Better Off in Heaven

Laurel Schlemmer lived with her husband, Mark, and their three sons in McCandless, a well-off suburb north of Pittsburgh. The couple met on a Christian dating site. At church and in the community she seemed gentle and devoted, but at home she was struggling, and psychiatrists later said she had become fixed on the false belief that her two younger boys were autistic.

In April 2013, at her parents’ home in Marshall Township, Schlemmer tied Daniel and Luke with twine and drove her van backward over them, injuring both. Police and child welfare workers accepted her account that it was an accident, and testimony at her trial later showed otherwise. On April 1, 2014, she held six-year-old Daniel and three-year-old Luke under the water in the family bathtub. Luke died that day, and Daniel died on April 5. She told investigators she believed she would be a better mother to her oldest son, then seven, if his brothers were in heaven, and she described hearing voices that pushed her to act.

In March 2017, after a non-jury trial in Allegheny County, Judge Jeffrey A. Manning found her guilty but mentally ill of two counts of third-degree murder. On September 13, 2017, he sentenced her to 30 to 80 years, which he called a de facto life sentence. She was to begin the term in a state psychiatric hospital.