I sat in a cell eight hours a day doing the interview. She re-lived murdering her son two feet from me. I saw the tension in her entire body, the stress, the tears and the shaking. She tried to overdose him and let him die in his sleep. He convulsed and she panicked. She used a razor to cut his wrist. Waited. He didn’t die. She used the razor to cut his throat. She thought he had bled out and was gone. She placed his limp body into the bath to clean the blood off of him. She didn’t think he was alive. In fact, that was when Charley died. He drowned. They said it took an hour and a half to kill him, and then she tried to kill herself. After the first interview, I left her cell and the supervisor walked me to her office. She asked how I was doing. I couldn’t speak. I sat in an office chair and stared out the window until I could get up and leave the prison without tears in my eyes.
