Psycho Mom

After the prosecution rested, Ms. Crowder says, "some of the jurors looked like they hated us."

"I'm not sure I've ever been in the presence of someone whose pain was so palpable," Marshall says.

A stylish woman with close-cropped blond hair, Marshall spent five years in the late '70s as chief psychologist at Terrell State Hospital, where she was asked to testify in criminal trials. She now has a private practice in North Dallas. Of the four psychologists and psychiatrists who testified in Lisa's trial, Marshall's testimony lasted the longest.

In addition to reviewing the tapes and interviewing family members, Marshall spent about 20 hours talking to Lisa. "Andrea Yates would become immobile and non-functioning," Marshall says. "Lisa was quietly psychotic. She had a delusional disorder that is very unusual."

In all her years of practice, Marshall says, Lisa is the only patient she encountered who had no one she called mother. "It tells me about the absence of stability and predictability and healthy attachments in her life," Marshall says.

Contrary to her mother's rosy account, Lisa's childhood was a nightmare of abandonment and extreme emotional deprivation, Marshall testified. At her great-aunt's home, Michelle and Lisa slept on the floor. When she was 4, Lisa claimed, her great-aunt tried to smother her with a pillow. From then until she was 10 years old, Lisa often wet her bed and as punishment was sent to school in urine-soaked clothes.

When her mother came back into Lisa's life, she seemed like a stranger. "Lisa was very hopeful that her mother is coming to rescue her and Michelle," Marshall says, "but come to find out, it's at least as bad." Marshall would testify that Rosemary Cano was high-strung and demanding. The girls often went without food or clothes.

"The mother gets involved in drugs, leaving them in the car while she's in the clubs," Marshall says. "The girls are pretty much left to their own devices." Cano later spent time in prison on a drug charge.

Never part of her life, Lisa's father also did prison time. Showing up when she was 13, Lisa's father took his daughter for visitation, got drunk and forced her to perform oral sex on him. Marshall says that when Lisa talked about her father, "she was very sad, very frightened and very anxious, as if it said something bad about her." A bizarre visit by her father to the jail after Lisa's arrest, in fact, triggered a suicidal episode.

During her abusive first marriage, Marshall says, Lisa began to manifest depression, anxiety and a preoccupation with physical problems.

"When people are confused and have feelings they can't make sense of, they look for an anchor somewhere to explain it," Marshall says. "She has been abandoned so many times I imagine she has had this kind of depression all her life. When people begin to be delusional, they focus on some false belief. That becomes the glue that holds them together."

Though things improved when she married Angel, Lisa still faced the ordinary pressures of life: marital conflict, child-rearing problems and illness. Lisa fixated on the physical to explain her misery.

"There's the hope if it's something physical, it can be fixed," Marshall says. "Of course, the flu shot had nothing to do with it. It simply coincided with a time she was feeling bad. As she became more and more depressed, which is partly a biological process, she became more and more focused on it being a physical problem until she developed a full-blown delusional disorder."

In the week before Lisa killed, Marshall says, she started drinking her own urine, a bizarre remedy she read about on the Internet.

"The things she does over time are more and more unusual and psychotic," Marshall says. "Then we're into omens and voices in her head telling her, 'You have to die.'" When Marshall asked Lisa who or what the voices were, she replied: "It was like the voice of doom."

During Lisa's trial, Udashen played excerpts from each tape. At first Lisa is coherent, but she disintegrates in tapes seven and eight as the questions focus on the day she killed her children.

After driving Briana to kindergarten and buying a new hairbrush to replace the one she'd tossed, Lisa took Misty to school. When her daughter pointed out two crows on the lawn, Lisa took them as an omen that she and the girls must die that day.

At home, Lisa straightened up the house. Voices in her head said, "This is the day you have to do it. Today's the day you have to die." The family dog wouldn't come to her. Another sign.

But Lisa didn't make the final decision until she talked to Angel on the phone that afternoon. He told her about a child who could talk to family members killed in a car accident. To Lisa, that was the final signal.