by Ray Black
Kathleen Folbigg
Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) is one of those apparently modern phenomena attributed to the effects of polluting agents in the environment – airborne chemicals and gases, electromagnetic radiation, vaccinations, medications, dietary contaminants, and so on and so forth. It may actually be the case that babies have always died every now and then for no apparent reason, but people didn’t react in the modern way because infant mortality was more commonplace and so death certificates gave the likely causes of death as non-specific conditions.
Anyone who has had a baby will know that babies are not particularly good at regulating their breathing while asleep. They frequently appear to stop breathing altogether and then suddenly come back to life with a deep breath. The reason for this is a phenomenon known as sleep apnoea – a temporary cessation of breathing. Thankfully, the body usually has an involuntary overdrive mechanism that ensures intake of oxygen before it is too late. It is this mechanism that appears to malfunction in some babies, so that they fail to revive themselves and die in their sleep. In Britain this is known colloquially as cot death and in the USA as crib death.
When SIDS first became a recognised phenomenon it was regarded as an extremely unlikely and therefore very unlucky thing to strike a family. It followed that two cases of SIDS in the same family were regarded as so unlikely that foul play should be suspected. Consequently a number of mothers were charged with filicide and imprisoned. Some of them were guilty as charged, with evidence available to show that they had committed murder, by smothering their infants for example. For others the situation wasn’t so cut and dried – there was no evidence to suggest murderous intent at all.
Then, so-called specialists began to revise their opinions. They began to suggest that SIDS may be triggered by the genetic make-up of babies. This changed the complexion of things entirely. Suddenly, it became arguable that siblings of a SIDS baby might suffer from the same problem, even though a specific genetic flaw couldn’t be identified. As a consequence, a number of imprisoned mothers were released as the mathematical argument of chance was no longer admissible in the complete absence of evidence – circumstantial or material.
Of course another consequence was the fact that filicidal mothers now had the perfect cover for their behaviour. That is what happened in the case of the Australian murderess Kathleen Folbigg. She managed to extinguish the life from her four infants over the space of nine years (1990—99) by disguising their deaths as serial SIDS. Everyone believed that her children inherited congenital traits that led to their deaths.
The first three infants – Caleb (twenty days old), Patrick (four months old) and Sarah (eleven months old) – all died apparently from breathing difficulties, and people thought that Kathleen was an extremely unfortunate mother. Then the fourth child – Laura – died at nineteen months, which the coroner considered too old for SIDS, so a police investigation was ordered.
In the early days of the investigation Craig Folbigg, the father of the four children, found his estranged wife’s diaries. In them she had written numerous entries expressing the way that motherhood made her feel unattractive and ignored by her husband. Rather than loving her babies she had seen them as competition for her husband’s affections. But the most damning entry read: ‘One day Sarah left . . . with a bit of help’. Then of Laura she wrote: ‘She’s a fairly good-natured baby – thank goodness, it has saved her from the fate of her siblings.’ Evidently her good nature didn’t last in the mind of Folbigg.
The diaries were circumstantial evidence so the police had to find further evidence to reinforce a conviction. Another entry said, ‘Obviously I am my father’s daughter’. Upon investigation it turned out that her father had murdered her mother when Kathleen was eighteen months of age. It was these words that secured Folbigg’s fate. She was eventually found guilty of all four murders and sentenced to ten years for each child. Craig commented that he had had his suspicions but had always loved her too much to take things any further until he found the diaries, which turned passing thoughts into cold reality.
Some doctors argue that women who kill their children in a disguised manner are suffering from Munchausen by Proxy (MhbP), just like Beverley Allitt, the killer paediatric nurse. This view is based on the notion that they enjoy the attention that surrounds them during and after the event. Folbigg’s diaries certainly support this theory, as she wrote frequently about feeling marginalised by the presence of her babies.
In a way, it can be understood to be a form of perpetual immaturity, as the need for attention is a childlike quality in itself. So, in essence, such women don’t view their offspring as their own children to be loved unconditionally, but rather as younger siblings with whom they need to compete. Ultimately, inflicting illness and death is the perfect solution for them, because it means that they remove the competition and get lavished with attention in the process. This is a very worrying conclusion that says a great deal about the fragility and selfishness of the human condition in these women.
Not all filicidal mothers kill their babies in a disguised manner attempting to feign SIDS. Dena Schlosser was an insane Texan who interpreted a television news story as a message from her god and duly removed the arms of her eleven-month-old daughter Margaret as some kind of sacrificial act. China Arnold was similarly maladjusted and caused the death of her newborn baby daughter Paris by cooking her in a microwave oven.
Some mothers turn on their children because the pressures and responsibilities of life build to a point where their minds cannot cope any longer. They undergo personality changes, and murdering their dependants becomes the choice they make. A very good example of this is Andrea Yates, another woman from the USA. She was a loving mother of five children when one day she flipped to the dark side. While her husband was at work she drowned all five of her children in the bathtub and calmly called the police to announce what she had done.
