PICKENS, S.C. (AP) – When Suzanna Simpson spent six days in the hospital for severe mental illness, doctors urged her husband to get all of the guns out of their house for safety.
About a year later, Simpson woke up at 4 a.m., put on a headband with a small light, worked the combination on the gun safe and ambushed her husband, and their 7-year-old daughter and 5-year-old son as they slept. She said she tried to kill herself, but loaded the wrong ammunition in the gun. Simpson told a psychiatrist she thought the whole family would be reincarnated in a better world.
Four days of testimony ended Thursday in Simpson’s murder trial. A jury will now determine if she was insane and should go to a mental hospital until she regains her sanity or if Simpson, 38, is guilty and should get extra mental health treatment during her 30 years to life in state prison.
The case is another example of guns and mental illness intersecting in a country that struggles with both. One month before the killings in this county of 120,000 people, the same prosecutors, defense lawyers and even psychologist were in the same courtroom. A woman with multiple personalities pleaded guilty but mentally ill and received a life sentence for killing her two adult sons, her ex-husband and her stepmother.
Susan Hendricks killed her family for $700,000 in life insurance, prosecutors said. Her lawyer said she was consumed by a mental illness made worse through a childhood of abuse by both parents.