Sleep My Darlings

by Diane Fanning

  On the anniversary day, students arrived at King High School wearing Harry Potter clothing and accessories or the color green for Calyx’s love of Slytherin. Others showed up at Liberty Middle School and Freedom High School, which Beau would have attended that year had he lived, wearing Beau’s favorite color, blue, or clad in soccer gear.

  Dr. Kirsh was still seeing children traumatized by the event one year later. The potential for the delayed onset of PTSD was there for all of the children. She knew some of the kids would have lifelong chronic anxiety as the result of what had happened. She also knew that some of them would have such serious trust issues that they may limit themselves for the rest of their lives.

  She had one patient who was suicidal and still not functioning well a full year after the murders. One little third-grade girl told Dr. Kirsh shortly after the anniversary, “I’m just afraid that my mother will get so angry with me and she’ll hurt me. Sometimes she drinks and I get scared that she will crack.”

  All young hearts broken by a loss they could not understand and never would forget.

  * * *

  Since the turn of the century, the Dale Mabry Campus of Hillsborough Community College has displayed an exhibition of artwork executed by high school students. The 2012 show opened on April 12 with a permanent change in its name. A donation from the Calyx and Beau Memorial Foundation ensured that it would now be known as “Calyx Schenecker Art Infinitum” in honor of the young artist who lost her life at the age of sixteen.

  One hundred and eighty students submitted their art into competition for twenty-five hundred dollars in award prizes. Parker made the selection of Calyx’s works for the exhibition brochure, choosing those that represented “a period in her life when she was specifically delighted and fascinated by Asian culture.”

  In August and September of 2012, Parker and Grillmasters repeated the previous year’s event at the restaurants to raise money for the Calyx and Beau Memorial Fund. In November, the Future Business Leaders of America and the National Junior Honor Society paired up to conduct a cookie dough fundraiser. They surpassed their goal of $5,000, netting $6,000 for the foundation. In less than two years, the memorial fund had received $92,000 in contributions and had awarded twelve scholarships.

  * * *

  Everyone waited to see when and if this case would actually go to trial. A full-blown proceeding is not an inevitability. A plea bargain that would eliminate days of testimony and argument continues to be a very real possibility. Barring a deal between the state and the defense, an epic battle will ensue between advocacy of the ultimate punishment of death and an argument against Julie’s legal responsibility because of mental and emotional defects that demonstrate her insanity. In this situation, it will be difficult to select a jury and those chosen will need to make a decision that could haunt them for the rest of their lives.

  Finally, in December 2012, Judge Moody set a trial date for October 7, 2013, but since death penalty cases often take two to three years until the final reckoning in the courtroom, another delay is not inconceivable. The judge also ordered lawyers on both sides to provide the court, by late January, a schedule detailing the public release of the voluminous data files.

  A plea agreement prior to a trial would serve family members and friends well—it would end the anguish of the unknown and enable them to move on with their lives and would definitely save the taxpayers money. It may possibly be the best solution for both legal teams, the families, and the community involved in this heartrending tragedy.

  Sitting on the sidelines while this legal wrangling continues are two parents who have lost their children. While Julie Schenecker stares at the blank walls and forbidding bars of a jail cell what thoughts run through her head? Remorse? Regret? Guilt? Or does she still believe she was justified in her actions? If anyone knew, it was Julie. But with her fragile mental health did she even understand her own responsibility?

  The other parent, Parker Schenecker, deals with his own demons. He carries the burden of contemporary America’s approach to death. Unlike the Israelis’ and other cultures, he did not set aside his normal life with an intense, proscribed period of official grieving, designed to start the healing process. Instead, he soldiers on with the “celebration of life” approach—a candy-coated denial of the reality of the loss where wailing and gnashing of teeth is suppressed for expressions of joy of having known the deceased while they lived.

  Like most men, Parker felt responsible for protecting his family. Fathers everywhere have been consumed by guilt when tragedy befell their wife or their children—even in cases where there was no indication of anything amiss, even when the damage done was the result of an accident or illness. So how much heavier is that burden for Parker? He knew his wife was not mentally stable. He knew there was conflict between his children and their mother. He could have felt his decisions and actions cleared the way for the deaths of the children. But what if he had reached a different decision? What if he’d not deployed overseas? Would his children still be alive? Or would Julie have found another way to end the lives of Calyx and Beau? Determined people have always been capable of overcoming obstacles in their paths. There very well may have been nothing Parker could have done to prevent this calamitous event.

  At this point in time, the players are all gathered on the stage for the final act to begin, while the public waits for the curtains to open. No matter what the outcome in a case like this one, where emotions have run so high and answers have been so few, there will be no consensus on that outcome—no possible conclusion that can do justice to the family and friends of Beau and Calyx Schenecker.