In the case of Yates she was diagnosed with that moot condition described as postpartum depression in the USA and postnatal depression in Britain, which is something that new mothers frequently suffer from. She was certainly suffering from psychosis, which is a detachment from reality in thought and emotion, and was presumably brought on by the demands that come with raising a young family – insufficient sleep, unrelenting routine, social isolation, infrequent respite, etc. That explanation is understandable, if not excusable, but it could just as easily happen to a man in the same situation, so it is by no means a gender-specific condition.
Other mothers kill their children in a more calculated way. Darlie Routier was a woman from Texas who enjoyed the high life. In fact she enjoyed it so much that she grew resentful of her two sons when the family fell on hard times. No longer able to live the life that she had grown accustomed to, she began to think of ways to cut back on spending domestically. That included feeding, clothing and schooling her two sons, so she murdered them with a knife and then went about pretending that an intruder had attacked them. Had she done it in the days of Lizzie Borden she might well have got away with it, but it was 1996 and forensics had moved on since Victorian times.
Beverley Allitt
While Dorothea Puente resorted to murder for money, Beverly Allitt did so for attention. She has been dubbed the Angel of Death, because she worked as a paediatric nurse and made her patients her victims. There is a condition called Munchausen’s syndrome, whereby sufferers become obsessed with feigning illness, so that they enjoy being the centre of medical attention in hospitals. It is akin to hypochondria, except that hypochondriacs believe in their own maladies, although the crossover point might be described as something of a grey area.
Beverly Allitt had a very similar condition called Munchausen by Proxy (MhbP) syndrome, which meant that she made others ill so that she could bask in the sunlight of praise at having saved them from death. In short, she was the very worst kind of person you’d want looking after your child in hospital, for she was the exact opposite of the selfless altru
ist that a children’s nurse should be. As if harming children wasn’t bad enough, she ultimately took things too far and failed to save them, but even then she enjoyed the thanks of the grieving parents for trying her very best to save their children.
Allitt was one of four children born into an essentially ordinary home environment. But she was an attention-seeker from an early age. Sibling rivalry prompted her to feign illness and injury as a young girl and she quickly cultivated her craft of deception and self-delusion, even giving herself plaster casts for supposedly broken bones. So she reached adult life with Munchausen’s syndrome/ hypochondria well developed in her personality. The Munchausen component came to the fore when she faked the symptoms of appendicitis and actually had her appendix removed quite unnecessarily. She then prevented the appendectomy scar from healing by picking away at the sutures. She also self-harmed by lacerating her body with broken glass and bruising herself with hammers.
When Allitt left school her career choice was to train as a nurse. She was evidently drawn to a work environment with which she was already very familiar. While training she was considered to be somewhat of an oddity among her fellow students. She was absent from training college frequently and then relished the attention she got when she returned, having used illness as her excuse for being away. She was also suspected of being behind a number of unpleasant events involving the smearing of faeces in places where others took their refreshments. Presumably she found some kind of pleasure in witnessing the disgust and fuss it created. Clearly she would stop at nothing to be noticed and things were set to get a whole lot worse.
Despite her poor attendance record and having failed her nursing exams on numerous occasions, Allitt was given a six-month contract at the hospital she had trained in, due to staff shortages. It was the Grantham and Kesteven Hospital in Lincolnshire, England. She had actually applied for a nursing position elsewhere but had been turned down, so Allitt was determined to use her six months to impress the administration. Unfortunately for them, Allitt’s idea of making a good impression was one that would lead to serial murder and attempted murder.
At the age of twenty-three, Beverley Allitt began work in Children’s Ward Four. She was very attentive, perhaps overly attentive, but seemed to lack any emotional connection with her young charges. In hindsight her colleagues would remark that she displayed no feelings towards the babies and toddlers she nursed. She never held them when they cried and she showed no feelings even when they died, but she always did her job in a workmanlike manner, so everyone overlooked her lack of compassion.
Her psychological condition advanced to MhbP in February 1991. Her first victim was a seven-week-old baby boy named Liam Taylor. He was admitted to hospital with pneumonia. He was never discharged but left hospital dead from heart failure thanks to Allitt’s intervention. Her attack on Liam Taylor was the first of thirteen, four of which were fatal. They lasted for a period of fifty-eight days until Allitt was finally arrested.
At first the medical staff at the hospital couldn’t believe what a run of bad luck they were having, as there were no obvious signs of foul play. Even when they did begin to develop suspicions they simply couldn’t get to the bottom of it because they couldn’t identify a method of attack that pointed the finger at anyone. Following the fourth death, that of a baby girl named Claire Peck, staff alerted police simply because the number of cardiac arrests over such a short space of time was too high to be explained statistically.
To their enormous credit, the police began a systematic investigation using a chart. By a simple process of elimination they identified the presence of Allitt as the only component common to all thirteen attacks. The evidence was circumstantial but damning, so Allitt was arrested without further delay. Forensic work subsequently identified the use of insulin as the agent Allitt used to induce cardiac arrest in the children. She also interfered with their supplies of oxygen.
