Maybe Darlie Didn't Do It
Five years after she was convicted of murdering two of her sons, Darlene Routier sits on death row in Gatesville, still maintaining her innocence. This month, as her lawyers prepare to head into court again, new information about her raises the possibility, however slim, that she's been telling the truth all along.
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Darin's reluctant admission certainly raises more questions than it answers. But it also suggests some tantalizing what-ifs. If, for instance, Darin's fake burglary scheme had come out before Darlie's trial, prosecutors might still have gone after her but probably would not have sought the death penalty in what would have been a tougher case to make. Darlie's defense lawyers surely would have used that admission to create reasonable doubt as to her involvement, perhaps leading to her acquittal, regardless of whether she was guilty. Most significantly, if Darin's admission leads to additional confessions about a break-in at the Routier house, it could well prove what Darlie has been saying all along: that she did not kill her kids.
The Clampetts or Ozzie and Harriet?
EVERY DETAIL OF DARLIE ROUTIER'S life has been thoroughly examined by reporters, investigators, lawyers, and cops. Academic treatises on maternal filicide have been reviewed again and again to see if any case compares with hers. Yet even now, no one has been able to come up with a plausible explanation as to why she would have stabbed her boys. Unlike Andrea Yates, Darlie had no history of mental illness or psychotic hallucinations. Unlike Susan Smith, the South Carolina mother who drove her kids into a lake, she had no abuse or incest in her background. She had no criminal record, and she was not known to have committed adultery.
Born in Pennsylvania, Darlie moved to Lubbock as a teenager with her mother and stepfather. She met Darin at a Western Sizzlin', where he worked as a cook (her mother waited tables there). The seventeen-year-old boy was immediately infatuated with the bubbly fifteen-year-old girl with the frosted hair. "She was different than anybody I had ever met," Darin recalled, "a trendsetter on her own path." They married four years later in the garden room of his parents' house. He had been voted most likely to succeed at the small high school he had attended on the outskirts of Lubbock, and he planned to prove it. After moving to the Dallas area, he started a small company that tested electronic components, and when he began making money in the early nineties, he and Darlie cut loose. They bought a $130,000 house, adding marble in the bathroom, white carpet in the dining room, and $12,000 worth of drapes in the living room. They bought a $600 fountain for the front yard and a $9,000 redwood spa for the back. Darin purchased a thirty-foot cabin cruiser to use on nearby Lake Ray Hubbard and a 1982 Jaguar to drive to and from work. When Darlie's beloved cat died, she spent $800 for a tombstone to put over its grave at a pet cemetery.
In 1995 Darin's company brought in about half a million dollars in gross revenues, and he paid himself an annual salary of $125,000. "At the time, we were in the top two percent of the tax bracket for our age," he told me more than once. And they spent every cent they made. Their neighbors thought they were a hoot, Rowlett's version of the Clampetts from The Beverly Hillbillies. Darin wore shirts with the sleeves rolled up to show his muscles, grew his hair long in the back, and sported a diamond watch and gold-nugget-and-diamond rings. Darlie got size 36 DDD breast implants that she showed off in tight-fitting tops, made regular visits to the tanning salon, and wore diamond rings on every finger. She bought a toy Pomeranian with white hair matching her own.
Even if they were a little flashy, they were not disliked; one neighbor called them the "Ozzie and Harriet of the nineties." Darlie was known as a cookie-baking housewife who always let the neighborhood kids hang out at her house, which they called the Nintendo House because of the elaborate game room that Darin had designed. (After her arrest, several of those kids put signs in her front yard proclaiming her innocence.) She cooked for neighbors going through hard times and even made a mortgage payment for a neighbor with cancer.
In early 1996 Darin's business began to suffer, and he got behind on the bills; he was at least a month late on the mortgage and owed $10,000 in back taxes to the IRS and $12,000 on credit cards. But if the financial problems were causing stress in their marriage, no one in the neighborhood saw it. Darin decided to start a second business, called Champagne Wishes, in which he would take people around the lake on his boat at sunset while they sipped champagne and, if they wished, used the boat's bedroom. Darin's difficulties didn't seem to concern Darlie either: Her shopping never slowed, and she made plans to take a trip that summer to Cancun with some friends.
