WETASKIWIN — Lawyers have made their closing arguments in the second-degree murder trial of an Alberta woman who has admitted to drowning her two sons.
Crown prosecutor Gordon Hatch says Allyson McConnell killed the boys as revenge against her husband with whom she was undergoing a bitter divorce.
Defence lawyer Peter Royal argued that McConnell didn’t mean to kill 10-month-old Jayden and Connor, who was 2 1/2.
Royal says McConnell’s mind was so clouded by severe depression, along with the sleeping pills and booze she took trying to kill herself, that she couldn’t have formed the intent required to convict her of murder.
A psychiatrist who treated McConnell says he believes the most probably explanation is that she meant to kill herself, but was so close to her children that she considered their lives extensions of her own.
There is no jury and the judge is to hand down a verdict April 20.
McConnell’s case has drawn wide public attention.
Some time between Jan. 29 and Feb. 1, 2010, she drowned her sons in a bathtub.
The morning of Feb. 1, she got into her car and drove from the family home in Millet, to Edmonton, where she parked at a toy store and went to a hotel restaurant where she ordered lunch.
But she left and jumped off a bridge onto a busy freeway.
McConnell testified at the trial that she couldn’t remember anything about that weekend’s events.
Her mother and sister testified that she had no idea her children were dead until she was told — news that drove her into six hours of hysterics in her hospital room.
Court heard that McConnell had a long history of depression and suicide attempts that began after she was impregnated by her father when she was 15.
“You couldn’t imagine a sadder case than this,” Royal said Thursday.