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player ready...Speaking in a thin, halting voice, Marilyn Lemak frequently pauses and searches for the right words as she tries to explain the inexplicable.
She says she needs the public to understand how sick she was when she murdered her three small children in March 1999, according to a video recently obtained by the Tribune. She wants people to know that she was a good mother, that she has not forgiven herself and that she wishes she were dead.
In a documentary slated to air Sunday on the French television channel M6, Lemak, 54, struggles to describe how a deepening depression amid a bitter divorce prompted her to drug and suffocate her children inside their Naperville home more than 13 years ago. She says she agreed to the TV interview — her first public comments since her arrest made national headlines — to help erase the stigma of mental illness, especially among affluent women with seemingly idyllic lives.
“I was a good mother who got very seriously mentally ill and did a terrible, tragic thing. And I think that was the depression,” she says. “But I think that I was a good mother, yes.”
Lemak is one of several women featured in the documentary “Mal de Mere,” which examines how society responds to mentally ill mothers who harm their children. The Tribune, which allowed the French team access to its archives and to reporters who covered the case, received an unedited copy of the hourlong interview.
In the raw footage shot last August at the Dwight Correctional
Center in Livingston County, Lemak bears little resemblance to the vibrant, copper-haired mother who once enjoyed organizing play dates and school fundraisers. She now appears pale and surprisingly small, with thick eyeglasses, baggy prison garb and a utilitarian hairstyle that leave her looking both schoolmarmish and frail.
She describes how she laced her children’s peanut butter sandwiches with prescription medication, then sang to them as they lost consciousness on March 4, 1999.
“And you cut their breaths?” the interviewer asks.
“Yes, I held my hand over their nose and mouths. Yes.”
“And everything was finished?”
“Right,” Lemak responds.
And for the first time she publicly acknowledges the magnitude of her crime.
“Looking back, how could I have done something like that?” she asks. “I don’t want to make an excuse. I, I don’t know if I’ll be able to forgive myself or not. … I’m trying but it hasn’t happened yet.”
Anger as motive
Lemak, a former surgical nurse, also slit her own wrist and swallowed several pills that night in a failed suicide attempt that authorities have long described as insincere and proof of her selfishness. Despite prosecutors’ insistence that she committed the murders to hurt her then-estranged husband, Lemak says she did it to escape the pain brought on by depression.
“It had been weeks of this, and I was not getting any better. … I was feeling
worse and worse. I was feeling more hopeless, more helpless, like it was never going to get better,” she says, shaking her head at the memory. “And I decided to take my own life and that my children would come with me because it would be better for them too.”
Statistics, however, indicate that depression rarely leads to homicidal acts. To the contrary, prosecutors and expert witnesses argued that Lemak’s actions the day of the murders — canceling the baby sitter and maid, cutting the phone, locking the doors — indicate a calculating, methodical woman in full control of her actions.
“There are hundreds of thousands of people who suffer depression on a daily basis, and they do not commit crimes,” said DuPage County Assistant State’s Attorney Joseph Ruggiero, who prosecuted the case in 2001. “These horrendous murders were generated and driven by her anger. While she was diagnosed with depression, the motive for these crimes was and always will be her anger.”
Given the selective details and often jumbled recollections, it’s clear that Lemak tries to shield herself from the fact that she murdered her young children: Nicholas, 7; Emily, 6; and Thomas, 3.
Though she acknowledges committing a terrible act, she avoids expressly saying she killed her children. She talks about the kids being in heaven or “not here,” but she only once refers to them as dead. And she never calls them by name, instead referring to them as “my oldest,” “my second” or “my third.”
She maintains her composure throughout the interview with only a few exceptions. She truly cries just once, when she describes how she used to look at the three bright stars in Orion’s Belt and imagine they were her children looking down on her.
“I think about it every day,” she says of the slayings. “Why did I get to that point? And why didn’t I die? And I haven’t reached an answer … there is no easy answer. But every day I think about them. Every day. And I wish that they were still here.”
