Maria Isabella Amaya was thirty-six. She and her husband, Halley William Amaya, had come to the United States from El Salvador about ten years earlier, and lived in a three-storey Victorian house divided into flats at 63 Summerfield Place, Port Chester, a village of twenty-four thousand people in Westchester County near the Connecticut line. He worked as a maintenance man at the Westchester County Medical Center at Valhalla, and had worked at a Hilton hotel before that.
She had been in hospital for mental illness at some point, and had been taking medication for depression for the previous eight months. She was due to see a psychiatrist on the afternoon of May 30, 1990.
That afternoon she killed the four children in the first-floor flat: Halley William Jr, eleven; Jessica, eight; Christopher, six; and Edward, three and a half. All four were stabbed in the neck with a kitchen knife. The three eldest went to Edison Elementary School. Officers found them lying in different rooms, with pillows or stuffed animals near their faces.
Her husband became worried when she did not arrive for the appointment. He went home and found them. Before the police arrived he went to a neighbour, Ms Orphanos, gave her a card with a telephone number on it and asked her to call the doctor, saying that his wife had killed the little ones and had tried to kill herself. She made the call to a number in White Plains and did not know who she had spoken to. He then telephoned the police himself, and officers reached the house at ten to three.
They found her unconscious with blood around her neck, from what they believed were self-inflicted stab wounds, and she came round shortly afterwards. She also had burns on her body which the police could not at first explain. She had swallowed lye.
She was arraigned the next day on four counts of second-degree murder, in the intensive care unit at United Hospital, and was to be moved to a detention centre when doctors allowed it. The police chief, Carl Verrastro, said she was coherent and understood the charges. At a news conference that afternoon the police said they did not know what had led her to it.
She was subsequently found competent to stand trial and entered a plea of not responsible by reason of mental disease or defect. The plea was accepted and she was committed to a state psychiatric hospital in Orange County. There was no trial.
Neighbours had heard the couple arguing, and described them as reserved but hard-working. They had seen no sign of the children being beaten or ill-treated, and said only that they were not disciplined. The assistant district attorney responsible for domestic violence cases, Jeanine Pirro, said there had never been any thought that the family was abusing the children.
A family friend produced a photograph of herself and Mrs Amaya smiling at a dinner for hotel staff and said she could not believe she would kill her children with her own hands, and asked how they could have been such friends without her knowing. A neighbour said they had seemed like every other family. 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 the church that evening.
On the night of the killings a child's drawing of a rabbit was still taped to the front door of the house, and Christmas lights were still hanging from the roof.
Two details differ between the accounts: the family had lived in the house for three years according to the police and about five according to a neighbour, and the number of years since they left El Salvador is given only approximately.
This is a single act rather than a series, and it is in the archive under that classification.