Mother Kills Her Son, Doesn't Know Her Surviving Kids Will Tell Everything

"Mommy, don't want to be here."

The 911 call starts with a mother reporting her six-year-old son, James Hutchinson, missing from the family home. She tells the dispatcher she went to bed, woke up, and he was gone. She sounds tired, cooperative, a little vague on details. But the detective who takes over the interview already knows more than she's telling him. He knows the boy is dead. He knows the mother drove him to a park in the middle of the night. And he knows something else: the surviving children, ages seven and nine, are about to be interviewed by forensic specialists. Kids don't lie, he tells her. They're going to tell me exactly what happened.

The story that crumbles

The interview, captured on video, is the entire episode. The detective walks the mother through her initial account, then gently—then not so gently—shows her where it falls apart. She said all five of them went to the park. No, she admits, just me and the three kids. She said her boyfriend wasn't involved. Later, it emerges he told her to "get rid of" the children. She said she dropped them off and left for five minutes. The detective pushes: can we agree it was more than five? Probably. More than twenty? Probably. More than a half hour? I don't think it was a half hour.