Sometimes we don’t know how many different forms the violence took. Carol Bundy was battered and emotionally abused by both parents and sexually molested by her father. Genene Jones had a troubled and increasingly hypochondriacal childhood (an ongoing cry for help or a desperate means of seeking affection) and has said it included abuse. Presumably Martha Ann Johnson did too, given that her low IQ would have made her a target for anyone irritated by mental sluggishness. We know that Martha feared being alone and married for the first time at age fourteen.
It’s hard to know after so many years exactly what happened to Bavarian poisoner Anna Zwanziger during her childhood but she was passed from relative to relative after her father died and such a history increases the likelihood of physical cruelty. Step-parents are statistically more likely to abuse stepchildren than they are their natural born. Anna’s first suicide attempts were made as a very young woman so she’d clearly suffered during her early life.
Violence can be lost in the midst of time - one crime book suggested Anna had a good stable childhood in her father’s inn, whereas more detailed research shows that her father died when she was five leaving her doubly orphaned and spending the next five years being shunted from one foster home to the next.
Similarly, a recent television programme on Peter Sutcliffe suggested that his childhood was unremarkable - yet a close reading of his life shows that as a child he was terrified of his father and used to pop his head around the door to make sure that the man wasn’t home before he entered the house.
Other sources have suggested that Ted Bundy had a good upbringing, whereas in truth his religious unmarried mother was ashamed of him and his violent and bigoted grandfather became his role model for his formative years.
Cruel and controlling families
Alice Miller wrote in Banished Knowledge that ‘It is absolutely unthinkable that a human being who, from the start, is given love, tenderness, closeness, orientation, respect, honesty, and protection by adults should later become a murderer.’ As we’ve seen, the women in this book weren’t given most of the necessities she describes.
Further proof that violence comes from within the family is found in Oliver James impressively detailed Juvenile Violence In A Winner-Loser Culture. The book shows that the children who ended up being labelled as aggressive had been hit hard and long by their parents. This was true of studies carried out in places as culturally diverse as England, Sweden and New York. Moreover, the violent parents rarely praised their children and were unenthusiastic about the good things their offspring did. Carol Bundy’s hyper-critical and vicious parents fit the bill.
Oliver James also looked at the impact a depressed mother had on her children. Small children (under the age of five) in her care were particularly at risk. He notes that ‘Murder of children is the only violent offence that women are more likely to commit than men.’ Quadruple child killer Martha Ann Johnson, depressed but determined to get her ex-husband back, and the alcoholic Jeanne Weber slot into this category.
He describes depressed mothers who rejected their babies. By age one the child became equally rejecting, refusing to acknowledge the mother when she came into the room. These neglected children also avoided eye contact and seemed to retreat into their own little world.
This account squares with Gwen Graham’s comments that as a baby she didn’t like to be held. She’d been ignored by her youthful and isolated mother so didn’t bond with her. The mother then became violent towards Gwen as she grew up. Gwen was doubly unfortunate in that her father beat her too.
Self hatred
Sociologists, psychologists and women’s studies specialists have all identified the self harm that women from such high conflict families experience. As these abused girls grow up they harm themselves by starvation, overeating or heavy drinking. Others cut their arms or burn themselves with cigarettes and there may be several attempts at suicide.
This is true of the killers in this text - Anna Zwanziger, Jeanne Weber, Catherine Birnie, Charlene Gallego and Aileen Wuornos all had drink and/or drug problems. Martha Ann Johnson, Catherine Wood, Rose West, Myra Hindley and Carol Bundy were overeaters. Gwen Graham had cut and burnt herself, Genene Jones abused prescription medication whilst Judith Neelley lived off a diet of junk food and neglected herself physically to the point where she and her clothes were unclean.
Karla Homolka, though slim and beautiful, became obsessed with her diet and thought she was fat. She also turned up at school talking of suicide and showed faint marks on her wrists. She came from a family of heavy drinkers and in the days before her trial was sometimes drunk by the afternoon.
It’s true that many criminals don’t accept responsibility for their own actions, blaming the crimes on bad luck or pornography or hearing voices - and some might say the same is true of those who cry abused childhood. But there are independent witnesses to many of the cases in this book who testify that the children were indeed abused.
Some of these girls were so isolated and brainwashed by their abusive families that they thought the beatings and excessive rules were normal. Rose West, who continued to have an unhealthy relationship with her incestuous father when she was a married woman, conforms to this pattern. Carol Bundy also talked about the good times like family outings - and it was through talking to relatives that they uncovered the physical beatings and emotional humiliation that had actually occurred in her childhood home.
Parents in denial
Many of these punitive parents knew that the neighbours were talking about them, and in some cases their children were fostered because of the abuse, but the parents still didn’t seek help for their violence or change their behaviour. There is a rigidity amongst some parents that prevents them from acknowledging the pain they can create.
John Douglas, in The Anatomy Of Motive, tells the story of mass murderer Charles Whitman, who was frequently hit by his father. His father also beat his mother. Young Charles was often bruised and was almost drowned by his father for coming home drunk when he was eighteen.
