I promise you: You will have no regrets.
I have had to deal with all manner of brutality, tragedy, sorrow, and pain, but I can recall no other story I have researched that had the sheer gut-wrenching impact of the Christine Jonsen case.
Beyond the news headlines, there were questions raised and differing legal philosophies that had to be dealt with. Few of my readers choose to read about murder cases for their sensationalism, and if they do, they will be disappointed. I believe they want to understand the motivations behind the killings and to learn how detectives approach each case and combine modern forensic science techniques with old-fashioned hunches and years of experience. In this light, in this case, it’s important to explore the ramifications of the most widely accepted standard used to weigh insanity and murder in America: the M’Naughton Rule.
This premise originated in England in 1843 at the trial of a man named M’Naughton. In essence, it is a very simple rule: If the accused recognized the difference between right and wrong at the time he committed the crime, he was legally sane. Further, the rule decreed that if he knew what he was doing was wrong and made an attempt to escape detection by covering up his crime, most juries would find him guilty. However, if he should be found sitting next to his victim babbling incoherently, making no excuses, and with no comprehension of what he has done, he will be far more likely to be deemed insane. But it is a judgment almost impossible to assess. Unless the jury members were there at the crime scene— which they cannot have been—they cannot know what the mental acuity of the perpetrator was at that precise moment. A defendant may have been seen before the crime, and he may have been seen after the crime. But who can say that his mind is the same mind it was at the time of the murder?
Some forty-five years ago, the American Law Institute, objecting to the “right or wrong concept” of M’Naughton, suggested a substitute ruling to test insanity. This modified test would ask, “Did the defendant have the substantial capacity to conform his conduct to the requirements of the law?”
That is, the defendant might have known that what he was doing was wrong—but, if insane, would not have had the ability to stop. In 1971, the Washington State Supreme Court upheld the M’Naughton Rule in a murder conviction and threw out the proposed substitute.
This is all fairly technical, but in viewing Christine Jonsen’s case, it is necessary in order to understand and evaluate what she did on an icy night along the Columbia River in eastern Washington.
Before I attended Christine’s trial, I wrote about three other cases in which I doubted the sanity of the defendants.
• A brilliant and wealthy young man had been under psychiatric care since his mother committed suicide a few years before. He himself had attempted suicide three times. He knew that his mind was not tracking well, and he went to Western Washington State Hospital and begged to be admitted. He told doctors there that he was afraid he would hurt someone, but they gave him tranquilizers and sent him away. The next day he beat two elderly neighbors to death with a hammer he had just borrowed from them. That, of course, seemed to be the act of an insane person. But he took pains to wash his own bloodied clothing—allegedly to escape detection. Under M’Naughton, he was found guilty of first-degree murder and sent into the general population of the Washington State Penitentiary.
• A fifteen-year-old boy whose father had been diagnosed as insane saw his parents literally “shoot it out” in a gun battle when he was three years old. He was close enough to be drenched by their blood as he crouched, screaming in terror. He had shown signs of profound mental illness for years before he finally raped three women and killed two more. But he, too, made efforts to cover up his crimes. He was convicted as an adult of first-degree murder and sent to prison under the M’Naughton Rule.
• A young man, also highly intelligent, who had fled to Turkey to avoid the “CIA,” who were “trying to assassinate me,” hid in his mother’s home, terrified of “them.” Voices told him to kill his mother, the mother who had tried vainly to have him admitted to a mental institution. He did kill her, and then returned to the blood-washed home where the crime occurred. He cleaned up all signs of her murder and gave detectives a strange alibi. He, too, was convicted under the M’Naughton Rule.
None of these frankly psychotic defendants had anything at all to gain from their crimes. They were caught in the grip of tortured, fragmented minds, and although they had cried out for help, no help came. Each made vague efforts to cover up their crimes, and these efforts made them guilty under the M’Naughton Rule. They should not have been loose in society, yet one wonders what possible good came from throwing them into a prison where there was only token treatment for mental illness.
Those who kill for lust, financial gain, jealousy, pure meanness, or in the commission of another felony deserve what they get—every bit of it. But what of the truly lost souls?
Christine Jonsen was lost. She was a delicately pretty and very shy young woman with haunted dark eyes. She was born in Yugoslavia, but her father left soon after her birth and her mother died when she was only five. Apparently there was no one in Yugoslavia who was able to take the little girl in. She was shipped off, alone, to America, where a cousin who lived in southwest Washington had agreed to adopt her. And so, she grew up in that rainy, often economically depressed corner of the state where most people make their living catering to tourists, or from logging and commercial fishing.
Christine tried very hard to be perfect, perhaps because she was an orphan, taken in by kind relatives. She wanted them to be proud of her, and she never wanted to be a burden. She won citizenship awards in high school, made the honor roll, and was named a princess in a local logging festival. Yet she always needed to belong, to have someone to call her own.
After graduation from high school, Christine went to Grays Harbor Community College. During her college years, she and her roommate became involved in the Mormon Church and transferred to Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. The Church would become a powerful influence in Christine’s life, and she lived, always, by its tenets. Or, rather, by the way she interpreted them.
