Lemak--Husband's new wife testifies
Anne Warfield
Husband's new wife testifies in Marilyn Lemak trial
By Flynn McRoberts
Tribune staff reporter
Published December 12, 2001, 12:54 PM CST
The woman who replaced Marilyn Lemak for her husband’s affections --
and who prosecutors say triggered a jealous rage that resulted in the
slayings of the three Lemak children -- today took the witness stand
in Lemak’s murder trial in Wheaton.
The former Janice Ryan -- now Janice Lemak, who married David Lemak in
May -- testified about a telephone call she received Feb. 19, 1999,
while David and Marilyn Lemak’s divorce was pending and eight days
after the husband had moved out of the family’s Naperville home.
Janice Lemak testified that the caller, a woman who did not identify
herself, said, “You can’t have him,” and then hung up.
On cross-examination by defense attorneys, Janice Lemak acknowledged
she could not say for certain who the caller was.
“I believed I knew who it was, but she didn’t say her name,” she said.
Asked by defense attorney John Donahue if the caller could have been a
friend of the woman who she thought it was -- he did not mention
Marilyn Lemak’s name -- Janice Lemak said, “possibly.”
When DuPage County State’s Atty. Joseph Birkett asked Janice Lemak if,
after the slayings, she told investigators she thought the caller was
Marilyn Lemak, Donahue objected before the witness could answer. Judge
George Bakalis ordered that Birkett’s question be stricken from the
record and for the jury to disregard it.
The caller’s identity is important to prosecutors, who hope to paint
for the jury a picture of Marilyn Lemak as a vengeful spouse seeking
to keep her husband from dating another woman.
An emotional moment in this morning’s testimony came when Donahue
asked Janice Lemak if she ever met the three Lemak children. Her voice
choking, she said, “I never had the privilege.” In the gallery, David
Lemak looked down, his lip quivering.
During Janice Lemak’s testimony, Marilyn Lemak, 44, showed no emotion
as she sat at the defense table, rocking back and forth as she has
done every day of the trial, now in its third week.
Prosecutors seek to convince a DuPage County jury that Marilyn Lemak
was sane, acting out her rage against David Lemak for having left her
for another woman, when she killed her children, Nicholas, 7, Emily,
6, and Thomas, 3, on March 4, 1999. The defense contends Marilyn Lemak
was insane at the time of the killings.
The trial continues this afternoon with the testimony of a forensic
psychologist who administered tests to Marilyn Lemak in the summer of
1999. A prosecution witness, he is expected to attest to the
defendant’s sanity.
Tribune staff reporter Ted Gregory contributed to this story.
Copyright © 2001, Chicago Tribune
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Lemak trial told of 11th-hour calls
Marriage counselor testifies for defense
By Flynn McRoberts and Ted Gregory
Tribune staff reporters
Published December 12, 2001
In the final hours of her children's lives, Marilyn Lemak reached out
one last time, leaving a series of phone messages to her old marriage
counselor, asking to see her again.
The two women exchanged voice mail the day before the slayings, and
the counselor testified Tuesday that she tried to reach Lemak again
the next morning. But after one more message, she got nothing but busy
signals. Inside the family home, Lemak was drugging her children and
smothering them with her hands.
As Lemak's murder trial in Wheaton entered its third week of
testimony, psychologist Charlotte Dillon said that she had not met
with Lemak for nearly a year when the Naperville mother called her on
March 3, 1999, to say "she was having a really hard time dealing with"
the breakup of her marriage.
That stood in contrast to the "emotionally cold" Lemak who told Dillon
in 1998 that she stayed with her husband only for his financial
support.
The Aurora clinical psychologist was one of the last witnesses for
Lemak's defense, which rested Tuesday after five days of testimony.
The defense was anchored by mental-health experts who buttressed
Lemak's contention that she was not guilty by reason of insanity when
she killed her three children.
A lone family member--Lemak's father, retired accountant William
Morrissey--and some friends and acquaintances portrayed a woman who
kept her darkest thoughts from those closest to her. They knew she was
struggling with divorce but had no hint of the alleged mental troubles
that ended the lives of Nicholas, 7, Emily, 6, and Thomas, 3.
Instead, defense attorneys relied on Dr. Lyle Rossiter and Dr. Phillip
Resnick, two forensic psychiatrists who interviewed Lemak after the
killings and contended she was so severely depressed that it rendered
her legally insane.
