Mothers Who Kill Their Children

Understanding the Acts of Moms from Susan Smith to the "Prom Mom"

Cheryl L Meyer, Michelle Oberman, Kelly White, Michelle Rone, Cheryl L. Meyer, Kelly White, Michelle Rone

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2001
• Print ISBN:
  9780814756447
• eBook ISBN:
  9780814761281
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della psicologia

An inside look into patterns and potential prevention plans for one of the most hotly sensationalized crimes

A special kind of horror is reserved for mothers who kill their children. Cases such as those of Susan Smith, who drowned her two young sons by driving her car into a lake, and Melissa Drexler, who disposed of her newborn baby in a restroom at her prom, become media sensations. Unfortunately, in addition to these high-profile cases, hundreds of mothers kill their children in the United States each year. The question most often asked is, why? What would drive a mother to kill her own child?

Those who work with such cases, whether in clinical psychology, social services, law enforcement or academia, often lack basic understandings about the types of circumstances and patterns which might lead to these tragic deaths, and the social constructions of motherhood which may affect women's actions. These mothers oftentimes defy the myths and media exploitation of them as evil, insane, or lacking moral principles, and they are not a homogenous group. In obvious ways, intervention strategies should differ for a teenager who denies her pregnancy and then kills her newborn and a mother who kills her two toddlers out of mental illness or to further a relationship. A typology is needed to help us to understand the different cases that commonly occur and the patterns they follow in order to make possible more effective prevention plans.

Mothers Who Kill Their Children draws on extensive research to identify clear patterns among the cases of women who kill their children, shedding light on why some women commit these acts. The characteristics the authors establish will be helpful in creating more meaningful policies, more targeted intervention strategies, and more knowledgeable evaluations of these cases when they arise.

1
PREVIOUS ATTEMPTS TO UNDERSTAND WHY MOTHERS KILL THEIR CHILDREN

There is a morbid curiosity in the United States relating to mothers killing their children. This fascination becomes evident when cases such as those of Susan Smith, Amy Grossberg, and Melissa Drexler (aka the “prom Mom”) become a media frenzy. On an anecdotal level, every researcher on this project can relate numerous stories about how an otherwise dull conversation became lively when people learned the topic of our research. In those conversations people wanted to hear cases, but more often wanted to discuss explanations. Generally they did not want to hear our research-driven conclusions, but rather to present their own, often ill-informed explanations and opinions. These may have related to their beliefs regarding the inflated use of the insanity defense (in fact applied in only a very small percentage of cases) or their theories about what “kind” of mother could kill her child.

On a scholarly level, most researchers have continually referred to mothers who kill their children as a homogeneous group with little differentiation among the women. However, even a cursory review of cases makes it clear that there are at least two groups which can be distinguished from each other: mothers who commit neonaticide,¹ killing their newborns, and mothers who commit other forms of filicide, killing their child.² For example, Melissa Drexler, who disposed of her newborn baby in a restroom trash bin at her high school prom, is very different from Susan Smith, who drowned her fourteen-month-old and two-year-old by driving her car into a lake. In obvious ways, their actions, demographics, and reactions were different. Prevention and intervention strategies should obviously differ for a teenage mother who committed neonaticide and a mother who killed her two children and fabricated a story about their whereabouts.³

A typology is needed so that people can begin to understand the many reasons for the occurrence of infanticide. This typology could assist educators in targeting more effective prevention strategies, practitioners in providing more focused intervention, law enforcement officers in their investigations, and legislators in creating more meaningful policy. Moreover, the general public, whose loved ones may be at risk, who as taxpayers pay for consequences of maternal filicide, and who influence public policy, may benefit on many levels from greater understanding of this tragedy. To begin, we will review attempts at previous typologies and their shortcomings.

Previous Attempts at Classification

In 1969 and 1970, psychiatrist Philip Resnick provided a classification system based on apparent motive.⁴ As Resnick’s was the first attempt at a typology and is the most widely noted, it is important to discuss it here in detail. However, it is also important to understand at the outset that his research methodology was relatively weak and not specifically focused on women, and is now largely outdated.