A few years later, Christine met the man who would become her husband when they both worked for a company selling campground sites. He was thirteen years older than she was, but that seemed a good thing to her; he made her feel safe and protected. They dated for two years before they married. When Christine’s husband got a job as a salesman in eastern Washington, they moved far away from Grays Harbor County and her relatives.
Richland-Pasco-Kennewick, Washington, called the “Tri-Cities,” are relatively new cities that sprouted up from the brown earth along the Columbia River in the forties and fifties with the advent of atomic power. It was as different from the Pacific Coast towns that Christine had grown up in as if she had moved to the middle of the desert in Arizona. But she was happy; she had what she’d always wanted and needed: a man she loved to whom she would devote her entire life. She had no ambitions for herself beyond being a good wife, and a mother.
Christine was thrilled when her first son, Ryan, was born eighteen months later. He was a lovely baby, husky, smiling, cheerful. Her friends recall her as a most devoted mother. A year and a half later, she gave birth to a second son, Christopher. He, too, was a handsome little boy, and their mother loved both sons fiercely. She hoped to give them all the things she never had and vowed to keep them safe always.
She took the toddlers to church every Sunday, and the only time she ever left them was when she went to work as a waitress at a restaurant to help the family finances. Often her husband didn’t make the sales commissions he expected. The restaurant was one of a chain that paid barely minimum wage. Waitresses there had to depend on tips to make a living wage. A company rule decreed that, even with burning hot plates of food to carry, waitresses could not use oven mitts. It was a stupid rule, and many nights, Christine went home with blisters up and down her arms. But she never complained. She considered herself lucky to have
her husband, her babies, and her church.
In the Mormon Church, marriage is ideally meant to be for life. Christine believed serenely that she and her husband had married with the hope of being together forever—in both life and the Celestial Kingdom beyond. She never looked at another man; it didn’t even occur to her to do that.
And then, during the Thanksgiving holiday, Christine’s whole world collapsed: She learned that her husband was involved with another woman. She was shocked, but typically, for her, she didn’t blame him; she blamed herself— for being a failure as a wife. She had tried very hard to be the perfect mate, and she had failed.
Her husband moved out, leaving Christine to support her little boys on her small salary. They moved into a tiny mobile home, and as Christmas neared, she didn’t have enough money for her rent. Her car broke down, and she couldn’t afford to fix it. And she was running out of groceries. Her church was known for taking care of its own, and it maintained warehouses full of food to help members in financial distress. But, as always, Christine was too proud to ask.
She had been a good worker at the restaurant, but it soon became clear to her fellow waitresses that she just couldn’t handle it anymore. One friend recalled later, “Her hurt was so obvious—you could almost touch it.”
Now that her husband was gone, Christine had no one to look after the little boys while she worked. Her bosses noted that she couldn’t keep up with her diners’ orders, and that she wasn’t smiling or joking enough with the customers. Her job was the next thing to go. She was fired just before Christmas. Her phone was disconnected. She stayed inside the trailer, hiding from the world that had suddenly slapped her in the face. And still she cuddled her baby sons and saw that they prayed before each meal— however meager the meal was.
She tried to give Ryan and Christopher a Christmas. She had no money for a Christmas tree, but she had an idea. A police officer saw her collecting discarded pine boughs from a tree lot. She planned to take them home and wire them together to make them look like a real tree. When she saw the officer watching her, she offered to put them back. He assured her that would not be necessary.
Alone in their trailer as the bitter winter winds buffeted it, Christine kept going over the sudden ending of her marriage. She took all the blame when it would have been so much better if she had been able to get angry at the man who deserted her. And, slowly, she went from regret to depression and then descended into insanity. She might have been Ophelia twisting blossoms in her hair, insane because she thought Hamlet had deserted her. Christine was just as frail, just as abandoned.
But dangerous.
As her thought processes were revealed later in court, she began to believe that she must be very evil indeed to have failed as a wife. Soon she built on her delusions and thought that her husband was also terribly evil. Her disturbed conclusions got all tangled up with what she believed were Mormon beliefs, beliefs never taught by the Church that had been her guide for so long. Unable to distinguish between what the Church truly said and her own bizarre imaginings, Christine decided that she was what the Mormons called a “son of perdition.” Perdition was synonymous with Satan, and a son or daughter of perdition was an anti-Christ figure closely associated with the devil.
Christine felt that all hope was gone; she would be cast into “outer darkness” and “go away into a lake of fire and brimstone with the devil and his angels.”
The Church bishop who talked to the distraught young mother described a “son of perdition” as a person who has gone “beyond faith into absolute knowledge. They have to throw away that knowledge and actually fight Christ— deny that knowledge—become an enemy of Christ and deny that he exists. Judas was a son of perdition.”
He did not realize how fragmented Christine’s mind had become.
Christine, spinning deeper and deeper into psychosis, was terrified that her “evil” would become apparent to the Church elders and that they would come and take her children away from her. And yet, she somehow realized that it might be better if her children were removed from her for a while. Again, failing to recognize the danger in her, the bishop assured her that her children needed to be with her.
