Metro

‘Killer Nanny’ Yoselyn Ortega makes first public appearance, faces murder charges of 2 tots

She has hidden these four months from reporters and cameras. But today, the notorious accused Killer Nanny made her first public appearance, sitting hunched and handcuffed at the defense table for a brief hearing.

Yoselyn Ortega, wearing baggy gray sweats and with her hair in loosely-braided cornrows and pigtails, came to court for an update on her first degree murder indictment in the unfathomable knife-point slaughters of two young, Upper West Side children under her care.

Lucia and Leo Krim perished in the October 25 slashing. The girl was 6 years old. The boy was 2.

Ortega was in court for just two minutes, during which Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Gregory Carro expressed impatience at the length of time it is taking for her to be psychologically evaluated. Ortega, who now bears a thick slashing scar to the front of her neck, listened via a Spanish interpreter.

“Six thousand pages have to be read,” Ortega’s public lawyer Valerie Van Leer-Greenberg responded, referring to the medical records Ortega has generated prior to the stabbings and during her four months in a prison ward at Elmhurst Hospital, where she remains. “That might take a while,” the lawyer said.

“They’ve had them for a while,” the judge responded. “It’s not like they got them yesterday.” Ortega will be brought to a courthouse clinic for further evaluation on March 21, and back to open court April 5 for possible psych exam results, the judge said.

Lucia and Leo Krim had been found bleeding to death in the bathtub of their W. 75th Street apartment by their mother, Marina Krim, when the mom returned home with her third child, Nessie, 3, who survives.

Ortega was still in the apartment, and had slashed her own self in the throat, authorities said. The Krim family did not attend today’s proceeding.

The nanny kept her head down during much of the brief hearing, her eyes fixed on the defense table except for one worried glance at news photographers. It was her fifth court proceeding, but her first time being photographed; her lawyer has zealously tried to keep reporters and cameras away.

“It is a pathetic woman who lies here,” Van Leer-Greenberg, had told a judge in a failed attempt to bar reporters from Ortega’s November hospital bed arraignment.

“She is in a very debilitated condition. She has tubes running out of her torso. She has a right to privacy,” the lawyer argued then. Today, the lawyer’s protests were denied. The lawyer declined to talk to the press as she left with a pair of middle aged women who had attended court on Ortega’s behalf.

The reasons for the slaughter have remained unclear. Law enforcement sources have said that Ortega was unhappy with the Krim family for meeting her request for a raise with an offer of additional pay in exchange for five hours of week of housekeeping.