But on May 3, about a month before the murders, Darlie made an unusual entry in her otherwise upbeat diary. "I hope that one day you will forgive me for what I am about to do," she wrote. "My life has been such a hard fight for a long time, and I just can't find the strength to keep fighting anymore." On that day she considered taking some sleeping pills to kill herself. But she never took them and never finished her diary entry. After talking with her on the phone, Darin became worried and came home to comfort her. At that point, she told me, she was ashamed of what she had done and never thought about taking her life again.
Darlie said her "blah feeling," as she put it, was because she hadn't gotten her period in more than a year. When it arrived a few days after her suicidal thoughts, she said, her spirits soared. In fact, people who saw her in the weeks that followed say she did not seem particularly despondent. Her old friend Barbara Jovell did tell Darlie that she should get some counseling or perhaps enter a treatment center, as she herself had done when she once felt suicidal, but Jovell didn't sense that Darlie was desperate or self-destructive. And she certainly didn't act differently. In late May Darlie and Darin took the boys to Scarborough Faire, a festival featuring characters dressed in medieval costumes. Darlie, flamboyant as always, wore a silky belly-dancing outfit.
On June 5 the boys played in the hot tub, and that evening Damon and Devon huddled under blankets in front of a television Darin had just installed in the living room. Darlie and Darin would later say they stayed up talking past midnight, then kissed each other good-night. Darin went upstairs to the master bedroom, where Drake, then seven months old, was asleep, while Darlie curled up on the couch downstairs next to the two older boys. She had been sleeping on the couch that week, she said, because she wanted to watch over Damon and Devon, who had been spending the night downstairs since school let out, and because she was a light sleeper and would sometimes be awakened by Drake turning over in his crib.
A few hours later, a 911 dispatcher in Rowlett received a frantic call. "Somebody came in here," Darlie screamed. "They just stabbed me and my children!"
The Case Against Her
THE FIRST TIP-OFF FOR THE COPS was the 911 call. Why, in the midst of that craziness, did Darlie feel the need to tell the dispatcher that she had picked up the butcher knife, that her fingerprints were on it, and that she hoped they would still be able to get the prints of the attacker? One of the first officers at the scene was also perplexed that Darlie didn't tend to her sons, even when he asked her to. Instead she held a towel to her own neck. Nurses at the hospital where Darlie was taken said that when she was told that her sons were dead, she exhibited a "flat affect" and did not dissolve into hysteria, as mothers often do upon learning they have lost their children.
After the murders, Darlie gave conflicting accounts of what exactly the intruder had done to her. One officer said she told him that she had struggled with her assailant on the couch. Another officer said she told him the struggle was at the kitchen counter. A friend who talked to Darlie while she was in the hospital said Darlie told her that she remembered lying on the couch as the man was running the knife over her face—but in her formal written statement to the police, Darlie said her only view of the man came as he was walking away from the couch. She said she just couldn't remember any distinct details about the attack or the killer except that he was wearing dark clothes and a baseball cap. Was it really possible that Darlie, who could be awakened by her baby moving in his crib, had slept through the stabbings of her sons a few feet away?
The cops' suspicions grew when the doctors and nurses who treated Darlie told them that her wounds could have been self-inflicted. Then, a few days after leaving the hospital, she showed the police dark bruises that covered her arms from wrist to elbow. Yet the doctors who examined her said the bruises were too fresh to have been inflicted on the night of the attacks. More likely, they said, Darlie hit her arms with a blunt instrument after she left the hospital—or had someone else do it—to convince the police that she had been attacked.
After studying the crime scene, the police noticed that the so-called intruder had apparently gotten into the house by slashing a window screen that covered a low garage window, then stepping through the slit. Why, the cops asked, didn't the intruder just pull off the screen, as burglars normally do? Why did he only slice Darlie's throat and stab her in the shoulder and forearm instead of plunging his knife deep into her body the way he plunged it into the bodies of her boys? Why not make sure that Darlie was dead so that she would not be able to identify him?
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