Alvin J. Benoit
May 11, 2009
Breaking News: Mother guilty of children’s slayings
May 14, 2009
Witness: ‘Mommy, I love you. I don’t want to die,” daughter begged
Amy Hebert awoke at 3 a.m. Aug. 20, 2007, to “a voice” that ordered her to retrieve 11 knives from her kitchen and butcher her two children, Camille, 9 and Braxton, 7, according to her defense attorneys.
The source of the voice: either Satan or God, according to differing statements presented by defense attorneys in Hebert’s first-degree murder trial.
The 42-year-old Mathews woman spent Mother’s Day in District Judge Jerome Barbera’s courtroom Sunday as friends and relatives agreed she was a wonderful parent. But forensic psychologist Dr. Glenn Wolfner Ahava told jurors about the psychotic hallucinations she experienced the morning of the killings.
During a May 2008 jailhouse interview with Hebert, Ahava said she told him “the voice of God” told her the only way she could keep her family together was to kill the children. According to Ahava, Hebert said she and her children would be together afterward in heaven.
“She thought it was God’s will, so she obeyed,” he said.
Hebert recalled going to the master bedroom where her children lay sleeping in her bed and setting the knives on the bed, Ahava testified. When one of the children moved, she grabbed the knives and ran from the room, he said.
The imagined voice chastised Hebert, she told the psychologist, for not following through with the order. At the voice’s command, she practiced stabbing Camille’s empty bed before returning to the master bedroom intent on murder, Avaha said.
Hebert told Avaha she stabbed Camille first while Braxton was asleep. The boy woke up and ran, but Hebert said she wasn’t sure where. Hebert said she followed Camille to the master bathroom where she repeatedly stabbed her.
“They died a slow and painful death,” Avaha said of the children. “But the voice told her to stab them until they were dead.”
As Hebert plunged the knife into her daughter, Avaha said Camille responded, “Mommy, I love you. I don’t want to die.”
Hebert told Avaha her reply: “I love you too, but (her father Chad Hebert) is coming to get you and we have to be together.”
The scene was replayed as Hebert killed her son, Avaha testified. She also repeatedly stabbed the family dog, Princess.
Lafourche Parish District Attorney Cam Morvant asked Avaha in cross-examination if Hebert admitted washing her hands and changing her clothes after allegedly stabbing her children. Avaha said she hadn’t. Hebert also failed to tell the psychologist that she had penned letters to her ex-husband and former mother-in-law.
Dr. Alexandra Phillips, the psychiatrist who saw Hebert when she was first admitted to Ochsner St. Anne General Hospital the morning of the killings, told defense attorney George Parnham that the Mathews woman reported “hearing the words of Satan” as she stabbed her children.
“She said Satan was in the room laughing at her,” Phillips said.
In Monday’s testimony, Dr. Phillip Resnick, an Ohio-based psychiatrist, told jurors Hebert suffered from eight of the nine indicators for someone with major depression with psychotic features.
“She killed out of love, not hate,” Resnick told jurors. “She psychologically believed the children were better off in heaven. Her deposed, distorted thinking made her unable to rationally weigh if the homicide was right or wrong.”
The defense rested its case Monday afternoon. Morvant began his rebuttal yesterday morning.
If convicted, the jury could sentence Hebert to the death penalty
Staff photo by KYLE CARRIER / Tri-Parish Times Lafourche Parish District Attorney Cam Morvant and Assistant District Attorney Kristine Russell leave court Monday. Rebuttal arguments began yesterday as the double first-degree murder trial of Amy Hebert entered its ninth day of deliberations.
