ALTON, Ill. — A Metro East woman who was convicted of killing her two infant daughters in the 1980s will soon walk out of prison.
Paula Sims was granted parole Thursday, her attorney Jed Stone confirmed with 5 On Your Side. The Illinois Prisoner Review Board voted 12-1 on granting her release. Stone said he talked with Sims on the phone to let her know the news. He has served as her attorney since the late 1990s.
“I walked in the hearing this morning believing in my case,” said Jed Stone, Paula Sims’ attorney. “You never know how an argument is going to be heard and I’m grateful 12 of the 13 agreed with me. Paula was delighted and thankful."
In 1986, Sims claimed someone had abducted her daughter Loralei from her Jersey County home.
“He was going to kill me, I was in such shock, I didn’t know he was going to take my baby,” she told reporters at the time. “I just did what he said.”
Police launched a massive search. Ten days later, the baby’s remains were found 150 feet behind the Sims’ home. She was so badly decomposed that a cause of death couldn’t be determined. No one was ever charged.
Three years later, police were called to the Sims’ home in Alton.
It had happened again.
Sims claimed a gunman took her 6-week-old daughter, Heather. Her 15-month-old son was unharmed. Four days later, Heather’s body was found in a trash can in West Alton.
Baby Heather was buried and soon Sims was charged with the death of her first daughter, Loralei. Two months later, she was indicted for Heather’s murder.
In 1990, she ultimately confessed to killing both babies.
Sims tried to get a new trial and use postpartum psychosis as her defense, but a judge denied the request. She was sentenced to life without a chance at parole.
That changed back in March when Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker granted Sims’ request for a parole hearing, giving her a chance at something people in the St. Louis area never thought she would get: freedom.
Postpartum psychosis is a rare mental illness that causes some new mothers to experience life-threatening thoughts or behaviors, according to the Mayo Clinic. Symptoms include paranoia, hallucinations, and attempts to harm oneself or their baby.
“Today is a great day for women because it recognized the existence and severity of a little-known mental illness called postpartum psychosis,” said Stone.
In 2006, 5 On Your Side’s Kay Quinn interviewed Sims in prison.
“I just want to bring awareness, and this is real … and I’m not some monster,” Sims told Quinn.
Her husband and son were killed in a car crash while she has been behind bars, but friends who have remained by her side have said they would let her move in with them in southern Illinois, Stone said.
Thursday in a statement, members of the Illinois Senate Republicans said “the Prisoner Review Board has voted to release another individual who has committed heinous, unspeakable crimes.”
The group also says “the people of Illinois deserve to know that due diligence is being performed on the individuals making parole decisions. Right now, they have no reason to believe that is happening.”
“To claim that this board did not do its due diligence is just wrong,” added Sims’ attorney.
As for the killings of her own children?
“I think every day the deaths of her two children pain her to tears. I know she feels responsible and ashamed,” said Stone.
The 62-year-old Sims remains at the Logan Correctional Center in Lincoln, Illinois Thursday night.
Her lawyer expects Sims to walk out of prison, a free woman, on Friday.