14 DAY TRIAL // 35-year-old Felicia Boots pleaded non-guilty to charges of murder of her 14-month-old daughter and 10-week-old son, explaining her actions were influenced by postnatal depression.
The Canada-born mother of two had moved to the UK in 2008, after marrying Mr. Boots in August 2007, a fellow Jehova's Witness. There was a history of anxiety in her family, with brother Scott Sinclair taking his own life the year she married, right after he had quit the Jehova's Witnesses.
Felicia and Jeffery, an investment banker, had just moved to a new million pound mansion in Nappy Valley, when the woman started experiencing severe depression.
During a rage, she imagined her children being seized by social services, because she was an unfit mother, the Daily Mail writes. The woman strangled her babies with her husband's tie and laid them in her wardrobe, sitting side by side.
She had tried killing herself after having ended the life of her toddlers, but failed to do so, inflicting only superficial damage to her neck.
Mrs. Boots pleaded down to charges of manslaughter. She is supported by her husband throughout this ordeal.
Felicia stated that, after the incident, she started researching postnatal depression, in an effort to comprehend why and how she was able to go through with the horrific crime. She found one in ten women suffer clinical depression after giving birth, and the symptoms matched hers.
The judge was sympathetic, and the woman will not be awarded jail time for the crimes.
“Although the roots of Mrs Boots’s actions were profoundly tragic given the loss of two such young lives, what occurred was not what most people would regard as criminal activity.
“I unreservedly accept that what the defendant did to the two children she and her husband loved and nurtured, was solely the result of psychological and bio-physiological forces that were beyond her control,” he stated.