Voices ‘Screaming at Her’ Drove Nanny to Kill Two Children, Psychiatrist Testifies

NEW YORK — A psychiatrist testified Thursday that a nanny who fatally stabbed two young children in her care believed she was following a command from the devil and was in the grip of psychosis so severe she could not understand her actions or recall them later.

“She wasn’t in her normal conscious state, where she could control her behavior,” the psychiatrist, Dr. Karen Rosenbaum, told jurors on her second day of testimony. “She was in a dissociative state and a psychotic state and wasn’t aware of her actions.”

Rosenbaum was the first of several expert witnesses expected to testify at the murder trial of the former nanny, Yoselyn Ortega, who has entered a plea of not responsible by reason of mental disease or defect.

Ortega, 55, is charged in New York state Supreme Court in Manhattan with two counts of first-degree murder for the deaths of Leo Krim, 2, and his sister Lucia, 6, on Oct. 25, 2012. If convicted, she faces life in prison. If found not responsible, she would be committed to a secure psychiatric facility.

To prevail with an insanity defense, Ortega’s lawyers must show she did not understand the consequences of her actions or know they were wrong.

Prosecutors, however, argue Ortega killed the children and tried to kill herself in a bathroom of the Krim’s Upper West Side apartment because she resented their mother and was overworked. They point out she had been deeply despondent and had told her sister to take care of her teenage son in the days before the killings. She also left her valuables at home that day.

Rosenbaum said Ortega had been having auditory and visual hallucinations, coupled with bouts of crippling depression, since she was a teenager in the Dominican Republic, but her illness was never diagnosed or treated.

Ortega told Rosenbaum in more than a dozen interviews that in the week before the murders she started hearing multiple voices, including a deep one she thought was Satan’s, telling her to kill herself and the Krim children, Rosenbaum said.

She claimed to have no memory of the grisly slayings; the police said she cut the little boy’s throat and stabbed the girl 30 times, using two kitchen knifes.

“She had been struggling against voices. For at least a week she was fighting against them,” Rosenbaum said. “They were screaming at her.”

The day of the killings, the last thing Ortega claimed to remember was taking Lucia home to use the bathroom, Rosenbaum said. The psychiatrist said at that moment, the “auditory hallucinations won over her and she went into an altered state of consciousness.”

Rosenbaum said psychosis was the only logical explanation for the murders, as Ortega had told her relatives she cared deeply for the children. “She loved the children,” she testified. “There is no reason she would want to hurt anybody other than the psychotic delusion she was experiencing.”

On cross-examination, the lead prosecutor, Stuart Silberg, forced Rosenbaum to acknowledge Ortega had never mentioned to anyone, even her closest relatives, that the devil or other voices had told her to kill the children.

In the months leading up to the killings, Ortega had talked about feeling depressed, about hearing voices and about being followed by shadows and a “black man,” according to trial testimony. Yet it was not until months after the murders, when Rosenbaum interviewed her in a hospital, that Ortega said Satan had ordered her to kill the children.

“After the crime is when she starts telling you and other psychiatrists about how the devil had been telling her to kill herself and the kids, correct?” Silberg asked. “Yes,” Rosenbaum replied.

Silberg also suggested that the number of wounds on the children told of a woman intent on killing, just as her two self-inflicted neck wounds proved she tried hard to end her own life. He said the evidence suggested “an intentional, thoughtful act.”