A former morning news anchor who stabbed her 80-year-old mother to death on Halloween — insisting the elderly woman was "the devil" — was sentenced Monday to life in prison, eligible for parole only after 25 years. The case lays bare what happens when a post-Christian society strips away the language of spiritual affliction and leaves the dangerously delusional to spiral without intervention.

Angelynn "Angie" Mock, 48, pleaded guilty in August to murdering Anita Avers at their Wichita, Kansas, home. Police found the mother dead in her bed with multiple stab wounds; her daughter stood outside, hands cut, ranting.

"I'd kill that bitch to have my mom back any day. I don't even know who she is anymore," Mock said, according to an affidavit. "I know, I believe she's the devil."

Mock told investigators she had gone to her mother's room to discuss an upcoming job interview at Wichita station KSN — a sign she was still trying to function — and claimed she found Avers sharpening knives. She accused her mother of lunging at her and spewing "venom," telling her: "I know you're f--king Jesus Christ."

"I had to kill her, she wasn't going to stop," Mock said.

Her stepfather, Barry Avers, told investigators Mock had been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder and suffered from delusions and depression. She frequently claimed people around her were "robots" and "not real people." She said she spoke to God. She called herself the Anti-Christ. She grew angry when others didn't believe her.

She was on medication. She was prone to outbursts. But she was never violent, Barry said — until she was.

Years earlier, Mock had been held at a psychiatric hospital for roughly two weeks after an explosive episode. The most recent spiral her stepfather could recall came just three or four weeks before the killing, when she erupted at family during a card game. That was the warning. Nobody intervened.

In January, a judge found Mock not mentally fit to stand trial and ordered her to a psychiatric facility for evaluation. By August, she was deemed fit enough to plead guilty. The system's answer to a woman who believed she was the Anti-Christ and her mother was the devil was: medication, then prison.

The secular press will file this under "mental illness" and move on. And yes — the diagnosis is real. Schizoaffective disorder is documented. But Mock didn't just hear voices; she named the powers behind them. God, the devil, the Anti-Christ, venom, robots. These are not clinical terms. They are the vocabulary of spiritual warfare, and this woman was fluent in it.

A culture that still took evil seriously might have seen the escalation — the card-game outburst, the claims of divinity, the dehumanization of everyone around her — as something more than a medication compliance issue. Deinstitutionalization emptied the hospitals. Secularism emptied the conceptual framework entirely. What's left is a woman who told the world she was the Anti-Christ, and a world that had nothing to say back until her mother was dead in her bed.

Mock previously anchored morning news at KTVI in St. Louis from 2011 to 2015 and later at KOKH in Oklahoma City. At the time of the murder, she was working in sales at a data management software company. The career arc — from trusted voice in living rooms to a killer claiming divine mandate — is the kind of collapse a functioning society would have caught.

The question this case leaves hanging isn't whether Mock is sick. It's what a nation that refuses to name evil — and refuses to care for those consumed by it — expects to happen next.