On July 17, 1978, Gail Trait, twenty-six, killed her four children in her mother's apartment on the East Side of Buffalo: Kylia, eight, Amina, six, Inez, four, and Demario, two. She stabbed them and mutilated the bodies, and afterward told police that she had been trying to save her soul. The children had been back in her custody for about ten days. The year before, she had placed them voluntarily in foster care so she could train as a nurse, and she was studying liberal arts at Erie Community College. Relatives told reporters she had talked of a voodoo curse, a story the police later called unfounded.
She was charged on September 15, 1978, in an eight-count indictment. The trial court dismissed the indictment in furtherance of justice, and on June 1, 1979, the Appellate Division, Fourth Department, reversed that order and reinstated the charges, noting the nature of the crime, the kind of defense being raised and the public interest in a trial. Tried in Erie County, she was convicted of murder and on February 25, 1980, sentenced to twenty-five years to life.
She spent almost ten years in prison. On April 8, 1988, the Appellate Division unanimously reversed the conviction and ordered a new trial, holding that she had been denied the effective assistance of counsel at her first trial. Trait did not want the retrial. She offered to plead guilty so that she could go back to prison, and threatened suicide if she was made to stand trial again.
The retrial went ahead without a jury before State Supreme Court Justice Theodore S. Kasler and lasted three weeks. In 1989, in a court session that took three minutes, Kasler found her legally insane and not responsible for all four murders. He declined to explain the verdict from the bench or afterward. Trait, then thirty-five, nodded and said, "Thank you, your honor." The finding sent her not to prison but to state psychiatric hospitals.
She was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and spent about a decade in treatment. By 1998, living under the surname Williams and facing release, she spoke publicly for the first time, saying she had very bad memories and a great deal of remorse and that counseling, medication and religious faith had given her back her sanity. An aunt she was staying with said Gail had remarked that Kylia would have been almost thirty that month. Another relative told The Buffalo News that Gail had killed her children but that the state had let her do it, because the children should never have been alone with her when she needed psychiatric care. She was released in 1998. In law she stands convicted of nothing; the operative outcome of the case is the insanity verdict.