The moment I learned that I was pregnant, I began sleeping badly, waking up before daybreak with a feeling of vague dread. It was the summer of 2023. My oldest daughter, now five, had been the result of an ignominious I.V.F. “journey,” and her birth had been followed by years of infertility. In my mind, it was a foregone conclusion that my husband and I would never have another child. Yet there I was, forty-five years old and unmistakably storked.

I felt guilty for not being elated. I tried to describe my ambivalence to my husband: after all we’d been through, I wanted to focus on work; there was no way we could afford it; another child would disrupt our family dynamics. As much as I loved being a mother, I found myself secretly wishing the baby away.

It was in the midst of these discordant emotions that I found her, in an old article in People magazine. She stared at me from the screen. Her eyebrows were arched, making her seem shocked, or possibly recalcitrant. The headline—“N.J. Mom Found Guilty of Killing Toddler Son, Burning Body and Burying Him in Yard”—jolted me. “Nakira Griner reportedly admitted to police that she’d hit the child because he wouldn’t ‘eat nor listen to her,’ ” the writer stated. A neighbor was quoted as saying that Griner was, “like, the most genuine person in the whole world.” The woman went on: “My kids were close with her and her kids were close with me. I just don’t know what to do.”

I read the piece several times, then looked for more articles about this mother of two who had committed the ultimate transgression. A report on CBS News described her as an “aspiring YouTube personality” in Bridgeton, New Jersey. On February 8, 2019, she had called 911 in a panic to say that her toddler son had been kidnapped. Later, during her trial, she admitted through her lawyer to burning and dismembering his body, then hiding it in her back yard. I couldn’t get the image out of my mind—it was horrifying, unfathomable. I remember thinking, Who would do such a thing?

I usually spent my days editing a fashion journal, but, suddenly, my focus was elsewhere. I tracked down her videos on YouTube, in which she shared her love of clothes and designer handbags. In one video, uploaded around six months before her son died, she dutifully explained consignment shopping to her modest follower count and showed off her favorite monogrammed Louis Vuitton bag. I also found pictures of her late son, a toddler with dark, curly hair and a sweet expression.

As my belly grew, and resignation about my pregnancy turned into acceptance and then anticipation, I couldn’t stop thinking about Nakira. Earlier that year, she had been convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Nearly every afternoon, I Googled her to see if there had been any new developments in her case.

It wasn’t long before I began researching other stories about women convicted of killing their children. Mothers who beat, shook, shot, drowned, strangled, and stabbed their babies. Mothers who placed their babies in the microwave and turned it on. There were days when I did little else besides read about one harrowing scenario after another, cataloguing them on my computer. I scrutinized the photos of these women. Some glared back at me with a wild, defiant gaze. Others seemed meek, with downcast eyes that refused to meet the camera. I realized that I was looking for something in their eyes, a sign—anything that might explain how a mother could turn against her own child.

I would end up going down a rabbit hole, trying to understand. In the course of my research, I interviewed members of Nakira’s family and several attorneys and investigators who worked on the case. I spoke to sociologists and criminologists, legal scholars and mental-health professionals, all of whom study the intersection between motherhood and violence in one way or another. The experts emphasized that a woman’s childhood often plays a key role: isolation, neglect, abuse, and generational trauma appear in numerous filicide cases. Yet many studies have found that most women who commit filicide have, like Nakira, never been in trouble with the law before. When I discussed the case with Anna Motz, a British forensic psychologist who has worked with violent women in England for more than three decades, she observed, of her experience interviewing women who have been convicted of killing their children, “There’s always a bit of self-preservation. I’m not a monster, I’m not a bad person.”

Nakira’s mug shot showed a young Black woman with dark hair gathered at the nape of her neck, green eyes staring intently into the camera. I studied one photo of her wearing felted reindeer antlers and looking at her son, who is balanced on her hip. She was a mother, like the ones I saw every day at school drop-off, as I kissed and waved goodbye to my daughter in the morning.

The story of Nakira Griner’s crime and her subsequent trial had made the rounds on TikTok. Her case was shocking in the exact way that true-crime buffs appreciate: a nonsensical act; an innocent victim; an unlikely, photogenic perpetrator. But, aside from a dormant Facebook page and the YouTube videos, I couldn’t find much of anything about what her circumstances had been beforehand. I was curious about her past—her relationship with her own mother, what she had been like as a young girl. What had her expectations of motherhood been? And what was it, on that particular day, that caused her to snap?

On impulse, I decided to write to her. Nakira was now an inmate at the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women, in Clinton, New Jersey. Writing an inmate is surprisingly straightforward in the United States—a company called JPay allowed me to correspond with Nakira at thirty-five cents per e-mail.

