Psycho Mom

If Yates is granted a new trial, jurors will be faced with much the same testimony about her mental state, this time without Dietz. But they won't see what jurors did in the Diaz case: 12 hours of videotapes taken of Lisa in the weeks following her arrest, before anti-psychotic medication stabilized her condition.

In contrast to the Yates case, jurors at the Lisa Diaz trial saw directly inside her harrowing world, where germs and worms and evil spirits tormented Diaz and her children. The morning of the slayings, the signs and omens had become clear: So Diaz did what any good mother would do. She set out to save her precious babies.

A pretty, waif-like Latina with a wide, full mouth, a strong nose and brown eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses, Lisa listens with suspicion as Dallas psychologist Dr. Jaye Crowder explains that he is there at the request of her court-appointed attorney, Steve Miller. It has been three weeks since Lisa's arrest, and Miller wants to have his client examined as soon after the events as possible. Lisa agrees to the interview in a soft voice.

She seems subdued, unexpressive but lucid. Over 12 hours of interviews, Lisa will eventually describe why and how she killed her children. Her voice will fade to a whisper, as if she's afraid guards will overhear. By tape eight, when Dr. Crowder presses her for details about the killings, Lisa stares at the floor, rocks back and forth, licks and bites her lips and obsessively rubs one shoulder. She pauses and mumbles and stares, then breaks down in wrenching sobs.

Dr. Crowder's interview began simply enough: Describe how you grew up.

Born in 1970 and abandoned soon after by her mother, Lisa and her sister Michelle were raised by their great-grandmother until Lisa was 4. After the great-grandmother's death, the girls lived with their great-aunt, where they felt rejected. Their mother, Rosemary Cano, remarried and came to get them when Lisa was 9.

Her mother seemed "like a stranger," and the girls had trouble adjusting to her ways. Lisa had no contact with her father until a visit when she was a teenager. Lisa's stepfather, whom Lisa liked, left after four or five years.

Lisa admits that her mother probably should have left them with the great-aunt. As bad as her great-aunt's home was, Cano's household was worse. "You look a little tearful again," Dr. Crowder says. "Do you remember crying about it?"

"Yeah, at the beginning," Lisa says, taking off her glasses to wipe away tears.

Lisa's childhood unhappiness gave way to a troubled teenage life. Never a disciplinary problem, Lisa made good grades in school until ninth grade, when she got pregnant and dropped out. She later earned a GED. Her first husband, David Sanchez, was controlling and jealous, she says. Lisa gave birth at age 17 to their daughter, Misty. A year later, in 1988, she had another child, whom she gave up for adoption. She married Sanchez when she was 19. The couple had many problems: Sanchez was ordered to attend anger management classes, and Lisa was prescribed Prozac for panic attacks. After several separations, they divorced in 1996.

Angel Diaz, whom Lisa met in Dallas at her job, was a godsend. Stable, well-educated, kind, he worked in quality control management. "He was just like the type of person that I had imagined for myself," Lisa says. They married in 1997, two days before Briana was born; Kamryn followed in 2000. After Briana's birth, Lisa became a stay-at-home mom. Though Lisa admits that she sometimes yelled at her children, she says she couldn't bring herself to spank them. She'd endured too much of that as a child.

They seemed a happy couple. But like many blended families, the Diazes had arguments about disciplining 16-year-old Misty and Angel's 9-year-old son from a previous relationship. But what upset Lisa most was when Angel called her a hypochondriac.

Dr. Crowder spends hours quizzing Lisa about her many physical ailments. They began, Lisa says, with a flu shot in January 2002.

"Driving home, I got a horrible, horrible headache...one of the worst headaches I've ever had," Lisa says. "I kept telling everybody that it was [after] that flu shot that I started having all these symptoms...And then the other thing that happened was, I started to feel...like kind of scared, paranoid."

Lisa recounts a litany of complaints: stiff joints, headaches, pain in her kidneys, numbness, intense thirst, chills, sinusitis, fatigue, sore throats, weight loss and insomnia. Some of her symptoms were bizarre: She'd lie down to go to sleep and feel the backs of her eyes "shaking."