[sniffles]
[exhales]
When I made this recording, it was a couple
hours after I had discovered the hole in the yard.
I was thinking, what if she killed me right then and now
and dragged me into that hole?
Because...
no one makes a hole that big.
This is a picture of Delila and I.
It was taken last year.
For a moment, it felt like...
like the murder didn't happen.
We went through this trauma together.
I don't think it ever gets easier.
My sister and I will never be free from Karina.
The lasting effects of her abuse on us, mental
and emotional abuse, is always going to be within us.
[sniffles]
[The Paper Chase's "What's So Amazing About Grace?" plays]
[strings continue playing sinister tune]
[static crackling]
[knock at door] [creaking]
-[banging on door] -[creaking]
[water dripping]
[banging on door] [creaking]
[sinister chord strikes]
So in this picture,
it's my mom, it's Karina,
holding me as a baby.
I refer to her as Karina, and sometimes my mom,
because I have very mixed feelings about her.
And she is Karina to me, because she hurt someone...
that she shouldn't have, you know?
Not everyone is perfect by any means, but it
never allows you to take the action that she did.
I am the oldest, and then there are four boys and Delila.
My mom was 16 when she had me,
and she married my biological father.
She would tell me things like,
"If I didn't have you when I was younger,
"if I didn't get pregnant, I could be living
a different life."
And as a child, when you hear that,
it makes you feel like it was your fault.
But between me and Delila,
I would say Delila got the worst of it.
[sniffles]
DELILA: I'm scared of my mom.
[crying quietly]
I'm so scared. I'm so scared.
It's hard for me to talk about it.
I just pretend like it never happened,
and it does feel surreal.
It feels like a dream.
I think that my mother
is evil, and she had demons inside of her,
and I think that
she was struggling with something for so long.
I've repressed so much that sometimes I forget
what I was put through.
MAILINE: I've decided to come forward to
talk about what my mom did, because...
it's really made a lasting impact on our family
as a whole,
but also, I wanted to shed some light on
how domestic violence can take a really ugly turn.
I wrote how I felt in my diary, because if I said it out loud,
I would get verbally attacked and verbally abused by Karina.
"All those names, those orders.
"She doesn't deserve me.
"Even if her life is tough, she doesn't deserve to have me.
"She should never have had me in the first place.
She should have gotten an abortion."
My handwriting looks like
three different people wrote this.
I was so confused and distraught,
and I didn't know who I was.
You live with those words in your head your entire life.
You are never the same.
The first time I experienced physical abuse with
her is when she burned me with a spoon.
I went into the kitchen where my mom was cooking.
So I remember getting on the stool and just kind of,
like, looking over, trying --
trying to look over the best I could to see what was going on.
My mother is screaming at me
like, "What are you doing right here?"
Didn't I tell you not to stand by the stove?!
Then I remember this hot spoon just coming down onto my arm.
My left arm -- yeah, it's kind of disappearing, though.
Um...
Yeah, so it was my left arm,
and it was, like, right here,
and I remember it was right here, because,
for the longest time,
this is going to sound a little messed up,
but I was so proud to have a scar, because...
I was able to show that, yeah, she did hurt me.
Like, this is real, it happened.
My dad came home from work,
and he saw me crying, and he looked
at my arm, and he asked me what happened.
What's wrong, sweetie?
It just sounded fishy to him.
He called the police on her shortly after,
but no charges were ever officially pressed,
because he ended up dropping the charges,
and that happened a lot with her.
My dad wanted to make things easy, like, without having to
go to court and spending money on a lawyer and all that.
One night, my dad came home from work.
He noticed that the house smelled when he came in,
and he was like, "What is that in your hand?
What are you doing?"
He saw her pouring gasoline around the house.
She's like, "This house is just...
I'm gonna burn this house down."
Honey.
MAILINE: He was like, "What are you doing?
The kids are home."
And she just didn't answer him.
He was so afraid he couldn't stop her alone that he called
a relative, and the relative came over
and was able to sit her down.
She seemed to always kind of back
down when someone on the outside was involved.
