What drives a parent to kill?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/you/article-1330827/What-drives-parent-kill.html

Real lives: What drives a parent to kill?

By Mary Greene

Last updated at 12:43 AM on 21st November 2010

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It's the most heinous crime of all – yet in just two weeks this summer a cluster of cases of filicide hit the headlines. Mary Greene looks into these recent incidents in the UK to try to make sense of the seemingly inexplicable
Mary Greene feature
Mary Greene feature

From left: Christy Ruddell, two, whose mother has been charged with his murder; Bethany Caudwell-Kennerley, three, whose mother was jailed for life for killing her

A mother walks into a police station, her wrists slashed, carrying the lifeless body of her two-year-old son who has been strangled and stabbed. (She was later charged with his murder.) A father, described as ‘an all-round good person’, kills his six-year-old diabetic son with an insulin overdose before killing himself. He has recently parted from the boy’s mother and fears losing his livelihood. Another ‘loving’ mother is sentenced after smothering her angelic-looking three-year-old daughter with her favourite Piglet pyjama case then attempting to slash her own wrists. It transpires that she has misled her estranged husband into believing he was her child’s father, and was facing a custody battle.

Perhaps most horrifying is the fact that these stories of vindictiveness, jealousy and despair appeared in newspapers over a single two-week period this summer. Behind the headlines in each case is a shattered family tormented by questions that will haunt the survivors for the rest of their lives, yet the background to filicide – a word hardly ever used, perhaps because society deems the crime it describes to be literally unspeakable – is nearly always horribly mundane, some commonplace story of the family break-up endemic in life today.

For most parents in the painful throes of recent separation, the initial desperate bitterness will eventually subside. Yet seemingly more and more often the deep anger is brooded upon until it boils over into a crime of unbearable sadness and wickedness: the annihilation of a child’s life by a parent…a murder that runs so contrary to human nature that we recoil from the thought of it. How could a father bear to hear his children’s terrified screams? What deranged logic or warped love could drive a mother to kill her own child?

Even for professionals who deal with the grim aftermath, these cases are shocking.
Dr Keith Ashcroft is an investigative psychologist, based in Manchester, who has studied scene-of-crime reports of numerous family murders, often also involving the suicide – attempted or successful – of the killer-parent. ‘I’ve broken into a cold sweat looking at these photographs,’ he says. ‘They are absolutely horrendous. Yet the suicide notes tend to be unbelievably matter-of-fact and unemotional.’

The background to these horrifying murders is nearly always horribly mundane

Last Christmas – all too often the season of ill will and family conflict – Andrew Copland, 56, a painter and decorator from Aldershot, Hampshire, shot dead his four-year-old daughter Maisie, inflicted gunshot wounds on his partner from which she died the next day, then shot himself fatally through the head. Maisie and her mum had arrived on an access visit minutes earlier. Copland was described as an acknowledged ‘woman hater’, known to have a violent temper and an obsession with guns.

But there is another kind of father who can be triggered to kill, the sort invariably described by his baffled neighbours as a decent family man who lives only for his children. And therein lies the risk factor, Dr Ashcroft explains: a family so dysfunctionally close-knit that when a father – and it is usually the father, despite a cluster of recent killings by mothers – decides that life is no longer worth living, his warped logic and distorted sense of himself as protector and provider demand that he take his children and partner with him.

Psychologists call it ‘enmeshment’ – an intense over-involvement that can blur boundaries between parent and child, so that the annihilation of the whole family seems like an extension of their own suicide. ‘These men either live their lives through their families or believe they own them,’ says Dr Ashcroft. ‘So when they decide to take their own lives, they feel entitled to take the lives of their children, too.’ Today’s patterns of intensive parenting, where adults tend to be over-involved in their children’s lives, can provide a climate where such unhealthy emotions flourish.

‘Most people describe these people as good family men because they don’t really know them: they’re socially isolated,’ says Kevin Browne, professor of forensic psychology at Nottingham University. ‘To outsiders, they always appear to be together as a family. The men are locked into their role as father, a role they feel they would lose if the family broke up.’ The catalyst is any outside threat to family integrity – estrangement from a partner, loss of a job or threat of financial ruin. ‘Rather than lose his wife and children, the father would prefer them all to be dead, including himself.’
Mary Greene feature

Chris Hall, six, was killed by his father

If such brutal murders were acts of insane, unpremeditated impulse they might be easier to comprehend. But it is a grim, difficult task to kill a whole family, requiring considerable forward planning. In August 2008 Christopher Foster, a former multimillionaire, shot his wife Jill and 15-year-old daughter Kirstie and then set fire to his idyllic country home in Shropshire. At the time of his death, he was £4.5 million in debt and knew that the bailiffs were on their way. His own CCTV footage that survived the blaze suggests the murders were carried out calmly and deliberately.
He shot the dogs and horses, pumped oil into the basement of the house, blocked the driveway with a horse box, and lay down on the bed beside his wife’s body until smoke overcame him.