“Dear Nakira,” I began. “I’m a writer, living in Paris, France.” I ventured: “I would love to talk with you about your life, in and out of prison.” She wrote back the same day: “Um if i am being honest i’ve been approached by many, and i’m almost sure that there wil be more to come. And i am very skeptical about not only you but this whole process entirely.”

I appreciated her shrewdness. I’d read on prison-pen-pal websites that one should be tactful in asking about an inmate’s crime, so I stayed away from the topic. Instead, I asked her about life at E.M.C.F.W. “Prison is soo much better than jail,” she replied. “You can live here, feel the breeze on your skin here, get wet by the rain here, make snowballs here, get a suntan here, touch blades of grass here. Moral of the story I can live here.”

As we began exchanging messages, she asked me at least as many questions as I asked her, including “why this topic and why now.” By this time, I had decided to write about maternal filicide, and I tried to explain my reasons as best I could: “I became a mother myself some years ago, and with it the cultural and societal expectations and pressures of motherhood became very real.” I told her I had realized that rather than interrogating the underlying issues—the kind that might cause a mother to break—we prefer to scapegoat such women. “It’s the woman in the mugshot who is the problem,” I wrote. “She’s the monster. Lock her up and throw away the key. Because any ambivalence I might feel towards my own children, any sense of weariness, despair or ‘mom-rage’ is not at all the same because . . . I am not her.”

Over the following months, we built a kind of rapport. When I told her that I was pregnant, she thanked me for sharing. “I honestly appreciate that,” she wrote. “Because most people including family tend to hide things like that from me assuming anything baby related is a trigger.” When work got busy and I didn’t write to her for a little while, she worried about me (“knowing that you are 8 months pregnant i just want to make sure”). And when I gave birth to a baby girl, she congratulated me.

My eldest daughter turned six. She knew that I was writing to a woman in prison, and she was curious in the oddly specific way that kids can be—not about what Nakira had done (for which I was grateful, because what on earth would I have told her?) but about what she ate, what she wore, whether she was allowed to have stuffies in her cell. I shared my daughter’s questions with Nakira, and she diligently answered each one: she ate in her room; she wore a khaki-colored uniform; and she had a beloved Ike from “South Park” stuffie, made by another inmate.

By then, Nakira had begun sharing details with me about her childhood, her marriage, and her surviving son, whom I’ll call J.J. Nine months old when his brother died and his mother was first sent to jail, he was now the same age as my daughter, and, she said, he spoke to his mom over the phone every day. “When i need to smile i think about the times i currently have with J.J. on the phone & our many conversations,” she wrote to me, in May, 2024. “The terrible but super cute pictures that he sends me.” Then, in July: “The only reason I’m alive today is because J.J. is.”

Little by little, she also told me about Baby Dan, her late son, who had died a month shy of his second birthday. In one e-mail, I mentioned that my two-month-old baby refused to settle down unless I played Enrique Iglesias, and she replied that every time Baby Dan had needed a diaper change, she’d had “to rap a specific Kodak Black song for him called No Flockin or he would loose it.” Nakira told me that she preferred not to think about that time, though—the good memories or the bad. “The pain outweighs it all,” she said.

I never asked her exactly what had happened, and she never offered to tell me. She didn’t “knowingly, purposefully or intentionally” end her son’s life, she wrote at one point. Then, in the same e-mail, “accepting the fact that your child would still be here if it weren’t for you is inexplicably detrimental to the heart.”

I had been corresponding with Nakira for months when my husband and I decided to leave Paris for New York with our children for work reasons. But I knew that the move might also help me get to know Nakira better: in the U.S., I could speak to her on the phone, or perhaps even meet her in person.

In her e-mails, Nakira described a childhood “surrounded by squalor. Abandoned houses, empty syringes & bottles of liquor.” Her mother, Melissa Fuller, grew up in Vineland, New Jersey, and ran away from home at fifteen; she was eventually put in foster care. At seventeen, Melissa met an older, married man in nearby Bridgeton and became pregnant. Nakira James was born in 1994; her younger sister, Lasha Trussell, was born two years later, to a different father. The girls sometimes lived with their grandmother or an aunt, other times with their mother and Lasha’s father, who was a part of the sisters’ lives on and off until he was convicted of armed bank robbery in 2003.

Nakira told me that she was never really sure who her father was. When she was around ten, her mother started seeing a new man, and the family moved in with him; Melissa told Nakira that he was her father. It was Christmastime, and his house was full of gifts. Nakira was confused but decided to focus on “the pretty things.” They lived there for about a year until, one day, Melissa and her boyfriend had an argument; afterward, her mother blurted out that the man wasn’t her father, and she and the girls immediately moved out.