Resnick based his system on cases of both paternal and maternal filicide. He reviewed the world literature on child murder from 1751 to 1968 and found relevant articles in thirteen languages. From that literature, he amassed 131 case reports of filicide and 34 case reports of neonaticides in which the mother had acted alone. “The cases are reported in varying detail from mental hospitals, psychiatrists in practice, prison psychiatrists, and a coroner’s office.… Although this variation creates difficulties for analysis of data, the problem of small sample size is eliminated. To illustrate how filicide may be unconsciously multidetermined, two cases treated by the author, including material gathered during sodium amobarbital (Amytal) interviews, will be presented.”⁵ Resnick identified two general types of cases, filicide and neonaticide. He then divided filicide into five categories, namely, acutely psychotic, altruistic, unwanted child, accidental, and spouse revenge.

Resnick defined acutely psychotic as parents who killed under the influence of hallucinations, epilepsy, or delusions. The category of altruistic filicide was divided into that associated with suicide and that intended to relieve suffering. In the former subcategory, suicidal parents indicated they could not abandon their child when they killed themselves. In the second subcategory, the filicide represented euthanasia aimed at eliminating the child’s real or imagined suffering. In Resnick’s third category, that of unwanted child, the parent murdered the child because s/he did not want the child. For mothers, Resnick indicated the child may have represented an impediment to a new relationship or been the product of illegitimacy. The accidental filicide category represented unintentional deaths that were generally the result of abuse. Finally, Resnick’s last category, spouse revenge, was defined as parents who kill children in an attempt to make their spouse suffer.

Some of Resnick’s filicide categories have little applicability to women. For example, he offered no evidence to support a spousal revenge motive in women.⁶ Moreover, “it is in practice extremely difficult to be sure that revenge was the real or the only motivation; to find that there is currently a quarrel with the spouse is not sufficient reason for supposing that revenge is predominant. Often in such circumstances other motivations, especially inability to bear the prospect of deprivation, loss of love, or loss of status, are equally if not more prominent.”⁷ In addition, although Resnick found that the majority of filicidal women fit under the altruistic murder category, only the murder/suicide subcategory has received subsequent research support, not the euthanasia category.⁸ Some have questioned the existence of an altruistic motivation altogether: “‘Realistic altruism’ in fact means ‘mercy-killing,’ and to combine this with such an entirely different condition as killing under the influence of a delusional psychosis seems inappropriate.”⁹

Regarding neonaticide, Resnick responded to what he believed was a prior overemphasis on the social context of neonaticide by focusing on psychiatric factors:

Most neonaticides are carried out simply because the child is not wanted. Reasons for neonaticide include extramarital paternity, rape, and seeing the child as an obstacle to parental ambition. However, illegitimacy, with its social stigma, is the most common motive.

The unmarried murderesses fall into two groups. In the first group are young, immature, passive women who submit to, rather than initiate, sexual relations. They often deny their pregnancy, and premeditation is rare. The women in the second group have strong instinctual drives and little ethical restraint. They tend to be older, more callous, and are often promiscuous. It is speculated that unresolved oedipal feelings may contribute to some neonaticides that have previously been attributed to entirely sociologic factors.¹⁰

Interestingly, despite his attempts to find psychoanalytic causes for infanticide, even Resnick identifies the social stigma of pregnancy outside marriage as the most common motive for neonaticide. However, approaching infanticide from a psychoanalytic perspective and focusing on intrapsychic or psychological causes creates a general problem for Resnick’s classification systems. Resnick indicated that two-thirds of the filicidal group of women were psychotic,¹¹ a finding that receives little empirical support elsewhere. This focus on the individual is relatively outdated, given the current emphasis on the importance of environmental, cultural, and social factors in the development of personality and psychopathology.¹² In addition, there is a waning interest in orthodox Freudian psychoanalysis,¹³ especially given the lack of sensitivity to women’s issues inherent in purely psychoanalytic approaches. As psychologist P. D. Scott has argued, Resnick’s system