According to Dr Ashcroft, ‘These people plan in extreme detail. It’s rarely an impulsive act.’ For men like this, suicidal fantasies are nurtured over time as a possible escape route. ‘It would be a notion in the back of their mind, growing like a seed, for months, years, as they get more depressed.’

Although the media impact is huge when these tragic cases emerge, experts agree
that such offences are still rare. Despite all the changes in modern life that might seem to increase the risk factors – divorces, custody battles, financial stress, text messages that fuel suspicions of infidelity – instances of filicide have remained fairly constant for decades. (Home Office figures show that in the UK 28 children aged under 16 were killed by a parent in 2008-9.) The fear, however, is that emotive coverage may inadvertently encourage more killings, warns Dr Ashcroft. ‘For someone who is severely depressed, it’s a precedent: “It’s happened before…so I’ll do it.” That’s possibly the explanation when these things happen in clusters – they may feed off each other.’

Tragically, that seems to have been the case in Oswestry, Shropshire, when Hugh McFall, a businessman facing financial ruin, bludgeoned his wife and 18-year-old daughter to death in February this year. He left a note – ‘I love you more than anything I have ever loved. I couldn’t let you suffer. Daddy. xx’ – and then he hanged himself. His computer showed that he had accessed news coverage of the widely publicised Foster family murder in the same small town only 16 months previously.

Fathers tend to commit these murders more often than mothers, not only because women are less likely to be violent, but because when couples divorce custody of children usually goes to the mother, giving rise to feelings of jealousy and rage in the father if access is made difficult. For those who kill, their overwhelming urge is to hurt their former partner. Cab driver Ashok Kalyanjee, who stabbed his sons Paul, six, and Jay, two, in 2008, before setting himself on fire (a failed attempt to commit suicide), first telephoned his estranged wife to taunt her: ‘You’ll regret everything that you have done to me in life.’

For some women the killing may be an extreme response to feeling hopeless about their lives and
the future

And in Australia Robert Farquharson was jailed in 2007 for murdering his three sons by driving them into a reservoir on Father’s Day to spite their mother. (His retrial this summer again found him guilty.) Prosecutors said that after swimming from his submerged car he had the ‘delicious reward’ of telling his ex-wife about their deaths.

‘They’re not insane,’ says Professor Browne of such fathers. ‘They’re extremely jealous, but jealousy is not a mental illness. These are men who have to be in control
and have very paranoid attachments.’ Investigators into such cases look for that history of violence, alcohol dependency, mood swings, relationship conflicts and the need for control and power within the family.

As for the recent killings carried out by mothers – still sub judice and so far unexplained – it is generally agreed that the majority of women who kill their children are profoundly mentally ill, or suffering from extremely rare postnatal depressive psychosis. Dr Gerard Bailes, a psychologist for East Anglia’s forensic psychiatric service, recalls a mother who killed three children and herself while experiencing religious delusions. ‘She believed the children were possessed by devils and demons and that she was releasing them; for that individual, it seems absolutely logical. There’s a strange, twisted, perverted love: “I’m going to save the children. They’ll go to an afterlife, even if I won’t because of what I’ve done.” ’

For other women, he says, the killing may be an extreme response to depression or a feeling of hopelessness about their lives and the future; perhaps something is wrong with the child and the woman can’t cope, such as single mother Satpal Mahal-Singh who has been charged with murdering her severely autistic son earlier this year. ‘I have heard rationalisations after the event when a mother has survived, only to suffer awful trauma when she realises what she has done,’ he explains.

For survivors of these family tragedies, there is little professional help. Nobody will forget the stricken, disbelieving face of American oil worker Pasquale Riggi, whose estranged wife Theresa has now been charged with the murder of their daughter, five, and eight-year-old twin boys, found dead in an Edinburgh flat in August. Rose Dixon, chief executive of Samm (Support After Murder and Manslaughter), says that very few trauma counsellors have the experience of dealing with such extreme cases: ‘The services available to people after murder are almost non-existent. Yet studies show that 93 per cent of those bereaved by homicide suffer post-traumatic stress.’ When a parent is the killer, surviving family members may be tormented not only by grief, but by divided loyalties. ‘Some will take the offender’s side and say he was ill, he needed help and was pushed to the limit,’ says Dixon.

