A mother suffering from post-natal depression thought her TV was 'telling her to do things' before she drowned her baby and dumped it in a factory car park, a court has heard.
Amy Black, 40, snapped after enduring a sleepless night with seven-month-old daughter Zoe, who had been crying constantly because of a painful case of glue ear.
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At an earlier hearing Black pleaded guilty to infanticide on the grounds that she ‘caused the death of her child at a time the balance of her mind had not recovered fully from giving birth’.
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The court heard she and her husband, 70-year-old Zen trainer Jack Black, had lived in the UK for 30 months before the tragedy.
They met after Black read a book her future husband had written about Zen spiritualism and left her home in the US state of Minnesota to travel to India in the hope of finding ‘spiritual fulfilment, Mr Black, or possibly both’.
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Mr Spencer said she indicated she was having suicidal thoughts and went on to tell her husband, who suffered from chronic respiratory problems often leaving him confined to a wheelchair, that he was a UK government employee who had been placed in their home ‘to spy on her’.
The court heard that neighbours told police that Black appeared ‘overburdened and finding it difficult to cope with a sick husband and newborn baby’.
Mr Spencer added that a neighbour recalled hearing Zoe crying at 7am before a CCTV recording two hours later showed Zoe cradled in her mother’s arms.
Further footage taken at 9.39am showed Zoe held under her mother’s right arm, which, said Mr Spencer, ‘was in a way inconsistent with Zoe being alive’.
At 9.41am, Black was filmed scaling a makeshift ladder she had constructed from garden furniture to drop Zoe on the other side of the 8ft high wire mesh security and into the factory car park.
Minutes later, CCTV showed Black scaling the fence and standing at the point where she had dropped her child. She took with her a cordless phone and a knife, which she used to inflict non-serious wounds on her own arms and neck.
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He added that Black told police who accompanied her to hospital: ‘Don’t bring Zoe back. She wanted to die. She’s been unwell because she’s been crying a lot.’
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Psychiatrist Mary di Lustro told the court that she and two fellow experts agreed that Black was suffering from a mental illness and personality disorder and concurred with the prosecution that she should be detained in a medium secure mental health unit under Section 37 of the Mental Health Act.
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