Mom allegedly cut off baby's arms
Faces capital murder charges

Tuesday, November 23, 2004 Posted: 9:31 AM EST (1431 GMT)

PLANO, Texas (AP) -- A woman with a history of postpartum depression cut the arms off her baby girl who later died, authorities said.

Dena Schlosser was sitting in her living room covered with blood when police arrived Monday. Her almost 11-month-old daughter lay fatally injured in a crib in a bedroom of the family's apartment in Plano. The child was pronounced dead shortly afterward at a nearby hospital.

Police have charged the 35-year-old mother with capital murder, but declined to reveal where she is being held.

Schlosser, who had a history of postpartum depression, had been investigated on child neglect allegations earlier this year, but Texas Child Protective Services had recently closed a seven-month investigation, concluding that Schlosser did not pose a risk to her children. Neighbors said she seemed to be a loving, attentive mother.

"There were never any indications of violence with this family," agency spokeswoman Marissa Gonzales said. "The children had always been healthy, happy and cared for."

But, on Monday, authorities discovered a grisly scene at the family's apartment after the child's father called a day-care center, and asked them to check on his wife and daughter.

Day-care workers called 911 after talking to the mother; an operator then called Schlosser.

Asked if there was an emergency, Schlosser calmly responded "Yes," according to 911 tapes released by police.

"Exactly what happened?" the 911 operator asked.

"I cut her arms off," Schlosser replied, as the hymn "He Touched Me" played in the background.

"You cut her arms off?" he repeated.

"Uh huh," she answered.

It was not immediately clear what instrument was used to sever the baby's arms or why the child's father called a day-care center to check on his family.

Schlosser lived at the apartment with other family members, including her two older daughters. Authorities said the girls, ages 6 and 9, were at school when police arrived, and that their father was at work.

No one answered the door Monday night at the family's apartment in suburban Dallas. Children's bicycles rested near the entrance along with angel garden statues.

Neighbors said Schlosser took her children swimming in the summer, had picnics in the courtyard and walked her baby around the complex the same time each afternoon.

Dena Livingston, 43, said she saw Schlosser making her rounds with the stroller on Sunday. Two days earlier, she saw Schlosser waiting with the baby outside the elementary school where her two other daughters attend.

"She didn't give off like she was in a distant world or didn't care about the baby," Livingston said.

Livingston's husband, Brad, added: "To see her with the girls, you would just think she was a great mother."

Child-protective officials were interviewing Schlosser's daughters and would talk to the father before deciding whether to remove the girls from the home.

In January, the agency was called to the home after Schlosser was seen running down the street, with one of her daughters bicycling after her, authorities said. When officials arrived, the child told them her mother had left her 6-day-old sister alone in the apartment.

Schlosser appeared at the time to be suffering from postpartum depression and having a psychotic episode, Gonzales said.

Schlosser was hospitalized, and later agreed to seek counseling and saw a psychiatrist, Gonzales said.

"At the time we closed the case, we had been assured that Mom was stabilized and that she was not a risk to herself or her children," Geoff Wool, spokesman for the Family and Protective Services Department, said.

Great - another post-partum depression whack job. What a twisted bitch.

This is one of those stories that makes you go, eeeeeeeeeee. I'm glad my mom was nice.

This is one of those stories that makes me go "Damn, I'm glad she did this in Texas because they'll fry her ass!"

As nutty as this woman is I don't think she deserves the death penalty for having mental problems. That's wrong.

Not to sound like an ignorant male, but is postpartum depression just the fact that the mother misses having the baby inside her?

Some mental problems aren't worth fixing.

At least this housewife didn't get naked and jump into Terrell Owens's arms on TV. THAT would have been terrible.

--PunkDavid (the moon at night is big and bright)

What's the hymn "He Touched Me"?

http://www.dead-baby-joke.com/


Sorry,tasteless...

It's kind of like "I Touch Myself", but about Jesus.

--PunkDavid (I'm gonna get down on my knees and start pleasin' Jesus)

That's too damn funny. Great response.

My freshman English professor was a specialist in humor. We talked about how humor and jokes are a reaction to those things in life that we find disturbing. Sometimes whole genres of jokes evolve in a society, and those can usually be traced to a certain societal change that is occurring that many people are uncomfortable with. Some are easy to trace such as gay and AIDS jokes in the 80's, racial and ethnic jokes as new groups come to a society. Some are more difficult to trace, but easy to see once you look at them carefully.

In the 60's, a genre of joke developed, elephant jokes. They were usually pretty silly. Things like "Why did the elephant stand on the marshmallow? So he wouldn't fall into the cocoa." My favorite joke when I was three was, "Why shouldn't you go into the jungle between 2 and 4 pm? Because that's when the elephants jump out of the trees. (follow-up joke) Why are Pygmies so short? Because they went in the jungle between 2 and 4 pm."

Pretty innocuous right? Well they're not so innocuous. This is how my professor explained it (and he was not a crackpot, studies have been done by prominent sociaologists on this subject). What is an elephant? It is an animal, a large animal. Where do elephants usually come from? Africa. What are these elephants doing in these jokes? All kinds of silly things. They keep showing up in places that just don't make sense, places they don't belong. Are you seeing where this is going? These jokes were a reaction to integration and teh civil rights movement and these big, scary, Africans showing up in places they don't belong. Pretty interesting stuff.

So, I'll let everyone guess why "dead-baby" jokes emerged in the 70's.

--PunkDavid

I've had the humor discussion/debate in class too

Yea, killing is a great solution

And it doesn't sit well with a pro-life stance either

Thank you. I was hoping for something like that.

In January, the agency was called to the home after Schlosser was seen running down the street, with one of her daughters bicycling after her, authorities said. When officials arrived, the child told them her mother had left her 6-day-old sister alone in the apartment.

Schlosser appeared at the time to be suffering from postpartum depression and having a psychotic episode, Gonzales said.

Schlosser was hospitalized, and later agreed to seek counseling and saw a psychiatrist, Gonzales said.

"At the time we closed the case, we had been assured that Mom was stabilized and that she was not a risk to herself or her children," Geoff Wool, spokesman for the Family and Protective Services Department, said.

Don't people double check things? You can't just be assured that a woman who appears to be suffering from postpartum depression and psychotic episodes is stabilized. You must double check that she's going to therapy and taking her meds if needed.

This strikes me as remarkably simmilar to the Andrea Yates case. She was also suffering from postpartum depression, and had been warned after her second child to stop having children. She and her husband had three more. They then homeschooled the children. Stress + postpartum = psychotic break.

I'm not saying that these women are not responsible for the murders of their children, for they most certainly are. But, I think its a general failure of some system that allows, if you will, this to happen. When people with mental illnesses are released from mental hospitals, aren't they monitored to make sure that they continue fostering the habits that will keep them as well as possible? You don't release a psychotic person and claim to be assured that they're stable.

It seems like more investigation could have and should have been done when the mother was originally charged with child neglect. A social worker should have been assigned to the family to keep an eye on things.

All that aside, this is horrible. I saw it on the news a bit ago, and I was both saddened and sickened.

This is EXACTLY how to analyze this situation.

Rather than jumping to "kill her, what a horrible person", lets examine what really happened here and how we can PREVENT this from happening again.

Killing this person now is purely reactionary and does not prevent this from happening again.

I think anyone who murders someone has some sort of mental problem, with very few exceptions. But damn, we Texans seem to have the most psychotic murderers around. They don't just kill people, they do it in an original way. I think satan likes it down here.