New hearing for woman who killed infant son, then gouged out her eyes in prison
On a spring morning in 2013, Chicago police forced their way into a hotel bathroom and found Kimberlynn Bolanos and her infant son covered in blood in the bathtub.
The 5-month-old boy, Isaac, had been stabbed 44 times and died from his wounds. Bolanos had more than 20 knife wounds and lost three liters of blood but survived. She later told a psychiatrist that the gruesome scene was the aftermath of an epic battle between herself and shadowy forces behind global warming, poverty and war.
She told of hearing, through the walls of her house, the screams of loved ones being tortured by agents of the “People at the Top,” according to one of nearly a dozen psychiatric evaluations she has undergone in the last decade.
In the desperate hours before the attack, she said she slept with Isaac cradled in one arm and a knife within reach of the other. When her boyfriend’s phone began ringing around 5 a.m., she was certain the agents were about to storm the hotel room and take her son away.
Over the decade since then, Bolanos has been evaluated by at least 10 mental health professionals. Several have said she was legally insane at the time she killed her son and when she confessed to police. Others have said knew what she was doing.
A judge in the case has consistently found her mentally fit. Bolanos ended up changing her plea from insanity to guilty but mentally ill and was sentenced to 38 years in prison. Just months into her sentence, Bolanos gouged out eyes.
On Tuesday, the case will be back before Judge Charles Burns, who has been told by an appeals court to reconsider whether Bolanos was mentally fit when she changed her plea in 2016. The judge is also being asked to determine whether she is well enough to understand her lawyers as they now seek to overturn her prison sentence.
"Even on medication, her mental state was still sufficiently severe to lead her to gouge out her eyes," the appeals court noted. "We this case is chilling ... We find defendant’s case warrants further inspection."
Bolanos’s public defender has declined to talk about the case, but in court filings has said Bolanos, 32, suffers from delusions and has been hospitalized so often while in prison that it has been difficult for her to help with her defense.
At her most recent appearance in Burns’ courtroom in January, Bolanos wore wrist shackles as she was guided into the courtroom by a sheriff’s officer.
“I told them not to shackle blind people or pregnant people,” she blurted out, her eyes shut tight as she turned her face toward the judge’s bench. While Bolanos is blind, her belief that she is pregnant is a delusion, her lawyers say.
Bolanos seemed unconcerned about the crucial hearing this week. “Do I have to show up?” she said. “Can I just do a Zoom rather than driving six hours?”
‘God would have an heir’
Kimberlynn Bolanos was happy when she learned she was pregnant, though the circumstances were far from ideal: Her boyfriend had brought her to the emergency room at Swedish Covenant Hospital after she overdosed on heroin, according to court documents.
Bolanos told the doctors she hadn’t realized she was pregnant, even though she was four months along. She stopped using drugs and started prenatal vitamins.
When she delivered her son three months later, the boy was healthy and she had no drugs in her system. By all accounts Bolanos was glad to be a mother -- though she apparently believed she was on a mission to save the world and her son would help her.
“I thought I was killing bad people (with her mind) and the world was getting good,” she said. “God would have an heir to my mission.”
According to one psychiatrist’s report, Bolanos has believed since her early teens that she assigned to save the world, and that that she and her loved ones were targeted by a shadowy cabal behind global warming, poverty and war.
In seventh grade, when her parents split up, she attempted suicide by taking 30 Tylenol tablets. In eighth grade, she was committed to a mental hospital.
At 16, she said she heard the voice of God and was told of her role in saving the world. Neighbors called her “the crazy lady” because she shouted at airplanes and “satellites” she believed were watching her.
At age 20, she tried to kill herself by injecting wasp poison into her heart. “If I died, everybody would stop getting tortured and it would prove I’m not a spy for the wrong people,” Bolanos explained to a psychiatrist.
After Isaac was born, Bolanos was a devoted and attentive mother, according to her parents. Bolanos’ mother said she once inspected the child when left alone with the boy and found no signs of injury.