There were things that she's done that terrified him.
I don't know what set her off that very night.
My dad even said he doesn't quite
know exactly either what set her off.
I know they were having their own marital problems.
You could leave, but her first
choice was to burn down the house.
Ever since then,
he was just terrified for his life, because
he wasn't sure why she would resort to that.
And I think she was capable of
setting the house on fire and burning it all down.
[music climbing]
Eventually, my parents decided that their marriage needed to
come to an end, and they got a divorce.
Years later, he said to me,
he doesn't think he would be here right now if he continued
to stay married to her, and he's glad he got out when he did.
So this is a picture of Kou and Karina.
My mom moved us all to Milwaukee, and she basically
moved on, you know,
dating and eventually meeting Kou, who became
our stepfather.
Karina and Kou had two more children.
And so my baby sister and baby brother were born.
I would say that this is the height of the relationship.
This is their honeymoon phase.
Karina didn't like that Kou was giving Delila attention.
DELILA: Kou treated me as his own daughter.
I grew up thinking he was my biological dad,
and I treated him as my biological dad.
My dad, he was fixing this one car for me.
Karina came out angry, and she
had grabbed a brick from the garden.
My mother started smashing bricks
into the windows of the car.
[glass shattering]
And my dad was out there yelling,
and my mother just stopped.
I think she did it to get his attention
and punish him.
-AS KOU: Are you nuts? -Oh, so now you pay attention.
DELILA: He knew that my mom was crazy,
but he loved Karina,
and he couldn't separate his kids from their mom.
I was scared that she was going to hurt him or herself,
and I couldn't do anything about it.
My mom would install cameras to the front yard of our house
and then to our backyard,
and for some odd reason, she added a camera into the kitchen
and a camera into the living room.
I found out that those cameras
were actually used to stalk my dad.
I remember after school, we were just sitting in her car,
and she would pop up her app,
which connects to the cameras, and she would constantly check
up on him and see what he was doing.
This isn't for robberies, this is for
you to constantly check up on my dad.
I did confront her, and I told her,
"Why are you so obsessed with him?"
And she responded,
"You never know what he's doing.
What if he's cheating on me?"
MAILINE: She did stalk him.
One time, she's like, "We have to go.
"We need to go find out where he is.
He should be home right now."
So we go, and we're driving around.
There's a lot of townhomes and apartments,
and she's like, "Which one is it?
He's down here somewhere."
She's trying to call him, and he's not answering, and I'm just
sitting here like, oh, my God, what is going to happen?
We pull up to one, and she, like, goes and checks,
and he's not there.
She was just obsessed with
the fact that he was cheating on her.
We drive home, because we couldn't find him.
Then a big fight ensued when he came home.
AS KARINA: You think I'm stupid?
I know you weren't at work.
MAILINE: I was always just confused why he stayed
with her, and he still did things for her.
He was still kind to her.
It's just -- I don't understand, and I
don't think I ever will, what happened there.
AS KARINA: Stop lying to me!
He loved her, for whatever reason, that he felt some type
of love towards her,
and he stayed with her, even though she was
horrible to him.
I did feel bad,
because he didn't deserve all of that.
I think he should have gotten out.
DELILA: I remember I was sitting down at
the kitchen table, and I was eating.
My mom had bought
some kind of rat killer
chemical.
She was telling me,
"Oh, you know, I'm going to poison your dad.
I'm so mad at him."
I was getting used to her threats.
At that time,
I didn't feel like she was capable of doing it.
She would often tell him, like, "I poison your food," or
"I switch your medication out with other things,"
and he was terrified.
She did have, like, a nursing background.
She would use that and say,
"I know how to kill you."
I was scared -- I remember one time saying,
"Mom, don't say that."
Dinner's almost ready.
This is for Kou.
MAILINE: Kou was scared.
He was just scared to be living with her.
Like, she was just so obsessed with him.
How does a person live with
someone who is just obsessive over their --
every little aspect of their life?
I feel like he couldn't live, and he couldn't breathe.
He would tell me to keep an eye out for her doing
weird things.
