Eleazar Paula Mendez was a Mexican national living at De Queen, in Sevier County, southwestern Arkansas. She spoke little English and followed the whole of the case that followed through an interpreter. She had moved to the town about a year earlier to give her children a safer place to grow up. Her husband, Arturo Morales, could not make a living there and went back to New York to work.
He was to have come for Christmas in 2005 and did not, so she took the children to New York instead. During that visit he asked her for a divorce.
On the morning of Saturday January 28, 2006, officers went to the house after a telephone call from Morales in New York, who was worried about his family. Mendez collapsed as they arrived. Inside they found the three children lying side by side on a bed: Elvis Morales, eight, and the five-year-old twins Samuel and Samantha. She was taken to hospital for having swallowed a toxic substance.
She told investigators she had tried to kill herself that morning by drinking ant poison, that the children had seen her do it and had asked her to do the same for them, and that she had blessed them and then suffocated them. She left notes in Spanish; officers needed a translator to read them, and one of them said she could not go on without her husband.
Elsewhere in the house officers found four cups on a table beside a container of an insecticide called Tempo, with a mixing glass next to it. The police chief said it looked as though they had been drinking hot chocolate. The cups and the glass went to a laboratory, and the children's bodies to the state crime laboratory for post-mortem examination.
The prosecutor, Tom Cooper, said he believed she had poisoned the children before suffocating them, and that he doubted other parts of her account. That belief is on the record; what the laboratory found is not in the accessible reporting.
A priest who saw her in hospital that night, the Rev. Salvador Marquez-Munoz, said she had tremendous remorse and had asked for prayers and forgiveness, because she was realising how much she had hurt the community as well.
She pleaded not guilty on January 30, 2006 and was held without bail on suicide watch while a psychological evaluation was carried out. Sixteen months later she pleaded guilty in Sevier County Circuit Court to three counts of capital murder and was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. Through the interpreter she told Judge Ted Capeheart that she had taken life away from her three children. Prosecutors could have sought the death penalty had the case gone to trial.
Arturo Morales was not in court. The prosecutor said he had taken leave from his job in New York the previous October, disappeared, and had not been heard from since by anyone in Sevier County.
Two details differ between sources and are left as they stand. Her name is given as Eleazar Paula Mendez and also as Paula Eleazar Mendez. The children's ages were reported on the first day as six to eight, and the following day as five, five and seven, before settling at five, five and eight in the reporting of the plea.
This is a single act rather than a series, and it is in the archive under that classification.