New hearing for woman who killed her young son and gouged out her eyes in prison

One spring morning in 2013, Chicago police burst into a hotel bathroom and found Kimberlynn Bolanos and her young son covered in blood in the bathtub.

The five-month-old boy, Isaac, was stabbed 44 times and died of his wounds. Bolanos was stabbed more than 20 times and lost three liters of blood, but survived. She later told a psychiatrist that the gruesome scene was the aftermath of an epic battle between her and the dark forces behind global warming, poverty and war.

She said she heard the screams of relatives being tortured by agents of the “people at the top” through the walls of her house, according to one of nearly a dozen psychiatric evaluations she has undergone over the past decade.

In the desperate hours before the attack, she slept with Isaac in one arm, a knife within reach of the other. When her boyfriend’s phone started ringing at around 5 a.m., she was sure that the agents would storm the hotel room and take her son away.

Over the next decade, Bolanos was examined by at least ten psychologists. Several said she was insane at the time of her son’s murder and when she confessed to police. Others said she knew what she was doing.

A judge in the case found her sane throughout. Bolanos eventually changed her plea from insanity to guilty but mentally ill and was sentenced to 38 years in prison. Just months after her conviction, Bolanos’ eyes gouged out.

The case will return to court Tuesday before Judge Charles Burns, who an appeals court has ordered to review whether Bolanos was mentally fit when she changed her confession in 2016. The judge will also determine whether she is well enough to understand her lawyers, who are now trying to overturn her prison sentence.

“Even under medication, her mental state was so severe that she gouged out her eyes,” the appeals court found. “This case is harrowing… We believe that the defendant’s case requires further investigation.”

Bolanos’ public defender declined to comment on the case, but said in court documents that Bolanos, 32, suffers from delusions and has been in the hospital so often during her time in prison that it has been difficult for her to assist in her defense.

During her last appearance in Burns’ courtroom in January, Bolanos was handcuffed as she was led into the courtroom by a sheriff’s officer.

“I told them not to tie up blind people or pregnant women,” she blurted, her eyes tightly shut as she turned her face toward the judge’s seat. Although Bolanos is blind, her belief that she is pregnant is delusional, her lawyers say.

Bolanos didn’t seem worried about this week’s crucial hearing. “Do I have to show up?” she asked. “Can I just participate via Zoom instead of driving six hours?”

“God wants an heir”

Kimberlynn Bolanos was happy when she found out she was pregnant, even though the circumstances were less than ideal: Her boyfriend had taken her to the emergency room at Swedish Covenant Hospital after she overdosed on heroin, court documents show.

Bolanos told doctors she didn’t realize she was pregnant even though she was four months pregnant. She stopped taking medications and started taking prenatal vitamins.

When she gave birth to her son three months later, the boy was healthy and she was off medication. By all accounts, Bolanos was happy to be a mother – although she apparently believed she was on a mission to save the world and her son would help her do it.

“I thought I would kill bad people (with their minds) and the world would be a better place,” she said. “God would have an heir to my mission.”

According to a psychiatrist’s report, Bolanos believed from her early youth that it was her mission to save the world and that she and her loved ones were the target of a sinister conspiracy responsible for global warming, poverty and wars.

In seventh grade, when her parents separated, she attempted suicide by taking 30 Tylenol tablets. In eighth grade, she was placed in a psychiatric hospital.

At age 16, she heard the voice of God and learned of her role in saving the world. Her neighbors called her “the crazy woman” because she screamed at airplanes and “satellites” that she believed were watching her.

At the age of 20, she tried to kill herself by injecting wasp venom into her heart. “If I die, everyone will stop being tortured and it will prove that I am not a spy for the wrong people,” Bolanos explained to a psychiatrist.

After Isaac’s birth, Bolanos was a devoted and attentive mother, according to her parents. Bolanos’ mother said she examined the child once when she was alone with the boy and found no signs of injury.