Following that experience, Nakira recalled being constantly on the move. “Me and my sister tallied it,” she told me. “We must’ve lived in at least twenty different places throughout our childhood.” Sometimes the family stayed in their car, but the girls were also left for long stretches with various friends of their mom’s. Nakira’s sister Lasha said, of their upbringing, “I was always confused.” Melissa “never told us when she was leaving, never told us when she’d be back.”

Lasha, a stay-at-home mom of three young children, lives in Florida now. Over the phone, she recollected her mother’s violent temper. “Everything we did, even something small, it always felt very big,” she said. “Like you could go in the fridge and drink a sip of juice that my mom wanted, and she’ll beat you bloody. And it’s for drinking juice, you know.” After remembering a traumatic moment, Lasha would giggle, short and sharp; she called it her “coping mechanism.”

Nakira, too, had vivid memories of their mother’s anger. At some point in elementary school, Nakira told me, her mother found a note from a boy in her pocket, saying how much he liked her. Irate, Melissa punched Nakira in the face, then used makeup to cover the bruises. She coached her daughter to say that she’d taken a snowball to the face, should anyone ask. (No one did.) There were some attempts at normalcy. In one e-mail to me, Nakira recalled “going to the Rite Aid early in the A.M.” with Lasha every day before school. They would brush their teeth and wash their faces in the public rest room while their mom waited in the car. On their way out, they would swipe a snack and a soft drink for breakfast. (Melissa denies her daughters’ accusations of abuse.)

When I called Melissa, she was on break at an Inspira Health hospital in Woodbury, New Jersey, where, at the time, she said that she was working as a supervisor. She told me that the family would move when she “couldn’t keep up on the rent,” and that this had happened only “around four or five times.” “I didn’t have challenges with my kids until they became teen-agers,” she said. “They really didn’t need too much discipline.” She continued, “I would give them that look and they know I’m not playing around.”

Nakira was often late for school or missed it altogether. Although she was a good student, she was self-conscious about her “dirty clothes” and “disheveled hair,” as she later told a forensic assessor. During breaks, she would hide in the girls’ bathroom to avoid other students. She imagined a future where she’d be famous, but, she told me, “most importantly I wanted to be a mother.” “I had so many toy babies & strollers. It was my favorite thing to play, A mom,” she wrote. “So much so that my great aunts had a problem with it surprisingly. And forbade me to keep playing a mom and be happy actually being a child.”

She was nineteen and working as a cashier at Wawa, a local convenience store, when she met her future husband, Daniel Griner, who was a customer. He was twenty-six and on a leave of absence from a nursing school nearby. “It was love at first sight,” she wrote. “I went home and told my mom if this white boy comes in one more time he’ll be my husband.” The couple got married on Valentine’s Day, 2017, and Nakira James, who was by then seven months pregnant, became Nakira Griner. Three weeks later, their son Daniel Joshua Griner, Jr., was born. Everyone called him Baby Dan.

Daniel, Sr., became a nurse at an Inspira Health in Vineland, and the couple began their married life in a two-story clapboard house on a quiet, leafy street about an hour away, in Bridgeton. Nakira had long craved stability, and for a brief, hopeful moment, it looked as if that was what she had: a husband with a good job; a baby boy; and a house of her own, where, she told me, she dreamed of keeping “report cards from when he was in kindergarten,” as there had been in her husband’s childhood home. “I was willing to really endure almost anything to give him that,” she said.

When her son was five months old, Nakira got pregnant again. Her first pregnancy hadn’t been easy: Baby Dan was delivered almost two months early because Nakira developed preeclampsia. Afterward, she told me, she had experienced postpartum anxiety, paranoia, and depression. She was acutely aware that a new mother should have an “overwhelming feeling of love towards the baby,” but she had “just felt numb,” she said. Her symptoms were never officially diagnosed, but she said that they never went away. During her second pregnancy, she told me, she developed a condition called hyperemesis gravidarum, which causes severe nausea and frequent vomiting. After another difficult birth, she found herself home alone with two babies. She wrote to me, describing “extreme paranoia & being set off by my babies cry” during those early days. “I couldn’t understand why it made me feel the way it did,” she added. Still, Nakira kept her struggles to herself. “She put on a good show when she talked to me,” her mother said. “That’s one thing I can say,” she went on. “We can act as though nothing is bothering us, but on the inside we’re dying.”

