‘God told me to stone my children to death’

A MOTHER who smashed her sons’ heads with heavy rocks, killing two of the boys, was so deluded she thought the Lord told her to do it, her lawyer said in opening statements at her murder trial.

"Does she follow what she believes to be God's will or does she turn her back on her God?" defence lawyer F.R. "Buck" Files Jr asked the jury of eight men and four women in Tyler, Texas.

Deanna Laney, 39, has pleaded innocent by reason of insanity to charges of murdering eight-year-old Joshua and six-year-old Luke and causing serious injury to Aaron, 14 months. Prosecutors are not seeking the death penalty.

The deeply religious East Texas woman who home-schooled her children in the tiny town of New Chapel Hill, 100 miles southeast of Dallas, wept uncontrollably and shook her head, at times burying her face in a tissue, as she listened to evidence and prosecutors showed gruesome photographs of her dead children.

Her husband, who has supported her, sat a few rows behind with friends and family.

Prosecutors contend Laney knew right from wrong when she killed her children last Mother's Day weekend, despite opinions from two psychiatric experts for the defence, two for the prosecution and one for the judge all of whom said Laney was legally insane.

"The issue of sanity is tried in the court, not the hospitals," District Attorney Matt Bingham told the jury.

Bingham said Laney attacked the baby first, hammering his head with a four-pound rock she had hidden under his cot. When he began crying, Laney's husband, Keith, woke up and found his wife standing over the baby.

"Everything's OK," she told him.

He assumed his wife was changing a nappy and went back to bed. Laney then struck the baby again.

"Aaron Laney will never be the same," said Bingham, adding the boy's vision has been impaired and he will never live independently.

Laney then woke up Luke, led him outside the family's rural brick home and asked him to put his head on a large rock.

"He does what his Mommy tells him," Bingham said.

Laney smashed the six-year-old's skull with a large landscaping rock. Then she went to get her oldest child, Joshua.

He, too, obeyed his mother and put his head against a large rock in the yard. His mother hit his skull with a 16-pound rock.

Officers who testified about the crime scene said the father was hysterical when he awoke to find his sons had been killed, yelling at his wife, "What did you do?"