The chapel erupted. Screams. Gasps. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think. Antifreeze. She had poisoned my sons with antifreeze because she thought they were expensive.
The police arrived within minutes. The sirens wailed outside, a discordant harmony to the chaos inside. Diane tried to recant immediately, claiming grief-induced hysteria, but the damage was done. Too many witnesses. A recorded confession on someone’s phone.
They arrested her in front of the altar.
The investigation moved with terrifying speed. Because of Emma’s testimony and Diane’s outburst, the police ordered an immediate exhumation of the bodies—bodies that hadn’t even been buried yet. I had to sign the papers on the hood of a police cruiser outside the funeral home, my hand shaking so badly I could barely form my signature.
Forty-eight hours later, the toxicology reports came back.
Detective Sarah Mitchell sat me down in her office. She looked tired. She had kids of her own, she told me.
“High levels of ethylene glycol,” she said softly. “In both boys. It confirms everything Emma said. We also found the jug in Diane’s garage, fingerprints and all. And her search history… God, Sarah. She looked up ‘dosage for infants’.”
I didn’t cry. I was past crying. I felt a cold, hard stone form in the center of my chest.
Trevor tried to call me that night. He was staying with his father, Robert. I let it go to voicemail. He left a message, sobbing, apologizing, begging to see Emma.
I deleted it. He had grabbed me. He had told me to get lost. He had chosen the murderer over the mother.
The trial date was set. And I knew, with a certainty that frightened me, that I was going to burn their entire world to the ground.
The trial of The State vs. Diane Morrison became a national spectacle. News vans camped on my lawn. Headlines screamed about the “Granny Killer.”
I sat in the courtroom every single day. I wanted her to see me. I wanted her to look into the eyes of the woman whose life she had tried to dismantle.
Diane’s defense attorney, a shark named Patricia Hendrix, tried everything. She argued insanity. She argued that the confession at the funeral was the result of a “psychotic break” induced by grief. She tried to paint Diane as a confused, elderly woman who had snapped under the pressure of caring for a growing family.
