Mother on Trial in Baby’s Death : Crime: Prosecutors say she knew what she was doing when she secretly gave birth and hid the infant in a dresser drawer. Defense lawyer says she’s not guilty of murder by reason of insanity.

For nine months, Linda Philhower kept a secret.

A small, frail-looking 23-year-old child-care worker, Philhower did not show her pregnancy. Her mother and stepfather never suspected that their unmarried daughter, who lived quietly in the family’s Azusa home, was carrying a baby to term, alone and without medical care.

At 11 p.m. on a Friday in 1990, Philhower gave birth to a boy over a bathroom toilet.

She carefully wiped the bathroom clean of blood, wrapped the eight-pound infant in a towel and placed him in a dresser drawer in her bedroom. Eleven days later, her mother discovered the decomposing body and called police.

Philhower is on trial on charges of murder in Pomona Superior Court in the Dec. 29, 1990, death of her newborn son. It is the second time she has concealed a pregnancy and the second time she hid a baby after giving birth to it alone, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Hyatt Seligman. Six years ago, Philhower’s family found her first baby in a closet.

That child survived and was given up for adoption. As a juvenile, Philhower faced criminal charges of child endangerment, and was put on probation. She was told to get therapy and “went to counseling twice,” according to testimony by her mother.

Now, Seligman told Pomona Superior Court jurors last week in his opening statement, Philhower is on trial for a more serious crime.

“The defendant killed this perfectly normal, full-term baby, born alive, out of a classic motive of women who have babies and abandon them: social stigma and fear of her mother’s disapproval,” he said.

Assistant public defender Allan Abajian, who is representing Philhower, maintains that the baby was stillborn, and that his client is not guilty by reason of insanity.

A fragile young woman with a tenuous grip on reality, Philhower’s personality fragments under stress, and she loses track of what she is doing, psychiatrists said in oral and written testimony.

“If she did do any acts that were dangerous to the baby’s life, she did so without conscious awareness,” Abajian told a reporter outside court.

While the murder of newborns is rare--12 cases were reported in California last year--some child-abuse experts say the number is underreported, underprosecuted and increasing.

Betty Sutton, a doctor at Patton State Hospital in San Bernardino County, has treated about 60 women incarcerated there who were judged not guilty of murdering their children by reason of insanity. Little psychological research exists on such women, but Sutton and a colleague lectured about the problem at a recent psychology conference in Long Beach.

“A lot of times, these people will do very well and function very well, outwardly,” Sutton said in an interview last week. “They will develop a lifestyle that is very structured and they get a job they can do.

“But the ordinary stress that most people can deal with can precipitate a psychiatric break, or major depression (in them),” she added.

Very often, such women are extremely dependent on their mothers and focus on pleasing them, failing to view themselves as separate, Sutton said. One patient referred to her mother as her “oxygen supply,” she said.

With such a “desperately problematic pregnancy,” such women may not recognize that they are pregnant, or that a child exists, because they refuse to let it sink into their consciousness, said Roland Summit, a child-abuse prevention consultant at Harbor UCLA Medical Center in Torrance.

Phillip Resnick, a professor of psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, who has studied such women, agrees.

“At one level, she knows she is pregnant, but at another level, she thinks, somehow, (the pregnancy) will take care of itself, it will be stillborn,” he said.

“The baby is sort of treated like a bowel movement,” Summit said.

Denial and avoidance, labeled disassociation by mental health professionals, is a normal coping device. But in these women it reaches abnormal levels, both men said.

Philhower’s personality profile, as detailed in court testimony, is similar to that given by mental health professionals.

Dr. Michael Coburn, a psychiatrist appointed by the court to examine the defendant, testified that Philhower suffers from emotional instability. Under stress, she engages in severe denial. Philhower concealed the pregnancy, Coburn said, out of fear of displeasing her mother. She concealed the baby out of a childish belief in magical thinking that if she hid the baby, it would go away.

Coburn said Philhower told him: ‘ “I didn’t kill that baby. I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t hurt anything. I’m supposed to be the perfect child. . . . I feel I can’t make mistakes, because I’m so perfect to my mother.’ ”

Philhower told a Los Angeles County sheriff’s detective that the baby’s head was twisted when it came out of her body and fell into the toilet bowel. When she picked him up, he was not breathing, she told investigators.

Philhower said she kept the baby beside her bed for a full day before putting it in the dresser, where it was found after the family cat began scratching at the drawer.

Despite testimony from a coroner’s official that the baby’s inflated lungs indicated that it was not stillborn, Philhower’s mental condition prevented her from knowing whether the child was born alive, or whether it died accidentally, Abajian said.

“Even if the baby was born alive, there just doesn’t appear to be any malice for her to be guilty of murder,” the defense lawyer said.

Seligman said the insanity defense is too convenient. He said he doubts that Philhower could become insane only when pregnant, and only then be unconscious of what she was doing.

The prosecutor points to her stable life between pregnancies, during which she graduated from high school, attended Citrus College, held a job for four years as a child-care worker, enjoyed a good relationship with her parents, and had a boyfriend for four years. The defendant had good reason to knowingly conceal her pregnancy.

Philhower’s mother, Virginia Bath, 49, testified that she threw Philhower’s older sister, Diane, out of the house when she became pregnant at 17. Bath relented, however, and let her daughter move back in when she discovered that the girl was homeless and living in a car with her infant son.

When Philhower, like her sister, got pregnant at 17, she concealed it from her mother out of fear, Seligman said. Afterward, she was placed on juvenile probation and resumed her life. When she became pregnant again, Philhower dealt with it in exactly the same way, the prosecutor said, but this time with fatal consequences.

Her actions prove that Philhower knew what she was doing, Seligman said. When the baby’s body was discovered, the defendant pleaded with her mother and stepfather not to call the police.

Jurors, who are expected to begin deliberations this week, will decide the case in two phases. First, they will decide if Philhower is guilty of murder. Then they will decide the sanity issue.

But whether emotional problems such as Philhower’s can be labeled insanity remains a question still debated by mental health workers, Summit said.

“If (the problems) keep you from being fully conscious, is that an exemption from responsibility?” the child-abuse consultant asked. “Perhaps, but you’re not insane.”