Mother charged with murder in daughters' deaths

06:33 AM PDT on Tuesday, June 15, 2004

Associated Press

Charlene A. Dorcy is shown in a Skamania County Sheriff's Office photo.

STEVENSON, Wash. - A 39-year-old mother who confessed to shooting her two young daughters and leaving their bodies in an abandoned rock quarry was charged Monday with two counts of aggravated first-degree murder.

Charlene Dorcy of Vancouver was expected to return to court Thursday to enter a plea.

Aggravated murder is punishable in Washington by death or life in prison without parole. Prosecutors will have a month to decide whether to seek the death penalty.

"Certainly I like to have a case where an admission of guilt has been made. They make my life a lot easier," Skamania County Prosecutor Peter Banks said.

Dorcy called 911 from a pay phone outside the Vancouver Police Department on Saturday evening and confessed. Earlier that day, she said, she drove her 2- and 4-year-old girls about 80 miles east to the Gifford Pinchot National Forest and shot them, according to Skamania County Sheriff Dave Brown.

She then led detectives back to the rock quarry, where they recovered the children's bodies, Brown said.

KGW Two year-old Brittney and four-year-old Jessica Dorcy.

Looking bedraggled in an orange-striped prison uniform, Dorcy responded in a monotone Monday to questions from Skamania County Superior Court Judge E. Thompson Reynolds. He read her the charges, which stated that the deaths of 4-year-old Jessica and 2-year-old Brittney, were done with "premeditation." Asked if she understood, she said "yes" softly, but piped up when asked the proper spelling of her younger daughter's name.

"It's 'n-e-y.' Not 'a-n-y,"' she said confidently, correcting the court docket, in which the name appeared incorrectly as "Brittany." Reached later by telephone, her public defender Robert Lewis said, "I don't comment on pending litigation." Dorcy's husband Robert, reached at home late Monday, also declined comment.

"Any time there is a death involved, especially the death of small children, it is horrific," Banks told reporters outside the courtroom. The death penalty, he said, has never been handed down in his small rural southwest Washington county.

Some 85 percent of the county, home to about 10,000 people, is blanketed in national forest.

Neighbors said Dorcy showed signs of mental illness.

"Obviously, she wasn't all there," said 29-year-old Marcus Cates, whose house is next door to the Dorcys. After a heated incident roughly eight months ago, he and his wife called state Child Protective Services.

Cates said he was in his backyard one afternoon building a fence when Dorcy emerged from her house, angry that he was disturbing her "quiet time." He refused to stop.

"She basically lost it, and told us that it would be my fault if she killed her kids, or jumped off the Morrison Bridge," he said, referring to a bridge in nearby Portland, Ore.

A caseworker said the state agency was powerless to act without an eyewitness report or other evidence of physical abuse, adding that the neighbors should call police if they ever saw such behavior, Cristal Cates told The Seattle Times earlier. She said she never saw any sign of mistreatment.

To trigger a CPS investigation, "the child has to be at immediate risk of harm," agency spokeswoman Kathy Spears told The Times.

Other neighbors, however, described Dorcy as a devoted mother.

"The girls were loaded with toys," said 21-year-old Pauline Perez, whose two children often played with Jessica and Brittney.

"They had so many toys that she in fact used to bring some over for us - a slide for the backyard, big toys you'd spend a lot of money on." Another neighbor said she once walked past as the Dorcys were leaving their garage. There were so many toys inside that there was almost no path through them.

When another neighbor came to tell her of the girls' deaths, Perez thought it was a cruel joke at first. "Things happen, people lose their minds, and we can't judge them," she said.

Banks said autopsies on both children were completed Monday but the results were not immediately released.

A warrant has been issued for a search of Dorcy's white Toyota, which she said she used to drive the girls to the forest.

Banks said he is confident the weapon will be found in the car.

Authorities refused to speculate on a motive. "Her mental history will factor in - if there is a mental history," the prosecutor said.

In recent years, troubled mothers like Andrea Yates and Susan Smith have been the focus of intense debate on what constitutes mental illness.

In 2001, Yates drowned her five children one by one in her bathtub. In 1994, Susan Smith drove her car into a lake as her two boys slept in the back seat.

Forensic psychiatrist Dr. Park Dietz - who was a consultant to the prosecution on both the Smith and Yates cases - estimated that every year in the United States, about 100 mentally ill mothers kill two or more of their children at the same time.

But being mentally ill, Dietz said, does not necessarily mean the person can't tell right from wrong. "The fact that she turned herself in suggests guilt," he said.