Tampa:
The Tampa Palms neighbourhood here is the kind of place people move to get away from crime.
Stucco homes with neatly trimmed lawns and spacious lanais nestle inside gated "villages" with names like Lancaster and Oxford Place. Real estate agents point out the proximity of "top notch" schools, the 18-hole golf course and other upscale amenities that "cater to a perpetually-on-vacation-like lifestyle."
But in recent weeks, the residents have become all too aware of how deceptive surface appearances can be. On Jan. 28, the police arrived at a two-story house on a quiet cul-de-sac in Tampa Palms to find Julie Schenecker unconscious on the patio, blood on her white bathrobe. Inside were the bodies of her two children, Calyx, 16, and Beau, 13.
Ms Schenecker, 50, the wife of a high-level military intelligence officer, has been charged with the murders. When questioned, police said, she admitted to shooting her children and complained that they were "disrespectful and mouthy and that she was going to deal with it."
To the police, the physical evidence suggested a chilling sequence of events. Ms Schenecker appeared to have shot Beau with a .38-caliber handgun the previous afternoon while driving him to soccer practice, one bullet piercing the windshield and two striking his body. She then drove home and parked the van in the garage, where his body was found slumped inside the front passenger seat, the seat belt still buckled. Calyx Schenecker was on the computer in an upstairs bedroom when she was killed. Two bullets hit her, one in the back of the head and one in the face. The bodies of both children were covered with blankets.
Inside the house, the police said they discovered handwritten notes in which Ms Schenecker, who has pleaded not guilty to the crimes, wrote about killing her children and then killing herself -- the three days that she had to wait to receive the gun after buying it, she said in one note, had delayed the "massacre." But she did not turn the gun on herself, and it was unclear why she was unconscious when found.
Since the killings, neighbours, teachers and others who knew the family have struggled to reconcile the outward trappings of a picture-perfect suburban life -- the car pool, the soccer games and track meets, the Christmas card photos of a beaming couple with their two handsome, popular, high-achieving children, the family weekends spent boating or skiing -- with an act so dark that, as one neighbour, Matthew Patchan, put it, "there's no words to describe it. It was stunning, unthinkable."
Gary Bingham, who coached Calyx in track and field at King High School -- "the fastest freshman I ever coached," he said -- knew Ms Schenecker as an attentive mother who picked her daughter up from practice, attended team suppers and once surprised him with a birthday cake. He barely recognized the woman shown wild-eyed and shaking uncontrollably in a video taken as she was led from the house.
"I'm just looking at this person saying, 'Who is that?' " he said. In the time he worked with Calyx, he said, "the girl never once said anything negative to me." Now he is kept awake at night by visions of the shootings. "You got to get that stuff out of your mind," he said.
Daisy Questell, who taught Beau at Liberty Middle School, searches her memory for something she might have missed. But she comes up only with the easygoing boy who teased her about the no-chewing-gum rule, "never missed an assignment or got a bad grade" and never gave any indication of a problem at home. "I never heard anything about it, and you know how kids are, they say anything," she said.
Yet such extreme violence rarely comes out of the blue, and since the killings, fragments of information have surfaced that hint that the family's veneer may have covered a more turbulent reality. Ms. Schenecker was involved in a traffic accident in November, her Mercedes rear-ending a trailer being towed by another car. Florida Highway Patrol troopers noted that she showed "signs of drug impairment," including "dilated pupils" and "mush-mouthed speech." But she was discharged from the hospital before blood could be drawn, according to the troopers' report.
Two days later, police detectives were sent to the Schenecker house after Calyx told a counsellor that her mother had slapped her in the face. Ms. Schenecker did not dispute that she had hit her daughter, but she said that Calyx had called her "disgusting" and told her, "You're not my parent." The detectives concluded that "there is no evidence of a criminal offense in this case."
Others also noticed small things that at the time seemed insignificant, but now make them wonder. Mr. Bingham, the track and field coach, recalled that sometime in the fall, Calyx's father told him that arrangements would have to be made to pick her up after practice because his wife was undergoing "rehab." Mr. Bingham did not inquire about the treatment. "It wasn't my job to ask, as a coach," he said.