  AFTERWORD

  When any mother kills her child, it is an attack on our preconceived notions of motherhood. Contrary to everything we intuitively expect from the mother-child bond, this crime is not as rare as we would like to believe. According to forensic psychologist Geoffrey R. McKee, author of Why Mothers Kill, “biological mothers account for 30% of all child homicides between 1976 and 2000 at an annual rate as high as 256 or, on average, one child every thirty-three hours.”

  More conservative estimates, like that of Cheryl Meyer and Michelle Obermann, co-authors of Mothers Who Kill Their Children, place the incidence of these crimes at one hundred times a year, making it every three days that a mother kills a child in the United States. Even as one reads about the prevalence of the crime in these statistics, it remains difficult to comprehend how any woman could carry a developing fetus in her body for nine months and not feel the intensity of the maternal bond that would prevent such an act. Our reluctance as a society to believe that mothers would be capable of killing their offspring hinders our ability to recognize warning signs, intervene, and prevent more tragedies.

  When I researched the history of mothers who kill, the murders committed by Julie Schenecker grew even less comprehensible—they are clearly an anomaly in the literature. Dr. Phillip Resnick, professor of psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University of Medicine and noted maternal filicide expert, commented in the first week following the crime, “It is very puzzling. You might expect a parent to lose control and smack the kids, not come up from behind with a gun. There is something else going on that we don’t know about. On its face, it just doesn’t compute.” Even the ages of Calyx and Beau made the circumstances unusual—85 percent of the victims of maternal filicide are under six years of age.

  The two most common acts of maternal filicide are neonaticide, a term coined by Resnick in 1970 and defined as the killing of a newborn less than twenty-four hours old; and infanticide, the killing of a baby less than one year of age. Resnick said that the most likely time to be killed by a parent is on the day the child is born. This crime is committed most commonly by teenage mothers who are alone and unattended by any medical personnel when they give birth. New mothers under fifteen are seven times more likely to commit neonaticide or infanticide than new mothers over the age of twenty-five.

  Mental illness is a big factor in these case
s, but so is desperation. Desperation often leads to denial of the pregnancy and to an overwhelming fear that parents or others in authority would learn about the birth.

  The denial takes two forms. In one, the mother-to-be does not accept the fact that she is pregnant and no physical evidence of her condition will convince her. The mother can even walk away from the birth itself with no conscious awareness that she left a baby behind. In affective denial, the mother accepts the reality of the pregnancy on an intellectual level but does not feel the normal emotions of a woman in that state. She does not inform anyone, see a physician, or make any preparations for the arrival of a child—definitely not the normal behavior of the first-time mother, who often obsesses about the coming child.

  E. L. Atkins argued in the American Journal of Forensic Psychology that those who kill infants in the first twenty-four hours of their life usually commit the act without any premeditation, acting in a state of impulsive panic, and thus are no threat to society, making incarceration unwarranted. Across the nation, a study discovered that only twenty-nine out of forty-two mothers who caused their newborn’s death were charged with homicide. Often lesser charges like the unlawful disposal of a body were all the other women faced. In the punishment phase, the sentences handed down ranged from parenting classes and counseling to thirty years behind bars.

  In the United States, all these cases have been approached as homicides from the onset because there are no specific neonaticide or infanticide laws here. Thirty other nations, including Turkey, England, India, Sweden, and Brazil, have laws targeting this specific crime. Great Britain passed the Infanticide Act of 1922—ninety years ago. British law works on the assumption that a woman who kills a newborn is most likely mentally unbalanced, and thus it prohibits prosecutors from placing any charge higher than manslaughter.

  In 1994 France struck down their infanticide statute, and the French now charge the mothers based on the homicide laws. There may not be any connection, but France now has a rising number of these crimes and has the highest rates of neonaticide in Europe.

  Less common is the murder of a child when its role in the family has been firmly established. In 1990, Patricia Crittenden and S. Craig determined that the proportion of children killed by parents decreased as the child grew older.

  Resnick created the first classification system for this rarer form of maternal filicide, basing it on the mother’s motivation. The first category is altruistic killings. Within that grouping are two subsets. In one are the cases where a mother commits a mercy killing, taking the life of a child who is suffering with a debilitating disease. The second contains mothers who believe that killing their offspring is in the best interests of those children.

  In some cases, the mother plans to commit suicide but does not want to abandon her children. She reasons that by taking their lives she can protect them by keeping them by her side in heaven. “The mother may well think of young children as extensions of herself and feel that her children would be lost without her,” Phillip Resnick told Time magazine. This motivation was evident in the cases of Kristina Gaime and Dorothy Ross in the Tampa Bay area.

  In others, the mother wants to save her child from an even worse fate than death. Andrea Yates is a prime example of this irrational thinking. She drowned all five of her children one-by-one in the bathroom of her Clearwater, Texas, home, then calmly waited for the police. She believed she was saving her children from the devil. Her mental illness was the obvious cause of that dreadful conclusion, but proving Andrea’s insanity would prove tricky—it took two trials. In most states, the legal definition requires that a perpetrator cannot distinguish between right and wrong, but Andrea walked a fine line. She believed killing her children was secularly wrong but simultaneously believed that it was right in God’s eyes. Like most women who commit altruistic filicide, an element of disordered thinking was behind her actions, even though her thinking did not fit the legal definition of insanity.

