Homicide and Severe Mental Disorder

Understanding and Prevention

Michael Farrell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000413274
• Subtopic: Psychiatry & Mental Health
• Index: Psychology

Homicide and Severe Mental Disorder: Understanding and Prevention provides a complete picture of how severe mental disorder can be assessed in cases of homicide, and how improved understanding can impact risk reduction and prevention. Michael Farrell brings together a wide range of material including theory, research, demographic data, case examples, enquiry reports, and practical strategies, providing clear examples throughout.

Farrell draws on examples of homicide representing a great challenge to both comprehension and prevention – cases that have sometimes provoked media criticism of public policy and services and have aroused public anxiety. In seeking fuller understanding, the book takes an overview of severe mental disorder, homicide, and prevention, before introducing the approach of Situational Crime Prevention and related theory and discussing demographic features of perpetrators and victims. Turning to prevention, the text examines examples of research into homicides perpetrated by individuals with severe mental disorder. Insights from Situational Crime Prevention are applied to selected cases, and a wider view is then taken looking at the criminological features of means, motive, opportunity, and location. Organisational constraints and limitations of communication in services are considered, and cases illuminating the issues and challenges throughout the book are summarised in a structured end of volume glossary. As evidence and insights accumulate and cohere, they more clearly indicate preventive strategies.

Homicide and Severe Mental Disorder will be of great interest to students, researchers, and teachers in psychiatry, psychology, and criminology, health and mental health professionals, criminal justice personnel, and those working with individuals with severe mental disorder.

Chapter 1

Prospect

DOI: 10.4324/9781003172727-1

Introduction

This chapter presents examples of recent cases of homicide by individuals with severe mental disorder (SMD) and shows how these are represented in media coverage including popular newspapers which sometimes caricature events. It looks at potential negative implications of public perceptions of SMD homicides on people with mental disorders who harm no one. The chapter also considers the importance of recognising the impact of SMD homicides on victims’ families and the local community. For the book as a whole, the aims, scope, methodology, special features, and proposed readers are set out. Leading into the rest of the book, an outline and structure of subsequent chapters is provided.

The impact of SMD homicides

About 7.30 am on 7 March 2013, Christine Edkins, a 16-year-old schoolgirl boarded the bus on her way to Leasowes High School, Birmingham, UK. Ascending to the upper deck, she sat alone partway down the aisle. Another passenger, Philip Simelane, was already seated further back. He left his seat, walked forwards as if towards the front exit stairs then stabbed Edkins as he passed her seat. As the attack was unexpected and random, other passengers on the upper deck did not realise what had happened until Christina Edkins showed signs of distress by which time Simelane had left the bus. He was arrested soon after (Reed, 2014). On at least two occasions previously, a specialist registrar in psychiatry had insisted that Simelane ‘needed in-patient treatment’ but this was not made available.

In the US, Deana Laney beat to death her sons Joshua, 8, and Luke, 6, with a rock in the yard outside her home. A member of an Assemblies of God church, Laney had told fellow worshipers a year earlier that the world was ending, and that God had ordered her to get her house in order. After the killing she telephoned emergency services and told them what she had done (CNN/KLTV, 2003; Falkenberg, 2003).

On 29 February 2016 outside Oktabrskoye Pole Metro Station in North West Moscow a woman was seen holding up the severed head of a child. The woman was nanny Gyulchekhra Bobokulova, the child Anastasia Meshcheryakova, a four-year-old in her care. Years before, Bobokulova had been treated in her native Ukraine for schizophrenia. After being arrested in Moscow, she told police that she was acting on Allah’s orders, and that voices had prompted her to kill Anastasia (TASS, 2016).

In Maine, US, William Bruce had been diagnosed with ‘paranoid schizophrenia’ (schizophrenia with delusions of persecution) after a series of violent incidents. In June 2006, alone in the house with his mother Amy, he struck her with a hatchet as she sat working at her desk and deposited her body in the bathtub. He deludedly believed that she was an al Qaeda agent (Bernstein and Koppel, 2008).

When events such as these occur, they typically attract extensive news coverage, some of which raises questions about possible prevention.

News media coverage

News coverage of homicide and mental disorder

A New York Times story (Sontag, 2011) covers the killing in Boston of Stephanie Moulton, a ‘petite, street-smart 25-year-old’ by 27-year-old Deshawn James Chappell ‘a schizophrenic with a violent criminal record’. Stephanie Moulton was a health worker in the group home where Deshawn Chappell was based. Prosecutors stated that Chappell, ‘beat her, stabbed her repeatedly and then dumped her partially nude body in a church parking lot’.

A UK newspaper, the Sun (Reporter, 2013) in an article headlined, ‘1,200 killed by mental patients: Shock 10-year toll exposes care crisis’, criticised the lack of communication between agencies as well as serious failings of community care.

A Daily Mail On-line article (Linning, 2015) about a ‘Psycho killer’ states, ‘Emmanuel Kalejaiye stabbed his mother Tolu Kalejaiye more than 40 times’; ‘He dressed up in women’s clothing to make neighbours think she was alive’; and the case ‘echoed 1960 Hitchcock film in which killer impersonated dead mother’.

The Daily Mail (Greenwood, Brooke and Dolan, 2016, p. 1) reporting the death of Jo Cox, a UK Member of Parliament, states that she was ‘shot three times with a sawn-off shotgun and stabbed repeatedly with a foot long hunting knife in frenzied attack’. The killer ‘kicked, stabbed and then shot’ the MP ‘at almost point-blank range’. A subheading added that Jo Cox was ‘brutally murdered by a loner with a history of mental illness’.

