She'd tried to do the same to her son, but she couldn't move him from the van's passenger seat. And there was the woman now who, police said, wheeled her dead daughter into her bedroom and tucked her into bed. There had been the woman years ago who wanted a large family, breast-fed her children and shuttled them between activities as they got older. Hers was "a tale of two mothers," Spradley said. But the combination of Lithium and the blood-thinner Coumadin that she took failed to end her life, though it likely accounted for her ghostly appearance in the arms of Tampa police officers shortly after her arrest. After she killed her children, she tried to overdose on prescription pills. Schenecker was determined to commit suicide, her attorneys said. She'd gamble and buy cars and then she'd collapse into bed for weeks, her attorneys said.ĭefense attorney Jennifer Spradley told jurors that by the end of 2010, Schenecker was coming apart and her family was "moving on." (The Scheneckers divorced after she was charged with killing their children.)īut everywhere the family moved, Schenecker experienced the same manic highs and lows that characterize bipolar disorder. She knew he'd sent her family an email, but hadn't allowed her to see it. Parker Schenecker, was about to leave her, prosecutors said. Schenecker also worried that her then-husband, former Army Col. Like many teenagers, the girl was sometimes critical of what her mother made for dinner, the clothes she wore, and how she behaved during her low spells. Though she'd walked away from a successful decadelong career in the military to raise her two children, prosecutors said she was angry at her 16-year-old daughter Calyx and her 13-year-old son Beau for becoming "sassy" teenagers.Ĭalyx in particular became the focus of her ire. Prosecutors used Schenecker's notebook Monday to portray her as an enraged woman who vented her frustrations on her family. The revolver she'd purchased from a gun shop in Oldsmar came with a mandatory three-day waiting period. "I was planning on a Saturday massacre," she complained to her notebook in late January of 2011. If convicted, she faces a mandatory sentence of life in prison. From the outset, prosecutors used the entries to outline their case: that Schenecker, who is pleading insanity, plotted her children's deaths, methodically carried them out and seemed at peace with the outcome.