Anxiety, depression, feelings of powerlessness and loss of control: these negative emotions are undoubtedly predictors of violence, and are common after family break-up. ‘That’s part of the tragedy for family members left behind, often racked with guilt as they look at things retrospectively,’ says Dr Bailes. ‘They may have known something was wrong and been concerned, but we can’t predict people’s actions. There are always going to be some people – fortunately, very few – who will commit that extreme act.’

And that’s what’s so terrifying. The seemingly devoted father, whose family means the whole world to him, might prove capable of the most heinous crime of all.



Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/you/article-1330827/What-drives-parent-kill.html#ixzz15u2bMDis

Thanks Mumbles....an interesting read.
Anything is possible in the sad Case, and nothing is impossible!.

A very interesting and thought-provoking article. I have often expressed on this forum my ponderings as to whether the numbers appear to be rising or if this kind of crime is on the increase.

In my parents' day, roles were more simple: women were expected to leave work when they got married and men were the breadwinners. Men were not expected to play a very involved role in child care and mostly women did not expect them to.

Enter 'New Man,' with the women's liberation movement. 'New Man,' carried the baby around strapped to his chest and expected applause and a medal for what women had been doing since humans have walked the earth.

Roles have changed (not for some, I know) and that 'enmeshing,' the psychologist speaks of in the article is a result, I think, of the evolving role of men in the lives of their children and so a certain level of 'ownership,' of the results of their input is what ensues. Divorce has become much easier to obtain since my parents' day. Where couples used to have to wait five years in cases of irretrievable breakdown, it's now two years and a 'quickie,' divorce can be obtained on the grounds of 'unacceptable behaviour.'

Women still earn less than men because many of the jobs available are of the 'caring,' variety or service variety and are low paid. If a marries, or cohabiting, woman with children carries on working in a professional career, her role model is 'Yummy Mummy.'

So, we have 'New Man,' taking a more active role with children, 'Yummy Mummy,' being a perfect career woman and mother and divorce much easier when expectations are not fulfilled, as mostly they are not.

Then we have, of course, the men and women who are none of the above: these are the people whose children get in the way of their games and online life.

I think there are, in general, differences in the reasons why women kill their children and men kill their children. For men, I think it's often about investment in and ownership of those children, and for women, as the author says, a sense of hopelessness. Roles may have changed significantly, but a good proportion of women still look for a man who will earn more than they do and on whom they become dependent financially. Not only financially, though, very often a woman's life outside of the family is as part of a couple and she is often isolated as a lone woman, who must be on the lookout for a replacement for her husband.

So much more is expected, these days, of both men and women in their relationships with each other and with their children and also in expectations of providing materially for the children. I think the burden of that provision is still very much on the father and when the father is in serious financial difficulties and takes his children with him in a suicide, I think it's not only because of a sense of ownership, but because he does not want to leave behind the knowledge of his failure that the children would carry.

Sorry if that's all a jumble, but it's just the thoughts evoked by the article, which may not seem to add up to a coherent whole!

Thank you mumbles and Anna, two very, very good reads. Rep points for both.

malena stool wrote:Thank you mumbles and Anna, two very, very good reads. Rep points for both.

Thank you malena.

We had a case of this in Ireland this week. John Butler was described by all who knew him as as a "devoted dad". Desperatley sad.

http://www.independent.ie/national-news/they-were-beautiful-children-i-cant-believe-theyre-gone-2425508.html?start=3

Anna it is not a jumble, the more of your posts I read the more I respect your obvious wisdom and experience, multi lingual and computer literate to boot.

Why people are more violent now I think has explanations outside just the nuclear family, but the reasons some of these men and women kill their families seem to be as you suggest:

For men, I think it's often about investment in and ownership of those children, and for women, as the author says, a sense of hopelessness

There is something else going on with these men and these women, for how many men have been robbed of their children by a hideous wife in a divorce - and how many women feel hopeless? For every man who has killed his children rather than "lose" them to divorce how many hundreds of men just accept the divorce and make the best of it they can, with shared custody?

Men who have money often think that their wives only were after their money or cared deeply about it and they, the men, resent this deeply but yet how many men use their money to "get" women who would not have otherwise considered them?

Women who feel their husband slipping away or cheating because they are no longer as sexually appealing or are tied down to children, feel horribly resentful and yet how many of those used their sex appeal and those children to get and keep a man?

There seems to be a large element of hypocrisy and a lack of self awareness never mind the grown up ability to face the end of the "dream" and thankfully most of us do not fall prey to that to the extent that we find a "delicious satisfaction" in harming anyone never mind setting out to kill our children.