Nakira attempted to describe the turbulence inside her head to her husband. But Daniel worked twelve-hour shifts; when he got home, he would often stare at his phone, too exhausted to pay attention to his wife’s unravelling. Nakira told me that it was their willful toddler who bore the brunt of her emotions. Baby Dan tested the boundaries, Baby Dan defied his mother, Baby Dan threw tantrums and wouldn’t stop. She asked her husband for help with discipline, but he rarely stepped in, which became a source of contention between them. “I didn’t want to be the bad guy,” she told me. “I didn’t want to be seen as this mean, angry monster.” Nakira recalled times that she raised her voice at Baby Dan, or shouted. When shouting didn’t work, she slapped him. Eventually, she brought out a belt. Afterward, she said, she would feel shame, which would quickly turn into anger again. Now, in hindsight, she saw things differently. “It wasn’t anything he was doing,” she told me. “It was me. It was how I was perceiving what he was doing.”

Nakira still hadn’t told me what happened the day that Baby Dan died; she referred to it as “the incident.” She alluded to “mistakes” she had made, and the fear that led her to hide the events of that day. “I wanted to be better than my mother in every way,” she wrote, “& in every way I was, until I wasn’t.”

The road that leads to the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women is long and desolate. I had taken my bike on the train trip from New York that morning, and, as I pedalled from the station, nondescript greenery flanked the highway under a dull gray sky. I was wearing a long black coat, which flapped in the wind as I rode.

Nakira and I were left alone at a small table in a big room, the prison press officer just out of earshot. The first thing that struck me was her eyes, which she had emphasized with eyeliner and white eyeshadow at the inside corners. She wore her khaki uniform, and her hair was ironed straight, with little curls glued to her forehead. She kept one hand in the pocket of her trousers. “Your accent surprised me,” she said. Was she assessing me as I was her?

We had agreed to speak about “the incident” in person only; the subject was, Nakira observed, “too taboo for the phone and email.” Every call from her was preceded by an automated voice reminding us that our conversation would be “subject to monitoring and recording,” and I knew that every e-mail we exchanged was also screened.

We made small talk about my ride out there, and about her phone call that morning with J.J. “Today, I was met with him telling me that he was sad,” she said. He had to go to the dentist to get a few cavities filled. “But if he brushed his teeth like his father told him to do. . .”

It took some time for Nakira to tell me about the day that Baby Dan died. It had been a regular weekday; her husband left for work early, as he always did, and Nakira was at home alone with the boys. “We were on our way downstairs,” she began, a little haltingly. She was holding J.J. on one hip, and Baby Dan was clutching her other hand. “He doesn’t want to walk so I sling him over onto my hip,” she told me, shifting into the present tense. “But something happens. He leans forward and he slips, like, he falls and he kind of tumbles. And obviously it’s a mad dash downstairs.” At the bottom, she said, “he’s bleeding from his mouth. He has a huge knot forming on his head.” She said that he seemed to be in shock: “I convinced myself that since he wasn’t crying that it was going to be O.K.”

For the rest of the day, Nakira said, she gave him all the snacks he wanted and fussed over him. He threw up, and, after he continued to do so, she told me, she Googled “children falling down stairs” and “symptoms of concussions.” She was looking for confirmation that there was no need to go to the hospital, where people would see bruises “all over his body and his little butt.” She told me that a few days before the fall, Daniel had put Baby Dan over his knee and belted him, as punishment for refusing to eat his dinner. “That was the first and only time that he ever did that, but that left marks,” she said. Nakira was afraid that the doctors and nurses would not believe that Baby Dan had fallen down the stairs, and that she and Daniel would be subjected to what she called “scrutiny, ridicule, the police.”

That evening, Nakira said, Baby Dan fell asleep early. When Daniel got home from work, she didn’t tell him what had happened. She turned the baby monitor on in Baby Dan’s room, but, as the hours passed, she didn’t see him stir.

My palms became clammy in my lap as I sensed what was coming. “When I went in the room the next morning after my husband had gone to work . . . um . . . he was cold,” Nakira said, looking down. “I remember holding . . . I remember holding him and attempting to do CPR even though . . . even though I knew it was too late. And the contents . . . of his stomach . . . coming up . . . in my mouth.”

She was crying, so I offered her some toilet paper from my pocket, which I had hastily ripped off a roll in the prison rest room. She balled it up in her fist and dabbed at her face. Little bits of tissue paper got stuck on her chin, her temple, the tip of her nose.

I had asked her about J.J. “I can’t even tell you what he was doing,” she said. “I remember walking to the bedroom and pulling the gun from underneath the bed.” She told me that she “was going to go with” Baby Dan. “Like, wherever he was, I wanted to be,” she said. Her voice was barely audible. “And that’s when J.J. wailed. He just screamed, like, an unnatural scream. It brought me out of that trance and I went to him. And all he wanted was his bottle.”

Nakira acknowledged that Baby Dan had died because of her. “I carry the weight and I take the blame,” she told me. “Those were my decisions, and my lack of action led to his demise.” But the story that she articulated to me was a crime of omission: the help she never called for, the truth she hid, the lies she told. The other part, the crime of commission—what she did to his body—remained too horrifying to put into words. Only two memories stood out, she told me: the smell of something burning, and the image of herself “digging, clawing at the earth in an effort to hide what I had done.”