  Julie Schenecker, on the other hand, has not spoken of any lofty motivations for the murders of Calyx and Beau.

  Resnick’s second classification is the unwanted child filicide, not including those in the separate neonaticide category. This motivation revolves around illegitimacy or questions about paternity. These children die from either passive neglect or active, abusive aggression. Also included in this category are mothers who wanted the child initially but after the baby was born grow detached, resentful, or worn-out from the responsibility.

  This reason has never been shown to exist in cases where the children were older, more independent, and better equipped to care for themselves. It is not a category where Julie Schenecker would comfortably fit. When she was not in a depressive state, she was an energetic and creative mother.

  The third category is accidental filicide. Generally, these are cases of battering mothers who, in an attempt to discipline, engage in a fatal assault without any preplanning. These deaths typically follow a long history of child abuse.

  Julie is surely not one of these mothers. Her only resorts to the physical abuse of her children were two slapping incidents involving her daughter just months prior to the murders. In addition, Julie engaged in premeditation. Not only did she travel away from her home turf to buy a gun, but after making that purchase and learning of the five-day waiting period she also came home and wrote: “The massacre will have to be delayed.” Then, throughout what could have been a cooling-off period, she maintained her resolve and did not alter her plan.

  Also included in this category are the cases of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, where the mother is intentionally harming the child to gain attention from medical professionals but has no intention of actually ending that child’s life.

  Resnick’s next category, retaliation/spousal revenge filicide, is the result of a breakdown in a relationship that arouses the negative emotional reactions of jealousy or rejection. Often, a spouse’s infidelity is the triggering mechanism for this class of murder. It is also possible that the affection that the other spouse received from the child was internalized as a threat to the marital sexual relationship. Resnick posited that this parent’s homicidal impulse toward the child was a deliberate attempt to make the other parent suffer. It could also be present when a parent feels rejected by the child because of abuse or illness.

  Here is a category that theoretically could be a motivation for Julie Schenecker. Did she feel threatened by the relationship one or both of her children had with Parker? Did she feel rejected by her children—by Calyx in particular? It clearly seems possible that those thoughts were in Julie’s mind. Parker, in his civil suit, made it clear that he believed resentment was present in the e-mail she sent to him right after she killed the children. When she wrote: “Get home soon—we’re waiting for you!” was she giving a clear indication of a desire to inflict severe emotional distress on her husband, as Parker’s lawsuit claimed? Or was it another symptom of the disordered thinking of mental illness?

  The catch is that this motivation is more likely to be found in paternal filicide. “Filicides based on retaliation and on jealousy or rejection almost exclusively involved fathers,” McKee wrote. In every case I could find where a mother fit into this category, it was born from the belief that another adult was attempting to take the mother’s child or children away from her.

  Although it still remains a possibility, there was much more behind Julie Schenecker’s actions, making her fall most readily into Resnick’s fifth and final category: mental illness. Studies have demonstrated that 80 percent of mothers who commit filicide had a documented psychiatric history. P. T. d’Orbán researched the most common diagnoses of these mothers. Leading the pack at 43 percent of mentally ill women killing their children was the indication of a personality disorder.

  Personality disorder is one of the diagnoses in Julie’s mental health records. Psychologically, “personality” refers to the lasting behaviors and mental traits that distinguish one human being from another. A disorder of th
e personality indicates that the experiences and actions of the individual deviate from what is acceptable to society, causing disruption in the person’s social and personal life. These disorders are consistent with the individual’s sense of self and as such are deemed normal and appropriate to the person possessing them, causing anxiety, distress, depression, or all of the above.

  The second most common diagnosis, at 21 percent, is acute reactive depression, a transitory condition that is brought on by environmental factors or circumstances such as grief. Julie’s mental state went beyond this diagnosis to major depressive disorder, diagnosed nearly twenty years before the deaths of her children.

  Defined as having feelings of sadness, loss, anger, discouragement, or frustration that disrupt a person’s life for weeks or longer at a time, a major depression is demonstrated in a range of symptoms: agitation, restlessness, and irritability; dramatic change in appetite often with weight gain or loss; extreme difficulty in concentrating; fatigue or lack of energy; feelings of hopelessness and helplessness; feelings of worthlessness, self-hate, and guilt; becoming withdrawn or isolated; loss of interest or pleasure in activities that were once enjoyed; thoughts of death or suicide; and/or trouble sleeping or excessive sleeping.

  There is no doubt that Julie was afflicted with many of these problems. And depression is a common precursor to the act of filicide, particularly in cases where there is a planned suicide component. One mother in four who kill their children successfully commits suicide. Many more try and some grow so emotionally exhausted by the act of taking the lives of their children that they lack the energy to go through with the final part of their plan.