The fathers who kill for economic reasons- that is, their loss of income - appear to be in a higher demographic than most. A man with a low paying job or no job rarely kills his family because they'll be forced to do without his earnings and ashamed about that. "There will be no one left to think badly of me", is a rather shallow and egotistical approach to take, when pressing a pillow down over a child's face, throwing them into the water, or shooting them.

As for jealousy, the last person who got away with that as an excuse and still had fans, was Medea.

Just finished reading the above article, then read this on news page. Poor little mite.

Baby stabbed to death at flat named


An 11-month-old baby girl found stabbed to death in a flat has been named by police as Harley Ruck. The mother of the child, named locally as Jade Ruck, 22, is believed to be the woman arrested on suspicion of her murder.

The devastated family of the child described the killing as a "horrific tragedy" in a brief tribute.

Police were called to a flat in St Davids Road, Abergavenny, south Wales, at 5.30am on Saturday. Harley was discovered inside and, despite efforts to revive her, she was pronounced dead soon afterwards.

A 22-year-old woman was arrested on suspicion of murder. Gwent Police said she has since been detained under the Mental Health Act and is undergoing medical assessment.

Officers also revealed that a post-mortem had established that Harley died of multiple stab wounds.

The family statement said: "In the event of a horrific tragedy to our beautiful, happy, loving little daughter, granddaughter, (great granddaughter) niece and cousin who was loved dearly and will be sadly missed by all around her, especially by her lost heartbroken mum."

Earlier detective chief inspector Jon Williams, who is leading the investigation for Gwent Police, said: "I have a team of approximately 25 detectives and staff working on this case. Inquiries are continuing in the area and forensic examiners remain at the scene."

He added: "This is an extremely distressing incident. I would reiterate that we are not looking for anyone else in connection with the death at this time and there is no risk to the wider community. However, I would urge anyone with any information about this incident to contact police - it could be crucial in assisting us with this investigation."

Anyone with any information about the incident is asked to contact Gwent Police on 01633 838111 or Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111.

Death of a child, by his or her parent/s, with violence, is so unimaginably horrific - it goes against every instinct a normal parent would have. Stabbing, or shooting a baby? It gives you pause as to what the human animal is capable of.

Why do I suspect mental illness and/or drugs?

How many parents who are of relatively normal psyche and not on some kind of drug would ever be able to commit such a crime?

Most people are good.

widowan wrote:Death of a child, by his or her parent/s, with violence, is so unimaginably horrific - it goes against every instinct a normal parent would have. Stabbing, or shooting a baby? It gives you pause as to what the human animal is capable of.

Why do I suspect mental illness and/or drugs?

How many parents who are of relatively normal psyche and not on some kind of drug would ever be able to commit such a crime?

Most people are good.

I agree, widowan, and I had just been wondering if, for some reason, there are more people these days with mental health issues.

mumbles

Thank you for posting this article - its a long sad read. Unfortunately I also think that the numbers will start to rise because on top of that things mentioned we are also getting more stressed about how difficult life is becoming - I think advertising doesn't help - it presents a life which is only attainable if you are able to earn a high income - which leads people into debt (this is the biggest stress factor in my opinion) and can be the cause ofmore relationships breaking up.

Angelique

maebee wrote:We had a case of this in Ireland this week. John Butler was described by all who knew him as as a "devoted dad". Desperatley sad.

http://www.independent.ie/national-news/they-were-beautiful-children-i-cant-believe-theyre-gone-2425508.html?start=3

Yes, maebee, that and the other tragic case in Ireland this week are just so sad. It's dreadful when anyone is murdered, even worse when it's children and heartrending when a parent is involved.

The thing I've noticed is that this is a worldwide phenomenon; it seems to be happening everywhere. Obviously every case is different in the details, but there seems to be many instances of marital breakdown where a parent or, in some cases, a step-parent is the killer. Awful to think that the person a child would look to for safety and security, the person they trust, is the one who ends their life.

I notice the Mail article mentions mental illness, especially when the mother is the one who kills. Sadly this does seem to be a factor in many cases, and it's something that is terribly tragic. I cannot imagine the horror a mother must feel if she kills her child while she is suffering from mental illness, but then she recovers from her illness - how does she ever manage to live with herself? How does her husband/partner cope? Her parents or other children?

One thing that irritates me is that journalists can write about this phenomenon, they know it happens and they know it's becoming increasingly common, yet when it comes down to specific cases they seem to revert to assuming all parents are devoted and responsible and would no more harm a hair on their child's head than chop off their own right hand. Sentimental twaddle becomes the order of the day, instead of keeping an open mind and remembering that sometimes dreadful things happen even with 'nice' people.