As Donna Kidder thumbs through letters, drawings and snapshots from her daughter's life, she keeps hoping to flip a page and somehow find the somber facts to be fiction.

Her firstborn, Nicole Bouleris, disappeared into the confounding mazes of the mental-health and prison systems, where she lost her way and then her life at 29.

Officials with the N.C. Correctional Institution for Women say Bouleris wrapped a sheet around her neck and hanged herself from her prison bed, leaving a family wracked with grief, guilt and haunting questions.

Once sparkly eyed and fun-loving, Bouleris was transformed into a difficult and sometimes deceitful woman by mental illness that came on during her teenage years.

Her descent from cheerful child to troubled young adult shows how caring for the mentally ill can not only overwhelm loved ones, but can also elude a state.

Bouleris spent the last 14 years of her life in and out of mental- health-care facilities and behind bars for long stints. The systems could not save her. They could only punish her symptoms.

"We don't have a system that recognizes or identifies a crisis at a stage where we can give them services until it becomes a problem," said Sen. Ellie Kinnaird, a Democrat from Carrboro on state legislative judicial committees. "We've got to change the whole thing."

Almost three weeks ago, Kidder got a call from the women's prison warden. Bouleris had been found dead in her cell, apparently a suicide, the first reported there in 19 years.

In her living room Thursday, Bouleris' mother talked about the good times while studying some of her daughter's drawings -- Spider-Man spinning a web out of Nicole's head and the neon green alien on the front of an old homemade greeting card. They showed a troubled, but humorous mind.

Even in the last years of Bouleris' life, there had been glimmers of the warm, benevolent daughter who would give away her only raincoat in a hard-driving downpour, nuzzle her nephew on the living room floor or hide sweet notes in her mom's suitcase before long business trips.

But those enchanting moments were contradicted by the fire-setting felon, the drug and alcohol abuser who tested her family's love while struggling to quiet the voices in her head.

Confusing diagnoses

The mental health diagnoses were long and complicated. Bipolar disorder, depressive disorder, paranoid schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, alcohol abuse, cocaine abuse and borderline and antisocial personality traits.

There had been other suicide attempts. A drug overdose. Slit wrists.

"I knew my daughter had suicidal tendencies; she had been attempting suicide since she was 15," Kidder said. "This was the only time she left a note. I thought since she had left a note this time, and she didn't the other times, this was more than a cry for help, that she was at peace with this. I hurt. I felt guilty, but I was at peace because I thought she was."

But in the weeks since, a more unsettling picture has emerged.

Kidder has heard from friends and relatives of inmates still behind bars, prisoners too fearful of retribution to risk corresponding on their own. They have relayed that Bouleris was very open about her suicide plans. They say the guards did not check on her at the 6 a.m. shift change on Jan. 26, the day she was found dead at 8:30 a.m.

"This just totally changed the grieving process," Kidder said. "Now I'm angry."

Why, Kidder wonders, were the suicide threats not taken more seriously?

"If she's telling people she's suicidal, you just can't ignore this," Kidder said. "Even if she cried 'wolf' 100 times, guess what -- it's time 101, you still listen."

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