Julie Schenecker: Jury selection for soccer mom in murder trial

Julie Schenecker is charged with murdering her two teenage children in Tampa, Fla. Attorney's for Jule Schenecker are planning an insanity defense.

Jurors at the trial of a Tampa military wife accused of killing her two teenagers are expected to see many disturbing images and hear hours of troubling evidence.

They will see several sides to Julie Schenecker, a former military linguist who prosecutors say fatally shot her 16-year-old daughter and 13-year-old son.

They will see a colonel's wife and attentive suburban mom, cheering from the sidelines as her kids played soccer. They will also see a woman who bought a gun the weekend before the killings — and who complained in a letter that a three-day waiting period would "delay the massacre." They will see the handcuffed inmate, escorted by officers, who walked rigidly into jail following her arrest, her face contorted and eyes empty.

Jurors will have to decide which side of Schenecker, 53, is closest to the truth: an upper middle-class soccer mom who killed her children after planning the shootings for at least several days, or a woman who struggled with profound mental illness for decades and didn't know what she was doing. Her attorneys are planning an insanity defense.

Schenecker goes on trial this week, charged with two counts of first-degree murder. Jury selection was scheduled to start Monday.

Prosecutors are not seeking the death penalty, but if convicted, Schenecker could face life in prison without the possibility of parole. If Schenecker is found not guilty by reason of insanity, the judge could still order her committed to a mental hospital until it is determined she is no longer a danger to others or herself.

According to Tampa Police, Schenecker shot her 13-year-old son, Beau, as she drove him to soccer practice. The report said Schenecker then drove to their upscale home and shot her 16-year-old daughter, Calyx.

After Schenecker sent her mother a disturbing email, officers went to the house and found her drenched in blood on her back porch. They then found the teens' bodies, a scene that was so troubling that a stress team was called to counsel them.

Julie Schenecker was born in Muscatine, Iowa. There, she was an athlete and that continued in college, where she played volleyball for the University of Northern Iowa.

Schenecker eventually joined the Army, advancing to the rank of sergeant as a Russian linguist. While she was stationed in Munich, Germany, she met and married Parker Schenecker in the late 1980s. She left the service a few years later.

Col. Parker Schenecker was a career military officer and the family moved around. At the time of the killings, he was attached to U.S. Central Command in Tampa. He had been deployed to the Middle East a few weeks before the killings happened. He has since divorced his wife and filed a wrongful death lawsuit against her.

In part, prosecutors declined to pursue the death penalty because they think there is enough evidence to prove Schenecker is mentally ill, but not legally insane.

Under Florida law, the burden of proof will be on Schenecker's lawyers to prove she is insane. They will have to show that she was so mentally ill that she could not understand that killing her children was wrong.

"They have kind of an uphill climb," said Bob Dekle, a University of Florida law professor and retired prosecutor.

It will be especially difficult for Schenecker because she purchased a handgun five days before the shootings, then picked it up after the three-day waiting period and soon used it to kill.

But court documents show that Schenecker has a long history of mental illness. In the early 1990s, she was diagnosed with depression and treated with medication. From 1997 to 2001, she was medicated daily except for when she was pregnant and nursing, records show.

In 2001, she suffered a debilitating bout of depression and was hospitalized for nine months. Documents also show that she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, schizo-affective disorder and severe depression.

A few months before the killings, Calyx called the police on her mother, saying she had hit her. Police closed the case as there were no marks on the girl. The family was in counseling about a month before the killings.

Dekle points out that "being mentally ill doesn't prove someone is insane," and the two terms are not interchangeable in court.

"Mental illness is a medical concept," he said. "Insanity is a legal concept."

___

Follow Tamara Lush on Twitter at http://twitter.com/tamaralush .

Copyright 2014 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Julie Schenecker: Jury selection for soccer mom in murder trial
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Latest-News-Wires/2014/0428/Julie-Schenecker-Jury-selection-for-soccer-mom-in-murder-trial
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe