Darlie Routier: Doting Mother/Deadly Mother

Darlie Routier, the caller, spurted, sobbed, gasped and moaned a terrible  tale unheard of in the up-until-then pleasant, placid suburb. "While I was sleeping...me and my little boys were sleeping downstairs...someone came in...stabbed my babies.... stabbed me...I woke up...I was fighting...he ran out through the garage...threw the knife down..."

"How old are your boys?" Trammell pursued, and learned that the injured children were six and five. Devon and Damon were their names. In the meantime, a squad had detected the emergency vehicle wired by Trammell and reported to the dispatcher it was on its way to the Routier address.

Twenty-eight-year-old Darin Routier had been awakened from sleep upstairs by his wife Darlie's screams and now rushed downstairs into the family's entertainment room. Before he had gone to bed hours earlier, the last he had seen of that den was a domestic scene: his children lying on the floor watching their big screen television and Darlie lying on the sofa near them, looking sexy in her Victoria's Secret nightshirt.  

Now, his two boys, Devon and Damon, lay blood-soaked while Darlie, her nightshirt covered in blood, paced in a paroxysm of panic shouting at the police dispatcher into the portable phone. Says Barbara Davis in her book, Precious Angels, "He saw blood everywhere... Darin rushed to Devon's side (and) saw two huge gashes in his son's chest where the six-year-old had been stabbed repeatedly. Checking for a pulse and feeling none, he looked at Devon's face. Eyes wide open...stared vacantly back." He then turned towards the other boy, five-year-old Damon, lying near a wall, his back to the room. "A small amount of blood was oozing through the back of his shorts," writes Davis. "Damon's lungs rattled as he struggled to suck in air.

"Torn between two sons, the horrified father momentarily panicked, then made the decision to begin cardiopulmonary resuscitation on the son who was not breathing. Darin placed his hand over Devon's nose and breathed into his child's mouth. Blood sprayed back onto the father's face."

Policeman David Waddell was the first officer to arrive on the scene; he could not believe what he saw, had never seen anything like this as a lawman in that town. He sickened at the sight and the overwhelming smell of blood. Breathing deeply to contain his senses, the officer quickly surveyed the two children one appeared dead, the other with but a hint of a pulse and instructed Darlie to lay towels across Damon and apply pressure to his wounds. She ignored him which he thought strange, even in her frantic state but only continued to scream at the officer that the intruder might still be in the garage where he had fled.

Waddell was soon joined by another policeman, Sergeant Matthew Walling, and by a paramedic team of Jack Kolbye and Brian Koschak. Like Waddell, they paused at the threshold of the scene, momentarily disarmed by the top-heavy staleness of death. The paramedics immediately realized that they couldn't handle this carnage alone two children dead or dying and an adult woman soaked in blood, a bloody rag pressed to her throat   and radioed for backup.