Nine drivers had to swerve out of her way. One leaned on her horn the whole time. Shortly before five on the afternoon of Saturday, March 25, 2000, Judy Kirby pulled out of a gas station in Martinsville, Indiana, where she had bought gas and candy, went up an exit ramp the wrong way and turned north into the southbound lanes of State Road 67. She accelerated. Witnesses said she made no attempt to get out of anyone's way, although there was an emergency lane beside her. She passed six WRONG WAY signs and ten DO NOT ENTER signs. Her car clipped the back of one vehicle and then struck a van head-on at more than ninety miles an hour. The van went into the air and came down on its side. Investigators found that her brake lights had not been on.
In the back of Kirby's car were three of her eight children, Jordan, twelve, Joney, nine, and Jacob, five, and her ten-year-old nephew, Jeremy Young. In the van were Tom Reel, forty, his son Bradley, thirteen, his daughter Jessica, fourteen, and Bradley's friend Richard Miller. All four children in Kirby's car and all three Reels died at the scene. Miller lived, with permanent injuries to his back and right foot. Kirby was thrown from her car and suffered a closed head injury and broken bones.
The day had been strange from the start. She had left her sister Jeanetta Scott's house in Greenwood with the children and gone to a car wash and a McDonald's; Scott, worried about her, followed in her own car until Kirby stopped dead in the road and then drove off. Later Kirby sat at a stop sign for two minutes while traffic went around her. A woman named Sarah Mullis came out and asked whether she needed a telephone, brought her one, and watched her drive off with it; Mullis called 911, then found Kirby's car parked in front of her garage, retrieved the phone, and watched her sit staring straight ahead for five minutes before leaving. Kirby then turned up uninvited at a baby shower, telling everyone she was looking for a birthday party because it was her son's birthday. She and the children stayed fifteen or twenty minutes.
Three weeks earlier, on March 2, she had been involuntarily committed to the psychiatric unit at St. Francis Hospital, where she was diagnosed with psychosis and given an antipsychotic, and was also found to have hyperthyroidism. She was released on March 4, judged no longer an immediate danger. Before that, the prosecution would say, she had been wearing disguises, putting cameras in trees, reporting that people were following her and talking about suicide.
Morgan County charged her on April 14, 2000, with seven counts of murder, four counts of neglect of a dependent resulting in serious bodily injury and one of aggravated battery. The trial turned on a single question, what was in her mind as she drove. The state's case was that she meant to kill herself: she was in a turbulent relationship with her boyfriend, Tinnie Kirby, and was afraid of losing him and her children and of being arrested, because for the past year she had been dealing drugs. A witness testified that he had bought a prescription morphine drug from her for years, the last time a few weeks before the crash. The defense said her hyperthyroidism had made her psychotic and paranoid and that the illness, a badly designed ramp and poor medical care had caused the collision. Detectives had interviewed some 220 potential witnesses.
The jury convicted her on every count. Judge Jane Spencer Craney merged the neglect counts into the children's murders and on June 13, 2001, sentenced her to sixty-five years for each of the three Reels, served one after another, plus twenty years for the injuries to Miller, with fifty-five years for each of the four children running alongside: 215 years in all. The Court of Appeals affirmed on August 29, 2002, noting in passing that the evidence showed she had meant to kill herself, and necessarily the children with her, and that the Reels were not intended victims but people she must have expected to hit. The Indiana Supreme Court declined to hear the case.
In 2014 her public defender, John Pinnow, argued that she had been mentally ill and had not meant to kill anyone, and that her trial lawyers should have objected to the drug-dealing evidence. Louise Reel, whose husband and two children died in the van, came to the hearing. Judge Craney denied a new trial on February 18, 2015, and the Court of Appeals affirmed that denial in December 2015.