Then, in late May 2013, Bolanos said, she heard a “detective” come to her father’s house, in whose basement she and Isaac lived, asking about her.

She and her boyfriend took Isaac and moved into a room at a hotel on the northwest side. She bought knives at a Dollar Tree store and when she heard her boyfriend’s phone ring, she carried Isaac into the bathroom.

When her mother learned from a detective that Bolanos had confessed to Isaac’s murder, she assumed it was another delusion. “Kimberlynn would never do something like that,” the mother told a psychiatrist. “She loves the baby too much.”

High hurdle for the defense on the grounds of insanity

Had she gone to trial, Bolanos might have had a chance to convince the jury of her insanity, says Mark Heyrman, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago School of Law and an expert on mental illness and the justice system.

But, he noted, across Illinois, about 70,000 felony cases are dismissed and only about 85 people are found not guilty by reason of insanity. “The bar to be found insanity is very high,” Heyrman said. “The bar to be found competent to stand trial is very low.”

The reason for this is that a person only needs to understand that his actions are wrong and be aware of the consequences to be judged mentally healthy, he said.

In discussions with psychiatrists, Bolanos was able to explain her rights and admit that she knew her actions would harm her son and that she regretted stabbing him.

Bolanos’ fear that “they” would take the child away from her because of her past drug use was interpreted by some examiners as her fear that the police or child welfare services might take Isaac away. But she also seemed concerned that the authorities were working for the “people up there” who intended to inflict pain on her son.

“Insanity should work when you can’t find a normal motive for the crime,” Heyrman said. “If you commit a crime to make more money because you’re a drug dealer, people can understand that.”

“If you kill someone who is a natural object of affection, like your own child, that is not normal,” he said. “Is there any explanation other than mental illness?”

A lawyer familiar with Bolanos’ case said she was adamant that she did not want a trial, which Heyrman said is not unusual for schizophrenics.

“The stress of the trial exacerbates all of their symptoms,” Heyrman said. “(Schizophrenics) are very difficult clients for defense attorneys.”

This left Bolanos with only the choice of a trial before a single judge or a guilty plea. Judge Burns had rejected requests to exclude her confession on the grounds of mental illness and did not seem inclined to make a finding of insanity.

He was not inclined to be lenient either. Bolanos’s public defender asked Burns for a 20-year sentence, the minimum for the murder charge, in exchange for a confession that he was guilty but mentally ill. Burns said the lowest sentence he would agree to is 38 years.

Bolanos’ guilty plea but mental illness would entitle her to an evaluation and treatment in prison. But the state Department of Corrections has been sued for failing to provide adequate care for mentally ill inmates for years.

If she had been found insane, Bolanos would have been committed to a mental institution until it was determined that she was no longer a danger to herself or the public. “Very often that means they stay in the institution longer than they would have served in prison for the same crime,” Heyrman said.

Cook County Sheriff’s Department

“Reasonable doubt”

Five months after arriving at Logan Correctional Center, Bolanos was placed under surveillance after running across a prison yard screaming, “Shoot me! Shoot me!” On her fourth day, a prison guard observed (Bolanos) standing naked at the foot of her bed, hunched over with her thumb in her mouth.

“When (the guard) asked (Bolanos) if she was OK, (Bolanos) leaned down with her eyes wide open and placed her opened eyeball on the metal end of her bed.”

The next day, a guard looked into Bolano’s cell and saw that she was covered in blood. She had gouged out her eyes.

Her lawyers filed a motion to rehear her sentence in 2022 because she had been diagnosed with postpartum psychosis, a condition that exacerbated her longstanding mental illness. In a 12-page ruling that made no mention of the injuries to her eyes, Burns denied the motion.

An appeals court sent the case back to Burns, asking him to comment on whether Bolanos was competent to stand trial given her self-mutilation.

“We find that the defendant has sufficiently demonstrated that the court would have found reasonable doubt about her ability to plead guilty had the court known that, even while under medication, her mental condition was severe enough to cause her to gouge out her eyes,” the court wrote.