Charles Whitman eventually took this hatred out on the world, killing his wife and his mother then taking refuge in a Texas tower. He shot thirteen strangers before being shot dead by police.
After the massacre, his father admitted that he had made his children call him ‘sir’ throughout their brutalised childhoods - but rather than regretting his harsh treatment of them, he felt he hadn’t punished them enough.
Life after life
Charles Whitman isn’t alone as a beaten child who grew up to take revenge on the world. Again and again, prison authorities note that today’s prisoners were yesterday’s abused children. As we’ve seen, many of the killers profiled here were regularly hit by their parents or grandparents when they were growing up. As adult prisoners, such men and women often remain distressed or dangerous. Most institutions opt for a policy of just locking such prisoners up but Grendon Prison in Buckinghamshire, England, has opted for a more constructive approach.
This prison offers group therapy to some of the country’s most violent male prisoners. Eric Cullen, former head of the prison’s psychology unit, spoke of Grendon’s work in the BBC2 documentary Behind Bars. He said that prisoners had to come to terms with what they’d done to others, that they had to understand how they’d become the person that they now wanted to change.
Dr Joseph Marr, one of Grendon’s psychotherapists added ‘If we were showing abused children, people would want to rescue them. The inmates are these children grown up.’
The talking - and listening - cure seems to do some good, though we’re not talking miracles. Most prisons have a recidivism rate of sixty percent whereas Grendon has forty-five percent, the lowest reoffending rate of any British prison.
At group therapy sessions the men talk of their childhoods - being beaten by their parents and/or sexually abused in children’s homes is revealed in their stories again and again.
Ironically, the public often opts for even more punitive mea
sures when abused children become criminally abusive adults. Readers of crime magazines sometimes suggest that we should put killers in the stocks and publicly humiliate them. The awful reality is that these men and women have already been humiliated and hit by their supposed carers throughout their childhoods and are now passing the violence on.
Robert Adams, who I interviewed in the summer of 2000, agrees that there’s often a link between being a victim and becoming a victimiser. ‘There is evidence that people who have been physically or sexually abused in their childhood, and who haven’t coped with this, go on to abuse others or be violent towards them,’ says the former prison officer. (My italics.) He adds that some people don’t pass the abuse on. ‘The major problem is how to predict who will and who won’t. By and large, criminologists can’t help with this one, though they do have lots of theories.’
As this book has shown, Lonnie Athens four-step theory of violentization (being brutalised, resolving to return the violence, being violent, realising that this violence pays off) is one of the theories that makes sense.
The perils of punishment
Extensive data has shown that children who are frequently smacked have more behavioural problems, show more aggression or depression and have more problems with their mental and emotional health than children from less punitive families. Carol Bundy, Judith Neelley, Catherine Birnie, Cathy Wood, Gwen Graham, Rose West and Aileen Wuornos all showed these aggressive or depressive traits during their violent and dysfunctional childhoods. The others would show their aggression later - but the seeds were sown when they were young.
Three large American studies conducted in the 1990’s showed that children who were spanked regularly showed a marked rise in anti-social behaviour over a two year period. Conversely, those children who were rarely or never hit showed no increase in anti-social behaviour over the same period. (Research found in Barnardo’s National Children’s Bureau Highlight newsletter number 166)
Other countries - including Austria, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, Norway - have taken notice of the data and have made it illegal for adults to hit children. Sweden banned such punishment in 1979, which means that an entire generation has now grown up largely without being physically humiliated.
Granted, most of us who are regularly hit by angry adults don’t go on to become serial killers - but many such children grow up to develop drink problems and eating disorders. Others go on to hit their partners or their children or just live very unhappy and damaged lives.
Many parents think that if they stop hitting their children that they will spoil them - but Elie Godsi, author of the compassionate and knowledgeable Violence In Society, writes that it is love rather than hate which saves people from criminality and from ongoing personal distress. To quote from Walter Parsons, a former Chairman of Leeds Juvenile Court ‘You can whip vice into a boy but you can’t whip it out.’
Poisonous parents
So how does society make such abusive parents change? Hard-hitting mothers and fathers somehow manage to blank their actions out, to rewrite history in their heads.
Many people saw Rose West striking her children in the street. Other neighbours thought that she was too severe when it came to discipline. Yet her oldest son Stephen says, truthfully, ‘I think Mum has forgotten the beatings she gave us as a child and how she treated us. She would deny it ever happened in court. I know she would.’
There was also a form of denial in Daisy, Rose’s mother, who seemed surprised that her terrorised children grew into adults who couldn’t cope with life. But how could they be expected to cope when they’d had no praise, no fun, and had been regularly brutalised by their hate-filled father?
Society often makes excuses for spiteful and inadequate parenting or - in the absence of full information - puts a benign slant on child cruelty. The original reports of the West household described it as a disciplined but loving home.