He would say, like, "If something happens to me,
your mom did this."
He told me one time he waits for her to fall asleep before
he falls asleep.
I'm like...
that's very real and scary.
In April of 2011, Kou came to
my room in the middle of the night.
He's like, "Your mom is trying to set the house on fire."
I was like, oh, my God, what?
So I got up, like, quick to go see what
she was doing and see if she was really doing this.
The gas stove was on, and she was ripping newspaper
up and throwing the newspaper pieces into the gas burner.
And I'm like, "Mom, you need to stop."
Mom, please.
And then she grabbed a knife that was on the counter next to
her, and she's, like, waving
it at me, and she's like, "Get out of here and go back to bed
and mind your business."
Kou's telling me,
"It's okay. Let's go back to your room,
and we'll call the cops."
And so we start walking down the hallway,
and, all of a sudden, Kou, like, winces
in pain, he's like, "Ow, that hurt."
And I look, and it's a small knife,
and she threw it at him into his shoulder.
I said, "There's a knife in your back."
And I called 911.
The cops arrest Karina and take her to jail for the night.
I was afraid for my life that night, and then
I became afraid of nights for a long time after.
Kou dropped the case, and he told us he was
going to go back to live with her.
I just thought that was crazy.
Kou is telling me, "You need to call your dad.
"He needs to come pick you guys up.
It's not safe for you anymore."
I called my dad, and he's like, "Okay, yeah, I'm coming."
I was happy to go live with him,
but I was worried about Kou, because she's just
such a wild card.
Karina's actions are increasingly getting worse.
I never know what she's going to do.
I was afraid that Kou was being
left alone in a dangerous place with Karina.
[exhales, sniffles]
It was pretty common for her to call me
names every day, and I was pretty used to it.
I feel really, really sad when I listen to it,
because I remember
during this time, I was so miserable and so depressed.
I don't want to remember my mom like this,
but scars from emotional and verbal abuse
can last forever.
They were able to do an order protection for, um, us kids
so that my dad had custody of us for a whole year.
The day it expired, Karina came and got Delila
and her brother first, and then
she came and got another brother, and there was nothing
that anyone could do about it.
AS KARINA: Let's go!
MAILINE: And so after that, like, my dad,
he couldn't do anything, because she had the right to
take him, and...
we were just flabbergasted that she was able to do this.
We were all devastated,
and I hated her for what she did.
She split the family in half now.
Us three older ones went with my dad,
and then the three younger ones went with her.
I was afraid for the kids at the house.
I did feel guilty that Delila had to
become her punching bag now.
She didn't deserve any of that. Nobody deserves that.
I definitely felt like I needed to
protect my younger siblings and be responsible
and step up, because...
I didn't know
what my mother was going to do next.
Karina was getting more psychotic
and more aggressive with Kou.
AS KOU: Why do you always do this?
AS KARINA: Because you never listen!
I was very depressed, and I didn't know how to handle
their issues and handle my emotions
and handle my younger siblings.
I felt lonely as the oldest
daughter at home, to be witnessing firsthand
and feeling like I didn't have a fiscal support system.
AS KARINA: Go ahead, take your shot!
AS KOU: You are insane!
My mom was constantly telling me to
not keep in touch with my sister.
Kou came into my bedroom one day
and told me seriously,
"I'm sick and tired of your mother bullying me."
Their relationship was always getting worse.
I always hung out with my friends after school,
and I had gotten a call
from my mom, and my mom was asking me
to stay overnight at my friend's.
I don't even have my clothes here.
Usually, she doesn't let me sleep over at my friend's.
The next day, my mom asked me to stay overnight again.
[phone buzzing]
I was like, why?
I already stayed one night.
So why do you want me to stay another night?
And she wouldn't answer me why.
She told me, "I love you."
She would never say
affectionate things.
I counted three times where she said "I love you" to me.
So I thought it was pretty odd.
After coming back from my sleepover,
I came into the house, and I asked where dad was,
and they said that mom had told them that he
was going to go stay at a relative's.