relies heavily on motivation which is always highly suggestive and often over-determined, or defensive.… Direct observation of murderers suggest[s] that the majority commit the offense when their higher controls of discretion, reason, sympathy, and self-criticism are more or less in abeyance, and when they are in fact acting at so primitive a level that such sophisticated motives as revenge and altruism may be quite inappropriate. Passion and need are commonly accepted as precursors of, or even mitigating factors for, crime, but the importance of long-continued states of indecision and suspense are often overlooked. Yet it is stress of this continuing sort which is most likely to undermine defences [sic], and to uncover actions which are more familiar to ethologists [sic] than to psychopathologists. Inexplicable murders and destruction brought about in this way tend to be wrongly diagnosed “depression” or else a new label such as “catathymic crisis” or “autonomous affective crisis” is invented, often with complicated psychodynamic interpretations of what may simply be facilitation of primitive reactions by prolonged frustration and indecision.¹⁴

There are other problems with Resnick’s classification system as well. Many of the cases upon which Resnick’s system was founded were quite old, and came from various sources, languages, and cultures. These sources may not apply to infanticide in the United States. Resnick indicates that less common methods of neonaticide “include dismemberment, burning, acid, lye, throwing to pigs, and burying alive.”¹⁵ Some of these methods represent cultural or temporal distinctions that are not relevant to a contemporary U.S. context.

Although Resnick’s system represented a first attempt at a typology, it was formulated in the 1960s and few would argue that women’s societal status and roles have remained constant since that time. In general, norms related to sexuality, illegitimacy, and reproductive rights have undergone major transformations. For example, the social stigma associated with unwed mothering has clearly decreased since 1969. Married couples have been guaranteed the right to be free from criminal prosecution for using contraceptives since 1965¹⁶ and this right was extended to unmarried couples in 1972.¹⁷ Eventually the right to a legal, safe abortion was provided in 1973.¹⁸ (The relationship between abortion and infanticide has been considered elsewhere in this book.) In recent decades, scholars have posited alternatives to Resnick’s system.

In 1973, Scott,¹⁹ a British forensic psychiatrist, developed a new system of classification of parental filicide that, like Resnick’s system, was not specific to women. His categories included elimination of an unwanted child (by assault or neglect), mercy killing, gross mental pathology, stimulus arising outside the victim (e.g., revenge), and the victim constituting the stimulus (e.g., exasperation). d’Orban, another British forensic psychiatrist, later refined Scott’s categories to be specific to women.²⁰ His six groups included mothers who batter, mentally ill mothers, those who commit neonaticide, retaliating women, those with unwanted children, and those who kill out of mercy. With battering mothers, the filicide occurred due to an impulsive act characterized by loss of temper and the immediate stimulus arose from the victim. Mentally ill mothers included those who suffered from psychosis, depression, and personality disorders. Neonaticides and retaliating women were classified the same way as Resnick had done. Passive neglect or active aggression killed unwanted children. Mercy killings represented cases in which the victim was really suffering and the mother obtained no secondary gain by the death.

d’Orban reviewed the cases of all women charged with killing or attempting to murder their children who were admitted to Holloway Prison in England from 1970 to 1975. d’Orban’s sample consisted of eighty-nine women, forty-one of whom he personally examined. In addition, he reviewed all available records including depositions, psychiatric histories, and probation officer, police, and relative reports. Overall, d’Orban found that the women suffered from common family, social, and psychiatric stressors such as severe marital discord with a husband or cohabitee, housing problems, financial difficulties, and youthful parenting. Some of these stressors were more prevalent among certain categories. d’Orban was also the first to note the high percentage of firstborn or only children that become victims. Baker²¹ later found the same pattern. d’Orban found very little support for the mercy killing category (only one out of eighty-nine women fell into this category) and slight support for the retaliatory category (11 percent). Forty percent of mothers were classified as battering, 27 percent as mentally ill, 12 percent as neonaticides, and 9 percent as mothers of unwanted children.

