About a Boy 
Hannah and Andrew
In October 2006 a four-year-old from Corpus Christi named Andrew Burd died mysteriously of salt poisoning. His foster mother, Hannah Overton, was charged with capital murder, vilified from all quarters, and sent to prison for life. But was this churchgoing young woman a vicious child killer? Or had the tragedy claimed its second victim?
TexanMom says: Thank you, Pam Colloff, for bringing this story to light! What a tragic injustice. I pray for the Texas Appellate Court’s wisdom and swift action in this case. (May 10th, 2012 at 3:39pm)
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Orr filed the writ in April 2011, and soon afterward San Antonio Express-News reporter John MacCormack—whose reporting has raised questions about the fairness of Hannah’s conviction—made a routine call to the office to gauge the reaction to the recent developments in the case. He reached Doug Norman, who was part of the prosecution team at Hannah’s trial and who is now responsible for fighting her appeal. (Like Eastwood, neither Norman nor Jimenez would comment for this article.) Norman’s remarks were hardly the stuff of a cocksure prosecutor. “I may harbor doubts, but a jury heard this case and made a decision, and everyone has to respect that decision,” he told the Express-News. “I’ll put it this way. My job requires me to be an advocate for the state. As long as I can make a nonfrivolous argument, I’ll make it, but nothing in my job prevents me from praying for a more just outcome.”
EVERY SATURDAY FOR THE past several years, Larry has ridden his motorcycle from Corpus Christi to the Murray Unit, the maximum-security women’s prison west of Waco where Hannah is incarcerated: a squat, concrete building walled off from the world with cyclone fencing and coils of razor wire. He and Hannah are allotted two hours, during which they sit together in the dayroom, flanked by other inmates and their families. Once a month, Larry loads the kids into his van and they make the trip together, although on those visits, no contact is allowed. Hannah must sit on the opposite side of a metal divider, behind Plexiglas. There are two phones that the kids can speak into, and they eagerly pass the receivers back and forth, recounting the month’s events in stereo. “They get to see her for two hours, once a month—twenty-four hours in a year,” Larry said. He and the kids return home the same day so that he can teach Sunday school the next morning. Round-trip, the journey is 632 miles.
That Larry is able to be with the children at all, much less raise them, is “a huge blessing,” he told me. Not long after his arrest, a grand jury upgraded the charges against him to capital murder, and he feared that he too might face life in prison. But after Hannah’s conviction, the DA’s office offered him several plea deals, each of which required him to acknowledge that he had intentionally caused Andrew’s death. Larry turned them down. Finally he agreed to plead no contest to criminally negligent homicide. “The way it was explained to me, that’s how I would be charged if I accidentally ran a stoplight and hit somebody,” he said. “Pleading out to that was much better than having my children grow up without a mother or a father.” In exchange for his plea, Larry was given five years’ probation and a $5,000 fine. (Hannah’s mother and stepfather—whom the courts had named “managing conservators” of the children—were then able to return them to Larry’s custody.) While he was relieved not to have to serve prison time, the discrepancy between his wife’s punishment and his own left him stupefied. “How can one person get probation and another get life without parole for the same thing?” Larry said.
I visited Hannah at the Murray Unit one bright, cloudless afternoon, when the warden granted her a few hours to speak with me. She was even slighter in person than I had expected, and as she related the events of the past five years in her soft voice, she looked hopelessly out of place in her white prison jumpsuit. Yet her life behind bars, however incongruous, has taken on its own rhythm. She is awakened every morning at 2:45 a.m., rarely sleeping well; the overhead light above her bed never shuts off, and announcements blare throughout the night over the loudspeaker. At 4 a.m., she reports to the laundry, where she folds shirts and hands out clean clothes to inmates. After her shift ends in the late morning, there are letters to write home, in which she tries to stay present in her children’s lives by choreographing what she can from a distance. “I plan their birthday parties from here,” she told me. “I pick out the games and I make the decorations, if I can.” She devotes most of her evenings to Bible studies, leading groups of inmates through careful examinations of Scripture. One of her favorite books to revisit is Ruth. “It’s about trusting God and seeing how he is a god of redemption and restoration,” she said.
As we sat across from each other in the dayroom, Hannah and I discussed her case and the anguish that had consumed her following Andrew’s death. “I spent many nights beating myself up over ‘Could I have done this or could I have done that?’ ” Hannah told me, staring at her hands. “I regret that I didn’t push harder from the beginning to find out what was wrong with him—that I believed his problems were just due to his previous abuse and neglect, and that, when I finally decided he needed to see a doctor about his pica, we didn’t get him in quicker.” When I pressed her to explain why she and Larry had not called 911, she leaned forward, as if pleading with me to understand. “Because we were not thinking we were in a life-or-death situation,” she insisted. “For us to go to [the clinic] was a lot faster than it would have been had we called, at that point.”
