A World Bank manager withdrew his claims of insanity and pleaded guilty yesterday to strangling his two little girls in their Columbia home as revenge on his estranged wife.
Robert E. Filippi, 44, shook with sobs as a Howard County judge sentenced him to two consecutive terms of life in prison without the possibility of parole for the murders of Lindsey and Nicole, ages 2 and 4.
The girls were found in an upstairs bedroom June 9 with ropes around their necks.
Prosecutors originally had sought the death penalty for Filippi, but the girls' mother, Naoko Nakajima, objected. They reached a plea agreement with Filippi, who withdrew his previous plea of not criminally responsible by reason of insanity. Doctors deemed him competent to stand trial, and a date had been set for next month.
Assistant State's Attorney Kim Oldham said that Nakajima and prosecutors had decided that a punishment worse than death would be for Filippi "to live every single day with the image of Nicole's face and Lindsey's face in his own hands as he stole their last breath."
Filippi, dressed in an olive-colored suit and shackled at his feet, wept openly during the hearing while his former wife looked on stoically. Filippi's attorney, James B. Kraft, said that his client agreed that "to grant the death penalty would be to give him a break, in a sense."
The girls were killed the day before Filippi and Nakajima had been scheduled to begin mediation in their divorce and custody disputes. At the time, Nakajima had moved out of the family's spacious home in Columbia, although she was allowed regular visits with her daughters.
Filippi and Nakajima, 28, had married in Tokyo in 1996, when Filippi's job took him there. He was a team leader at the International Finance Corp. in Washington, a World Bank organization that grants loans to companies in developing countries.
Filippi said in divorce filings that Nakajima frequently took the two children back to her native Japan and failed to return to the United States on the dates they had agreed upon. According to court documents, Nakajima said that he had physically and emotionally abused her.
Yesterday, prosecutors said Filippi had been plotting for weeks to kill his daughters and himself, because, according to his journal, "I want to hurt her in the most unforgettable way."
Lindsey and Nicole spent the last day of their lives with their mother and grandparents, who were visiting from Japan, according to a detailed account prosecutors gave yesterday. At 5 p.m., Nakajima dropped off the girls with Filippi and went to dinner with her parents. She would later tell prosecutors that Filippi seemed "normal."
The girls spent the evening playing in a wading pool with their neighbor's two children; Filippi cooked dinner for both families. Later, neighbors watched as Lindsey and Nicole played with sparklers and tried to catch fireflies.
At 9:25 p.m., Filippi called Nakajima, angry that the girls did not want to go to bed because they wanted to watch television as they did at her home. Two hours later, Filippi called his sister. He told her that he had killed the girls and tried to hurt himself but "it didn't work."
Police found him sitting at his kitchen table, smoking cigarettes and crying. Upstairs, the girls were lying in bed together, with ropes wound tightly around their necks, their bodies still warm.
Filippi had written a note, asking his sister to make sure that Nakajima never get the children's ashes.