Selection of facts and descriptions

Analysis of such stories including the examples already mentioned (Farrell, 2018, pp. 125–140) shows that they are often structured to convey the seeming unfathomability and dramatic violence of some of these attacks. In this way, they are crafted to humanise the victim rather than the perpetrator. Perpetrators are briefly identified as being killers and psychotic. There is a ‘a dangerous paranoid schizophrenic … on trial release from a secure mental hospital’, a ‘cross-dressing Psycho-style killer’, ‘a schizophrenic with a violent criminal record’, and ‘a loner with a history of mental illness’. Bringing out the unpredictability of attacks showing the danger even of friends, is a report of a victim being killed by ‘his schizophrenic lifelong pal’. Similarly, the normally trusted figure of a nanny is instead dangerous, sinister, and duplicitous – a ‘killer nanny’ or a ‘hijab-wearing nanny’ who ‘kept her schizophrenia a secret’.

By contrast, descriptions of victims attract the reader’s sympathy. Youth is foregrounded, sometimes linked to victims being of school age or even younger as with a ‘16 year old … on her way to school on a bus’; a ‘thirteen year old school girl’, and a ‘four year old girl’. Professionals who were trying to help are sympathetically identified, as with ‘mental health worker Ashleigh Ewing aged 22 years’. There is also ‘a prominent schizophrenia specialist’ who helped patients by ‘sheer force of sympathy and good will’. Conveying a death leaving innocent dependents a victim is described as a ‘father of two’. While the vulnerability of age is captured with the reference to a ‘mother … aged 79 years’, the defencelessness of diminutive size is indicated by a ‘petite, street-smart 25-year-old’.

Details of attacks are conveyed vividly. Stabbings are linked with places that the reader might consider safe. One victim was ‘stabbed to death in a park’ and another ‘on the doorstep of his home’. Repeated stabbing is regularly mentioned along with the expression ‘frenzied’ to underline the ferocity of the attack. Details of the weapon or manner of killing are provided. Accordingly, a victim was ‘stabbed 17 times with a samurai sword’, another ‘died after being stabbed 39 times’, and a mother was stabbed ‘more than 40 times’ in a ‘frenzied attack’. A further victim was ‘shot three times with a sawn-off shotgun and stabbed repeatedly with a foot-long hunting knife in a frenzied attack’. Of one victim it is stated that the attacker ‘beat her, stabbed her repeatedly and then dumped her partially nude body in a church parking lot’. A mother was shot ‘in the face’. The nanny who had beheaded a four-year-old girl walked the streets ‘brandishing the head of the child’.

Media reports are crafted to bring disturbing events vividly to the public’s attention. As such they can be over sensationalised but can also raise justified issues about prevention in seeking to hold authorities to account.

Creating prejudice towards those with mental disorders and side-lining victims’ families

Where cases involving people with SMD are reported and discussed, and especially where they involve dramatic violence and/or random attacks, concern is sometimes expressed that this may provoke prejudice towards individuals with mental disorders more generally. This can lead to suggestions that accounts of the homicides do not over sensationalise events. Detailed descriptions may be seen as potentially inflammatory.

It may be pointed out that people with mental disorder are more likely to be vulnerable to violence and be the subject of attacks than they are to perpetrate violence. Researchers examining a Swedish population-based cohort found that individuals with schizophrenia were nearly twice as likely to be victims of homicide as they were to be perpetrators (Crump, Sundquist, Winkleby and Sundquist, 2013).

Also, instances of homicide and of violence generally are rare among individuals with mental disorders. Indeed, the great majority of individuals with mental disorder harm no one. A global study mentions the rarity of criminal homicide among people with psychosis, reflecting which it allocates only an indirect footnote (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2013).

An example of emphasising the rarity of SMD homicide occurs in a Sun newspaper story of 7 October 2013. After citing killings by people with SMD, the reporter quotes a spokesperson for MIND, a UK mental health charity, who points out that, ‘Mental health is far too often spoken of in terms of aggression and violence’. He adds that ‘We must remember that there are 1.2 million people in touch with mental health services – and the overwhelming majority are not hurting others’.

While such comments from mental health charities and others are protective of people with mental disorder who harm no one, they can seem to minimise the shock and grief of those directly affected by the killings. Consequently, such perspectives do not always strike a chord with the wider community. Instead of providing a context for the homicide, which is the intention, they can be seen as one sided.

Families and friends of victims killed by individuals with SMD may want to convey the trauma of the homicide by ensuring that it is described by the media and in court (as they might see it) without euphemism. In court they may feel side-lined.

A Hundred Families is a UK-based charity supporting the families of victims of a mental health homicide. Their practical guide points out, ‘The court proceedings often focus on the offender and the defending lawyers will usually put forward all sorts of arguments why they should be treated leniently. The voice of the victim, and the impact their violent death has had on the family, can often be completely lost in this process.’ (A Hundred Families, 2015, p. 13).

The present book aims, while examining some of the most challenging cases regarding understanding and prevention, to be neither over sensationalising nor euphemistic.

The book’s main themes and objectives and its content

Homicide and Severe Mental Disorder: Understanding and Prevention has two purposes. Firstly, it lays a foundation of understanding by discussing SMD and homicide, Situational Crime Prevention, and demographic features of perpetrators and victims (such as age and gender).

Next, the book identifies preventive approaches for homicides by people with SMD. It does this through considering research assessing the risk of violence, examining recent cases including via Situational Crime Prevention, exploring criminological features such as means and location, and discussing problems with organization and communication in mental health services, the police service, and elsewhere.

Methodology and rationale

The book focuses on understanding homicide by perpetrators with SMD and developing opportunities to prevent it. In doing so, it first presents information to aid understanding by defining and discussing SMD, homicide, and prevention, and by presenting demographic data.

Next the book examines prevention from a range of perspectives. Research ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Prospect
• PART 1: Understanding
• PART 2: Prevention
• Index