Under Illinois law, a defendant is legally insane if she is unable to
appreciate the criminality of her conduct due to a mental defect or
mental illness.
Mom, kids `inseparable'
The killings and Lemak's botched suicide attempt were an "extended
suicide," Resnick said last week, committed after David Lemak refused
her final effort to reconcile. She took the children with her because
she saw herself and them as "inseparable" even in death, testified
Resnick, a nationally known expert who spoke with Lemak for eight
hours nearly a year after the slayings.
As he has throughout the trial, David Lemak sat in the courtroom
gallery Tuesday. For the first time, however, he was joined in court
by Janice Ryan, who is now married to Lemak, according to defense
attorney Joseph Bugos.
According to testimony, Ryan and David Lemak had begun dating just
weeks before the killings. Prosecutors allege that Marilyn Lemak
killed the children out of anger and spite over her estranged
husband's relationship with Ryan.
Prosecutors question friend
Tuesday's testimony also included the prosecution's first rebuttal
witnesses: two of Marilyn Lemak's friends and Dr. Syed Ali, a
psychiatrist who interviewed Lemak in jail several times in the weeks
after the killings.
One of the friends, Kathleen O'Meara, told of long talks on her front
porch with Lemak, who she knew for eight years. Both were mothers of
three and both were going through divorces. In one conversation, Lemak
told O'Meara of an argument in which she demanded of her estranged
husband: "I want you to make me and the children No. 1."
"Above me?" he allegedly replied. "I can't do that, Lynn."
Then, O'Meara recalled with a theatrical hiss, Lemak asked her: "Can
you believe he said that?"
O'Meara said she told her friend: "Yes I can. I think what he meant
was that he needed to think of himself and his life. Lynn, happiness
comes from within."
A week later, on March 1, 1999, O'Meara again saw Lemak, who told her
that she had finally dealt with the divorce. "She said it might not
have been what she wanted, but she had to deal with it. She said, `I
got what I asked for,'" O'Meara said of Marilyn Lemak, who had twice
filed for divorce.
But on cross-examination, Bugos worked to undercut O'Meara's
credibility. He highlighted how her testimony on the stand
Tuesday--including the assertion that she didn't think Lemak was
"emotionally strained"--contradicted statements she had made shortly
after the killings.
Bugos read from a statement O'Meara signed on March 5, 1999, in which
she stated that Lemak was "emotionally strained the last three weeks"
before the slayings.
Prosecutors also called Ali, a Wheaton psychiatrist and Loyola
University faculty member who said he had testified about 40 times in
criminal cases. Ali contended that Lemak was sane, largely based on
her actions the day of the killings: locking the doors of the family
home, taking the phone off the hook and administering sedatives to the
children.
"The fact that there was premeditation there indicates to me that she
knew that what she was doing was wrong," Ali said.
He also recalled an interview with Lemak in which she addressed the
conflicting accounts of when she killed her three children.
Police investigators have testified that she told them that Emily and
Thomas were dead by the time Nicholas arrived home from school that
day. But she also told experts hired by the defense that she remembers
Thomas and Nicholas playing together on March 4.
Lemak told him that if Emily and Thomas were dead when Nicholas
arrived home, "this would imply premeditation," Ali said, "and that
her position was that there was no premeditation."
Ali's recollection of an interview last summer with Lemak suggested
that she was worried about how her actions would be perceived. "I am
sure I was angry. I guess it doesn't make it seem so good," she
reportedly told the psychiatrist.
When Ali asked why, Lemak responded, "Because it makes it look as if I
did this because I was angry."
Rather than what, Ali asked her.
"Rather than crazy," Lemak told him.
Lemak suicidal, deputies say
Earlier in the day, defense attorneys called two jail deputies who
helped keep a 24-hour suicide watch over Lemak in March and April
1999. Deputy Michelle Hawkins testified that on March 15, 1999, Lemak
sat in her cell, crying.
Hawkins asked if she could do anything for her. "She said, if I could
help her think of a way to die ... and that she already should have
been dead."
The second deputy, Leona Cantwell, recalled that five weeks later she
was walking Lemak to the jail gym when she started crying again.
Cantwell asked if Lemak was all right. She told her: "No, I'm not OK.
I miss my kids."
Copyright © 2001, Chicago Tribune
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--
Anne Warfield
indigoace at goodsol period com
http://www.goodsol.com/cats/