Kensington woman pleads guilty to killing artist Nancy Ann Frankel

A motive was not discussed in court Monday, though prosecutors did state that Birch faced mental health issues at the time.

A prosecutor recounted what Birch told homicide detectives after she called 911 to report the death.

“She said that she suffocated Ms. Frankel by placing a plastic bag over her head and squeezing the victim’s neck with her hands,” Assistant State’s Attorney Frank Lazzaro said. “There was a struggle during which Ms. Frankel was able to poke a hole in a bag.”

Birch told detectives she then placed her hand over Frankel’s mouth.

“Eventually, the struggle went to the ground,” Lazzaro said, “and Ms. Birch described and demonstrated to the officers strangling Ms. Frankel to death.”

He did not offer in a motive, nor did an earlier arrest warrant in the case.

Family members of Frankel’s had earlier said that Birch and Frankel were family friends, and that having Birch move in with Frankel would provide Frankel with companionship and Birch with a room in her house.

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“No one would have ever ever ever thought this could possibly happen,” Bill Streit, Frankel’s son-in-law said in an interview with The Post two years ago.

“It’s just so senseless what happened,” Frankel’s son Steven said in an interview Monday.

Mental illness appears to have played a role.

A Maryland doctor found that Birch “was experiencing psychotic symptoms at the time of the murder and diagnosed her with schizoaffective disorder,” a State’s Attorney’s Office spokeswoman said Monday.

But Birch also “understood murder was wrong and could control her conduct to conform to law,” the spokeswoman, Lauren DeMarco, added.

Those factors likely made it difficult to Birch or her attorneys to argue she was not criminally responsible, which is Maryland’s version of an insanity plea. Her attorneys could not be reached for comment but are expected to speak in detail at her sentencing.

Prosecutors allege that Birch may have tried to cover up the crime.

“Birch had staged the body to look more presentable, laying the victim on a pillow, folding her arms over her chest, and putting perfume on her,” DeMarco said in a statement. “This was after initially unsuccessfully trying to get the body back into her bed.”

Obituary: Nancy Frankel, artist who made abstract sculptures, dies at 92

Frankel worked as sculptor and art teacher. She made brightly painted, modern abstract works.

She had lived in the Washington area since the 1960s, and was an adjunct professor of sculpture at Montgomery College in Rockville, for about 20 years and a member of the Studio Gallery artists cooperative in Washington. In the mid-1970s, she helped found the Washington Women’s Art Center and the Washington Sculpture Group. She also ran children’s art classes and camps at her studio.

In early 2019, the Katzen Arts Center at American University hosted a retrospective of her work called “Nancy at Ninety: A Retrospective of Form and Color.” In a videotaped discussion of the exhibition, curator Claudia Rousseau, a professor of art history at Montgomery College in Silver Spring, praised Frankel’s work as possessing “a youthful spirit of invention — which is still going.”