriage and property they jointly own.

At the conclusion of his statement, Gene Kehoe stepped down from the witness stand, then turned to Judge Zager and asked, "May I give my wife a hug on my way out?" Zager responded, "No, you may not."

Kehoe’s attorney, Waterloo public defender Andrea Dryer, also asked that Zager impose the lightest sentences and sanctions within the court’s discretion.

“She genuinely wants people to know that she did love and does love her children with all her heart,” Dryer said. “She believes they were a gift from God and she understands that no one sees this the way she did. She truly believed she was doing the right thing by sending them back to God.”

However, because of the nature of Kehoe’s crimes, Zager ordered that the no contact order remain in place for five years. Zager also ruled that Kehoe’s additional sentences of up to 25 years for attempted murder and 10 years for child endangerment causing serious injury run concurrently to each other, but consecutively to the life imprisonment.

Unlike many others with mental illness, Zager said Kehoe had access to mental health professionals who could help her battle her afflictions.

“It was your decision at that time or leading up to the events…that you decided to terminate these services,” he said.

Zager said Kehoe’s actions have also deeply affected all of those associated with the case and society in general.

“Society has suffered because of your actions and because of the decisions you made,” Zager said. “We all feel a little less secure…because of your actions.”

Kehoe has a right to an appeal within 30 days of her sentencing.

http://www.press-citizen.com/article...ct-for-5-years