By Matt Wiley | September 11
The trial for Julie Schenecker, 52, the woman accused of murdering her teenage children in the family’s Tampa Palms home, has been postponed from October 2013 to April 2014, court records indicate.
Schenecker’s case, which was originally scheduled to begin on October 7 of this year, has been postponed until April 28, 2014. The case was postponed during a hearing on August 16, in which Hillsborough Circuit Judge Emmett Battles granted a motion from Schenecker’s lawyers for a continuance, to which the state did not object.
Court records show that prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for Schenecker, who has been charged with the January 2011 first-degree murder of her children Beau, 13, and Calyx, 16. Schenecker’s lawyers announced in August 2011 that they would rely upon an insanity defense.
The court decided in February of this year that Schenecker would need to be evaluated by three state experts to determine her sanity at the time of the murders.
As previously reported in the New Tampa Neighborhood News, Schenecker is accused of shooting her two children in the head for being “mouthy” and disrespectful toward her while her now-ex-husband, now-retired U.S. Army Col. Parker Schenecker, was deployed overseas. Schenecker has a prior history of both mental illness and substance abuse.
Schenecker sent an alarming email to her husband the night before the murders, which he reported to the police, who discovered the bodies of the children,. They also found Schenecker, who was unconscious in the backyard of the family’s home in the Ashington Reserve neighborhood of Tampa Palms.
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