In the grip of an irresistible impulse, Delora saw a girl laid out like a doll, arms crossed, a green necktie cinched tight. The girl in the vision, six-year-old Donna Isbell, slept in the next room. Her eight-year-old brother Roy Jr., was asleep nearby. Their parents, Roy Sr., a petty officer at Los Alamitos Naval Station, and Garnett, who worked nights at Douglas Aircraft, weren’t home.

Unable to find a green necktie, Delora took one of Mr. Isbell’s black socks. That would have to do. She tore the sheet from Donna’s bed, stuffed a corner into the girl’s mouth, then wound the sock around her neck and pulled.

Donna didn’t cry out. She lifted her arms once, then went still.

Delora waited, then pulled again.

Roy, asleep just feet away, didn’t stir.

Delora obeyed the impulse that had tormented her for a long time. Maybe now it would end.

She sat on the living room sofa and lit a cigarette. The smoke steadied her for a moment, then the fear crept in—cold and absolute. She couldn’t explain what she had done—not even to herself.

She walked barefoot to the house next door and knocked. No answer. A few doors down, she found Dr. Sidney G. Willner.  “Something’s wrong… at the house. Come with me,” she said. Then, almost to herself: “I must have done it. There was no one else there.”

They walked in silence. Dr. Willner wondered what she meant. Even if she had told him, nothing could have prepared him for what he found.

Dr. Willner called the Sheriff’s Department.

Deputies took Delora to the nearest substation for questioning. Because Delora was a teenage girl, the department brought in Detective Sergeant Lena Barner to assist Captain J.M. Burns with the questioning.

 As investigators questioned the high school sophomore, they noticed her emotional distance. Sergeant Barner said when she asked Delora why she did it, “She just sat there and stared.”

The only times she showed emotion were when she saw Donna’s body at the scene and when Roy and Garnett Isbell entered the substation. Roy and Garnett were devastated.

Delora babysat Donna and Roy, Jr. several times before the murder, and she and the children got along well. The family had no reason to fear her.

As Donna’s parents tried to process their grief, Delora answered investigators’ questions.

She said quietly, “I often felt like strangling my brothers and sisters.”

She harbored violent impulses toward her siblings for a long time. Her feelings, coupled with her constant fights with her mother, were the reasons she was allowed to move from Colorado to Southern California two years earlier.

Women and girls rarely commit murder—especially in 1951. The story made headlines across the country. It was horrifying. And strange.

Was it a movie? A psychotic break? Something older and darker inside her? Could someone commit such a brutal act… and not be evil?

NEXT TIME: Wrapping up Delora’s story.

Photographs courtesy USC Digital Library. Los Angeles Examiner Photographs Collection