THIBODAUX - A nurse who treated Amy Hebert for self-inflicted stab wounds testified the Mathews mother told her she had killed her two children to avoid losing them to her ex-husband.
Jurors in Hebert's capital murder trial briefly toured the house Wednesday morning where the fatal stabbings took place. In the afternoon, the jury listened to a crime-scene investigator give a detailed view of the children's final moments and their mother's bizarre and unexplained actions afterward.
Claudette Baye, a registered nurse at Ochsner St. Anne Hospital in Raceland, told jurors Hebert appeared alert and aware the day of the slayings, when she made a series of statements about her children's deaths and how her divorce from her ex-husband, Chad Hebert, factored into her actions.
" 'All I ever wanted was to be loved,' " Hebert said the evening of the killings, according to an entry in Baye's patient log. " ' Chad left me, and all I had was the children. I couldn't let him take the children away from me.' "
Prior to their case's conclusion Wednesday afternoon, prosecutors called 14 witnesses and presented 90 pieces of evidence over a three-day period in an attempt to prove Amy Hebert had a specific intent to kill her 9-year-old daughter, Camille, and 7-year-old son, Braxton on the morning of Aug. 20, 2007.
Defense attorneys will try to show, beginning this afternoon when their first witnesses take the stand, that Hebert suffered from a psychotic fit prior to fatally stabbing her two children and the family dog inside their house at 118 St. Anthony St. in Mathews.
Hebert has entered dual pleas of not guilty and not guilty be reason of insanity to two counts of first-degree murder in connection with her children's deaths. If a jury finds her guilty, she would face the possibility of becoming the first person sentenced to death in Lafourche since 1978.
Judge Jerome Barbera allowed Baye to testify before the 12-person jury after she answered preliminary questions from attorneys on both sides regarding notes she took while caring for Hebert in the intensive -care unit.
Two days after she killed her children, Hebert told Baye in a soft mumble that she had "intended to die with her babies" and twice asked scheduling information about their funeral, the nurse recalled with the aid of her patient log. Hebert also bemoaned her parents, particularly her now-deceased mother, for telling her as a child she would never amount to anything.
"I just want to die," Hebert told Baye after refusing breakfast the day of the killings. She refused lunch and dinner that day as well, the nurse's records show.
Hebert's statements were made at a time she needed the assistance of breathing tubes and strong pain medication for stab wounds to her chest, wrists and eyes, her attorney George Parnham said, suggesting those factors may have clouded her judgment.
Despite repeated attempts during his 21-minute cross-examination, Parnham could not get the nurse to budge from her earlier testimony.
Capt. Tim Scanlan of the Jefferson Parish Crime Lab presented jurors with analysis of blood-stain patterns that offered a window into the final minutes of the children's lives.
Scanlan prefaced his remarks by saying it appeared Hebert had " staged" herself in bed with her deceased daughter and son and the family's dog. Neither the children nor the pet were stabbed to death in the bed, Scanlan explained.
Hebert did not appear to have stabbed herself in bed, either. She likely did so in her bedroom and bathroom, Scanlan told jurors.
A possible explanation for Hebert's decision to move her deceased children in bed beside her has not been presented yet in court.
That Hebert moved their bodies made identifying where they died a trickier process than if they had remained where they perished, Scanlan said.
He testified that he found two scenes involving Hebert's daughter - one where it appeared she had been pushed against a bedroom wall and stabbed, causing blood to run down the wall, and another where it appeared she was stabbed on the floor of her mother's bathroom.
He did not say where in the house Hebert stabbed her son. The 7-year-old boy, who suffered from a mild case of autism, had more than 50 stab wounds.
The family's dog, Scanlan said, was fatally stabbed in the utility room, according to analysis of blood found there.
Blood from the two children and the dog would have almost certainly landed on Hebert's clothing, Scanlan testified. Yet no blood was found on the recliner she sat in while writing suicide notes to her ex-husband and his mother, Judy Hebert.
The only way this was possible, Scanlan told jurors, was if Hebert cleaned off prior to writing the notes, which handwriting expert Robert Foley testified earlier in the afternoon matched her submitted writing samples.
Hebert's hands left bloody prints on the tablet the note was written on, a coffee pot and a Bible. None of the items had blood sprayed on them during an attack, however.
Earlier in the day, the judge, jury and attorneys for both sides walked around the inside of Hebert's former house, including the bedroom and bathroom where the killings had unfolded.
Jurors toured the house about five minutes then surveyed the adjacent two-car garage before boarding a small bus for the 20-mile return to Thibodaux. Prosecutors requested jurors be given an opportunity to see the house's interior for themselves.
Hebert, escorted by her attorney Richard Goorley, also toured the house. She left in tears.
Per a judge's order, family members of Hebert and her ex-husband, spectators at the trial and reporters were not allowed inside the house.
