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."

Keith Acree, a spokesman for the state Department of Correction, said the State Bureau of Investigation was looking into the incident, standard procedure.

The autopsy report was not complete last week, according to Chief Medical Examiner John Butts, but his office is investigating the death as an apparent suicide.

State prison officials, too, are examining their actions, Acree said, but their findings will become part of Bouleris' inmate files and not available for public scrutiny.

Such vacuums of information have vexed Kidder for years.

When Bouleris turned 19, she was considered an adult. Doctors could no longer share her mental health records without consent. Kidder and her ex-husband, as executors of Bouleris' estate, hope to soon gain access to their daughter's prison medical records.

"This might be the first time we get to understand what was going on with her," Kidder said.

A normal childhood

Nicole Jeanette Bouleris was born June 14, 1978, in upstate New York.

"She was an absolutely normal, wonderful girl," Kidder recalled.

She made A's and B's in school.

She was on Raleigh swim and soccer teams.

Then the turbulent teenage years came on. She sneaked away to Florida with a boyfriend in a stolen car. She made an attempt on her life that landed her in a private care facility.

With medications and intensive care, Bouleris graduated from Sanderson High School in Raleigh and completed a year at East Carolina University in Greenville.

But her parents' marriage was crumbling then. Bouleris was abusing alcohol and drugs. She dropped out of ECU and returned home.

First she lived with her mom until Kidder's insistence on a curfew drove her away.

"She kept losing jobs because she was staying out late and not getting up in the mornings," Kidder said.

Then she tried staying with her dad. Eventually, the parents paid the first two months' rent for an apartment that Bouleris was unable to keep.

A pattern developed. She would get a job, lose it and face homelessness.

Kidder bought a condominium and charged her daughter $300 in monthly rent. She wanted to help but also wanted Bouleris to stand on her own.

Bouleris paid only one month's rent before losing her job. About a half-year later, with no rent coming in, Kidder told her daughter she had to move.

It was shortly after that, on Feb. 28, 2001, that Bouleris set fire to an unoccupied townhouse at Gaston Wood Court. The fire spread, displacing one family and causing more than $300,000 in damage.

E-mail confession

Bouleris already had a police record by that time. In the arson case, according to court files, Bouleris fled the scene but used a friend's computer to send e-mail to Raleigh firefighters and police confessing to setting the blaze.

When investigators caught up with her, according to court records, she said she was being followed by the FBI and CIA and had not sent the e-mail. "She told police she wanted to get out of this dimension and into another dimension which she called home," the Wake County court file says.

But a search of her book bag revealed kindling, candles, lighters and a fire starter log.

Bouleris was admitted involuntarily to Dorothea Dix Hospital, a state mental health institution, on March 26, 2001. She escaped nearly a month later on April 24, according to court records, and was taken back into custody on Aug. 24, 2001. She turned herself in to police to report being sexually assaulted by a serial rapist she later helped convict.

"Ms. Bouleris reports that secret voices told her to set the fires," the court documents say. "She stated she had not taken her medication for a while and was hearing voices."

For Kidder, that experience shows the intertwining of the prison and mental-health systems, both in crisis as the state pushes mental-health care into ill-prepared communities.

The judge, with court-ordered mental-health assessments at his fingertips, sentenced Bouleris to as much time as he could give.

"The first time my daughter was incarcerated, the judge announced that she belonged in a mental institute," Kidder said. "The judge said, 'If you could see what is in here, you will understand why I'm putting her in prison for this period of time.' We couldn't see. They won't tell us anything about our children."

During that prison stay, Kidder visited her daughter every weekend. It was difficult, though. Bouleris would lash out at her during visits and in letters. There were accusations and lies.

"I've gone through a lot of 'Was I that horrible a mother?' " Kidder said. "She told everybody I didn't visit her once during that whole time. She knew what buttons to push."

To further complicate an already complicated life, a prison psychiatrist struck up a relationship with Bouleris during her stay behind bars that led to trouble for both on the outside.

Improper therapy

According to N.C. Medical Board documents, Kim Marie Brydon had an inappropriate sexual relationship with a patient she started treating at the women's prison in 2001 that led to the surrender of her license on April 25, 2007.

Kidder refuses to talk about that part of her daughter's life.

Bouleris was released from prison on the arson charges in October 2004. Within a year, she was charged with driving while impaired.

"They basically let a mentally disturbed person out of prison without any support structure," Kidder said. "She should have been required to be in a halfway house, provided follow-up care, and given an opportunity to work. Instead she was dumped on the streets by the system."

By early 2006, according to prison documents, Bouleris was in trouble again, this time for forging prescriptions with a pad she had taken from the doctor she had been living with.

Once again, she was sentenced to prison. She was up for release in early May.

Around Christmas, Kidder heard from her daughter. Their conversation was good, but there were unusual moments.

"She thought she was an alien leader," Kidder said. "She told me she had cut her forehead to remove a probe."

Bouleris called her dad several days before her death but did not mention her suicide plans. She tried her mom, but Kidder did not answer the phone.

Bouleris finished a quilt in prison that day, an instructor later told her father, Dean Bouleris.

Kidder sobs at the thought. The last time Bouleris was in prison, she made a quilt and inscribed it "I love you mom."

Kidder wants to see her daughter's handiwork.

She wants the suicide notes the warden told her she wrote.

She wants answers.

She wants better treatment facilities and more help for the mentally ill inside and outside prison walls.

"I don't know what to do to effect these changes," Kidder said. "I don't know what to do to wake up the system. But I don't want another mother to go through this."

Mental Health series