[Sophia babbling]
MAN: There's this thing inside of me, it's like...
the appetite.
It's like a wolf that's...
filling... the hunger.
♪♪
MAN: Our communication center received
a call that there was two dead children inside the department.
WOMAN: Neighbors identified the little girls as Serena
and Sophia,
and their mother was the one who
called police to their 4th floor apartment.
♪♪
DETECTIVE: Okay?
MORGAN: In a nutshell, I don't believe her.
Amnesia doesn't work that way.
It's not persuasive, but that seems to be
her narrative she's presenting is everything was normal.
She almost sounds childlike herself, helpless, frail.
I think it was this vacillation between trying to
decide if she wanted to come across as mentally unstable,
that she had no memory of what she did, to really dissociating
and not wanting to face
the emotional reality that she's killed her children.
♪♪
TUSSEY: I would scream.
Most people would have a much more extreme reaction
to first hearing that
if they really believed two seconds ago that they were just
with their dad.
Even though she's crying, she's relatively calm.
So that is very striking about her reaction.
I'm a little skeptical about the authenticity of it.
MORGAN: With people who have psychopathy, we'll often see
a meager effort at the display of emotion.
Sometimes a feigned effort if they
can't muster enough of a feeling.
SAHNI: What she's describing is postmortem effects for
the children, and yet
she's talking about them like they're alive and they're
just injured.
So there's a complete disconnect there.
What we know is that after she drowned them,
she dressed them in pretty little princess dresses, and she
did up their hair, and she made
them look beautiful, and then she put them to bed, dead.
It's creepy on a lot of levels.
Her ability to objectify her children and maintain her own
narrative that was not based in reality
allowed her to drown each of them.
♪♪
SAHNI: Make no mistake.
She never misses a beat to stay in control of
the interview, she never misses a beat to exert her legal right.
She's quite clear and definite about that.
When you see that switch
so automatically, that is more consistent with psychopathic
behavior than a broken, psychologically frail
individual who has just lost her two daughters.
TUSSEY: Her lack of an answer is telling.
I think that her plan was to kill
herself with the pills, and it didn't work.
I don't think that she had really thought
beyond what would happen if she didn't die.
Sometimes when psychopaths entertain suicide,
it's because they want to have the final say.
[Sophia babbling]
She made a video on the day of their death.
It's probably not an accident.
The Sleeping Beauty is playing for the kids.
This doesn't bode well.
Sleeping Beauty is the story of a wonderful young woman
who can't wake up
until she's kissed by the handsome prince to come out
of her state of sleep that's induced by the witch.
Consistent with that, once they're dead
she dresses them up and lays them
out so they are little sleeping beauties.
SAHNI: She made a strategic, calculated decision to
videotape her children in their last moments.
She's documenting what a fantastic mother
she was, and yet she drowns them.
Elaine Campione is somebody who is fused with her children.
Her ego,
her internal sense of self, is anchored by the existence
and the narrative of, "I am a perfect mother."
Hi!
She's speaking with positive affect.
She has love in her voice and what
she's saying to them, that mommy loves you.
She's joking with them.
Uh, there's a total disconnect.
♪♪
SAHNI: Ultimately, this was a case of revenge.
This is Elaine Campione's narrative.
Elaine is a perfect mother.
Elaine is the only one who can take care of her children.
Many parents hate each other.
You know, and want to get back at one another,
even use their kids as pawns to get back,
but they don't kill them.
MORGAN: It sounds like it had been a difficult relationship,
but she's used her kids as a weapon in that way to punish
her husband.
The psychopathic part is viewing
the children as the implements.
♪♪
Her tone is less irate in this video.
It's as if she's woken up unexpectedly,
perhaps because she thought she was going to die,
and she is trying to come to terms with this.
When we think of parents who are psychologically fused with
their children, those children
are their anchors for their personality.
I think what we're seeing is the beginnings
of the unraveling, because her anchor is gone.
She's killed them. She's more broken.
This is a lot of fractured, damaged personality structure.
She's two very different people in many ways.
You have this woman who is presenting herself as very
frail and beaten down.
But then on the other hand,
she's clearly very much in control of her decisions.
♪♪
WOMAN: Legal papers were also found advising Campione
to appear in court for a child custody hearing
October 5th, the day after the girls' bodies
were discovered.
Leo Campione was trying to get custody
of the girls at the time they were killed.
TUSSEY: The custody aspect is a key element in this.
So it's possible that she saw this as her only option to
ensure definitively that he would not get to be
with the girls.
And her response to it is "I'll take them,
and you won't ever get them."
That's her power.
This was a note that Elaine took the time to write.
It was directed at her husband, and it says,
"All I wanted was a way out.
"The system failed.
"I was a great mother, and you wouldn't leave me alone.
"I had to protect our girls.
"They will sail away from this and all of you.
I hate you."
Her narrative is that she's actually doing
something that's incredibly altruistic,
and she's making it clear to her husband
that he caused this.
It's not her who drowned them. He pushed her to do this.
♪♪
WOMAN: Doctors' notes revealed that Campione was having
trouble seeing herself and children as separate entities.
These pictures were used by the defense as evidence.
Campione apparently told her mother to take it,
saying she loved her kids and was fearful
there would be no memory of her.
Campione's lawyer argues her client is mentally ill,
that she suffered from delusions and paranoia
and didn't feel she or her children were safe.
Once she had a goal in mind, which was to kill them,
to take them away from her husband,
she's very systematic about how she goes about that goal.
That's highly inconsistent with how people who experience
delusions and paranoia behave.
She as a psychopathic as she feels.
She is self-righteous, she feels vindicated.
She did something that no parent had the courage to do.
WOMAN: The jury didn't
but the defense argument that it was mental illness that
made her do it and not
a bitter custody dispute with her ex-husband.
WOMAN: Elaine Campione sobbed uncontrollably as the jury
announced a guilty verdict.
Her tears then turned to anger as she swore before being
handcuffed and hauled out of the courtroom.
There's where you see the self-righteousness,
there's where you see the attitude of, "Why am I being
"hauled out in handcuffs?
I did what was the right thing to do,"
and it was the most protective thing she could do for
her daughters, because she is a perfect mother,
and mommy loves you.
♪♪