I asked them if they wanted to go play outside,
because I haven't seen them in awhile,
and I wanted to spend some time with them.
When we went outside to play,
I saw my mom.
My mom looked wary, and she looked uncomfortable.
I saw a huge hole dug in her garden,
and it was covered with some tarp-like material.
I'm not thinking much of it, but I joke around, and I say,
"What if there's a dead body down there?"
And my siblings and I just laugh it off, and my mom is back
there, and she says,
"I'm just building a shed there."
It wasn't unusual for my mom to have projects in the yard.
Why?
Her reasoning to make the shed was to increase
the value of the house, because she planned to sell it.
She began to work on the shed a couple of days later.
The days passed, and Kou still didn't come home.
On the third day, when he wasn't home,
I messaged him and asked him
where he was, and I had no reply,
but my message was delivered.
I didn't believe he went away.
It wasn't like him.
He wouldn't leave his kids like that.
When I asked her about where my dad was, she would
go crazy, and she would yell
and cry and act crazy.
[sighs heavily]
I started recording, because I had
an intuition that something was off.
I...
asked where my dad was, and...
this was her response.
I knew something was wrong when
her response was so harsh and dismissive.
It kind of looks like where you would bury a body.
I remember texting Mailine about
the strange things going on in the house.
I started to think something's wrong.
DELILA: Kou had been gone for two weeks,
and my mother started cleaning up the house.
Most of the work being done was in the parents' bedroom,
and my mother told my siblings
and I to not enter the room at all.
One day, my friend came over, and I told her what was
going on -- we waited for my mom to leave the house.
We go check the bedroom.
We look in the closet -- nothing, there's no clothes
in there, no sign of my dad,
and the mattress is covered by a cloth.
That room was just so empty and eerie and just creepy.
We uncover the cloth,
and in the mattress, we find a cutout hole,
and I'm like, that's weird.
Why would the mattress be cut out?
That's the side that my dad usually sleeps.
We hear my mom coming back home,
so we cover the cloth back onto
the mattress, and we leave the bedroom as it was.
I remember texting Mailine.
It was just overall really odd that
the mattress was cut out the way it was.
I'm like, nobody does that, and why is she keeping that bed?
Now that's definitely something that
we should be worried about.
Things were starting to add up that Karina did something.
She texted me,
what if mom did murder Kou?
If she did, she's [bleep] crazy.
There's no other way to describe what's happening
right now other than
she killed him, and now she's hiding it.
DELILA: My younger sister had sent me a text
saying, "Mommy's suspicious,"
and I asked her why, and she explained to
me that mom was going to take her shopping, but instead,
they took an hour-long ride to the park.
When they arrived, my mom,
she took a trash bag and threw it somewhere in the park,
and they left.
I was asking what kind of object did you see
in the trash bag?
But my sister couldn't really remember.
Who would drive an hour away from home to a park,
a really big park, and just throw a trash bag away
over there?
That's a little inconvenient to throw one bag of trash away.
Did she throw away the murder weapon?
Is that what she threw away?
I just remember, every day when I
would wake up, I would be scared,
because who knows what's going to happen that day?
I was pretty hesitant about calling
the police, because I wasn't 100 percent sure if
my mother was actually capable of doing this,
but I went through with it.
I was telling the police officer all the things I found
and all the things I've heard from my mom.
Yeah, I think she might have done something.
The hole being dug and building a shed on top of it.
My dad and his stuff are gone,
and he's not replying to my texts,
and the mattress has a hole cut out.
[quietly] No...what?
DELILA: I was on the phone call for two hours.
The police officer that I'm talking to doesn't
tell me if they believe me or not.
I took a huge risk by working with law enforcement.
I changed the names of the officers on my phone
so that she wouldn't see that they were officers.
-Who's that? -Um, just a friend.
When Delila told me that she was working with the police,
I was scared.
I was worried for her safety.
I was worried what would happen if Karina
found out that she was communicating with them.
You're gonna be late.
So I told Delila, I'm like, you need to be very careful.
DELILA: We were cleaning up the house so
that she could put it up for sale.
