Nanny guilty of stabbing 2 kids to death

A NEW York nanny was found guilty on Wednesday of stabbing to death two children in her care at their luxury Manhattan apartment, in a case that drew national headlines.

A jury unanimously rejected the insanity defense of Yoselyn Ortega, 55, whose lawyer said she hallucinated a devil’s order “to kill the children and herself” when she plunged a kitchen knife into Lucia Krim, 6, nicknamed Lulu, and her brother Leo, 2, and left their bloody bodies in a bathtub.

The October 25, 2012 killings were discovered when Marina Krim returned to the family’s Upper West Side apartment to find her children dead and their nanny standing over them stabbing her own neck with a knife. Krim had come home with the children’s 3-year-old sister, Nessie, after Ortega failed to show up at Lulu’s dance class.

Ortega was charged with two counts each of first- and second-degree murder, punishable by a maximum sentence of life in prison.

“We hope now that this verdict will give the Krim family an opportunity to heal, to find some closure and to move on in their lives,” Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance said following the verdict, as a tearyeyed Kevin Krim, the children’s father, stood beside him. Krim declined to take questions.

Insanity defenses rarely succeed in New York, where proving mental illness is not enough to find a defendant not responsible for a crime.