As we talked about Andrew, she had to stop several times to compose herself. “I’m supposed to be done crying,” she said apologetically at one point, brushing away tears. Despite all the pain, she told me that if she could do it over again, she would not change their decision to bring Andrew into their home. “It’s not even a consideration,” she said. “I wouldn’t give up that time we had with him and that he had with us.”
I asked Hannah if her faith had been shaken by Andrew’s loss and the suffering that she and her family had experienced. “There was a time when I questioned how God could allow this to happen,” she said. “But what I’ve realized is that I can trust his heart, even though I don’t understand his plan.” The reality that Hannah, who is 34, may spend the rest of her life in prison for capital murder—a sentence usually reserved for violent criminals who pose a continuing threat to society—is one she is still struggling to understand; even harder to grasp is the possibility that she might never be reunited with her children. “I miss everything,” she later wrote to me. “Good-night kisses, bedtime stories, playing in the yard, birthdays, loose teeth, Christmas plays . . . movie nights, waking up to their beautiful faces.” The Court of Criminal Appeals is currently reviewing her writ, which contends that the information about Andrew’s gastric contents are grounds for a new trial. The court, which could rule imminently or years from now, could send the case back to Judge Longoria for a hearing or—far less likely—overturn her conviction. Because the court has not been inclined to intercede so far, members of Calvary Chapel have begun a letter-writing campaign to the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles in hopes of securing a pardon or a commutation.
Meanwhile, those who once pursued Hannah with such certainty have undergone their own trials. Detective Hess was put on administrative leave in 2008 after it came to light that he had disclosed confidential information to the suspect in an ongoing investigation for indecency with a child. Hess was allowed to return to the force and is now a patrol sergeant. And Eastwood was fired from the DA’s office in 2010. Then–district attorney Jimenez did not publicly disclose the reasons for the termination, but it occurred one week after Eastwood informed her superiors that she had been romantically involved in the past with a sex offender; she reported that she feared the information had been used by the offender’s defense attorney to get him probation in a criminal case. (A subsequent investigation by the attorney general’s office found that no crimes had been committed.)
As the Overtons wait on the appellate courts, Larry goes about the task of raising their five children, while also trying to rebuild his business. (After his arrest, he lost most of his clients. “One woman said she didn’t want to work with a child killer,” Larry told me.) In his role as single dad, he is aided by his extended family and his many friends from Calvary Chapel, who pitch in to do cleaning, grocery shopping, laundry, and babysitting. A church member who homeschools her daughters educates the Overton children, using lesson plans Hannah sends her. (Haller, their next-door neighbor, has since moved to Houston.) The kids now range in age from four to twelve, and when I visited them late one afternoon, not long after I had seen Hannah, they seemed unencumbered by the tragedy that had engulfed their family. They were no different from other children their age: exuberant, funny, guileless. As Larry stood in the kitchen and peeled potatoes, the kids—excited to have a visitor—showed me around their house, pointing out their favorite hiding places and the plaster cast of their footprints in the hallway, which includes the letter A for Andrew. The absence of their mother and their late brother was quietly acknowledged. “This is where Andrew used to sleep,” Isaac told me softly as he led me into the boys’ room. “There have been a few tear-filled nights because one of the kids misses Andrew,” Larry told me later. “I remind them that the Lord loves him more than anyone could and he is with Him now and we will see him again someday.”
The kids took me out back, where they jumped on the trampoline and played hide-and-seek in the salt grass. Emma, the youngest, trailed behind them with a doll, occasionally running inside to bang on the piano. It was Emma whom Hannah was pregnant with when Andrew died, and she is the child Hannah knows least. When Emma took her first steps, Larry brought her to the parking lot outside the county jail so that Hannah could watch from her cell above.
Larry called out that dinner was ready, and we gathered inside around a rough-hewn oak table he had made years ago. Dinner was potato soup—“It’s good and filling, and it’s cheap,” Larry told me—which the kids dived into after saying grace. They chattered about an upcoming birthday party and discussed the merits of their favorite colors, finishing each other’s sentences between slurps of soup. Had Andrew sat among them, I realized, he would have been nine years old.
After dinner the kids settled down in front of the TV to watch a movie that was Isabel’s pick: a Japanese animated film that her brothers and sisters showed less enthusiasm for, fidgeting as they lay next to each other on the carpet. Before they headed to bed, Larry turned up the lights for their nightly devotions. Isaac read John 9 aloud while Larry helped him sound out the difficult words (“synagogue,” “Pharisees”). A short discussion followed about the passage, in which Jesus heals a blind man, and then Larry closed his Bible and said, “Okay, guys, let’s pray.” One by one, the kids spoke their prayers, each of which ended with the same wish.
“Dear God, thank you for the soup,” Isaac said, his head bowed, his eyes closed tightly. “And thanks for the movie, even though it was kind of weird. I pray that you will bring Mom home soon.”
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