Eventually, the press officer announced that our time was up. We said goodbye, and Nakira promised to call. I stepped into the sunlight, a little stunned. In the distance, I spotted a woman dressed as if for a cocktail party, wearing a canary-yellow brocade coat and bright-yellow strappy stiletto sandals. The press officer told me that she was there to introduce a lecture on female empowerment to the inmates.

“There were times that she broke down and cried to me,” Daniel Griner, Sr., had told me over the phone. “I guess I didn’t know what to do or how to help her. I didn’t have the solution. So I kind of ignored it.”

Daniel is tall, with close-set eyes and an affable manner. He lives alone with J.J. now, in a one-story house in a different New Jersey town. A few weeks after my visit with Nakira, I went to see him there. We sat down in his living room, where Fox News played silently in the background on a large flat-screen TV. He fiddled with his Under Armour cap, worn backward, taking it off then putting it back on again whenever the subject turned difficult. Over the phone he had told me that Nakira “didn’t want people to think she couldn’t handle being a mom.” He said, “That was the biggest thing. She didn’t want people to judge her.”

It was a weekday. J.J. was at school, and I had promised to leave before he got home. Daniel told me that J.J. has started asking questions about his mom: Where is she, exactly, and why isn’t she here? Daniel keeps his answers vague. “It’s going to be really hard for me to tell him everything that’s happened,” he said. “I’m scared that it’s going to affect his feelings for his mom, and I don’t want that to happen. ’Cause she loves him.”

We began talking about the day that Nakira was arrested. The night before, Daniel had come home from work at dinnertime. “It was kind of strange because the kids were both in bed already,” he said. Daniel ruminated about Baby Dan. “I could’ve gone in there and kissed him, but she said that he was sleeping and I didn’t want to wake him up,” he told me. “I thought it was kinda strange because I looked at the camera, and, you know, he was, like, in the same position all night.”

In the morning, Daniel left without seeing the boys; later that day, he told me that he had a “regular conversation” with his wife. As he was about to head home for the day, though, he got a missed call from Nakira. He tried calling her back, but she didn’t pick up. “I knew something was wrong,” he said. “She always answers the phone.” Daniel asked his mom to go to the house; when she arrived, the police were there. Baby Dan was missing, they told her, and Nakira was at the station with J.J.

I had asked if I could see the legal files from Nakira’s case, and as I left his house Daniel handed me a big plastic bag from the supermarket Aldi. Inside was a tumble of papers, some moldy, some with partial footprints, leaves and twigs interspersed among the pages. He had kept the files in the back of his truck since Nakira’s conviction.

On the recording of the 911 call from that day, the operator’s steady voice is in sharp contrast to Nakira’s frantic crying. “You’re hiding?” the operator can be heard saying. “Who are you running from?” Officers were sent to the street corner from which Nakira had placed the call. She told them that she had been walking to Walgreens to get Pedialyte, with J.J. strapped to her chest and Baby Dan in a stroller, when someone pushed and kicked her from behind and then, she said, “snatched my stroller and my baby in it.” The officers took her to the station for questioning.

An extensive search was launched for Baby Dan, with about fifty people from the fire and police departments. After several hours, according to the police report, an officer found a partially buried Hello Kitty purse in the back yard of the Griner home, at 21 Woodland Drive. Inside was a tube of MAC lipstick and six layers of white plastic bags containing something that resembled “cooked meat.” On closer examination, the lead investigator saw what appeared to be “the remains of a skull, one foot, and one leg consistent with a child.” The search for Baby Dan was called off.

The next day, February 9th, Nakira was charged with first-degree murder, endangering the welfare of a child, desecrating human remains, and tampering with physical evidence. She was held at Cumberland County Jail in an isolated cell, allowed only a thick, tear-resistant suicide-prevention gown and mattress, and a Styrofoam tray. I thought of a line from one of her earliest e-mails: “The overwhelming feeling of loss makes you either literally insane, suicidal or numb and I at one point have felt all of those things.”

An affidavit drawn up by a detective with the major-crimes unit at the Cumberland County prosecutor’s office stated that Nakira called her husband on March 5th and told him that “she did what she did do” for the sake of him and their son J.J. The detective went on, “She said Daniel Griner Jr. had bruises as a result of Daniel Griner Sr. hitting him with a belt, and that [she] was trying to cover up the injuries.” The detective also noted that Daniel had “admitted to striking Daniel Griner Jr. with a belt earlier in the week.” The police found no evidence that Daniel had inflicted the injury that caused his son’s death or “any evidence that Daniel Griner Sr. participated in the fabricated story about the abduction.”

