But ten were murdered, at least ten. The murdered children of the last week of June 2017 included a six-month-old in Fresno (June 23); a two-month-old in Hanford, CA (June 23); a two-year-old in Houston (June 24); a one-month-old in Terra Bella, CA (June 24); a two-month-old in Valdosta, GA (June 24); a four-year-old in Tullahoma, TN (June 28); a two-year-old and a six-month-old in Paron, AR (June 28); a three-year-old in Rancho Cordova, CA (June 28); and a three-year-old in Chandler, AZ (June 30).
Taking this in requires some measure of calm and, lest we immediately be laid low, logic. Here we hesitate, since there is nothing innately logical about children being murdered by their parents. We operate, if we operate at all, from emotion, conjuring images of stringing up the killers or intervening in the dead children’s lives, maybe putting your arms around them and telling them how sorry you are for what they went through. This does nothing for them. It does not affect the fate of any other child moving forward, but I understand if you do it, because I do it, too.
The next hesitation involves looking squarely at the issue. Reading case studies about filicide is difficult, and I do not recommend it unless you want to sit in a coffee shop and cry after reading about a four-year-old boy in Finland whom social services suspected of being serially abused. A public health nurse visited the boy at his home. She took him onto her lap, where he rested his head on her shoulder for an hour and a half. The nurse saw this behavior as a call for protection. Three days later, the boy was beaten to death. I can never not see the image of the Finnish boy with his head resting on the nurse’s shoulder.
But I do not look away, because there is logic here—twisted logic, to be sure, but in the eyes of the perpetrators, logic nonetheless. We know this because they killed their children. At some point, whether a year prior or a minute before, these parents looked at what they perceived to be their options and decided their children would be better off dead.
Filicide is divided into three classifications: neonaticide, for children killed within the first twenty-four hours of birth; infanticide, children killed during their first year of life; and filicide, a child from age one to any age. Younger children are killed most often, with 70 percent of filicide victims younger than six years old.
Each category of filicidal parent displays certain patterns. Those who commit neonaticide tend to be young, in their teens or early twenties. It is nearly always the birth mother who does the killing. Often, she has hidden the pregnancy or claims to be unaware she was pregnant. She gives birth in secret, usually at home. She usually kills the child immediately. Neonates are often smothered or strangled; sometimes they are drowned. The mother then hides the body—in a dumpster, in a coffee can under the sink—and carries on as though nothing has happened. The pattern of denial and dissociation she had throughout her pregnancy continues; she was passive and made no plans for the child, and perceives now she will not need to. While newborns comprise 33 percent of all victims of filicide, the true number of neonates can never be known. We cannot account for the murder of a human we do not know exists.
Infanticide accounts for another 14 percent of murders. While these youngest children still tend to be killed by their mothers, fathers are gaining, with the overall percentage of filicidal parents evenly split between the sexes. This seems like a remarkable number in a country where men commit nearly 90 percent of all violent crime, until you take into account that young children are primarily cared for by their mothers. The idea that an infant can abet his or her own murder is ludicrous; nonetheless, in one study 58 percent of killers said the child’s crying precipitated the murder. Men becoming involved in the murder of their children raises the level of violence. According to Why Mothers Kill by Geoffrey R. McKee, mothers tend to kill with hands-on methods: children are smothered in their beds, drowned in the bathtub, their bodies sometimes swaddled and hidden inside or close to the home. These methods can be seen as a way for the mother to figuratively put the child back in the womb, though it is also the case that many women who kill their children are poor and kill with what is available. Fathers are three times more likely to use a firearm, according to a report in Forensic Science International in 2013. Men also engage in higher rates of assault; children are beaten or thrown or stabbed, their bodies disposed of far from where they lived, in some cases driven hundreds of miles.
