Murder Plot Can’t Kill a Mother’s Love

Lynn Bourbeau thought she’d experienced the ultimate assault as she lay near death in a hospital bed, her throat slashed ear-to-ear and her husband accused of trying to kill her.

A sharper blow was yet to come.

Less than a month after the Aug. 24 attack, her “baby”--her 14-year-old son--was charged with plotting with his jailed father to complete the job. Prosecutors said he stashed his father’s gun and ammunition, and offered a friend $1,500 to pull the trigger.

Yet she stood by her son through his January trial in juvenile court, even through testimony that he told a friend he had hoped to see her in a coffin.

And this month, after he was sentenced to five years’ probation, the most lenient possible, she opened her arms to welcome him home.

“That’s where he belongs,” Bourbeau softly told Du Page County Judge Michael Burke, who had agreed with testimony that the boy acted on orders from his manipulative father.

“I don’t love him any less,” Bourbeau said of her son. “I know he needs to get help, and we’ll get it.”

Bourbeau, 44, and her husband, Richard, lived in a comfortable house in suburban Glendale Heights with their handsome, athletic son and a homecoming-queen daughter.

“Everyone was shocked that this would be a family that any of this would be happening to,” said the Rev. Andrew Koschmann, pastor at the Lutheran church the Bourbeaus attended regularly.

The boy and his sister were active in church functions and popular with their peers, he said. “There was no hint ever to me of anything amiss in the family.”

But trial testimony revealed family secrets even Bourbeau said she didn’t know.

Starting when the boy was 7, his father routinely beat him, said defense attorney Kathleen Zellner. Witnesses, including the boy’s 16-year-old sister, told of seeing him being choked by his father.

The boy confided in his sister but balked when she wanted to report the abuse to authorities, Zellner said.

“He was afraid his father would kill him,” the attorney said.

The sister also described “a lot of fighting” between her parents, and Bourbeau admitted the marriage had been rocky. Though well acquainted with her husband’s foul moods, she said she never knew her son was being abused.

“I addressed it as just my husband’s temper,” she said after the sentencing.

That changed last summer when Bourbeau caught her husband choking the boy, and she started divorce proceedings, Zellner said.

Then came the attack on her.

Prosecutors say her enraged husband slashed her throat with a utility knife. Their daughter returned home, found her mother bleeding and called for help.

Richard Bourbeau, a part-time gas station clerk and delivery-service employee, was charged with attempted murder and jailed.

But prosecutors say that didn’t stop him from trying to get his son to help finish the job, calling the boy hundreds of times from jail.

The boy agreed to help because he feared for his own life, Zellner said.

“I was shocked,” Lynn Bourbeau said. “But after what my husband did to me, I don’t know how shocked I can be.”

Thanks to a jail informant and the boy’s revived conscience, the plot fizzled.

At his trial, the teenager told the judge it was the biggest mistake he’ll ever make.

“I know I can be a law-abiding citizen and a good son to my mother,” he said softly at his sentencing hearing.

Mother and son tearfully embraced after the sentence was announced.

“I’m terribly relieved,” said Lynn Bourbeau.

Richard Bourbeau still faces trial. He has pleaded not guilty to attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder. His public defender, Elizabeth Reed, would not comment.

Prosecutors had sought seven years’ incarceration for the boy and questioned the wisdom of returning him home.

“He is the person who almost caused his mother’s death,” said Assistant State’s Atty. Gene Ognibene.

“For a father to ask his son to kill his own mother is absolutely appalling,” Ognibene said.

The boy “was a danger to his mother,” Ognibene said, “and only [he] knows whether he still is.”