At first, Nakira was assigned a public defender named Kim Schultz. According to Jill Cohen, a private attorney who represented Nakira during the trial, Schultz tried to build a case that Daniel, Sr., had caused Baby Dan’s death, and that his wife was covering for him. The forensic assessor compiled a psychological evaluation of Nakira, which concluded that she suffered from “Major Depressive Disorder, Recurrent Episode, with peripartum onset, as well as Battered Woman Syndrome.” It pointed to her accounts of being grabbed by the throat, punched in the legs, and psychologically and verbally abused by her husband. (Daniel did not respond to a request for comment on striking Baby Dan with a belt, or on abusing Nakira.) I was taken aback—Nakira had never mentioned Daniel being physically violent—and asked her about these incidents. “I didn’t want to be seen as some type of victim of domestic violence,” she said. “Yes, these things happened, but they didn’t happen in the light that I felt she”—Schultz—“portrayed them.” She had instantly felt wary of her attorney’s strategy. “Her defense of me was going to be to drag my husband down,” she told me. “And I didn’t feel as though that was necessary. Nor did I think it was going to work out in my favor at all.” Daniel used savings and took on extra shifts to afford hiring Cohen.

By the time that the trial began, on December 12, 2022, a fifth charge had been added: creating false public alarm. In the prosecutor Elizabeth Vogelsong-Parvin’s opening statement, she painted an eerie picture. When police officers arrived at the Griner residence, a few details struck them as odd right away: even though it was cold out, the windows were open, the fans were running, and there was, Vogelsong-Parvin said, “a burnt smell in the home.”

Cohen had the unusual task of acknowledging that she was not going to fight four out of the five charges in question. Nakira did do “all those terrible things to cover the evidence,” Cohen told the court in her opening statement. But “the one thing that you can’t find her guilty of, because there’s not going to be enough evidence, is that she murdered, knowingly, purposefully—intended to cause the death of—Daniel Griner, Jr.” Cohen would go on to suggest that Nakira had kicked a toy downstairs and that Baby Dan, in chasing after it, “stumbled down the stairs and fell to the bottom.” Nakira didn’t seek help, the attorney explained, because Baby Dan already had bruises on his body and she was worried about what the authorities would think. “She should have called the doctor, E.M.S., or someone, and she did nothing,” Cohen acknowledged. “And subsequently she found him the next morning and he was dead.” Cohen finished by pointing out what the prosecution didn’t have: “There was no blood found in the home. There was no instrumentality of death.” Cohen told me later, “Believe me, the state looked for all of that. And it didn’t exist.”

Baby Dan’s remains were so deteriorated that the medical examiner, Dr. Peter Mazari, requested that a forensic anthropologist examine the body. The ensuing report, compiled by Evan Bird, stated that fractures were found on Baby Dan’s ribs, cranium, and left arm and leg, and that his body showed signs of “perimortem trauma,” meaning that his injuries had occurred “at or around the time of death.” His skull, the report noted, showed fractures “characteristic of inflicted, non-accidental, blunt force trauma.” Mazari, in his autopsy report, concluded, “Manner of Death: Homicide.”

It became clear early on that the state’s case rested on the findings of the forensic anthropologist and the medical examiner. Both testified as expert witnesses; both concluded that the injuries to Baby Dan’s body “wouldn’t be compatible with a simple fall down stairs,” as Mazari put it. Bird testified for more than four hours. Baby Dan’s skull had been fragmented into approximately seventy-four pieces, he told the jury, and “the skull alone took something like forty hours to put back together.” He explained that, although determining the time of death from bone analysis is less precise than from soft-tissue analysis, the fractures most likely occurred before Baby Dan’s remains were destroyed by the heat of an oven. In her cross-examination, Cohen suggested that the damage to the body could have happened after it was burned, say, while “trying to put it into a handbag.” “Sure,” Bird conceded.

Two of the lead investigators on the case, Cara Kahn and Ryan Breslin, had examined Nakira’s behavior on the day of Baby Dan’s supposed abduction. She had checked Facebook approximately forty-three times, tracked Amazon packages, visited designer-handbag shopping sites, and conducted online searches for where to buy Pedialyte. Vogelsong-Parvin, in her closing argument, contended that Nakira did not act like a grieving parent. She cited a series of calls that Nakira had made from jail to Lasha, Daniel, and other family members about what had happened. “What did you hear?” the prosecutor asked. “Did you hear remorse for a lost child?” The murder, Vogelsong-Parvin acknowledged, could not be proved by any single piece of evidence; but the kidnapping hoax, the destruction of the body, the forensic evidence of multiple instances of blunt-force trauma, and the internet searches added up to a scenario in which homicide was the only reasonable explanation. “Murders are made to look like accidents,” she concluded. “But accidents are not made to look like murder.”

