For months, a 38-year-old Massachusetts woman feared her own mother was going to kill her. She had heard the warning from her brother: Their family worshipped Satan and was plotting to kill her.
But the warning belonged to her dead brother, given to the woman at his funeral.
About five months later, Patricia Labossiere stabbed her mother, 67-year-old Julia Bradshaw, while she slept.
“I’m sick of her bullshit, so I stabbed her,” Labossiere, who was smoking a cigarette, told police officers when they arrived.
Now, the Massachusetts Parole Board is considering freeing Labossiere with an expert psychologist testifying Labossiere, 63, is a low-risk of reoffending despite continued beliefs and fears of satanism.
Oct. 27, 2000
On the night of Oct. 27, 2000, Labossiere called the Attleboro police to report that she had just stabbed her own mother in the house they were living in together.
When officers arrived, they reported Labossiere remained calm and told them her mother was in the bedroom. Officials also found a wet knife on the kitchen counter and a wet paper towel with blood on the kitchen floor.
Labossiere later recalled going into her room to get the knife when her mother was heading to bed.
She believed her mother was trying to place a curse on her that would make Labossiere kill herself, which had been revealed to her by her dead older brother.
“… the thought came to me that these major depressive episodes that I would fall into were curses from her,” Labossiere said. “And I believe those curses were meant to drive me to kill myself.”
The “curses,” she said, had come and gone over the years. While in prison, she was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, the parole board stated.
When her daughter was about 4, Labossiere remembers her daughter being healthy and happy. Labossiere was taking college courses and was “with a man who I cared very deeply for.”
“I just had everything. I felt I had everything,” she recalled. “Everything was going well and boom, I fell down into a hole of depression again.”
Labossiere had moved back in with her parents with her daughter after a divorce because she didn’t have anywhere else to go. Once again, she started feeling depressed.
“I could feel it coming on. And I said, this is my mother doing this to me and she wasn’t going to quit with me,” she recalled.
The family was known to the community as going to church and an “excellent family, very caring,” The Sun Chronicle reported. Labossiere remembers her mother making big holiday meals, being a hard worker and raising five children. However, she started believing her family members were not actually her biological family.
“I was just so bewildered and so frightened and so confused because I had always thought I was living in your all-American family — mother, father, sister, brothers, going to church, going to school,“ she recalled during her parole board hearing on May 15. ”And to have these thoughts that they were worshiping Satan in church … it was just too much to handle.”
On Sept. 9, 2002, in Bristol County Superior Court, Labossiere pleaded guilty to the second-degree murder of Bradshaw. She was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole.
During her first parole board hearing in 2020, Labossiere recognized her actions were “drastic” and that she “took no joy in it.” She said she killed her mother because “she was a life-long enemy and I wanted to end a life-long battle.”
Satanism fears
Labossiere still fears those around her in prison worship satan.
“[Those thoughts] don’t bother me because I’ve been living with it for 25 years. I feel that I don’t have to be one of them,” she told the parole board. “I’m sticking to my Christian beliefs.”
During more than 25 years incarcerated, Labossiere has not “expressed any violence towards anyone or threatened anyone in violence,” the board stated.
Labossiere added that she’s not interested in hurting or killing anyone else.
“I don’t know how to make you believe me, but I don’t want to go through anything like it ever again. It was targeted at my mother,” she said. “It’s not like I’m out to kill mankind. It’s not like I’m out to do a mass shooting and my mother’s gone … I’m considered a non-violent person in prison. I was nonviolent before prison.”
She now waits until she has more confirmation than just the voices before acting on her thoughts, she told the parole board. She couldn’t tell the board any specific examples, however.
At another point during the hearing, she said she was able to confirm what she needed to before her mother’s killing because it was “confirmed” through three people: Her lawyer, a friend and her ex-husband.
She told the board she still believes her mother is “an enemy” and “a devil worshiper.”
“How do you reconcile that with the idea that you might have a thought disorder,” one parole board member asked.
“Well, when I went to my lawyer who handled my divorce, and I asked him if he knew if my daughter was involved in witchcraft. He said, the whole town is. I was the only one who didn’t know what was going on,” she told the parole board.
But he’s never confirmed that in front of anyone else, she told the board.
“So, do you have any concern whether or not maybe you might have misperceived that,” a board member asked.
No, she said.
She also told the parole board she believes other people don’t have the powers to curse her like her mother and family did.
It’s because of this, that forensic psychologist Kerry Nelligan believes Labossiere is unlikely to hurt anyone if she’s released on parole.
“In the moment of the murder and the period of time leading up to that, she was essentially overwhelmed by mental health symptoms,” she told the parole board. “And, although irrationally and erroneously, nonetheless in her mind, truly in fear for her own life.”
Nelligan said Labossiere will have to continue with the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health if released on parole, and that they can help her with “access to support and intervention that would be needed in case such thoughts ever did come up, which I think is highly unlikely as long as she remains on medication.”
It’s not the first case like this that the state has dealt with, the expert stated, adding that “we have very experienced risk management folks across the state.”
Labossiere would do best transitioning to a group home setting with 24-hour access to help, said Heather Hovley, who works for the Department of Mental Health. But those types of facilities often have very long waitlists.
No indicator
It’s Labossiere continued fears of satanism and belief of her mother’s involvement that concerns Bristol County Assistant District Attorney Jillian Hirsch.
What if Labossiere starts believing a neighbor in her apartment complex or a boss that she works with is out to get her, the assistant district attorney proposed. There is no way “to ensure that she would be reporting that and that we would be able to get ahead of this.”
While the experts said the crime being out of character for Labossiere was a reason she won’t reoffend, Hirsch doesn’t agree.
“This appeared to be out of character, and that’s my concern going forward, is that there was no indicator that this would happen,” she said. “And how are we going to ensure that these delusional thoughts don’t cause her to commit such a violent, atrocious act in the future?”
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But she hasn’t — despite her continued fears of satanism involvement with the people currently around her, her lawyer argued.
“And she’s been able to regulate her behavior,” he said. “When she finds herself in that situation, she’s able to remove herself. She doesn’t respond with violence. I think that’s very important with respect to her risk and needs.”
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