Lemak paints a troubling picture of her life in Naperville, portraying it as a privileged place where she says women felt guilty asking for help. She says she often questioned why she couldn’t just be happy, despite the showcase Victorian home, the cleaning lady, the nannies and the money. She suggests she could have prevented the killings by talking to someone about her struggles when the symptoms first surfaced.
A self-described perfectionist, Lemak says she first grappled with depression after Emily’s birth, and it worsened after Thomas was born. Medical experts offered a similar timeline during her trial, though they disagreed on whether her mental illness met the definition of insanity, preventing her from being able to distinguish right from wrong.
“I had a picture in my mind of how my family should be with a mother and a father and three beautiful children and two dogs and a beautiful house,” she says. “And it wasn’t working out that way. It looked like it from the outside, but it wasn’t like that in my mind. It wasn’t perfect.”
Living with it
Lemak was sentenced to life in prison for the murders. Though her lawyers offered an insanity defense, a DuPage County jury agreed with prosecutors who insisted that she killed the children to spite her then-husband, David, an emergency room doctor who had reluctantly accepted her request for a divorce and had recently begun dating someone.
In the video, she refers to him as “my husband” and does not discuss their marital problems. She speaks softly, and not unkindly, as she describes how he tried to help her cope with depression but ultimately could not.
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“I did talk to my husband about it. He was a physician, and he didn’t know what to do either. I finally ended up calling a hotline to try to find someone to talk to, and I was put on medication,” she says. “But at that time, I remember telling my husband, ‘Don’t tell anybody. This is nobody else’s business. This is my business, and we’re not going to discuss it with family or friends.’ And I didn’t.”
David Lemak, who now practices medicine in Michigan, did not respond to requests for comment. He has not spoken publicly about the case since her sentencing, when he asked that his ex-wife be spared the death penalty so she would spend the rest of her life haunted by her actions.
“There, she will have to live each day with the knowledge of the horror she is accountable for,” he told the court in 2002.
It seems as if his wish has come to fruition, as Lemak says in the video that she would have preferred the death penalty. She would have been sent to a psychiatric facility if the jury had found her insane, but Lemak says that was not a welcome alternative.
“I wanted the death penalty. I wanted to be dead. Getting a life sentence? … I have nothing anyway,” she says as she struggles to maintain her composure. “No matter where I was, whether I was here or in a psychiatric facility, it wouldn’t matter. I would still think of it every day.”
When asked if she still entertains suicidal thoughts, Lemak responds with a short, rueful laugh.
“That is something I used to think about all the time, being that I made the attempt at home and failed, and I wasn’t expecting to fail,” she says. “If I knew there was a way I wouldn’t fail, I would consider it. But I can’t think of a way that I wouldn’t fail for sure.”
‘The weight of her act’
Claire Perdrix, the French journalist who did the interview for the documentary, says she believes Lemak genuinely wants to help combat the stigma associated with mental illness. She was struck by Lemak’s timid nature and thought she seemed “so small, (as) if she was still totally crushed by the weight of her act.”
“I don’t want to blame her, nor to give her excuses,” Perdrix said. “We don’t have to excuse her terrible act. We have to understand it or nothing will change.”
Lemak describes an uneventful life at Dwight, where she takes classes and works as a baker in the kitchen. She no longer takes psychiatric medication and finds that staying busy has been a valuable coping mechanism. She has a cellmate, though she acknowledges that some of her fellow prisoners consider her “a terrible person” because of her crime.
Her parents visit weekly, and she is in frequent contact with her siblings and other relatives. People from her old church, including her former pastor, still keep in touch, she says.
Lemak has pictures of her children in her cell, but she is not allowed to hang them on the walls. She looks at them frequently, she says.
She says she no longer cries every day, but she has not forgiven herself for killing the children.
“How can I?” she asks. “Again, I think that’s part of the stigma of depression. I know that I was depressed. I know that I was not in my right mind. I was not thinking clearly. But I should have been.”
She says she thinks of the children every day. And she often speaks to them, telling them how sorry she is.
“I think if you believe in God and heaven, and that’s where they are, then what could be better than that?” she asks. “But they didn’t get to live their lives, and that’s the tragedy. They should have been able to live their lives — and then go to heaven.”