The press also said that Myra Hindley came from a loving respectable home - yet observers said that Myra’s parents had nothing in common and that her father was reclusive and violent. He himself admitted he never had any feelings for the child. One of the websites about Carol Bundy states that her parents did their best for her - their best being to physically, emotionally and sexually abuse her so badly that she made her first suicide attempt at the age of twelve or thirteen.
Elie Godsi has worked with offenders in Rampton, a maximum security hospital for offenders detained under the Mental Health Act. He writes eloquently of his experiences in Violence In Society. Again and again he found that such prisoners had been repeatedly abused by their parents or carers. He’s all too aware of the fact that ‘various levels of hitting, shaking, shoving, and pulling children is for much of the population an acceptable method of child rearing’ and that there is a fine ‘transition between physical punishment and physical abuse.’
Over ninety percent of parents at some time hit their children - and some people hit them several times a week - so there is a great deal of emotional hurt, fear and physical pain in the world today. Small wonder that violent crime rates are so frighteningly high.
So-called legitimate punishment often turns into abuse. The parents of the serial killers in this book mocked and hit their helpless offspring again and again - but they believed that they had the law on their side so they continued their attacks.
Not just a smack
Many parents refuse to see their own actions as abusive. Catherine Wood’s mother admitted that her husband was ‘difficult’ but was adamant that she wouldn’t have let him abuse Cathy or her siblings. A relative believed otherwise. Rose West’s father moved his family to a different area, rather than change his violent ways, when the neighbours gossiped about his frightened children’s screams.
Other research has backed this up, finding that parents trivialised hitting their children, saying that it was ‘just a tap.’ But when the children themselves were asked they said ‘It feels like someone banged you with a hammer,’ and ‘It’s like breaking your bones.’ Aileen Wuornos grandfather kept the curtains closed so that passers by couldn’t hear her crying as he hit her and Gwen Graham bore the marks of childhood punishments into adulthood.
Many other children are also given more than minor smacks. Dr Susan Forward, author of Toxic Parents, states honestly that ‘any behaviour that inflicts significant physical pain on a child, regardless of whether it leaves marks’ is physical abuse.
Over the past few years many children’s charities have become aware that legal punishments in the home constitute abuse and lead to increased violence in society. In a bid to both educate and legislate, the charity EPOCH was formed in 1989.
EPOCH, which stands for End Physical Punishment Of Children later linked to the Association For The Protection Of All Children, generally known as APPROACH. Many religious groups have joined the campaign to stop parents hitting their children, pointing out that though ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’ appears in some holy books it does not constitute doctrinal text.
EPOCH have produced a range of leaflets, booklets and posters which show the dangers of hitting children and which emphasise the use of positive discipline. As they say ‘rewards such as praise, approval and hugs work much better’ than smacks and ‘the more politeness, consideration and co-operation children get, the more they’ll give.’ The organisation also reports that ‘parents who try alternatives report success.’
Most of the female killers in this book suffered parental shouts and blows rather than the deserved love and hugs and approval. The others were coached by violent men who had once suffered at the hands of their violent parents. The results were ultimately disastrous.
As Alice Miller writes in Banished Knowledge, ‘When one day the ignorance arising from childhood repression is eliminated and humanity has awakened, an end can be put to this production of evil.’ She’s describing the repressed memories of being hit and humiliated as a child.
Almost all of the profiled female killers gave
birth to children who are now in the homes of foster families or relatives. If the law was changed to make physical punishment illegal then these children would assuredly suffer less than their mothers did.
Select Bibliography
Adams, Robert The Abuses Of Punishment Macmillan Press, 1998
Biondi, Ray and Hecox, Walt All His Father’s Sins Pocket Books, 1988
Burn, Gordon Happy Like Murderers Faber and Faber, 1998
Burnside, Scott and Cairns, Alan Deadly Innocence Warner Books, 1995
Canter, David Criminal Shadows: Inside The Mind Of The Serial Killer Harper Collins, 1995
Cauffiel, Lowell Forever And Five Days Pinnacle Books, 1992
Clark, Steve and Morley, Mike Murder In Mind Central/Boxtree Publishing, 1993
Cook, Thomas H. Early Graves Signet/Onyx, 1992
Douglas, John and Olshaker, Mark The Anatomy Of Motive Simon and Schuster, 2000
Douglas, John and Olshaker, Mark Journey Into Darkness Heinemann, 1997
Farr, Louise The Sunset Murders Pocket Books, 1992
Forward, Dr Susan Toxic Parents: Overcoming The Legacy Of Parental Abuse Bantam Press, 1990
Godsi, Elie Violence In Society: The Reality Behind Violent Crime Constable, 1999
Goodman, Jonathan (edited) The Lady Killers: Famous Women Murderers Piatkus, 1990
Goodman, Jonathan (edited) True Crime Parragon, 1999
Hare, Dr Robert D Without Conscience: The Disturbing World Of The Psychopaths Among Us Warner, 1994
Hoffmann, Eric van A Venom In The Blood Pinnacle Books, 1990
James, Oliver Juvenile Violence In A Winner-Loser Culture Free Association Books, 1995
Women Who Kill: Profiles of Female Serial Killers Page 28