In wrenching detail, a series of witnesses on Thursday gave a DuPage County coroner’s jury the most explicit public account to date of how and why Marilyn Lemak allegedly drugged and smothered her three young children–and why she then tried to kill herself.
“She said she wanted to die also,” said Naperville Detective Michael Cross, the case’s lead investigator, during an inquest into the children’s deaths. “She said she didn’t want her husband to be burdened with her and the kids, since they were no longer No. 1 on his priority list,” an apparent reference to their impending divorce and the fact that David Lemak had recently begun dating.
The jury also heard how each child began to hallucinate after they were given tranquilizers to knock them out. “They were grabbing for things that weren’t there,” Cross said. In their dazed state, the children even scrawled on themselves with green, red, yellow and brown markers, authorities said.
Because the two younger children were not completely sedated, Lemak allegedly gave 6-year-old Emily and 3-year-old Thomas a second dose before suffocating them, Cross said.
And the jurors were told how Emily and Thomas were killed while 7-year-old Nicholas played downstairs on the first floor.
Later, when his mother came downstairs, “she told (Nicholas) that Emily and Thomas would not be joining them for dinner,” said Cross, who interviewed Lemak at Naperville’s Edward Hospital shortly after the children’s bodies were discovered March 5.
“She then gave him a bagel, spread it with crunchy peanut butter” and sprinkled it with three crushed tablets of the anti-anxiety tranquilizer Ativan, Cross said.
Marilyn Lemak’s criminal defense attorney, John Donahue, has raised questions about her mental state before and after her arrest. On Thursday, Donahue said he likely would challenge the validity of her alleged emergency-room confession.
“There are going to be issues raised about her ability to give any type of a voluntary statement to anyone after the commission of this offense,” he said.
None of Marilyn Lemak’s family members attended Thursday’s hearing. But David Lemak’s parents, Albert and Mary, were joined by one of their daughters, Diane Hansa.
As Albert Lemak rubbed his eyes and Hansa took notes on a lavender pad, Mary Lemak bit her lip and held her fingers to her mouth. She glared to no one in particular as Cross described how her daughter-in-law had told police that she and the children were not David’s top priority.
Chief Deputy Coroner Peter Siekmann began the hearing with a methodical explanation of the case at hand. “Emily Lemak, white female, age 6, late of 28 S. Loomis,” Siekmann said. “Nicholas Lemak, white male, age 7, late of 28 S. Loomis. And also Thomas Lemak, a white male, age 3, late of 28 S. Loomis.”
The first witness was Naperville Police Officer Arzania Williams, who also was the first officer to burst through the locked front doors of the Lemaks’ Victorian home. He and another officer were responding to a 911 call from a woman later identified as Marilyn Lemak. Williams was told to ask for Lynn.
The caller “stated that she had killed her kids and she needed help,” Williams said. Once inside the house, Williams began yelling for Lynn.
She responded from the second floor of the house. Williams ran upstairs and found her lying in the doorway of the master bedroom. Beyond her, Emily lay tucked into a bed.
Marilyn Lemak “was responsive. I asked her where the children were,” Williams said. “She said, `In their beds.’ “
Moving through the house, the 15-year veteran officer discovered a blood-stained wedding dress on a bathroom floor and the boys in their bedrooms.
From the color of their skin, Williams said, he could tell the boys had been dead for some time. Each of the children had minor scrapes and bruises; Thomas also had a tooth-shaped cut on his upper lip, according to coroner’s reports. But the reports gave no indication that the person who suffocated them had caused those injuries.
Marilyn Lemak was injured as well. Cross testified that she had cut both her wrists after her children were slain. All but one deep cut on her right wrist were superficial, “hesitation marks,” he said.
Though it wasn’t addressed at the inquest, authorities previously have said that Marilyn Lemak also had drugged herself.
Referring to his interview with Marilyn Lemak, Cross said she awoke Friday morning–the day the bodies were found–and went to a bathroom seeking her X-acto knives. She couldn’t find them, though, and returned to the bedroom. Feeling weak, she called 911, and the officers who responded discovered a puddle of blood on the floor near the bed and a trail of blood across the floor.
Paramedics who responded to her call took Lemak to Edward Hospital, where Cross and two colleagues began questioning her.
He said he identified himself as a detective from the Naperville police. “At which time she said, `I did it,’ ” Cross recalled. “At that time, I advised her of her Miranda rights from a card I had.”
Early in the investigation, authorities said Emily and Thomas had been at school and day care on the day of the slayings and returned home in the mid-afternoon. Nicholas, they had said, had been at after-school activities and did not return until late afternoon or early evening.
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But on Thursday, Cross said Marilyn Lemak had told him that Nicholas had been at home when his siblings were suffocated–Thomas dressed in a blue-and-white horse and cowboy shirt, according to autopsy reports, and Emily in a multi-colored T-shirt. Nicholas was found wearing a purple T-shirt, gray sweatpants and white socks.
Cross said that Lemak had told him she had given the children one drug, Ativan. But toxicology tests disclosed Thursday that two others were used as well: aspirin and Zoloft, an anti-depressant.
Authorities said they did not know exactly how Emily and Thomas were given the drugs. None of the medications had been prescribed to the children, officials said.
Preliminary coroner’s reports obtained Thursday stated that David Lemak, an emergency-room physician, told authorities early in the investigation that he suspected his wife may have taken some of his doctor’s pads and illegally written the prescriptions.
After about 15 minutes, the jury came back with its decision. “We the people find that Emily Lemak came to her death as the result of cerebral hypoxia due to suffocation,” said the jury foreman, Douglas Hodges. “The verdict of this jury is homicide.” He repeated the same conclusion for Nicholas and Thomas.
In the short period it took the jurors to reach their conclusion, Hodges later said, he had thumbed through pictures that investigators had taken of the scene.
The first few were general photos of the Lemaks’ home. Then Hodges came across a picture of Emily Lemak, lying dead in a bed in the home’s master bedroom with blankets tucked around her body nearly up to her head.
He looked at it just long enough to realize what it was–and he quickly set it down.
“The pictures are here,” he told his fellow jurors. “Look at them if you want to or don’t look. I’m choosing not to.”
None of the other jurors looked.
Hodges said that while most of the talk centered around the testimony, a few jurors looked through the toxicology and autopsy reports as they decided whether to rule the deaths homicides, suicides, accidents, natural or undetermined.
“It was pretty cut and dried. It wasn’t a hard decision,” said Hodges, a general manager of a Chicago remodeling company. “It took me longer to write the (verdict) reports than it did for us to make a decision.”
“We all discussed how sad it was and how horrible it must have been for those kids,” he said. “Seeing the family was tough, knowing the pain they must be in.”