Angelica Salazar Alvarez was twenty-seven and living in Elkhart, Indiana. She was from Mexico and in the country illegally, and she gave her account of what happened through an interpreter.
On the evening of November 14, 2006 she took her four children down to the basement of the house. She described killing them one at a time: first Daniel Valdez, four, then his two-year-old sister Jessica, then their six-year-old half-brother Gonzalo Lopez, and last Gonzalo's eight-year-old sister Jennifer, with her hands around the child's neck. She said they were sleeping.
She wrote a note on the computer explaining what she had done and why, moved into another room, laid the children's bodies on the floor and tried to kill herself. She used an electrical cord to hang herself; it did not work, and she then took several sleeping pills.
Her husband, Fernando Valdez, came home and found the four children dead and believed his wife was dead too. She recovered at Elkhart General Hospital and was charged with four counts of murder on November 22.
The note said her husband was in the process of leaving her and that she did not think she was capable of caring for the four children alone. Her lawyer, Juan Garcia Jr, put it in her own terms: that she believed the children would be better off in heaven, and that he knew how odd that sounded to anyone else but that it was where she was mentally at the time. He said she had been to Elkhart General for mental health problems and after her discharge was basically untreated.
One point in the record is contradicted and both sides of it belong here. Answering her own counsel in court, she said she had given the children sleeping pills before strangling them, and earlier testimony had suggested the same. At sentencing the prosecuting attorney, Curtis T Hill, produced toxicology reports showing the children had not been drugged.
Her competence was litigated at length. Judge Terry Shewmaker ordered two doctors to evaluate her at her initial hearing; their opinions were split, so he ordered a third, and in May 2007 declared her incompetent to stand trial. She was sent to the state hospital at Logansport. Doctors there reported improvement and found her fit, and the case resumed.
She pleaded guilty to all four counts on September 4, 2007. The agreement was that the state would not seek the death penalty and that she gave up any right to use her mental illness to argue for a lighter sentence. Hill said afterwards that he would have preferred the death penalty and that he would be hard pressed to find many circumstances that called for it more, but that seeking it would have meant years of appellate argument over whether she had the mental capacity for it. Her counsel argued that mental illness should be treated with the same seriousness as physical illness, and asked the public not to think of her as a monster.
She was sentenced on September 24, 2007 to life imprisonment without parole. She told the court through a translator that she had sincerely repented and accepted her responsibility.
Gonzalo Lopez, the father of the two older children, spoke after sentencing. Through a translator he said he held no ill will towards her, and that he had peace and tranquility and had forgiven her.
This is a single act rather than a series, and it is in the archive under that classification.