Zelinsky is just as matter-of-fact when she describes the day that irrevocably changed the course of her life, and her family's.

She tells the story of paranoid thoughts - among them the idea that her neighbors were resentful because she held a job and had never married - and a mounting depression that wouldn't abate, despite medication.

It all became unbearable, she says, on Dec. 22, 1978.

"I just woke up that day with this urgent feeling that . . . I had to commit suicide," she said.

"When I planned my suicide, I also planned to take my mother, too. We lived in the sticks and there was no transportation. She does not drive, so she would have to depend on the neighbors to help, and they would take advantage, steal from her and cheat her. So I decided it would be best to kill her, too."

Reports from the time show that Zelinsky advanced on her 78-year-old mother in a bedroom of the cottage they shared.

Instead of fighting her, Zelinsky says, her mother warned her.

"She said I'll go to jail, and I said, `No I won't because I'm going to kill myself,' and she says, `No, you will go to jail,' " Zelinsky recalls.

The warning didn't change a thing.

Zelinsky hit her mother on the head with a blunt instrument and strangled her, reports show. Afterward, she sawed off her mother's head and left her body draped over a bathtub.

What happened a short while later, when Zelinsky arrived at the State House and threw the head out her car window, is something Roy Bucci will never forget.

"A trooper started hollering, `My God, look what's in this bag!' recalls Bucci, a former Trenton police officer who was on the building's steps that day. "And I happened to look in at the time and, yes, I saw the head.

"If I remember right, there was an (American) flag in the bag. It was a plastic trash bag, a green trash bag, the kind you would use for your normal, everyday garbage. My initial reaction was like, `It can't be real, it just couldn't be real.' "-- -- --

About 15 minutes earlier, Zelinsky's neighbor, Floyd Menchek, had seen her pulling out of her driveway. He'd waved at her, he recalled, and received a wave in return.

There was nothing unusual about the casual exchange, Menchek says, and he soon got busy working in one of his farm buildings. But before long, Menchek began hearing radio reports about the head-tossing. And that, he says, was when state police showed up, approached Zelinsky's little white house and opened the door to "a disaster."

Troopers spent a couple of days collecting evidence in the bloody home. When they were done, they asked Menchek - then mayor of East Amwell - to wipe it clean, he says.

He made sure to do it before La Ware and her mother arrived from New York, he says, but the women were still spooked by what they found in the house.

Cans of food, La Ware recalled, were rotting in kitchen cabinets.

"They just were open so you couldn't use them again," she says. "You had to toss them."

Up in the attic, all of Zelinsky's clothes - with the exception of one fur coat - had been slashed.

"That was when I was suicidal," says Zelinsky, who admits she was paranoid back then. "I was so depressed, and I thought some people in the neighborhood would take all of my stuff if I killed myself, so I destroyed it."

It's an explanation filled with the depression, delusions and suicidal thoughts that are typical of paranoid schizophrenia, Marin says.

Acting on those suicidal thoughts, he added, is not unusual for someone with Zelinsky's illness. About 10 percent of schizophrenics do it, he says - significantly more than the 1 percent of the general population who attempt to kill themselves.-- -- --

Those death wishes often go hand in hand with violence toward others, Marin says, but Menchek didn't expect anything of the kind from Zelinsky. He knew his exceptionally bright neighbor was eccentric, he says, but never realized she was sick.

He did, however, know something was wrong between Zelinsky and her mother.

"They had fights," he recalls, "screaming and yelling at each other."

La Ware says her family knew about the discord and suspected Zelinsky was causing it by stealing money from her mother and refusing to let her leave the house. But Zelinsky says the friction arose because she and her mother had different priorities.

"My mother was very much for girls getting married, and she was a little critical of me - of my looks and why I did not take more of an interest in the fellas," she says.

Her aunt's darkest time, La Ware says, came after she left her job as a bookkeeper for the state and started telemarketing work at home.

"She stopped a lot of things, her habits that we liked when she was healthy: giving gifts and (being) more social," La Ware remembers. "Then, when she lost her job, everything turned really bad for her because she couldn't think clearly and couldn't come up with solutions."

La Ware heard eerie evidence of that lapse two years before the murder.

"My grandmother was claiming that her daughter, Aunt Jean, was going to kill her, and this was a thing that (my mother) heard often," La Ware says.

It never occurred to La Ware that her grandmother meant it.

"You figure she's just an old lady and it's just a phrase people use," she says.

Another warning arrived at La Ware's home shortly before the murder.

"I had a letter from my aunt," she says, "indicating there wouldn't be any Christmas."

Instead, there was a funeral, and the Christmases after that were never quite the same.

Source: The Times

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