Arapahoe County – An Aurora grandmother told her son she was receiving “spiritual messages from the geese flying overhead” roughly eight months before she stabbed her toddler granddaughter 62 times with a butcher knife, according to court testimony Thursday.
Carol Pappas, 56, sat motionless with her head down through a four-hour preliminary hearing in which Arapahoe County District Judge William Sylvester ruled there is a “clear likelihood” that evidence is strong enough to convict her of first-degree murder and other charges.
The strongest evidence presented by Deputy District Attorney Karen Pearson was an Oct. 29 911 tape in which Pappas called Aurora police and said she had stabbed her granddaughter “about 20 times.”
Pappas said she had murdered the toddler about 15 minutes earlier, which would have been just minutes after the girl’s father left for work, according to testimony. When police and firefighters arrived seven minutes after the 911 call, Pappas unlocked the door with blood on both hands.
“She unlocked the door, holding a cellphone and a blue baby pacifier in her bloody hands,” testified Aurora police officer Nathan Meier. “The little girl was face-down on a bed with holes in her red shirt. Next to her was a butcher knife, about 8 inches long.”
The coroner found that 21-month-old Madison Pappas died from 62 stab wounds in her torso and neck.
Aurora police Detective Ron Tanguma said Pappas’ son, Nicholas, punched a wall when told of his daughter’s death, calling his mother “a murderer” and yelling that “she should go to prison.”
According to Tanguma, Nicholas Pappas yelled: “No way was she sick enough to kill my daughter.”
In the courtroom, Pearson played the 911 tape, in which Pappas said in a fearful, anxious voice: “I don’t know why. I just did it. I flipped. I’m mentally ill.”
Detectives testified that Pappas’ mental health declined in the mid-1990s, and she was diagnosed as manic depressive and bipolar. She and her mother lived with her son and daughter-in-law, Jessica, in a house on LaSalle Drive in Aurora in November 2004. But she began to deteriorate, getting “very involved with the birds in the backyard,” according to testimony.
Carol Pappas moved out for financial reasons in February 2005. After three months at the Colorado Mental Health Institute in Pueblo, she moved back in August, with the arrangement that she would babysit in exchange for her rent.
She was hospitalized twice in September. Nicholas Pappas expressed frustration that his mother was repeatedly released from treatment programs, then deteriorated, Tanguma said.
Pappas told police she hadn’t been sleeping and wasn’t taking her medications.
The next court date is April 25.