We were in the basement cleaning, and all of a sudden,
there's two men outside, and they're knocking on the door,
ringing the doorbell,
[doorbell rings]
and immediately, I knew it was the police officers.
OFFICER: Anybody home in there?
My mom saw on the camera and knew that it was them.
[knocking noises]
She told us to be quiet, to settle down,
and she turned off all the lights.
-[doorbell ringing] -[knocking noises]
OFFICER: Hello in there, anybody home?
We were just quiet,
just waiting down in the basement, and I was texting
the police officer like, "Hey,
she's ignoring you on purpose."
They left, and they did the same thing next day,
and my mom had the same reaction the next day.
I felt disappointed when they left, because I wasn't
sure if they were going to keep on persisting.
We're taking our belongings, and we're leaving the place.
And I'm texting the sergeant, "We're leaving."
As we step out,
the police officer came out,
handcuffed her, and read her Miranda rights.
When my mother was being handcuffed and taken away,
she looked furious.
She turned back at me and said,
"Don't tell the police officers anything."
I immediately updated my sister, Mailine.
At that point, I was feeling very relieved.
I knew that Delila was safe.
Part of me was a little worried.
I was thinking, what if Karina
finds out that Delila helped orchestrate this?
I felt like there was still a possibility of her getting
away, because we're just used to her getting caught,
getting let go.
Is Karina going to get out again
like she always does?
DELILA: I was still worried where Kou was,
and I was hoping that he would pop up.
The sergeant had told me that they
had gotten a search warrant for my house.
They removed the shed,
and then they dug up the hole, and they had found a body.
I didn't want it to be my dad so bad.
I really wanted it to be someone else besides my dad.
I know it sounds horrible, but I really wish it wasn't my dad.
The police called Mailine, and I was in the same room.
He confirmed that it was my dad's body,
and I remember crying so hard.
I felt guilty that I hadn't catched on sooner,
and I also feel disgusted,
because I was living in that house
while he was in the backyard.
The sergeant told me that once they found his body,
and they told Karina that his body was found in the yard,
she did admit to killing him.
I was devastated.
My siblings were there listening, and I was devastated
for them, because that was their dad,
and hearing them cry for the first time
in a long time, that hurt.
This is a mug shot of Karina
after she was arrested for murdering Kou.
This is the her that I always kind
of knew was there, that I was scared of.
I always feel torn when I see
pictures of her, because I missed my mother,
and then I hate her
because of everything she's done to me.
[sniffles]
I just need a minute.
[sniffles]
I believe it was premeditated.
However, she claims it was not.
And she claims that he raped her,
and then...
she waited for him to fall asleep and got her gun
and shot him twice in the head while he was sleeping.
Everything seemed too pre-planned for her to
have killed him because of this one event.
There were too many things already put
into motion for me to truly believe her.
I think a part of me
didn't want to believe that my mother really did do it.
But part of me wanted justice for my dad.
I learned that my mother had shot him twice
in the back of his head while he was sleeping.
Then my mother dragged him from
the bedroom all the way to the backyard.
She dug a hole for his body
and put his body down there.
And she covered some tarp-like material over his body.
[exhales shakily]
[sniffles]
I'm trying not to worry so much about the future
just because there's so much time until she gets out.
But I am going to be prepared for it.
I will make sure that my siblings and I are safe.
I don't care if she knows that I helped with
law enforcement, because I know that I did the right thing.
I am proud of what I did -- I'm proud of that.
I have mixed emotions about her.
I hate her, I love her, and I miss her.
But I also don't miss her.
I don't want her to be near around me,
and I don't have any plans on
contacting her anytime soon, and I don't
plan on seeing her in the future.
MAILINE: I do think about when she's going to be out.
Is she going to try to reach out to
my younger siblings, who I now have custody of?
I want no contact with her.
She's just a mother by name, but we have no relationship.
The evil in her just kept growing.
And every time she got away with doing something horrible,
it grew bigger.
And somewhere along the way, she lost her moral compass.
And when you lose that, there's nothing to stop you
from doing anything.