Nakira didn’t testify. Through Cohen, she admitted that she had destroyed Baby Dan’s remains in a blind panic but claimed that she did so only after her son had already died of the injuries he incurred from the fall down the stairs. Cohen remembered the trial as a particularly tough one: Nakira “stuck to her story” and wouldn’t take the twenty-five-year plea deal on offer. “She said that after a few seconds he was perfectly O.K.,” Cohen said, of the fall. “You know, no blood, no nothing.”

Lasha and Daniel had both agreed to testify at the trial. But Lasha had just given birth to her third child and couldn’t make the trip. And Daniel, in the end, couldn’t bring himself to participate. He recollected being under immense pressure from his family, who, once they realized that he and Nakira were back in touch, staged what he called an “intervention.” “They all came to my house,” he said, “and were telling me not to talk to her.” Earlier, he had told me, “They were saying to me that I’ll lose my nursing license and I might lose my job.” In the end, no one testified on Nakira’s behalf.

On January 4, 2023, Nakira’s verdict was announced. In photographs of the courtroom, she appears in dark-gray prison scrubs, her hands shackled to a chain around her waist. I recognized the little curls glued to her forehead. Kahn was there, along with some colleagues from the police department. They sat with Daniel’s family, all wearing pins with Baby Dan’s face on their chests, as the jury found Nakira guilty on all counts. “We all just hugged each other,” Kahn said. “Because, you know, it’s not going to bring Daniel back, but it’s justice.”

Now, three years later, Cohen wondered what she might have done differently: “I’m not sure whether I really explained to her in great detail before negotiating for her that she was looking at life in maximum security without parole.” It was an affecting case, but Cohen thought that Nakira’s demeanor seemed guarded and cold. “I didn’t like her,” she told me at one point. “I guess she didn’t trust me either.” I asked Cohen if she had ever questioned Nakira about her childhood, or her postpartum mental health. “Did I need to put on psychologists to show that she’s, you know, not in her right mind, that she was acting under extreme pressure?” Cohen said. “I guess I could have said that she had postpartum depression and put that on. Truthfully, there might be some merit to it.”

In an appeal, filed shortly after the sentencing, a second public defender argued that “the State had no theory of how Ms. Griner killed [Baby Dan], or her motive.” He noted that “the dispute over whether the extensive bone injuries were the cause of death or the result of Ms. Griner’s decision to destroy his body after his accidental death was the only disputed issue at trial.” And he pointed out that the medical examiner had based his conclusion of homicide not only on scientific evidence but on the fact that “the remains were found ‘desecrated’ and ‘outside of a house,’ which he viewed as ‘highly suspicious.’ ” (“I think the circumstances played a very large role in the ruling of homicide,” the examiner had said during the trial.) The appeal mentioned a 2021 paper from the Journal of Forensic Sciences, in which researchers studied the cognitive bias of forensic work and concluded that “forensic pathologists were more likely to rule ‘homicide’ rather than ‘accident’ for deaths of Black children relative to White children.”

In June of last year, Nakira’s appeal was denied. She has applied for post-conviction relief, a legal process used to dispute a defendant’s sentence or conviction. A different public defender has begun working on her case, and an investigator is reinterviewing her former attorneys, witnesses, and family members. If her application is successful, Nakira will get a new trial; if it isn’t, she told me recently, “all hope is lost.”

Both Kahn and Breslin have potent memories of being on the scene that day. “I was there when the baby was found in the purse, and it was just crazy,” Breslin told me. “I can still picture vividly the flashlight going on to, like, what is that? Oh, my God.” Kahn, who interviewed Nakira at the station, was struck by her affect. “She was emotionless,” Kahn told me. “I just wasn’t picking up on a normal human reaction to somebody that just lost their child.” (Breslin did recall Nakira crying. “I’m pretty confident I remember Cara giving her tissues,” he said.) Kahn couldn’t reconcile Nakira’s behavior with the circumstances. “How do you stay in your home all day while you know that your child is baking in an oven next to you?” she said. “How do you smell that? How do you sit there and Google and check your packages? It’s just unfathomable.” Grief counsellors were brought in to help the officers. “They put me through some P.T.S.D.-specific training to work me through it,” Kahn recalled. “Because, you know, it’s just one of those things you can’t unsee.”

Kahn was reluctant to speak with me at first. She eventually agreed, she said, “because you can’t have a lopsided story.” She was still haunted by the case. “It’s this weight that we all kind of carry around,” she said. “We don’t want to relive it.”

