THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, September 29, 1995 TAG: 9509290490
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY LAURA LAFAY, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CHESAPEAKE LENGTH: Medium: 84 lines
Janice Marie Eastman, the Deep Creek woman who bludgeoned her husband and children to death two days before Christmas, was taken off a respirator Thursday and was not expected to survive the night.
Eastman, 33, has been unconscious and in critical condition at Chesapeake General Hospital since deputies found her hanging from the bars of her Chesapeake jail cell Thursday morning. The incident was the last of several suicide attempts, according to one of her lawyers, Stephen P. Givando.
``Perhaps in one sense this is the best resolution to what was an absolutely horrible, impossible situation,'' Givando said Thursday.
``Janice was not a monster. She was a severely mentally ill, emotionally disturbed woman who was devoted to her family. And yet she committed an act that was so heinous, she was so ridden with guilt, her life was absolutely unbearable to her.''
Eastman had been held in the jail without bond since Dec. 23, the morning after she went from bedroom to bedroom in her Deep Creek ranch house, using an 11-inch kitchen knife and a sledgehammer to kill her husband and two children as they slept.
Eastman had also intended to kill herself that night, Givando said.
``Her desire to kill herself was what set everything else in motion,'' he said. ``She felt that her existence was, in some way, a punishment for her family.''
Although Eastman had no history of mental illness, co-workers at a Deep Creek child-care center where she volunteered were stunned when they saw her after the summer of 1994, Givando said. She had lost about 60 pounds and become withdrawn.
That fall, Eastman's husband, Kenneth, lost his job. Near Halloween, Eastman was diagnosed as depressed and delusional. She was hospitalized for five days at a Virginia Beach psychiatric center.
She was haunted by the cost of her stay there, Givando said. She was worried that her family would suffer because of it.
``She was filled with such self-loathing,'' he said. ``I mean absolute contempt for herself. I've never met anyone with such an abject sense of worthlessness. In some sense, I think she felt she was responsible for everyone in her family. And I think she felt completely incapable of meeting their needs. In her mind, since she had failed so abysmally at that, she thought it would be unfair to kill herself without taking them with her.''
But after killing her family on Dec. 22, Eastman was unable to kill herself.
During the next nine months, most of which she spent in a cell in the Chesapeake jail, she tried again. Repeatedly.
When deputies took all of her potentially dangerous possessions away, Eastman took off her clothes, tied them together and tried to strangle herself. One attempt left a pronounced bruise on her neck, Givando said. Finally, deputies took away her clothes as well.
Eastman spent long periods of time sitting alone and naked in her cell, Givando said. Occasionally, she refused to meet with her court-appointed lawyers.
``She thought we were interfering with her desire to end her life by defending her on this charge,'' Givando said.
Givando and his co-counsel, Randall Smith, asked that Eastman be sent to Central State mental hospital for treatment. She was taken there Aug. 10 and returned to the jail Sept. 8. While there, she was put on anti-depressant medication. The medication may have elevated her mood just enough to enable her to carry out her suicide, Givando said.
On Wednesday morning, she waited until a deputy came to escort a woman in a neighboring cell to the shower. Knowing they wouldn't return for 10 minutes, she hanged herself with a rope she had made with ripped-up bed sheets. The deputies who discovered her had trouble getting in to cut her down. She had jammed the lock with pieces of orange peel, paper and eraser, and tied sheet strips around the doorjamb.
Eastman's remaining family - her parents and two sisters - live in Washington state. They asked the hospital about donating her organs but were told that prolonged lack of oxygen had rendered them useless, Givando said.
No one in the family had the money to fly to Virginia on Wednesday, Givando said. But when Eastman dies, they will fly her home.
Eastman's trial on three counts of capital murder had been scheduled for Oct. 17.
KEYWORDS: MURDER ARREST SUICIDE ATTEMPT by CNB