In early January, a home teacher of the Mormon Church went to the trailer home and talked with Christine. He was gravely concerned when he saw that her whole personality had changed. He found her on the verge of “being completely crazy and suicidal.” He took her to his home and called the bishop. The two men spent the evening trying to counsel Christine, but she was too distraught to listen to them.
The men from her church set up two appointments with psychiatrists for Christine, but when they went to pick her up to drive her to the doctors’ office, she would not answer the door.
It was far too late. Christine Jonsen was consumed with a terrible guilt that her “evil” and her estranged husband’s “evil” would somehow contaminate the children she loved so much.
She had tried everything she knew how to try. She had begged the bishop to find a home where someone kind could take her boys for a few months. She would work two jobs, and she would get out of her terrible financial dilemma. But he had advised her gently that the boys needed her. Their father’s desertion was enough of a trauma for them to cope with. They could not have their mother go away, too.
The church offered to find a babysitter so that she could work afternoons, but Christine knew she couldn’t make enough money that way. They would all starve.
At a certain point, starving no longer mattered. Christine became worried about her babies’ immortal souls.
In her mental state, she felt that she would only become more evil, that the devil himself would drive her further and further from God. As a Mormon, she believed that if her babies died before their eighth birthday, they would be assured of a place in the Celestial Kingdom. Children could not be baptized in the Mormon Church until they reached the age of accountability, but if they died before they were eight, they would go to Heaven because they were without sin.
Christine agonized over what she should do. What if she became increasingly a daughter of perdition—to the point where she would no longer be concerned with her sons’ salvation? She couldn’t keep them from the cold and hunger now, and every day things got worse.
On February 4, the snow was deep and crusted with ice in the Tri-Cities area. Christine had heard that freezing to death wasn’t painful. She planned to join the boys as they went peacefully to sleep and froze. Holding them close, she sat in the snow outside the trailer home, waiting for death to overtake them. But Christopher began to cry and she realized that this plan would not be painless, and she could not bear to have them suffer—even for an instant— as she helped to free them from the wickedness that pervaded her life.
She took the youngsters back inside the trailer house and dressed them warmly, and then she carried them to her car. They drove around the Tri-Cities area all day while she tried to come up with a plan. Periodically, she stopped and parked so that she could think. Several times, she stopped to buy food for the little boys.
Now Christine knew what she had to do. She had decided that she must drown her two precious babies. But it was so hard to do.
The Pasco-Kennewick Bridge is suspended by cables forty feet above the Columbia River that roars beneath. In February, the river was as icy as death itself. Back and forth, back and forth, she drove. It was midnight, and then 2:00 A.M. If she waited until daylight, it would be too late. Sometimes, there were too many cars on the bridge; sometimes there were cars just behind her. And then, finally, there was no one—no one except the desperate mother and her two sleeping sons.
“By then,” she would say later, “I knew it had to be done. I did it.”
Christopher, the baby, was first. She carried the still-sleeping child to the center of the bridge and dropped him into the frigid water, hearing a splash far below—and then... nothing. Tears streaming down her face, Christine walked back to the car and got Ryan. He, too, disappeared u
nder the black water below. And then she stood alone on the empty bridge, the wind tearing at her clothing. She had made the ultimate sacrifice.
They were gone from her, but they were entering the Celestial Kingdom.
Several hours later, a disheveled Christine Jonsen walked into the Pasco Police Department and asked to talk to someone. She had killed her children, and she wanted to turn herself in.
Detective Archie Pittman, horrified and disbelieving, interviewed Christine. He taped his interview with her as she described what she had done in a flat, emotionless voice. “I had to do it,” she said. “I dropped my babies into the water. I heard two ‘kerplunks’ a long way down.”
“Why?” Pittman asked in a strangled voice. “Why did you do this?”
She looked at him as if he could not understand, even though it was so clear in her mind. “You can’t know why I did it unless you look at my whole life. He [her estranged husband] is partner to this...This is how evil we are. Each of us have used people in our lives. We’re not pure at heart. Not loving people, but using them.
“I was lazy and rebellious and I fought against everything that’s good and I had degenerated, rather than grown. The only change was that I lied about it. I would always lie to myself.”
To the detective, the soft-faced woman before him looked like anything but a degenerate sinner. She looked as if life itself had risen up and crushed her. Pittman said a silent prayer that what she was telling him was not the truth, only the ramblings of a broken mind.
It might be impossible to prove what she was telling him. If the children were in the river, there was a good chance they would never be found. The Columbia was so deep as it passed through the city and its current so powerful that two tiny bodies would quickly disappear.
Pasco police detectives, all of them hoping this was only a nightmare from a psychotic mind, found the little trailer cold and empty. There were children’s clothes and toys there, teddy bears left behind—but no sign of Christopher and Ryan. They looked in the cupboards and found little food. There were only stacks of unpaid bills, and an almost palpable air of despair in the small mobile home.