Eight days after her two little boys were stabbed to death, Darlie Routier stood at their grave laughing and spraying Silly String. A TV camera was filming, and that tape helped put her on death row.
On June 6, 1996, she called 911 from her house in Texas, screaming that someone had stabbed her babies. Devon was 6 and Damon was 5. Their baby brother Drake, 7 months old, was upstairs with their dad and slept through all of it.
When the first officer ran in, Damon was still breathing. He told Darlie to press towels on her son's wounds, and he later said in court that she didn't. Damon died before the ambulance got him out of the house.
She had a cut on her neck that came within millimeters of her artery. She said a stranger broke in while they slept on the couch and she fought him off. Police found no blood trail outside and no sign anyone ran through the garage, and they decided she cut herself.
Then the local news aired what would have been Devon's seventh birthday.
In the video below the family stands at the grave with balloons. Darlie is smiling, chewing gum and spraying Silly String on her sons' headstones while everyone sings happy birthday to a little boy buried right there.
"He wanted to be seven," she said later.
Her family says the news cut out the prayer service that came before it, but the jury only saw this part. She was convicted and sentenced to death in 1997, and she still says she's innocent. Her husband believed her for years. A bloody fingerprint from the house has never been matched to anyone in the family, and new DNA results are still pending.
Drake grew up with no brothers and a mother on death row, so which one was she: a killer celebrating, or a broken mother doing what her son would have wanted?