Before she went down to the basement on the evening of November 14, 2006, Angelica Salazar Alvarez wrote a note on the family computer. It said that her husband was in the process of leaving her and that she did not believe she could care for four children alone. Then she took the children down with her: Jennifer Lopez, eight, and her brother Gonzalo, six, and their younger half-siblings, Daniel Valdez, four, and Jessica Valdez, two. By her own account she strangled them one at a time with her hands while they slept, Daniel first, then Jessica, then Gonzalo, and last Jennifer. She laid their bodies on the floor in another room, tried to hang herself with the electrical cord from a lamp, and when that failed swallowed sleeping pills.
She was twenty-seven, from Mexico, and in the country illegally, and she gave her account in court through an interpreter. Her husband, Fernando Valdez, the father of the two younger children, came home and found the four children dead and his wife unconscious, and thought she was dead too. Autopsies found that the children had been asphyxiated. She recovered at Elkhart General Hospital, and on November 22 the Elkhart County prosecutor, Curtis T. Hill Jr., charged her with four counts of murder.
Her lawyer, Juan Garcia Jr., said she had been treated at Elkhart General for mental health problems and after her discharge was basically untreated. She believed, he said, that the children would be better off in heaven, which he acknowledged sounded strange to anyone else but was where she was mentally at the time.
Her competence was litigated for most of the next year. At her first hearing Judge Terry Shewmaker of the Elkhart Circuit Court ordered two doctors to examine her; they disagreed, so he ordered a third, and in May 2007 he found her incompetent to stand trial and sent her to the state hospital at Logansport. Doctors there reported that she had improved and found her fit, and the case went on.
On September 4, 2007, she pleaded guilty to all four counts. The state agreed not to seek the death penalty, and she agreed to life without parole and gave up any right to argue her mental illness for a lighter sentence. Hill said he would have preferred to seek death and would be hard pressed to think of a case that called for it more, but that it would have meant years of appeals over her mental capacity. At the sentencing hearing he argued that she had known exactly what she was doing: she had a plan, he said, and had thought it through systematically and carried it out, and that was murder.
One detail of her account did not hold. Answering her own lawyer at the plea hearing, she said she had given the children sleeping pills before strangling them, and earlier testimony had suggested the same. At sentencing Hill produced toxicology reports showing that the children had not been drugged.
On September 24, 2007, Shewmaker sentenced her to life without parole for each child's death. Garcia asked the court and the public not to think of her as a monster, and argued that mental illness should be treated with the same seriousness as physical illness. Through a translator she told the judge that she had sincerely repented and accepted responsibility. Afterward Gonzalo Lopez, the father of the two older children, said through a translator that he held no ill will toward her, that he had peace and tranquility, and that he had forgiven her.