For a single moment on that day just before Christmas, Jean Zelinsky reconsidered her murder-suicide plan.

She already had committed an unthinkable crime, but her most twisted act, the one she'd be remembered for, was still only an idea.

"At one point, when I was still in the house after my mother was dead, I thought, `Maybe I should drop the rest of my plan and call the police and confess to what I did,' " Zelinsky told The Times in a rare interview about the gruesome crime she committed in her East Amwell home on Dec. 22, 1978.

"But then I said, `I've gone this far, I might as well go all the way to the end.' And I did."

Twenty-five years later, locked away in a state psychiatric hospital in Ewing, Zelinsky says it was depression and paranoia that prompted her to kill and behead her mother, Julia.

"I was angry at society for turning against me," she says. "That's why I decapitated my mother and took her head and threw it on the New Jersey State House steps - because (the building) symbolized society to me, and I was saying to the world: `See how you have warped me by the way you treated me?' "

The incident, during which Zelinsky drove up the steps, crashed her car into a pillar, threw her mother's head at the feet of some state troopers and shouted "Merry Christmas - this is what you wanted," was so bizarre that it set the legal community abuzz well beyond New Jersey.

Even now, the shocking episode, which ended with Zelinsky trying to slit her own throat with a razor, remains firmly embedded in Trenton lore.

Because she is so notorious, the news that she has regularly left the hospital to visit stores and restaurants - sometimes without supervision - tends to raise some eyebrows.

But soon, Zelinsky may have even more freedom: She is seeking release from Trenton Psychiatric Hospital into transitional housing.

A judge will consider that possibility in March.

The process is a reminder that, a quarter of a century later, it's still up to New Jersey to sort out the criminal justice issues generated by Zelinsky's violence: Will she pose a risk to her neighbors or herself if she's set free? And should her fate rest forever in the hands of the state?-- -- -- In conversation, Zelinsky doesn't obviously fit the label she carries - that of a paranoid schizophrenic with mixed personality disorder - and it's hard to imagine her doing the violent things she describes.

She's 73 now, old enough to find getting up from a chair to be a strenuous chore; a tall, carefully dressed woman with stark-white hair, tortoiseshell glasses and orthopedic shoes.

She's pleasant, and her comments are articulate and focused.

But from between her words peek quirks that could be symptoms of her illness, of her medication or of things altogether unrelated - slow speech, a slushy pronunciation of the letter "s," a tic that's somewhere between a squint and a grimace.

And there's this: When she's asked to reflect on her murder of the woman who raised her, Zelinsky doesn't talk about epic emotions like shame, or guilt or grief. Remembering, she says simply, leaves her "sorry" and "sad."

"It's been a long time and that's in the past, and I just don't dwell on it," Zelinsky says. "Thoughts come and they go, but I don't sit and try to bring them up or anything."

That lack of emotion is typical for a paranoid schizophrenic - even a medicated one, says Dr. Humberto Marin, a psychiatry professor at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.

"You don't see (emotional response) in these people," he says. "They're, like, flat. They talk about terrible things in the same tone of voice they use for happy things."

It's a trait Diane La Ware - the daughter of Zelinsky's late sister - has grown used to.

"She never shows remorse in her letters," says the niece, who learned of the murder in a newspaper and then shocked her family with a chilling announcement: "Aunt Jean killed Grandma."

"If you asked, `Do you feel guilt and remorse?' she'd say, `Yes,' " continues La Ware, 45, of North Jersey. "But if you allowed her no hint of what you wanted to hear, I don't think she would use those words. She hasn't in 25 years."-- -- -- Still, doctors say Zelinsky may be a candidate for release from the hospital.

Although she attempted suicide seven years ago, has occasionally lashed out at staff members and refuses to believe she's schizophrenic, her illness is in remission. She hasn't been psychotic in at least six years, says Joan Mysiak, a psychologist at the hospital.

To gauge how Zelinsky might handle release, a judge has asked her doctors to gradually offer her more freedom on the hospital's campus, and possibly outside it.

It's a test Zelinsky hopes to pass, because her frustration with hospital rules has made her eager to trade her shared room on a locked ward for a spot in a supervised home outside hospital grounds.

"They classify me as a high-functioning patient," she says of hospital workers, "but they don't treat me like a high-functioning person."

An example cropped up a few months ago.

"I wanted scissors to cut something - out of paper, not myself - and they would not let me use the scissors because they said I might hurt myself," she recalls. "It infuriated me."

Zelinsky insists she wouldn't be a danger to anyone if she were released, saying she'd be "hooked up with a mental health system of some sort" and would continue to take her medicine.

She knows it will be up to a judge to decide whether she can try it, and she's aware that he'll discuss her illness and treatment publicly when she appears before him March 17.

It's a process she's been through annually since her commitment, when the state's Superior Court was put in charge of determining her level of freedom - and it's one that won't change unless she's released from her status as criminally insane, an idea the judge rejected in September.

"I accept that it has to be," Zelinsky says of the hearing process. "I did commit a crime - even though I was found not guilty by reason of insanity, so I am not a convict - but, still, I realize I committed a crime, a terrible crime, so I just accept going to court."-- -- --