Initially people found it difficult to believe that a trained nurse could be responsible for such heinous crimes. An angel of mercy had turned out to be an angel of death, thereby destroying the bond of trust that exists between the medical profession and the public. It wasn’t until Allitt’s life history had been disclosed that people realised just how serious her personality disorder really was. She had craved attention so badly that she had played with the lives of infants so that she might be thought of as a Florence Nightingale figure. And indeed, it worked, if only for a few short weeks.
What was worse was that she totally denied any wrongdoing and has never fully admitted her crimes, almost as if they never happened. It’s as if she thought that her behaviour was normal and that she believed all people did similar things. Perhaps her mind works in such a different way to most that she cannot help but judge the world entirely by her own standards. To that extent it could be argued that she suffers fundamentally from a form of autism that happens to express itself as Munchausen syndrome and then develop into MhbP when all other avenues are exhausted.
In May 1993, Beverley Allitt was convicted of four murders and nine attempted murders. She began thirteen life sentences at the age of twenty-four in Rampton Secure Hospital, Nottinghamshire, England. It isn’t far from another hospital – the one she had hoped to work in, having impressed the staff with her nursing skills in Lincolnshire. Little did she realise that she was dangerously ill herself. Even incarcerated Allitt continues in her quest to attract attention. Waiting for her trial she stopped eating and developed anorexia nervosa, which caused delays to the proceedings. Since her conviction she has frequently self-harmed by whatever means available to her – piercing her skin with paper clips and scolding herself with hot water. It seems that she is hardwired by her condition to have a perpetual need for attention, come hell or high water.
Her sentence is the most severe ever given to a British female defendant and she has the dubious accolade of being one of the most prolific female serial deviants. She is in the company of such infamous killers as Rose West and Myra Hindley, except that she worked alone while they had male accomplices in their crimes. The case was such a high profile one, as is usually the case with female killers of children, that it is unlikely that Allitt will ever be released.
Insanely, it is an oddity of British law that results in thirteen life sentences not actually meaning what it suggests. Officially, Allitt has only been imprisoned for ‘at least forty years’ which means that she has to be considered for parole when she is sixty-four. That provides each ‘life sentence’ with a duration of a paltry three years and four weeks. In point of fact, several of her victims were older than that when she performed her evil work on them.
Judi Buenoano
Some women get divorced or separated, others simply kill their partners and move on. It is quicker, more convenient and cheaper than if divorce is involved, although it does carry the inherent risk of resulting in arrest for murder. Nevertheless, Judi Buenoano got away with it repeatedly and for many years before justice finally caught up with her. She has consequently been named the Black Widow, and with good reason. She has been described as a scheming, cold-blooded killer who preyed on her victims and all because of greed. In 1998, Judi Buenoano became the first woman to face execution for her crimes in Florida, USA, in 150 years, meeting her end at the hands of Old Sparky – the infamous electric chair.
Like so many of the criminals mentioned in this book, Judi Buenoano had a troubled childhood. She was born Judias Welty, in Quanah, Texas, on April 4, 1943. Her father was a farm labourer and her mother came from an ethnic background, with relatives in the Mesquite Apache tribe. Judi never really got to know her mother as she died when Judi was only four years old, which resulted in the family being split up. Judi and her younger brother, Robert, were sent to live with their maternal grandparents, while the two older children were put up for adoption.
Judi was happy living with her grandparents but it wasn’t long before things were to change. Her father remarried and took Judi and Robert to live with them i
n Roswell, New Mexico. Judi didn’t get along with her new stepmother and was constantly teased by her two stepbrothers. She was allegedly beaten, starved and forced to work long hours and by the time she reached the age of fourteen she retaliated. She attacked her father, stepmother and her two stepbrothers, for which she received a two-month prison sentence. When she was released, rather than have to face the misery of homelife, Judi chose to go to reform school and attended Foothills High School in Albuquerque until she was sixteen.
Having totally turned her back on her family, Judi sought work and managed to get a position as a nursing assistant in Roswell using the name Anna Schultz. In 1961 she became pregant, but would never divulge the name of the father and gave birth to a son whom she christened Michael Schultz.
Judi married an airforce officer by the name of James Goodyear on January 21, 1962. James was a loving, caring husband who adopted her son Michael. Their first child, James Jr, was born in 1966 and their daughter, Kimberley, in 1967. The family settled in Orlando, Florida, and it was here that Judi saw an opportunity to start her own business. With the financial backing of her husband, she opened the Conway Acres Child Care Center and worked hard while James Snr did his tour of duty in Vietnam. Three months after his return home, James was forced to spend a period in the US naval hospital in Orlando suffering from some inexplicable illness. He lost his fight for life on September 15, 1971, and Judi wasted no time cashing in on his three life insurance policies – netting herself a nice little sum. Later the same year there was a mysterious fire at the Goodyear home and Judi received a further $90,000 to add to her coffers.