Lisa Pilch, who played Division 1 volleyball with Julie Schenecker at the University of North Iowa and kept in touch over the years, noticed at a reunion in 2009 that something seemed different about her college friend. "I just thought that she was a little subdued," Ms. Pilch said. "I thought her eyes looked a little bit either distant or vacant."
Forensic researchers who have studied mothers convicted of killing their children said that such women often leave a trail of clues behind them. "In almost every case there's obvious signs," said Cheryl L. Meyer, a professor at Wright State University whose research team examined 219 cases of maternal filicide and conducted lengthy interviews with 40 of the mothers.
As disturbing as such crimes are, they represent a robust portion of child homicides in the United States. Dr. Meyer found more than 100 cases a year of children killed by their mothers in the 1990s, a figure she says is probably an underestimate. Other experts, basing their numbers on data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, believe that the number may exceed 200 a year, though precise figures are elusive because the deaths are often misclassified.
Many mothers kill their children through some form of neglect or repeated abuse. But in a quarter of the cases Dr. Meyer studied, the mothers purposefully murdered their children. In a notorious 2001 case, Andrea Yates drowned her five children in a bathtub. In 1995, Debora Green, a doctor in Kansas, set fire to her house, killing her 6-year-old daughter and 13-year-old son. When a third child escaped onto the roof, Dr. Green told her to jump but made no effort to catch her.
The victims in most maternal filicides are infants or younger children. But mothers who kill purposefully sometimes kill older children, including teenagers, Dr. Meyer said. Delving into the lives of such women, researchers often find histories of mental illness, broken relationships, social isolation or other stresses that may have helped push them into violence. Many are devoted mothers, who plan to kill themselves and become convinced that their children are better off dead than left in the care of others.
Geoffrey R. McKee, a forensic psychologist in South Carolina and the author of "Why Mothers Kill," said that in a severely depressed state, it was possible that a mother could misread the normal parent-child battles of adolescence. "The children can be pretty much as they always are, but if Ma has changed, then banter on the part of her children can be interpreted as mouthing off," said Dr. McKee, who has conducted forensic evaluations in high-profile cases like that of Susan Smith, who was convicted in 1995 of killing her two children.
How much of what researchers have found might apply in Julie Schenecker's case remains unclear, although John Fitzgibbons, a prominent criminal lawyer in Tampa, said that the public defender representing Ms. Schenecker, Robert Fraser, is widely expected to offer an insanity defence for his client.
Mr. Fraser and the prosecutor, Jay Pruner, an assistant state attorney, have declined to comment on the case. The state has until early April to decide whether to ask for the death penalty. Ms. Schenecker, a former Army linguist, who in court appearances has wept quietly or sat stiffly, eyes closed, spent 20 hours in intensive care after her arrest, and remains in the infirmary of the Hillsborough County jail.
Ms. Schenecker's husband, Col. Parker Schenecker, an intelligence officer with the United States Central Command who was in the Middle East when his children were killed, has not spoken publicly about the crimes or about his wife, except to say, through a spokeswoman, that he visited her in jail late last month and informed her he was filing for divorce. When he was home, Mr. Bingham said of Colonel Schenecker, "It was all about being at home with the kids." At a memorial service at the First Baptist Church here, Colonel Schenecker asked those who mourned the children to "please, don't forget how they lived."
The students who were closest to Calyx at King High School also prefer to focus on the image of the teenager they knew, a girl with an outsize artistic talent, a quirky fashion sense, a passion for Harry Potter books and an openness to new things that led her to sample strange foods like ostrich burgers and try to persuade her friends to sign up for a marathon in Thailand.
They planted a willow tree for Calyx in the school courtyard. They speak happily about their friend, but say they see no purpose in delving into reasons for an act they cannot comprehend.
"I'm not in a place to make sense of it," said Jena Young, 16.