When I initially read about Baby Dan’s death, it had seemed like an isolated tragedy. But, as I dove deeper into the subject of maternal filicide, I learned that roughly every two days a child dies at the hands of his or her mother in America, more than in any other developed country. A study from the Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma suggests that the actual rate is likely higher, as a result of inaccurate coroner rulings and the number of victims whose bodies are never discovered.

Earlier this fall, a deadlocked jury in the Lindsay Clancy murder case forced the judge to declare a mistrial. The story of the affluent, white nurse who killed her three young children has become a lightning rod of sorts for discussions about postpartum mental health and about how filicidal mothers are treated by the judicial system. Even before the Clancy trial began, the forensic psychiatrist Susan Hatters-Friedman pointed out to me how quickly the discourse around the case had turned to postpartum psychosis, a rare disorder that affects about one in a thousand new mothers. “There was an outpouring of money and concern and ‘She must have been mentally ill,’ ” Hatters-Friedman said. In contrast, “Black and brown people,” she noted, “tend to be portrayed as bad rather than mad.” Clancy might have been, for some, easy to empathize with because she was supported by her ex-husband, colleagues, family, and friends. She had a network willing to testify and speak to the media on her behalf. Nakira did not. Clancy also had consistent health-care coverage and thus a documented history of her mental-health breakdown. Again, Nakira did not.

The sociologist Martha Smithey observed that to understand crimes like this we have to recognize that they are committed by human beings. “That human being could be me,” she said. “It could be you.” Then she added, “People want to think it’s about murder, and it’s actually about mothering.” Smithey, who has focussed her research on filicide and has uncovered a trend in the criminalization of mothers in low-income households, told me that often the trigger for a mother who kills her young child is a crying baby, who, she said, becomes a “symbol of her failure.”

Almost every expert with whom I spoke emphasized that, although there can be commonalities, each case of maternal filicide is oddly specific. Gwen Adshead, a British forensic psychiatrist, used the term “the bicycle-lock model” to explain the many risk factors that have to align, like numbers on a combination lock, for fatal violence to occur. The last risk factor, according to Adshead, is the relationship between the perpetrator and her victim, and what happens between the two on the day itself. That interaction, she said, is “often key to understanding the homicide.”

What exactly had happened that day between Nakira and Baby Dan was unknowable—I would never be sure of what, if anything, had finally turned the lock. “And, of course, if a mother tells me, ‘My child fell down the stairs,’ I would always wonder, Well did you throw them down the stairs?” Anna Motz, the British forensic psychologist, said. I remembered Motz’s comment about “self-preservation” when Nakira told me that she was still upset by the way that she had been portrayed by the prosecutors. Their description of her Googling and shopping on the day of Baby Dan’s death had especially bothered her. “They made it seem as I just went on about my life with no cares and no worry,” she said. “I was just so out of my mind.”

I had noticed that, although Nakira recounted Baby Dan’s last days in broadly the same way since she was arrested, small details had changed. According to Cohen, Nakira had said that Baby Dan’s fall seemed “minor.” But she had told me that he bled from his mouth and had a “huge knot forming on his head.” During one conversation with me, Nakira observed, “I feel like every time you reflect on a memory, it always kind of changes shape.” Adshead had pointed out that for most perpetrators their “cover story” is, in fact, a life buoy. Its purpose isn’t malevolence or deception, she said, but, rather, “a story you can live with.”

Over the years of writing to, speaking with, and visiting Nakira, I had come to care about her. The remorse she expressed was hard not to empathize with. “My husband lost his son, my child lost his brother & so on & so on & the guilt from that alone is crippling,” she had written in one of her first e-mails. I liked her willingness to reflect on her life, her inquisitiveness, her dry humor. At times, I caught myself thinking back to our first meeting, her hands wiping away tears or protectively hugging herself—the same hands that had shoved Baby Dan into the oven, then stuffed his remains into a Hello Kitty purse. It was jarring.

After Nakira’s conviction, Daniel didn’t speak to her for many months. But, as time passed, he began accepting her phone calls from prison. Eventually, he decided to believe his wife. “I forgave her,” Daniel told me. “I didn’t want to carry that with me for the rest of my life. I wanted to be there for her because she had no one else.” He faltered a moment, then added, “And I still love her.”

Lately, though, things between the couple have become more complicated. Nakira told me recently that Daniel has started dating another woman. On the phone, she tried to be sanguine about it. Daniel will always be “my family,” she said. “I want him to be happy, and I don’t get to control how that looks.”

Nakira knows that access to J.J., to life outside, depends on her husband’s graciousness. “He doesn’t have to financially support me, he doesn’t have to allow me to be a part of J.J.’s life,” she said. When we first began corresponding, Nakira spoke to her son every day; now she said that months had passed since their last call. “I’m just going to wait it out,” she told me, “because I have no other choice.” ♦