My girl’s stabbing frenzy
A troubled young woman stabbed her mother over 200 times, bludgeoned her. But was she in her right mind?
The case... mad OR bad..?
Someone had tried to decapitate her...
The Gilbert girls had already been through a lot.
In 2010, the family had been devastated by the disappearance and death of Shannan Gilbert, then 24.
Shannan was an escort, and may have been one of almost a dozen victims of a Long Island serial killer.
As no-one had been charged with the murders, her mother Mari tirelessly campaigned for justice, alongside her other daughters Sherre, Sarra and Stevie.
The family lived in the quiet and scenic village of Ellenville, in Ulster County, New York – and, since Shannan’s mysterious death, Sarra Gilbert’s mental health had deteriorated.
Diagnosed with schizophrenia in 2014, Sarra was plagued by hallucinations, heard voices.
On 23 July 2016, Sarra had been suffering these symptoms and called her mother for help.
Hours after Mari arrived at Sarra’s Ellenville home that Saturday morning, Sherre became worried that neither her mother or sister were answering her calls.
At 1.45pm, she called the police, asked if they’d look in on the house – if a loved one fails to respond, the police could be called in to conduct such a welfare check.
When the police arrived, they found Mari’s car in the drive but nobody answered the door.
An officer peered into the window – to see a body lying on the living room floor. They went into the house and found the naked, bludgeoned and bleeding body of Mari Gilbert. She’d been stabbed 227 times, beaten with a fire extinguisher, sprayed with its foam, and stripped. There were gashes through her throat where someone had tried to decapitate her. The police found Sarra in the kitchen – covered in blood and with a 15in knife. ‘I killed my mom,’ she said. Sarra, 27, w was arrested and charged w with second-degree m murder and c criminal possession o of a weapon. While Stevie c condemned her sister, itr John Ray–a lawyer who’d represented the Gilbert family throughout their efforts to solve the mystery of Shannan’s death – stepped in as Sarra’s defence. There was no question as to whether Sarra had killed her mother, but her defence was focused on her mental illness.
At the initial hearing, Ray told the court Sarra was mentally unfit to stand trial and should be sent to a mental-health facility for treatment.
Despite undergoing a psychiatric examination, Sarra’s trial began in April 2017.
Ulster County Court heard Sarra had stabbed her mother over 200 times with a large kitchen knife, before hitting her over the head with a fire extinguisher.
Then she’d tried to drown Mari by spraying her with foam from the extinguisher.
Sarra Gilbert pleaded not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect.
What Ray told the jurors unravelled more family secrets.
He said that Sarra had been driven to a psychotic breakdown by years of abuse and mental torment.
‘We know she was raised in one of the worst families this country ever had in its bosom,’ he told the court. He spoke of Sarra’s troubled childhood in which she was in and out of foster care, had a schizophrenic dad addicted to heroin, and was even sexually abused.
He also referred to her late sister Shannan becoming a sex worker.
Since Shannan’s death, he argued, Sarra had been on a downward spiral.
Records also showed Sarra had been hospitalised in mental facilities at least twice since 2014.
While there, it was noted that she had violent tendencies, frequently lashing out at staff and
refusing to take her prescribed medication.
John Ray claimed that mental-health services had let Sarra down.
‘The state let her out again and again and again, with no doubt she would do exactly as she did,’ he argued.
The jury also heard that Mari’s interest in black magic may have been a key contribution to Sarra’s psychotic breakdown.
Mari had been practising witchcraft for years and, according to Sarra, would cast spells on her.
Since her sister Shannan’s murder, Sarra had often rambled incoherently about mermaids and demons.
She even appeared to believe that she was a god, and that her mother was an evil god, possessed by a demonic entity.
On that fateful Saturday afternoon, Sarra had tried to remove the ‘evil presence’ from her mother’s body.
But, she told the investigators, the demon just wouldn’t die, so she removed Mari’s clothes and jewellery, thinking that was giving the evil its strength.
‘She sat on her mother, stabbed her, took two cigarette breaks and went back and stabbed her some more.
‘If that’s not psychotic, I don’t know what is,’ Ray insisted.
He pleaded with the jury to recognise that Sarra wasn’t responsible for her gruesome actions ‘because of what was done to this poor little girl’s brain’.
But Dr Sandra Antoniak – the prosecution’s forensic psychiatrist – questioned the real extent of Sarra’s supposed insanity.
While Sarra clearly suffered from schizoaffective disorder, Antoniak said, s she appeared to b be exaggerating her illness in order to escape responsibility for her crime. She also felt that Sarra’s actions had been caused by drug abuse, rather than mental illness.
Sarra’s sister Stevie echoed this, insisting that ‘she would have taken any drugs she could get [her] hands on’.
According to Stevie, her sister started using drugs as a teenager and tried to convince everyone that her resulting behaviour was down to mental illness.
She also said that Sarra was intensely jealous of her own relationship with Mari, and that her sister had tormented their mother for years, even assaulting her.
‘This was the result of long-term hate and not a mental breakdown,’ she added.
The prosecution also told the jury that Sarra had actually planned to lure her mother to her home in order to butcher her.
They claimed she’d asked Mari to come over to help her days earlier, but refused to let her mother in when she arrived with her partner.
Prosecuting attorney Emmanuel Nneji revealed another possible motive.
Sarra had previously been arrested for cruelty to animals and endangering the welfare of a child when she drowned a puppy in front of her 8-year-old son.
Nneji believed that Sarra was angry with her mother, as she’d been given temporary custody of her son after the arrest.
Had she plotted to murder Mari for revenge..?
The jury rejected the claim of mental illness and found Sarra Gilbert guilty of second-degree murder. Judge Donald Williams handed down a sentence of 25 years to life, the maximum sentence allowed by law.
The judge offered Sarra the chance to address the court, and she tearfully begged for mercy. Judge Williams added that her sentence was not a punishment. Rather, it was out of ‘an overwhelming desire to protect other people by taking you off the streets for as long as I can’.