Mother accused of slayings talked of mental illness
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Identified in the article in The Columbian of Vancouver at the time only as Annette, her middle name, she described herself as a friendless, paranoid schizophrenic who was given medication to try to quiet the "demons" inside her head.
The article was about mental-illness issues facing the Clark County area.
"My life is a crisis. I live in torment," Dorcy said. "I feel like I live under a curse, like I'm cursed. Satan is here in this world, and he's out for me, big time."
Dorcy, who had married a year earlier, went on to start a family. She and her husband lived with their daughters in a well-kept home on a cul-de-sac in suburban Hazel Dell.
Then, on Saturday, authorities say, the 38-year-old woman put her 2- and 4-year-old daughters into the car, drove 80 miles to an abandoned rock quarry in the heart of Skamania County, shot them to death, then returned home, called police and turned herself in.
She is expected to enter a plea today to two counts of aggravated first-degree murder. Prosecutors have yet to decide whether to seek the death penalty.
On Tuesday, Clark County Chaplain Ell Loney said Dorcy's husband, Robert Dorcy, 45, has forgiven her despite his grief.
"Believe it or not he has. He is a Christian," said Loney, who ministered to the husband Sunday.
In another development, Skamania County Undersheriff David L. Cox said Tuesday that investigators recovered a weapon from the woman's car "but we're not yet saying whether it is 'the' weapon."
Mental illness has afflicted Charlene Dorcy since childhood, and the family repeatedly sought help but was told she was not a danger to others, Loney said.
"They haven't been hiding this thing. They took her for help. It's not something they ignored — I'm pretty sympathetic to her in this regard," he said.
In the interview in 1997, Dorcy said she had no friends.
"I'm so isolated. I don't belong anywhere," she said. "The demons speak to me, tell me I'm worthless, I'm nothing, I don't deserve to be here."
She said she tried to overdose on pills seven times, starting at age 13, and had lost more than 20 jobs in three years of restaurant work, handling deliveries and clerking at a convenience store because of her inability to get along with other people.
"They don't understand me," she said. "I'm a mystery to them."
Professional help did no good, Dorcy said, dismissing the potential benefit of participating in a support group and saying a doctor who prescribed antidepressants was a "numbskull."
"I get very angry when I go talk to counselors," she added. "I need compassion and sincerity and friendship. All they want is a hundred bucks an hour."
She said she was born in neighboring Portland and grew up in Hood River, Ore., after her parents divorced when she was a baby. As a teenager, she said, her father sexually abused her, then committed suicide.
"As a child, I just knew I was different," she said. "I talked to trees. I have a magicalness in my mind, a lot of magic there. I didn't feel like I belonged. I still don't."