Marilyn Lemak called the Naperville police herself. "I did it," she told the operator, by the account the columnist Eric Zorn later published. "My husband didn't want us anymore." The house on Loomis Street was a cranberry-red Victorian built in 1885, in the city's historic district, a block from neighbors who later said nothing had ever seemed wrong there. Officers found Nicholas, seven, and Thomas, three, dead in their beds. Emily, six, lay in her parents' bedroom, and her mother was beside her. Lemak had swallowed pills and cut her arm, and she survived. The killings are dated March 4, 1999, a Thursday; the first newspaper reports had the police arriving on the Friday.
Prosecutors said she had given the children a mix of aspirin derivatives and prescription drugs to make them drowsy, and when they were asleep had suffocated them one at a time, pinching each child's nose and holding a hand over the mouth. The Chicago Sun-Times, previewing the trial, reported the state's account that the antidepressant she was taking had been sprinkled on the children's peanut-butter bagels. She was forty-one, a former surgical nurse, thirteen years married to David Lemak, an emergency-room physician, and in the middle of divorcing him.
To the neighborhood she was Lynn, a woman who waved while she jogged and walked her children to Ellsworth School, and who the summer before had worked a lemonade stand with them. "She was the basic Naperville woman," a neighbor, Shannon Watson, told the Chicago Tribune. "She was a very nice, very outgoing, very friendly person who loved her kids." Watson remembered her holding Emily in her lap and calling her Angel Baby. On the Monday night before the killings the two women had settled a kitchenware order, a vegetable peeler, an apple corer, two oven mitts, an oil spritzer and two soap dispensers, eighty dollars in all, and Lemak had talked about hosting another party at the house.
The children were buried after a funeral on March 11 at Ss. Peter and Paul Church. Their father described them three years later, in court, introducing each one with the same words, "Let me tell you a little bit about." Nicholas was a good student who loved to learn and to dress up as a policeman or a secret agent. Emily was a budding artist. Thomas was "the happiest child I've known." "His greatest thrill, I think, was every day," he said. A CBS report on the twentieth anniversary gave Emily's age as seven; the contemporary reports and her father's statement give six.
Nobody needed to find the killer. What the detectives had to establish was her state of mind, because the only real defense open to a mother who had called the police to her own house was insanity. Early in the investigation a prosecutor sat down with the Naperville detectives and the DuPage County Major Crimes Task Force to go through the legal definition of insanity in Illinois, and the investigators then set out to gather the evidence that would answer it. Ray McGury, the sergeant in charge of the detectives, said years later that the killings had a history in the days before: "It wasn't like March 4 she woke up and said, 'I'm murdering every one of these kids.' There were things previous on March 3, March 2."
What they found, by their account, was preparation. In the days before the deaths Lemak had canceled the children's regular activities, and the statements she gave police afterward were lucid. Jim Glennon, who commanded investigations for the task force, called the crime "thought out," not a spur-of-the-moment collapse. Bob Guerrieri, the sergeant who ran the processing of the scene, put the motive in one sentence: "She murdered her three children because she hated her husband." McGury allowed that she "absolutely" had mental health problems; the investigators' position was that the evidence showed planning anyway.
The state's theory centered on the end of the marriage. David Lemak had moved out and begun seeing Janice Ryan, whom he later married. "She was angry, frustrated and outraged that David had begun seeing Janice Ryan," DuPage County State's Attorney Joseph Birkett told the court at a pretrial hearing. "There was no separation between her anger at Janice Ryan and David, and the murders of the children." Prosecutors also said they would show that she had long resented the children, blaming them for coming between her and her husband and for making it hard to keep working as a surgical nurse. Her lawyers answered with a different woman: a devoted mother who had suffered postpartum depression and had sunk into madness as her marriage collapsed.
Birkett announced that he would seek the death penalty, and the defense gave notice that it would plead insanity. The case produced a ruling of its own before trial. Lemak's lawyers asked to depose David Lemak under a new Illinois Supreme Court rule, Rule 416(e), which allowed depositions in capital cases, and Circuit Judge George Bakalis agreed. Birkett asked the Supreme Court to overturn the order. On June 21, 2001, in People ex rel. Birkett v. Bakalis, the court declined to intervene, finding that the rule applied and that the judge had not abused his discretion. Justice Thomas dissented, arguing that a grieving father was not the kind of witness the rule was written for and that the order bore on the rights of crime victims.
The trial ran three weeks, and the state called the children's father as its first witness. Lemak did not dispute that she had killed her children. Her lawyers, led by John Donahue, described a woman seriously depressed who had lost her sanity as her marriage came apart, and who had killed the children and tried to kill herself believing they would all be reunited in a better place. "It's the quintessential contradiction of a good mother causing the deaths of her three, beloved children," Donahue had said before trial. Prosecutors noted that she had first offered the reunion explanation some time after the killings, following several therapy sessions.
Witnesses who had been with her in the days before March 4 testified that she had not seemed delusional or psychotic. Janice Lemak, by then David Lemak's second wife, was allowed to tell the jury about harassing phone calls that prosecutors attributed to Marilyn Lemak in the weeks before the killings. In closing, Birkett called the defendant a "methodical, controlling, manipulative woman" and said the murders were the work of "a very angry, very jealous and very manipulative woman," not the product of illness.
The jury deliberated for about nine hours over two days. It had three choices beyond acquittal: guilty, guilty but mentally ill, or not guilty by reason of insanity, and on December 19 it rejected the last two and convicted her of three counts of first-degree murder. Illinois required the defense to prove insanity by clear and convincing evidence. "I reviewed everything, all my notes, and realized the defense was not clear and convincing for the verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity," one juror said. Another, Allan Munch, said years later that the jurors had searched for an explanation and never found one.