Victims of filicide are four years old on average. Boys are killed very slightly more often than girls. The average age of a filicidal parent is thirty-one. All races and nationalities kill their children. Ideology can play a part. China’s one-child policy, which ended in 2016, all but assured the use of neonaticide as a form of birth control. War and famine have, and will continue to, put parents in the position of deciding whether it is viable to keep all their children alive, and if not, they may kill the weakest or youngest. This is categorized as altruistic filicide, a designation both common and controversial.
In 1969, Dr. Philip Resnick developed five categories of motives to explain why mothers kill their children. In altruistic filicide, a suicidal mother feels it will be too cruel to leave the child in the world without her, or she feels the child has a disability, real or imagined, that will make the child’s life intolerable moving forward. Acutely psychotic filicide is the result of a psychosis: the mother kills the child with no rational motive. Unwanted child filicide, while most often involving neonaticide, can also include the murder of a child who is seen as a burden. Accidental filicide occurs when a child is unintentionally killed as a result of abuse; these include deaths as the result of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a psychological disorder that compels caretakers, usually women, to exaggerate or fabricate medical conditions in those they care for in order to get attention for themselves. Most rare, according to Resnick, is spouse revenge filicide, wherein the child is killed to punish a partner.
That Resnick classified 49 percent of the maternal filicides he studied as altruistic reflects the belief that parents, mothers especially, are hardwired to protect the child. Seen this way, her actions are an extension of motherly love, protecting the child despite possible consequences to herself. If a woman kills someone else’s daughter, she can face charges of criminal homicide. If she kills her own daughter, the system is more likely to take a measure of pity, to say she could not have been in her right mind at the time and charge her with a lesser crime.
The laws in a number of countries support this belief. The British Infanticide Act allows a mother to be charged with manslaughter rather than murder for killing her infant, on the grounds that she has not fully recovered from giving birth; she is then more often referred for mental health treatment than remanded to jail. More than twenty other nations have similar laws. In New Zealand, the law covers a murder of a child up to the age of ten. These exceptions are made only for mothers, not fathers.
Though the United States has no such law, our bias toward mothers is clear in the ways we punish filicidal parents. Resnick found that mothers were sent to mental institutions 68 percent of the time and to prison 27 percent of the time, whereas fathers went to prison 72 percent of the time and to hospitals 14 percent.
“We still view children as the mother’s property,” wrote Dahlia Lithwick in a 2002 Slate article about filicidal parents. “Since destroying one’s own property is considered crazy while destroying someone else’s property is criminal, women who murder their own children are sent to hospitals, whereas their husbands are criminals who go to jail.”
A default determination of “crazy” can feel like security, a fence between mothers who kill their children and the rest of us, so long as we maintain our marbles. But it also removes a person’s will from the situation. As Lithwick further wrote, “The destruction and control of something deemed to be a woman’s sole property sends a powerful message about who’s really in charge, and this message hasn’t changed since the time of Jason and Medea.”
Medea, who after murdering her two children to punish Jason’s infidelity flies away in a golden chariot d
riven by dragons, and does so without remorse. Her rational choice to sacrifice her children has made Medea one of the great pariahs of literature. If we have no trouble seeing her act as one of unmitigated revenge, we have a harder time ascribing the same intention to real filicides. Mothers who mean to commit suicide after killing their children rarely succeed, scholars argue, because they have already killed what is most important to them. Their suicide, in other words, becomes redundant.
Five decades after Resnick’s seminal work, the motives for filicide have grown to eleven, to seventeen, depending on current perceptions and psychological diagnoses. A 2012 study of fatal child abuse, for instance, found that perpetrators in more than 90 percent of filicide cases suffered from a personality disorder, including borderline, narcissistic, dependent, and immature; that 38 percent abused alcohol; and that 46 percent were perpetrators or victims of domestic violence.
Risk factors for those who kill their children include social isolation, mental illness, a pattern of unemployment or underemployment, and psychological stresses, such as financial hardship, housing problems, marital difficulties, and a lack of family and community support. Amanda’s eroding circumstances—the loss of her marriage, her home, losing custody of her children—are all factors that can move a mother closer to killing her child.
