Postpartum Psychosis Defense Fails : Anaheim Woman Guilty of Murdering Baby Son

An Orange County jury convicted Sheryl Lynn Massip of second-degree murder Thursday, rejecting the frail Anaheim housewife’s claim that she was insane when she ran over her infant son with the family car in the spring of 1987.

Ending an emotional trial that drew national attention to the relatively unexplored issue of maternal psychoses, the jury found that 24-year-old Massip was sane when she placed her 6-week-old son in a Fullerton street and crushed him to death with the car.

“I’m sorry that (the jury) didn’t understand,” a sobbing Massip said in an interview minutes after the verdict was reached. “Something wasn’t right with me (when she ran over the child, Michael), and I was trying to tell them that. But they didn’t hear me out.”

Massip, who testified during the 2-month trial that she heard voices telling her to “put (the infant) out of his misery,” had claimed that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis. That is a rare maternal disorder--an exaggerated form of the more common “baby blues” thought to cause emotional changes and anxiety in some new mothers.

But prosecutors asserted that she ran over the child knowingly and deliberately and then made up a kidnaping story to cover up the killing.

Prosecutors argued that Massip acted out of frustration over the colicky child’s constant crying and her own failing marriage.

Her husband, Alfredo Massip, divorced Massip shortly after she

killed their son. Alfredo Massip, a key witness for the prosecution, offered perhaps the most damning testimony of the trial, describing his ex-wife’s admission to him that she killed their son.

Said Deputy Dist. Atty Thomas J. Borris: “The verdict was just and fair based on the evidence. She killed her kid, and that’s what the jury found.”

The verdict, reached after 7 days of deliberation by the jury in Superior Court in Santa Ana, appeared to devastate Massip.

She wept silently at the defendant’s table as the guilty verdict was read. Walking out of the courthouse, Massip cried uncontrollably and collapsed into the arms of her father, Ed De Lano of Rowland Heights.

“I’d give anything to have my son back. I just wish they understood,” Massip said as she walked from the courthouse.

Massip, a former hairdresser described by family and friends as gentle and passive, faces a maximum prison term of 16 years to life when she is sentenced Dec. 23 by Judge Robert R. Fitzgerald.

On the prospect of prison, Massip said: “If it’s something I have to do, I’ll do it for my son, for Michael. I just feel sorry for everyone . . . for the doctors (who testified on her behalf) . . . for the jurors . . . for me.

“I have to live with this for the rest of my life,” she said.

Raymond Seymour, the jury foreman reached at his home in Irvine, said the jury spent a full week deliberating because “it was very complicated. There was a lot for us to go over. It was just a very difficult experience.

“It was very emotional for all of us,” Seymour said. “It will be some time before I really want to talk about it.”

Seymour called the verdict against Massip “the hardest (decision) any one of us has ever had to make in our lives.”

Other jurors refused to answer any questions on their deliberations as they left the courthouse. Several appeared shaken, with tears in their eyes.

Emotions ran high in the courtroom as the jury returned its verdict, and Judge Fitzgerald’s voice cracked as he gave the jurors their final instructions.

Defense attorney Milton C. Grimes shook his head in disbelief after the verdict was read.

“I never could have imagined this,” Grimes said. “This is the worst, the most difficult to accept because I believe the evidence was clear.”

Offering medical testimony and accounts from those close to Massip in an effort to show her strange behavior before the killing, Grimes had pushed for a finding of not guilty by reason of insanity.

Grimes acknowledged the relatively untried nature of the postpartum psychosis defense and said he had feared that the jury might return a

verdict of manslaughter against Massip. But on the verdict of second-degree murder, Grimes said, “I just don’t know what they were thinking about.”

Equally perplexed by the verdict was Massip’s father, De Lano.

“My daughter’s not a murderer,” De Lano said, his face flushed. “There’s no way they could understand (her mental condition) and come back with a verdict like that. There’s no other explanation (for the killing) except mental illness.” Massip testified that she first tried to throw her son into oncoming traffic on the morning of April 29, 1987, then hit him on the head with a blunt instrument and finally ran over the child with the family Volvo.

She then dumped the body in a neighborhood trash can and, hysterical, told the police that the child had been kidnaped by a mystery woman with red hair and a gun.

Only when confronted hours later by her suspicious husband, Alfredo Massip, did Sheryl Massip confess to the killing.

Prosecutors painted Massip as an unprepared but sane mother who killed her son out of frustration over the colicky child’s incessant crying and the deterioration that his birth seemed to have caused her marriage.

But Massip, a frail woman with no history of violence, argued that she was temporarily insane at the time of the killing. She claimed to be suffering from a rare maternal illness known as postpartum psychosis that is thought to hit about three in every 1,000 new mothers, causing severe anxiety, mood swings and--in extreme cases--hallucinations and violence.

Following the birth of her son, Massip and family members said, the young mother had trouble eating and sleeping.

The once-meticulous woman began bathing only irregularly, and she was frequently distraught and irritated, witnesses said. Massip testified that she would hear the baby crying even when she was not with him.

And there were voices. Massip claimed in an emotional day of testimony on the witness stand in mid-October that she heard voices in her head “telling me Michael is in pain . . . commanding me to put him out of his misery.”

Postpartum psychosis, a condition largely unexplored by medical and legal experts in this country, has been employed as a defense with mixed verdicts by about 15 women in the United States in the last several years, scholars say.

Massip was the first murder defendant in Southern California to point specifically to postpartum psychosis as a defense for her killing.

Legal and medical thinking on the emerging issue still remains unclear. And because of this, Massip’s case has been watched closely nationwide, attracting interest from legal and medical scholars, authors and media from across the country. Legal observers suggested that the importance of the Massip case as a potential precedent-setter in the field contributed to the jury’s unusually lengthy deliberations.

Defense attorney Grimes brought to the stand several medical experts to testify on Massip’s behalf, including retired Stanford University psychiatrist James A. Hamilton.

A nationally recognized leader in the study of postpartum illnesses, Hamilton said Massip represented a classic case of maternal psychosis.

But prosecutor Borris offered his own medical witnesses to try to refute that claim.

And key to Borris’ case was the testimony of Massip’s ex-husband. Alfredo Massip, who served his wife with divorce papers while she was in jail on murder charges, bitterly told the jury how his wife had confessed to him that she had killed the child. He quoted his wife as telling him: “I’ll rot in hell.”

But Grimes sought to portray Alfredo Massip as an insensitive and unhelpful husband who failed to recognize severe changes in his wife’s behavior and refused to allow her to seek medical help for herself.

Alfredo Massip was unavailable for comment Thursday following the verdict.

Grimes said he plans to file a motion for a new trial, a standard practice in criminal cases.

Times staff Writer Andrea Ford contributed to this story