Then in late May 2013, Bolanos said she heard a “detective” had come to her father’s house, where she and Isaac lived in the basement, asking about her.
She and her boyfriend took Isaac and moved into a room in a Northwest Side hotel. She bought knives from a Dollar Tree store and, after hearing her boyfriend’s phone ring, carried Isaac into the bathroom.
When her mother learned from a detective that Bolanos had confessed to killing Isaac, her mother assumed it was another delusion. “Kimberlynn would never do that,” the mother told a psychiatrist. “She loves that baby way too much.”
High bar for insanity defense
Had she gone to trial, Bolanos might have had a chance of convincing a jury she was not guilty by reason of insanity, said Mark Heyrman, a retired University of Chicago Law School professor who is an expert on mental illness and the justice system.
But as he noted, about 70,000 felony cases are closed out across Illinois and only about 85 people are found not guilty by reason of insanity. “The bar for being found insane is very high,” Heyrman said. “The bar for being found fit for trial is very low.”
The reason is that a person need only understand what they are doing is wrong, and understand the consequences, to be judged sane, he said.
In interviews with psychiatrists, Bolanos has been able to explain her rights and admits she knew her actions would harm her son and that she felt regret as she stabbed him.
Bolanos’s fear that “they” were going to take her child away because of her past drug use has been taken by some examiners to mean she was concerned about police or child protective services taking Isaac. But she also seemed concerned that authorities were working for the “people at the top” who intended to inflict pain on her son.
“The insanity defense should work if you can’t find a normal motive for the crime,” Heyrman said. “If you commit a crime to make more money because you’re a drug dealer, people can understand that.
“When you kill someone who is a natural object of affection, like your child, that’s not normal,” he said. “Is there some explanation other than mental illness?”
An attorney with knowledge of Bolanos’s case said she was adamant that she did not want a trial, which Heyrman said is not unusual for someone who is schizophrenic.
“The stress of trial aggravates all of their symptoms,” Heyrman said. “(Schizophrenics) make very difficult clients for defense attorneys.”
That left Bolanos the option of a bench trial or a guilty plea. Judge Burns, having denied requests to bar her confession based on mental illness, seemed not inclined to make a finding of insanity.
Nor was he inclined to leniency. Bolanos’s public defender asked Burns for a 20-year sentence, the minimum for the murder charge, in exchange for a plea of guilty but mentally ill. Burns said the lowest term he would agree to was 38 years.
Bolanos’ plea of guilty but mentally ill would entitle her to evaluation and treatment while in prison. But the state Department of Corrections has been sued for failing to provide adequate care for mentally ill inmates for years.
Had she been found insane, Bolanos would have been sent to a mental institution until she was ruled to be no longer a threat to herself or the public. “Very often, that will mean they end up institutionalized for longer than they would have been in prison for the same crime,” Heyrman said.
‘Bona fide doubt’
Five months after arriving at Logan Correctional Center, Bolanos was put under observation after she ran across a prison yard, screaming, “Shoot me!, shoot me!” On her fourth day, a prison guard “observed (Bolanos) standing naked at the end of her bed, bent over, with her thumb in her mouth.
“When (the guard) asked (Bolanos) if she was OK, (Bolanos) bent down with both of her eyes wide open and placed her open eyeball on the metal end of her bed.”
The following day, a guard looked into Bolanos’s cell and saw her covered with blood. She had plucked out her eyes.
Her attorneys in 2022 filed a petition to reconsider her sentence based on her diagnosis of postpartum psychosis, a condition that aggravated her long-standing mental illness. In a 12-page order that did not mention the injuries to her eyes, Burns dismissed the petition.
An appeals court sent the case back to Burns, asking that he address whether Bolanos was fit in light of her self-mutilation.
“We find defendant has sufficiently shown that the trial court would have found that a bona fide doubt of her fitness to plead guilty existed had the court known that, even on medication, her mental state was still sufficiently severe to lead her to gouge out her eyes,” the court wrote.