Killer mom slept with daughters' bodies

By TRACY McLAUGHLIN, Special to Toronto Sun

Last Updated: October 1, 2010 1:19am

After Elaine Campione drowned her two girls, she dried them, put on their PJs, tucked them in her bed with their teddy bears, then crawled in beside them and spent the night, a jury heard Thursday.

Elaine Campione, 35, has admitted that she killed her children, Serena, 3, and Sophia, 1, Oct. 2, 2006, but her lawyer claims she was not sane at the time and therefore not criminally responsible.

The mother was arrested after she called police two days after the children died.

When police met her at her apartment she was calm but alert, even as her children lay decomposing in her bed with a fan blowing on them at high speed.

When police asked where her children were, she answered, “they’re dead in my bed.”

Police arrested her on the spot, but first they took her to hospital because she claimed she had taken an overdose.

On the witness stand, Simone English, a psychiatric nurse who interviewed Campione at a hospital that morning, said the mother seemed “sad” but otherwise normal.

“She said that when she got into bed she thought something was wrong,” English said. “She said the children weren’t moving and when she got into bed they didn’t stir.”

“Did she say how the children were when she put them to bed?” Crown attorney Enno Meijers asked.

“She said they had a family evening and when she put them to bed they were fine,” answered the nurse, who at the time would have had no way of knowing that the children were dead when the mother crawled in with them.

“She said the children slept with her,” English said.

“She said she called police in the morning because she thought something was wrong with the children.”

After asking her routine questions the nurse discovered Campione was on welfare and living with her children after she left an abusive marriage, and that she was in both group and individual counseling for depression following an overdose four months earlier.

“I didn’t see any signs of mental illness at the time.”

From: http://www.torontosun.com/news/canada/2010/09/30/15540086.html