'An Emotional Purge'
Routier told police she fell asleep on the couch with her two boys and woke up to Damon's cries.
She glimpsed a man in the dark and pursued him, picking up a knife he dropped in the utility room.
The man fled and Routier realized the boys were wounded and she was bleeding. Her screams alerted her husband, Darin, who was sleeping upstairs along with their infant son, Drake. Darin performed CPR on Devon while Routier called 911.
“They just stabbed me and my kids … my little boys,” Routier told the dispatcher. She added, “his knife was lying over there and I already picked it up. God … I bet if we could have gotten the prints … maybe,” a comment that prosecutors later characterized as calculating.
Other doubts about her veracity surfaced early on.
Investigators were puzzled that Routier hadn't woken up immediately and why the intruder ignored valuable jewelry in the kitchen. Medical experts who treated Routier said injuries to her right arm and throat appeared self-inflicted.
Crime scenes like the Routier murders in Rowlett, Texas, with “lots of blood, lots of stabbing and lots of cutting—that tends to show some sort of emotional purge,” Williams says. “That usually means [perpetrators] are close to the family. Who's likely to have that collapse and kill the children? One of the parents.”
Silly String Scandal
When the trial opened on January 6, 1997, prosecutors portrayed Routier as an avaricious, bleached blonde with breast implants who stabbed her sons out of fury over financial troubles and fabricated a crime scene implicating a stranger.
The affluent couple owned an expensive boat, a luxury sports car and took lavish vacations, Dallas County Assistant State’s Attorney Greg Davis contended.
In early 1996, however, Darin Routier’s business income flattened out and their debts increased. Prosecutors theorized Routier killed the boys because raising them was too expensive.
"Children are costly. Children demand attention, they demand money," Davis said during the trial. "If you eliminate those children, you eliminate that demand."
“The real Darlie Routier is, in fact, a self-centered woman, a cold-blooded woman and a woman capable of killing her own children,” Davis told the jury.
Defense attorneys accused prosecutors of character assassination and ignoring evidence like the bloody sock, saying an injured Routier had no time to run to the alley and plant it.
Routier took the stand to testify about her trauma the night of the murders. “Can you imagine? Your babies are dying in front of you. What do you do?” she said.
But a 1996 video of a cemetery gathering where Routier laughed and sprayed Silly String by her sons’ graves shocked the community and loomed over the trial. The Routiers have explained the event was a somber memorial service that ended with a celebration of the lives of Damon and Devon, who would have turned 7 that day.
“Ripping that thing out of context was just unconscionable by the prosecution, as far as I’m concerned,” Smith says.
Davis told the Dallas Morning News in 2016 that “the totality of the evidence is what convinced the jury.”
‘This Is Not Solved’
The crime occurred two years after South Carolinian Susan Smith caught national attention for drowning her two young sons on October 5, 1994. The prevailing zeitgeist was, “oh, it’s the mother who did it,” defense attorney Smith recalls.
He met Routier in 2002 and after multiple conversations, concluded “that there is no way this mom did it. She’s a traumatized victim.”
He points to the scar on Routier’s neck. “That thing came so close to killing her. It cut her down to the carotid artery. One millimeter more and she’s dead,” Smith says. (Court docs note that, if Routier’s wound had been two millimeters longer, “she would have bled to death within two to three minutes.”)
No execution date has been set for Routier, who is among the 2.3% of women on death row as of January 2026.
The defense team is seeking forensic tests of a fingerprint found on a coffee table they hope could lead to a break in the case, Smith says.
“If she were granted a retrial and it was held here in Dallas County, I am firmly convinced that she would be exonerated,” he notes.
Routier’s mother, Darlie Kee, and husband, Darin, who divorced Darlie in October 2011, maintain she is innocent.
“This is not solved," Kee said in 2016. "They have not found who killed my grandsons. That person is still walking the streets.”
The Dallas County State’s Attorney’s Office did not respond to A&E Crime + Investigation’s request for comment on the case.
Death Row Mistakes
Since 1973, at least 202 individuals wrongly convicted and sentenced to death have been exonerated, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. “For every eight people executed in the United States, one other person has been exonerated from death row,” per the center.
University of Houston Law School professor David Dow credits that error rate to investigators developing a premature commitment to a narrative.
Once committed to a suspect, “they are searching for clues that suggest the culpability of the person who they've already decided committed the crime,” Dow, who founded The Texas Innocence Network, tells A&E Crime + Investigation. “And that causes them not even to see evidence that points away from that possible suspect.”
In the majority of homicides of children under the age of 5, federal data shows a parent is the perpetrator. However, police and prosecutors must avoid any cognitive bias when investigating domestic murders, experts tell A&E Crime + Investigation.
In Routier’s situation, “if it turns out that she is, in fact, innocent,” Dow says, “her case will epitomize this type of wrongful conviction.”
