Manhattan Killer Nanny Yoselyn Ortega Claims She Heard Voices, Convicted By Court

An Upper West Side Nanny was found guilty of first and second degree murder Wednesday in the State Supreme Court in Manhattan, New York, after a two-month trial which featured heart wrenching testimonies from the parents of 6-year-old Lulu and her brother 2-year-old Leo Krim.

According to reports from the New York Daily News, Yoselyn Ortega, 55, who is convicted of four accounts of murder sat stone faced and motionless during the trials. She brought the kids to their 57 West 75th Street on Oct. 25, 2012, and used a pair of kitchen knives to stab and slash them in the bathroom. Then she placed the mortally wounded kids in the bathtub. Mother Marina Krim, 41, walked in on the nightmare nanny just as Ortega began to slice her own wrist and plunged a knife into her own throat.

According to a New York Times report, the defense said Ortega was severely mentally ill and heard voices including Satan’s telling her to kill the children. Her lawyer Valerie Van-Greenberg presented evidence in court that Ortega had delusions and hallucinations since she was a teenager in the Dominican Republic, and that her psychosis had gone untreated and undiagnosed until her arrest.

Two psychiatrists for the defense, Karen B. Rosenbaum and Philip J. Resnick, said Ortega was in a grip of a psychotic break so severe, she did not understand her actions or know they were wrong. After interviewing her family members and scouring her medical records, they came to a conclusion she was overcome by voices in her head in the weeks before the murders. She could not recall the gruesome killings, they said.

According to the NYT report, because of a lack of any concrete medical records, the defense team relied on the testimonies of Ortega’s friends and family to show she had two mental breakdowns in the Dominican Republic, one in 1978 after her younger sister died and a second in 2008 after a close family friend committed suicide.

In both cases she slipped into depression and refused to leave her family’s house. In 1978, she received treatment from a doctor and recovered. During the Second episode, one of the witnesses said she started expressing irrational fears about people coming to get her.

Ortega’s family testified that she appeared to be unravelling in the six months before the killings. She beagan crying frequently, asking people to pray for her and speaking of “shadows” and a “black man" following her and attempting to split up her family.

Prosecutors, however, focussed on the statements Ortega gave to Dr. Marc Dubin a psychiatrist who spoke to her 11 days after the horrific event as she was recovering from her neck wound at the New York Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medical Centre. In both the interviews, Ortega complained about her money trouble and expressed frustration with Marina about her schedule and workload, but did not mention hearing voices commanding her to kill.