In January 2002 prosecutors decided not to pursue a death sentence, which left the judge a single option under Illinois law, natural life. At a thirty-minute hearing in the Wheaton courthouse on April 8, 2002, Bakalis first rejected a motion for a new trial that listed seventeen alleged errors: that the state's insanity statute was unconstitutional, that Janice Lemak should not have testified, and that a juror who told the Tribune after the verdict that he "thought [Lemak] was guilty from the beginning" should be questioned. He refused to question the juror.
David Lemak then took the stand. "I miss their smell after bath time and when they snuggled up with me on the couch," he said. "I regret that I'll not see them off on their first dates or their weddings." He asked for the sentence the law already required, saying that his family believed the fitting punishment was for Marilyn Morrissey, as he called her, to spend the rest of her life in prison, where "she cannot harm any of us ever again."
Bakalis, a judge known in the courthouse for his reserve, told her that every day, looking at the walls and the bars, she would see the children's faces and hear them asking, "Why, Mom? We loved you, Mom. Why did you do this to us?" He sentenced her to life without the possibility of parole and ordered psychiatric care "so you will always maintain the capacity to understand the horror of your crime." On her lawyers' advice she said nothing. Birkett called it the sentence "she richly deserves." Donahue promised an appeal.
She was taken to Dwight Correctional Center. Ten years after the killings Donahue told the Daily Herald that she was medicated, surviving, and using her nursing training to help other prisoners. For years she threw interview requests away. In August 2011 she sat for French filmmakers making a documentary for the channel M6 about women who harm their children, believing, she said later, that it would be seen only in France; portions reached Chicago news in 2012, and in them she blamed the killings on her depression and her divorce. Joseph Birkett, by then an appellate judge, answered that she had never had a break from reality. "She knew what she was doing," he said. By the twentieth anniversary she had been moved to Logan Correctional Center in Lincoln. The house on Loomis Street was given to North Central College in 2008, as part of a four-million-dollar gift from a Naperville couple.
Her last legal effort took a new line. In a petition for executive clemency to Governor J.B. Pritzker, filed in 2021 by her attorneys Andy Vickery and Jed Stone of Waukegan, she argued that Zoloft, prescribed by her primary-care doctor and taken at the time of the killings, had made her psychotic and violent. The doctor treating her depression had started her on fifty milligrams a day in June 1998 and raised the dose to two hundred milligrams beginning less than two months before the killings. Illinois law in 1999, the petition said, allowed an involuntary-intoxication defense only to someone tricked into taking a drug, not to a patient taking what a doctor prescribed; it pointed to the Illinois Supreme Court's 2006 decision in People v. Hari, which ordered a new trial for a man on Zoloft because his jury had not been instructed on involuntary intoxication. It argued that the drug carried no warning then that it could cause homicidal or suicidal thinking. Stone said the manufacturer had known from clinical trials of such effects and had not disclosed them to the Food and Drug Administration; that is the petition's claim, and it has not been tested in court. The petition noted that in 2004 the FDA ordered a black-box warning on the medication. It asked for her sentence to be commuted or changed to life with the possibility of parole.
To press the petition she broke a long silence. In the summer of 2022 she spoke for fifty-four minutes by phone from Logan, with Stone listening in, to Zorn, the former Chicago Tribune columnist, in the first interview she had given a Chicago-area journalist. She said she remembered almost nothing of the trial or of the months in the DuPage County jail before it. "I was a zombie," she said. She had been disappointed, she said, that Bakalis did not sentence her to die, and she stayed suicidal through her first years in prison, hoarding pain relievers to overdose and cutting herself; by her account she persuaded doctors in 2005 to take her off psychoactive medication entirely. Of 1999 she gave the explanation her lawyers had given at trial: her husband did not want her or the children, and they would all be in a better place. "I'm not trying to make excuses for myself," she said. "I'm not trying to say, 'Oh, it wasn't me, it was just the medication.' But I am trying to understand what happened." She thought about her children every single day, she said. DuPage County State's Attorney Robert Berlin's office, opposing the petition, called her actions rageful, said prosecutors did not accept that Zoloft had made her kill her children, and argued that clemency was a last resort, not a substitute for the new-trial claims she said she could still bring in court.
The Illinois Prisoner Review Board heard the petition in 2022 and sent the governor a confidential recommendation. As of March 2024, twenty-five years after the killings, Pritzker had not acted on it, and he is under no obligation to. Berlin urged him to deny it "in preservation of justice and the memory of Thomas, Emily and Nicholas," calling the killings "cold, calculated and premeditated." The detectives who built the case said the same thing in plainer words. "She should stay exactly where she's at," McGury said. "If there is a God, then a God will make that decision about forgiveness."
June 1998: her doctor starts her on fifty milligrams of Zoloft a day.
March 4, 1999: Nicholas, seven, Emily, six, and Thomas, three, are killed at the family home in Naperville; their mother survives an attempt on her own life.
March 11, 1999: the children's funeral at Ss. Peter and Paul Church.
June 21, 2001: in People ex rel. Birkett v. Bakalis, the Illinois Supreme Court declines to block the deposition of David Lemak.
December 19: the jury convicts her of three counts of first-degree murder.
January 2002: prosecutors decide not to pursue a death sentence.
April 8, 2002: Judge George Bakalis sentences her to life without the possibility of parole.
2008: the Loomis Street house is given to North Central College.
August 2011: she is interviewed by French filmmakers for the channel M6.
2012: portions of the documentary reach Chicago news.
2021: her lawyers file a clemency petition with Governor J.B. Pritzker, arguing that Zoloft made her psychotic and violent.
Summer 2022: she gives Eric Zorn her first interview with a Chicago-area journalist.
2022: the Illinois Prisoner Review Board hears the petition.
March 2024: Pritzker has not acted on the petition.