London -
A British mother with postnatal depression killed her two babies because she had delusions that they would be seized by social services, a court heard on Tuesday.
Jewellery designer Felicia Boots, 35, suffocated her ten-week-old son Mason and 14-month-old daughter Lily days after the family had moved into a new £1.4million home in an area known as Nappy Valley because it is popular with young, rich families.
Her husband Jeffery, an investment banker, returned home that evening to find the house in darkness and his wife sitting on the stairs, hugging herself.
She had tried to kill herself but inflicted only superficial damage to her neck.
He ran upstairs and found their children lying side by side on the floor of a walk-in wardrobe in the master bedroom of the semi-detached house in Wandsworth, south-west London. They had apparently been strangled with one of his ties, the Old Bailey heard.
Mr Boots, 35, was heard wailing: “My lovely son, my beautiful daughter. They have gone. Help me, help me, help me.”
His wife had been diagnosed with postnatal depression after the birth of both children. She had been prescribed antidepressant medication and her condition outwardly appeared to be improving.
Hours before she killed her children she sent a photograph taken on her cellphone of Lily to her husband, who took this as a sign that she was feeling better. He was unaware that she had stopped taking the medication because she was worried about its side effects while breast feeding despite reassurances from her doctor. Computer records show she made a series of Google searches about her concerns in the preceding weeks.
In a note found next to the bodies she “questioned how she could have done such a thing”. She wrote how “she was scared and sorry” and that her “life started to fall apart a few weeks before”.
Her husband called the emergency services but paramedics were unable to save the children. His wife, who was “unsteady and weak on her feet”, was arrested.
Mr Boots told officers at the scene that his wife was a good mother and he “could not believe that she would do such a thing”.
On Tuesday Mrs Boots wept as she admitted two charges of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility.
Her not guilty plea to two murder charges was accepted by prosecutor Ed Brown QC.
Her husband, who was in court, is standing by his wife. Brown said Mr Boots had written “a moving statement supportive of his wife in very sympathetic terms”.
A statement from Mrs Boots was read to the court by her lawyer Kate Bex. In it she said: “The ninth of May 2012 is a day I will be eternally sorry for. It should never have happened and it troubles me more deeply than anyone will ever know. A part of me will always be missing. But I am a good mum and I never meant this to happen.”
Justice Fulford said a prison sentence would be “wholly inappropriate in this case”. He ordered that she be detained at a mental health unit until doctors deem her fit for release. “This is an almost indescribably sad case,” said the judge. “Although the roots of Mrs Boots’s actions were profoundly tragic given the loss of two such young lives, what occurred was not what most people would regard as criminal activity.
“I unreservedly accept that what the defendant did to the two children she and her husband loved and nurtured, was solely the result of psychological and bio-physiological forces that were beyond her control.
“This has always been a happy family. This is someone who delighted in being a mother and she was good at it. This case is the polar opposite of the appalling incidents of child neglect and cruelty that sometimes come before the courts.”
Although most women have the ‘baby blues’ for a short time, one in ten in the UK goes on to suffer full-blown clinical depression which is unlikely to improve without treatment.
Four women in every 1,000 giving birth in the UK have to be admitted to hospital. - Daily Mail