CALIFORNIA: Come With Me Quick

• Share

Pudgy, 16-year-old Delora Mae Campbell seemed to be an ideal babysitter. She seldom had dates and was willing to work on Saturday nights; she was a neat, well-mannered, quiet girl who kept a house tidy and washed up the dishes. Mr. and Mrs. Roy J. Isbell always felt they had no need to worry when they left their two children and their modest house near Long Beach, Calif, in Delora Mae's hands. They had no way of looking into Delora Mae's mind.

Delora Mae went about her chores at the Isbells' house one night last month as calmly and competently as always; she fed six-year-old Donna and eight-year-old Roy, sat with them in the living room watching a murder movie called Repeat Performance, as it nickered in on the television screen from Los Angeles' station KTLA. She put them to bed, washed the dishes, and, with these chores done, walked back to the living room and stretched out on the couch.

She began to see what she described later as a vision. "It was Donna's head . . . there was a green-and-red-striped necktie next to her. I don't know whether I was awake ... or dreaming . . . but I saw that picture. Something told me to get up ... I went into the bedroom . . . There was no tie . . .I saw some socks on the floor. I picked one of them up ... and stepped over to Donna's bed and lifted her head with my right hand ... I put [the sock] around Donna's neck. I tied it once and pulled. Her arms lifted up ... and then sank back. She didn't cry out, but I put the edge of her bed sheet in her mouth."

A little later, a nearby doctor was summoned to his door. Delora Mae looked up at him, white-faced and gasping: "Come with me. Come with me quick." The doctor followed her to the house. He walked into the bedroom. Then he made a quiet telephone call to the sheriff's office. Little Donna was dead.

The pudgy, dark-haired girl who had strangled her was as quiet, self-contained and polite as ever when she was taken off to jail. For her appearance in court she dressed neatly, brushed her suede shoes carefully and showed no sign of emotion. In a frank talk with a county-jail psychiatrist, she observed that she had often longed to strangle one of her own small brothers. The psychiatrist's opinion —that she had responded to an irresistible impulse, but was legally sane—left her unmoved.

Her dreamlike calm finally broke. Delora Mae burst into tears after a jail, attendant discovered a legend she had scratched on her compact with the point of a bobby-pin, while sitting in her cell: "Delora Mae Campbell killed Donna Joyce Isbell Sat. nite Dec. 29 1951."