Halley William Amaya went home in the middle of the afternoon of May 30, 1990, because his wife had not turned up for an appointment with her psychiatrist. What he found in their first-floor apartment at 63 Summerfield Place in Port Chester, New York, sent him next door. He gave a neighbor a card with a telephone number on it and asked her to call the doctor, because, he said, his wife had killed the little ones and tried to kill herself. The neighbor dialed a number in White Plains and never learned who she had spoken to. He then called the police, and officers reached the house at ten minutes to three.
The four children lay in different rooms, with pillows or stuffed animals near their faces: Halley William Jr., eleven; Jessica, eight; Christopher, six; and Edward, three and a half. Each had been stabbed in the neck with a kitchen knife. The three oldest went to Edison Elementary School. Their mother, Maria Isabella Amaya, thirty-six, was unconscious, with blood around her neck from what police took to be self-inflicted stab wounds, and burns they could not at first explain; she had swallowed lye, a drain cleaner. She came round soon afterward.
The Amayas had come from El Salvador about ten years earlier. He worked as a maintenance man at the Westchester County Medical Center in Valhalla and had worked at a Hilton hotel before that. They lived in a three-story Victorian house divided into apartments in a village of twenty-four thousand near the Connecticut line; the police said they had been there for three years, and a neighbor thought about five. She had been hospitalized for mental illness at some point and had been taking medication for depression for eight months.
The next day she was arraigned on four counts of second-degree murder in the intensive care unit of United Hospital. The police chief, Carl Verrastro, said she was coherent and understood the charges. At a news conference that afternoon police said they did not know what had led her to it. Jeanine Pirro, then the assistant district attorney in charge of domestic violence cases, said there had never been any thought that the family was abusing the children.
Neighbors described the couple as reserved and hard-working and said they had often heard them arguing; they had seen no sign that the children were beaten or mistreated. A family friend held up a photograph of herself and Mrs. Amaya smiling at a dinner for hotel staff and said she could not believe Maria had killed her children with her own hands. The minister of the Methodist church a block away, who understood the family to be Mormons, said he regretted not having reached out to them, and opened his church that evening. A child's drawing of a rabbit was still taped to the front door, and Christmas lights still hung from the roof.
She was found competent to stand trial. Before State Supreme Court Justice James Cowhey, at thirty-seven, she tearfully admitted that she had killed her four sleeping children. Her lawyer, Allan Focarile, entered a plea of not responsible by reason of mental disease or defect, arguing that while she was aware of what she was doing she did not understand the consequences of her act. The plea was accepted, there was no trial, and she was committed to a state psychiatric hospital in Orange County.