Eleazer Paula Mendez stood before a judge Friday in De Queen, Ark., and pleaded guilty to killing her three children.

‘I took life away from my three children’ was her explanation, her allocution, the words spoken in her native Spanish.

Judge Ted Capeheart then sentenced Mendez to life in prison without the possibility of parole the sentence Mendez agreed to in a plea bargain and put an end to one of the most tragic murder cases in Arkansas history.

On Jan. 28, 2006, Mendez smothered Elvis Morales Mendez, 7, and her 5-year-old twins Samantha Morales Mendez and Samuel Morales Mendez.

Authorities, alerted that the children might be in danger by their father, who was living in New York, went to the Mendez home in De Queen. When the mother came to the door, she collapsed at the officers feet. Tests later showed she had taken poison after the murders. Authorities found the children side by side, tucked into bed, dead.

Some of their possessions had been piled up outside the house and burned.

Why had she done it? There was speculation that she killed the children out of loneliness and depression over her husbands absence, or in retaliation for his real or imagined affairs. No one can say for sure, except Paula Mendez.

And maybe even she doesnt know.

But does it matter?

The case made headlines across the United States and in Mexico. The Mexican government tried to intervene on Mendezs behalf, hoping to persuade prosecutors not to seek the death penalty.

In the end it was her guilty plea that spared her the gurney.

Mendezs husband, the father of her children, wasnt in court Friday. Authorities dont know his whereabouts.

Nor were any other family members. Save for three nuns and her priest, Mendez was alone.

Sad, some might say. But a situation of her own making. If there are any tears left to be shed, they should be shed for three little children whose lives were taken by the one person they trusted most in the world.

Mendez escaped the death penalty, and there will be those who protest that anyone responsible for the deaths of three innocent children should pay with their own blood.

But perhaps a life sentence is how it should be. She killed her children. A fact she must live with for the rest of her life.

The promise of death by lethal injection might have been a relief, a release for Paula Mendez.