Saturday night at 9 PM Eastern, I and several experts will be on Justice with Judge Jeanine on Fox News. The show is a special about the Julie Schenecker case, the family tragedy in Tampa, Florida, the subject of my current true crime project for St. Martin’s Press.
On January 27, 2011, Julie, a fifty-year-old mother, shot her thirteen-year-old son in the car on the way home from soccer practice. When she returned home, she left his body in the vehicle and went inside to her sixteen-year-old daughter Calyx who was working on the computer. Julie shot her in the head and in the face.
The next morning, on a welfare-check visit to the home prompted by a phone call from Julie’s mother, the police found Julie in her blood-covered bathrobe curled up in a fetal position on the patio beside the swimming pool.
Now, the prosecutor is seeking the death penalty in this double murder and the defense is claiming insanity. The courts will have to balance out the two extremes.