Paula Sims to open male-only dog salon?

Paula Sims is 56 and wants out of prison so she can be a pet groomer, which would be a marginally better profession for her than daycare worker. Even so, who is going to entrust their puppy to a woman who twice drowned her baby girls in their baths?

She claims to be a victim of postpartum depression. That might be plausible except that she had three children and only murdered the girls. Randy survived having Paula as a mother. He recently died in a car crash.

So if her baby-blues victimization did not strike when Sims had a boy — just in 1986 when she had Loralei and in 1989 when she had Heather — one is led back to the ugly likelihood that Paula Sims was practicing gender selection. She was fine functioning as a mother as long as the baby was male.

The image keeps surfacing of those Johnson & Johnson ads with happy, loved babies in their bubbly baths. Only a monster would hold those babies under the water until they stopped struggling for air, then have their wits about them enough to hide the bodies and make up a story about a masked gunman stealing them.

And then do the whole thing yet again to another baby girl three years later.

Madison County State’s Attorney Tom Gibbons properly summed up Sims’ plea for clemency: “baseless.”

Jurors in 1990 decided Sims needed to be locked up for life for only Heather’s murder. She admitted killing Loralei but those charges were reduced to get her guilty plea.

Gov. Bruce Rauner needs to see Sims for the evil being she is and keep her in prison.

This story was originally published December 18, 2015 at 1:00 PM with the headline "Paula Sims to open male-only dog salon?."