It is unlikely anyone looked at the coordinates of Amanda’s increasingly disordered life and calculated how she was at risk for killing her children. If Kathy Stott checked her daughter into treatment three times in the spring of 2009, it was for depression and an eating disorder. If Christine Duncan thought Jason should file for custody of the children, it was because Amanda had become an irresponsible mother. If Chantel Gardner knew her sister had previous mental health and alcohol issues, she nevertheless told police, who asked whether she thought Amanda capable of harming the kids, “I didn’t believe she could.”
Of course she didn’t. The eventuality was unthinkable to Amanda’s family. But they did see it coming; they just didn’t know what it was.
10
Easter 2003, Oak Grove, Oregon
Chelsea Errington had been dating Nathan Beck for a month when he told her he wanted her to meet his son. Chelsea knew little about Gavin, who lived with his mother somewhere near Portland. She knew Gavin had just turned six and that Nathan saw him as often as he could. But Chelsea was vague on the relationship with Gavin’s mother, or more precisely, it seemed something Nathan did not want to talk about. He and Amanda had been casual friends, a friendship that progressed to a brief intimacy around June 1996.
Nathan did not talk about that time. What was there to talk about? Amanda’s getting pregnant was not something he had planned for. He barely knew her; they were both nineteen and trying to decide what to do. Mike Stott wanted Nathan to marry his daughter. Instead, Nathan and Amanda decided to give the baby up for adoption. They picked a family. It was all set. Six months into the pregnancy, Amanda changed her mind; she wanted to keep the child. Nathan needed to figure out how to make this work. He assessed the situation and accepted his duties: he would join the navy. The navy would provide a secure future and steady pay. By January 1997, he was in boot camp, in Great Lakes, Illinois. His son, Gavin Michael Nathan Stott, was born in March. Nathan began making monthly child support payments soon after and never stopped. Later based in Washington State, he tried to see Gavin whenever he was in port.
Amanda had called Nathan a few days before Easter 2003 to say Gavin would appear in an Easter play at her parents’ church, and why didn’t Nathan come? Nathan said he would come earlier and take Gavin to dinner the Friday before.
“Hi, Nathan,” said the little boy with the glossy black hair by way of greeting. Chelsea thought it odd Gavin called his father by his first name. She knew that Gavin had lived with Amanda and her husband, Jason, for several years; perhaps he was accustomed to calling Jason “Dad.” Still, Gavin repeatedly saying Nathan’s name had a practiced tone, as though he’d only ever heard his father referred to by his first name or perhaps had been coached to use it.
They were eating dinner at McDonald’s when Nathan’s phone rang. It was Amanda, saying maybe it would be better if Nathan did not come to the Easter service, that Jason would not be comfortable with it. If Chelsea thought this a strange request, it became increasingly bizarre when Amanda called again and again—it seemed like she called fifty times—saying please don’t come; she knew Jason was being silly about the whole thing, but still, it would be better if Nathan did not show up.
Nathan and Chelsea showed up anyway.
The church was plain and did not look to Chelsea to hold more than a hundred people. The small sanctuary had chairs rather than pews. If Chelsea expected Nathan might get a big greeting from Amanda’s family, she was disappointed. Only Amanda came up to them before the service. She reminded Chelsea of an ’80s Hawaiian girl, with long, long hair and frosted blue eye shadow. Amanda was talking in a ditzy voice, saying it would have been better if Nathan and Chelsea had not come, but they were here now so, oh well!
The parishioners filed into the sanctuary. Jason, Amanda, baby Trinity, and Gavin sat toward the front. Jackie Dreiling was seated several rows behind them, on the aisle. She thought Jason was probably furious that Gavin’s father had come. Amanda had told her mother that Jason hated Nathan. Jackie thought this was because Jason was insecure, the reason, too, that Amanda used her children like gifts: she gave them to Jason to appease his insecurity. Jason wanted to be Gavin’s father? Here, I give him to you; you are his father.