Bourget and Bradford provided another classification of homicidal parents in 1990.²² They defined five major categories: pathological filicide (including altruistic motives and homicide/suicide), accidental filicide, retaliating filicide, neonaticide, and paternal filicide. Bourget and Bradford compared the characteristics of thirteen homicidal parents with those of forty-eight homicide offenders whose victim was not their child. Their sample consisted of all cases of child murder referred to a university-based forensic psychiatry service during an eight-year period (1978–1986). There were four males and nine females, and all resided in Canada. Most of their data were obtained through psychological assessment. They found that homicidal parents had been under severe stress in the previous year. In contrast to Resnick, they found little support for their pathological filicide category, which included altruistic motives, but strong support for their accidental filicide category, which included battered child cases. Once again, there was little support for the retaliating filicide category.

In 1991, Baker²³ began to formulate a more comprehensive approach by using a qualitative and semiquantitative study of all officially suspected cases of filicide in Victoria, Australia, between 1978 and 1988. Like Resnick and Bourget and Bradford, Baker included filicidal fathers in her sample in order to conduct a gender analysis. Baker used the Murder Book as her source to identify cases of filicide. The Murder Book, compiled by a researcher employed by the police department in Australia, contains the names of every suspected homicide case that comes to the attention of the police. Entries in the Murder Book include the names and addresses of suspected offenders and the deceased, a brief description of the case and sometimes the findings of the inquest and/or verdict. Baker also examined the Coroner’s file index, the Registrar General’s files, and records from the Department of Public Prosecutions. Documents she was able to assess through these means included the prosecution brief, the autopsy and toxicologist’s report, police records of interviews, coroner’s findings, correspondence, the record of investigation into the death, and a transcript of the inquest. Not every document was available on every case but Baker indicated that most files contained between one hundred to more than one thousand pages of material. She collected information on numerous variables including demographics, specifics of the crime and motive, the psychological state of the offender, relationship between offender and victim, dynamics of the household, disposition of cases, and factors associated with neonaticide.

Baker’s sample consisted of forty-six cases; of the twenty-five women among them, 24 percent committed neonaticide (no men committed neonaticide). Baker identified six major motives for the filicides, namely, altruism, spouse murder or revenge, jealousy and rejection, unwanted child, discipline-related cases, and self-defense. Three of the motives did not apply to the women in her sample. These motives were: spouse murder or revenge, jealousy and rejection, and self-defense. For women, altruistic motives were slightly more prevalent than discipline-related or unwanted child filicide motives. Suicidal women were only found in the altruistic group. Altruistic motives included mothers killing their children because they saw themselves as the victims of an incestuous rape and/or believed the children would be better off dead. Interestingly, for one quarter of the women in this category, altruism was combined with the belief that they were uniting their families in death. Baker cautioned that her categories were broad and “motivation is complex and may involve numerous cultural, environmental and psychological factors.”²⁴ Baker is quick to point out the flaws in her study, including biases in reporting and a small sample size. Nevertheless, the comprehensiveness of her approach is impressive.

In 1997, a few years after Baker’s original research on the topic, Alder and Baker published a report extending Baker’s original data analysis to 1991 and focusing on maternal filicide. There were thirty-two identified incidents of maternal filicide during that time period. Alder and Baker divided the cases into three groupings: filicide and suicide, which comprised eleven of the cases,²⁵ neonaticide, which made up ten of the cases, and fatal assaults, seven of the cases (four of the cases could not be used in their analyses). Alder and Baker indicated that in general women in the filicide and suicide group were “most often over 30 years of age with two or more young children, who felt that they could no longer cope with the difficult circumstances in which they found them...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: A Brief Cross-Cultural History of Infanticide
• 1. Previous Attempts to Understand Why Mothers Kill Their Children
• 2. Denial of Pregnancy: Secret Lives
• 3. Purposeful Killing: Neither “Mad” nor “Bad”
• 4. Maternal Neglect: A Search for Meaning
• 5. Abuse-Related Deaths
• 6. Assistance or Coercion from a Partner: Relations to Domestic Violence
• 7. Responding to Mothers Who Kill: Toward a Comprehensive Rethinking of Law, Policy, and Intervention Strategies
• Notes
• Index
• About the Authors