A killer’s tears
Nanny who knifed kids weeps – for herself
THE MONSTER finally melted.
An Upper West Side nanny who butchered two children under her care before sticking a kitchen knife into her own throat finally displayed a trace of humanity at her murder trial Friday — but only when the topic turned to her own sadness.
Yoselyn Ortega, 55, broke down in tears when a hospital shrink took the stand to discuss the nanny’s life woes, which she shared with him during a psych evaluation a month after the October 2012 slayings.
Yet Ortega (photo) hadn’t so much as winced during weeks of agonizing testimony about the horrible deaths ofLulu and Leo Krim, 6 and 2.
The cherubic children died in the bathroom inside their family’s W. 75th St. apartment, where Ortega stabbed and slashed them repeatedly.
It wasn’t until New York-Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medical Center psychiatrist Marc Dubin was called as a witness by Ortega’s lawyers that she showed any sign of emotion.
“She reports that she has been sad most of the day, crying, upset, that she has been unable to see her family, listing her son, brother and sister, father and mother,” Dubin testified about their interview session, causing Ortega to break down in the courtroom and turn away from the jury.
“She complains that she is unable to sleep in the hospital and that she hears voices through the day, but especially at night, saying, ‘We are going to get you,’ and she worries that they are going to cut her throat,” the doctor added.
Dubin is one of a series of defense medical witnesses called by Ortega’s attorneys, who have argued that she was having a psychiatric episode when she killed the Krim children and can’t be held legally responsible for their senseless deaths. But prosecutors say she had a clear-cut motive — to get even with her employer Marina Krim.
Ortega was obsessively jealous of the married mother and murdered her children to spite her, according to the prosecution.
She also told police, two days after the gruesome crime, that she had been worked too hard at her part-time domestic job.
Ortega faces up to life in prison if convicted. If found not responsible by reason of mental disease or defect, she’ll likely spend the rest of her life in a mental institution.