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Wyoming State Hospital officials have asked a judge to transfer a Gillette woman who beheaded and mutilated her young children to a supervised residential program. Laura Lee Rice has spent the past 20 years at a mental institution in Evanston after being found criminally insane. Prosecutors say Rice, a 58-year-old schizophrenic, killed her daughters because she believed they were clones of her real children. In 1989, the decapitated bodies of 15-month-old Danielle and 4-month-old JoAnn were found in Rice’s home at the Hitching Post Trailer Court south of Gillette. She had stuffed the children’s bodies in plastic bags. Later that year, Rice was found not guilty by reason of mental illness of two counts of first-degree murder. She was sent to the state hospital and has remained there ever since. Last month, the Wyoming Attorney General’s Office filed a motion on the state hospital’s behalf for Rice’s conditional discharge. In a letter filed in District Court, hospital officials urged Judge John R. Perry to place Rice in a less restrictive setting like a group home or an apartment on the hospital’s campus. Hospital superintendant Robert Stahl and psychiatric nurse practitioner Jamie Bennett wrote that Rice would have to check in with staff throughout the day to make sure she is taking her medications. She would be allowed to attend therapy groups and work in the hospital’s library, but “there is no intention for Ms. Rice to have unsupervised access into the community,” Stahl and Bennett wrote. They note that Rice has not shown any sign of violent behavior since being institutionalized and say she has a low risk of re-offending. “Ms. Rice has been engaged in her recovery process and deemed ready to progress to the next level of privileges,” Stahl and Bennett wrote. They point out that Rice at one time lived in an on-campus apartment but was moved to an in-patient facility because of a policy change requiring patients to get court approval before moving into supervised housing. A motion hearing is scheduled for 1:30 p.m. July 21 in District Court. It is not the first time that Rice has petitioned the court for her release. Court records show she filed a motion for discharge in 1998. District Judge Dan R. Price II denied her request after ruling that she “has not recovered from her mental illness and that she continues to be a substantial risk to others and cannot be adequately controlled if released on supervision.” Rice suffers from Capgras syndrome, a schizophrenic condition where one believes close relatives have been replaced by evil clones. Doctors who examined Rice said she complained of chronic pain in her neck, chest and stomach, which she said was caused by the clones “taking bites out of her body with their eyes.” Rice asked for the results of a CAT scan and chest X-rays taken after she was arrested to see if parts of her were missing. She also wanted to know if pieces of her were found in her daughters’ stomachs. Rice’s older daughter had small cuts around her legs, hands and eyes — all made after she had been beheaded. The other daughter was scalped and her ears were cut off. Her right little toe had been severed a few days before she was murdered. At trial, a psychiatrist testified that the post-death cutting was an attempt by Rice to see if the children were clones. When she took the stand, Rice said a dark-haired woman wearing glasses knocked on her door the morning of the murders. The woman was with two children who looked like Rice’s daughters. She claims the woman told her she had to get rid of them. After the woman left, Rice and the girls laid down for a nap. When she got up to check on her daughters, Rice said “it had already been done. Their throat(s) had already been cut.” Prosecutors have said she had a history of drug abuse and occasionally drifted into different personalities such as “Cindy,” “Sherry” and “Patty.” A few days before the murders, she told the girls’ father that she felt like her head was splitting — that she had no brain. She asked him to take her to the hospital but he didn’t. http://www.gillettenewsrecord.com/articles/2010/07/05/news/yesterday/news03.txt added by: MotherForTruth