But he was not Gavin’s father. Nathan was his father, and when Jackie saw Nathan take a seat in the back, she motioned to Gavin to come to her. She took him on her lap and whispered, “Daddy’s here.” She pointed at Nathan.
Gavin jumped off her lap and ran up the aisle and threw himself on Nathan. He knew exactly, Jackie thought, who his father was. From separate rows, the families watched the Easter production. They watched the children sing songs, Gavin dressed in a hat with little lamb ears.
Afterward in the lobby, Amanda again went up to Nathan and Chelsea. She nodded at Jason. That’s my husband, she said. She tried to wave Jason over, to get him to come say hello. He would not come their way; he did not say anything to Nathan or Chelsea that day. Weird for sure, Chelsea thought, as was Amanda trying to make light of it, repeating, oh, he’s just a goose this way. Later that year, after Nathan and Chelsea married, Amanda would tell Chelsea she was so pleased because now she could talk to Chelsea about Gavin rather than speaking directly with Nathan, thus avoiding jealousy on Jason’s part. And Chelsea would think, what the hell is this?
11
The late intellectual Christopher Hitchens sat across from me in a window booth at Jake’s Grill in downtown Portland. The faux-historic watering hole did brisk business at lunch, mostly businessmen at four-tops or alone at the bar. Hitchens was drinking Johnny Walker Black. Michael Totten, our mutual friend and fellow reporter, stuck to beer. There was no reason for me to be at this lunch other than Totten thinking I would enjoy meeting Hitchens, who was in Portland for an event for his latest book, God is Not Great.
I did enjoy meeting Hitchens. I enjoyed watching him silence the chattering buffoon at the next table without the man realizing how it had happened. I enjoyed catching the breathless “I love you . . .” from a woman who passed behind Hitchens’s chair and ran a finger along the shoulders of his suit jacket.
“I had it made in Vietnam,” he said when I told him the suit was beautiful. I asked if I might get him a proper fork so he did not have to keep eating his entrée with his oyster fork. I told him about Amanda and the children.
“Did she think the children would be going to heaven?” Hitchens asked. I told him that I believed she did. I appreciated how quickly he saw that the existence of heaven, something he actively did not believe existed, might matter to Amanda, that her thinking heaven was where she was sending her children might be a factor here.
“Do you really believe th
at?” asked my husband, Din.
We were finishing a bottle of wine in the living room when I suggested that Amanda had done what she had to protect the children; that maybe she thought they would be better off dead than in whatever situation they had been in. Din found this idea a serious reach. He thought Amanda was a coward.
“If things were so bad, why didn’t she jump in the river?” he asked.
He did not see the benefit of trafficking in maybes. Wasn’t the shortest distance between two points a straight line?
The year had made me consider what we make of people who kill and try to kill children. Two months after Eldon was killed and Trinity nearly killed, a girl who had gone to grade school with my daughter was murdered. She was seventeen. To protect her family’s privacy, I will call this girl Helen. She was on an errand for her mother when a man approached her and asked for money. Surveillance cameras at an ATM showed Helen unsuccessfully trying to withdraw cash with a credit card her parents had given her for contingencies. What happened during the several hours between when Helen was captured on camera and when the man was picked up for drinking in public and possessing a crack pipe is unknown. Upon his arrest, the man was found to have the keys to Helen’s Volvo and her cell phone. The following morning, Helen was discovered in her car in a parking lot. Her throat had been cut.
I lay in bed for two nights trying to come up with what I wanted to do with this man. I settled on taking him up in a small plane and flying him over the ocean ten or twenty miles, opening the door, and pushing him out. He would not survive the fall, but if for some reason he did, I imagined his terror in knowing he had no chance to get back to shore. He would be there alone. Maybe he would cry. Shortly, he would drown. Eventually, he would be eaten.
To the Bridge Page 5