The Nanny Murder Trial We Can't Look Away From

Why it’s impossible to watch and impossible to look away.

- Maureen O'Connor

Relief washed over a packed courtroom and exhausted jury when the people of New York rested their case against former nanny Yoselyn Ortega for the murders of Lucia and Leo Krim. The feeling was a little like at the end of a grueling movie, when the lights come up and everyone in the audience exhales simultaneously. “I didn’t cry until today,” a court reporter said, shaking her head and dabbing an eye. “What the hell—?” a man said, palms raised in disbelief, gesturing at Ortega and her defense lawyers.

The story of how 6-year-old Lucia and 2-year-old Leo died five years ago reads like a dark fairy tale for contemporary urban life: A happy family hires a nanny. She rarely speaks but performs her duties with quiet competence. She rarely complains. She never asks for a raise. She wears a uniform without being told to. But then, subtly, her behavior changes. The mother suspects resentment but cannot explain the shift. One day, the nanny fails to rendezvous with the mother. She’s never been late before. And as night falls on October 25, 2012, the mother, Marina Krim, searches her dark and empty Upper West Side home, calling her children’s names. “It was like a total horror movie,” Krim would later testify. At the end of a long hall, she sees a crack of light from the bathroom door. There, she finds her children and her nanny, transformed by unspeakable violence: “She’s all covered in blood, and her eyes are bugged out,” Krim would recall, in emotionally volatile testimony that culminated in her screaming, “You’re evil! You’re evil!” The nanny had stabbed two of her children to death with a kitchen knife and stacked their bodies in the tub.