On the morning of Saturday, January 28, 2006, police in De Queen, a small town in southwestern Arkansas, went to a one-story house after a frantic call from a man in New York named Arturo Morales, who was worried about his family. His wife, Eleazar Paula Mendez, forty-three, collapsed as the officers arrived. Inside, lying side by side on a bed, were their three children: Elvis, eight, and the five-year-old twins Samuel and Samantha. Their faces were not covered. Mendez was taken to the hospital for having swallowed a toxic substance; an emergency room doctor later told the prosecutor she had not taken enough to kill herself.
She had called Morales in New York herself to tell him what she had done. She told investigators that she had tried to kill herself the day before by drinking ant poison, that the children had watched her do it and asked her to do the same for them, and that she had then suffocated them. "I blessed them and then I suffocated them," she said, according to the prosecutor, Tom Cooper. She left notes in Spanish that officers needed a translator to read; one said she could not go on without her husband. In the yard outside was a seven-foot pile of burned papers: partly burned children's books, a page from a religion book with the words "vamos a celebrar," let's celebrate, sheets with a child's handwriting in blue ink, and charred letters from a labor union in New York.
She had come to the United States from Mexico about ten years earlier and spoke little English. About a year before the killings she had moved the children from New York to De Queen to give them a safer place to grow up, while Morales, who could not make a living there, went back to New York to work. The family never missed Sunday Mass, their priest said, and attended religious education classes. Morales was supposed to come to Arkansas for Christmas 2005 and did not, so she took the children to New York instead. During that visit he asked her for a divorce.
Elsewhere in the house officers found four cups on a table beside a container of an insecticide called Tempo and a mixing glass. The police chief, Richard McKinley, said it looked as though they had been drinking hot chocolate. The cups and glass went to a laboratory and the children's bodies to the state crime laboratory in Little Rock. Cooper said he believed Mendez had poisoned the children before suffocating them, and that he doubted other parts of her account. "I do not believe there is any dispute as to who killed these three children," he said. What the laboratory found was not reported.
That Saturday night a priest, the Rev. Salvador Marquez-Munoz, visited her in the hospital. "She has tremendous remorse. She is deeply sorry," he said the next morning outside St. Barbara Catholic Church. "She asked for our prayers and forgiveness because she is realizing how much she has hurt the community, as well."
At her arraignment on January 30 she listened through headphones to an interpreter and answered "Si" when asked whether she understood. She pleaded not guilty to three counts of capital murder. Circuit Judge Ted Capeheart ordered her held without bail and granted her lawyer, Norman Cox, a mental evaluation, which Cox said would take six to nine months; she was kept on suicide watch. The state could have sought the death penalty.
Sixteen months later, in May 2007, Mendez, now forty-five, pleaded guilty in Sevier County Circuit Court to all three counts. "I took life away from my three children," she told Judge Capeheart through the interpreter. She was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. Arturo Morales was not in court. The prosecutor said he had taken leave from his job in New York the previous October and disappeared, and that no one in Sevier County had heard from him since.
The reports of the first days disagreed on some details. Her name was first entered in police records as Paula Eleazar Mendez. The children's ages were given at first as six to eight, then as five, five and seven, before the reports of the plea settled on five, five and eight, and the girl's name appears as both Samantha and Samanta.