When She Was Bad

by Patricia Pearson

  The danger posed to female characterological integrity in the spreading use of abuse rationales has been widely articulated. The moral logic of these exculpatory defenses concerned feminists of the nineteenth century. One 1844 manifesto argued, “[Man] has made [woman], morally, an irresponsible being, as she can commit many crimes with impunity, provided they be done in the presence of her husband.” Why haven’t we made any progress with this view?

  In the past decade, as women began to stream into North American prisons in record numbers, our society, in a coincidence of timing, cottoned on to child abuse as a factor in criminal behavior. It has quickly become the newest rationale for female violence—another point of entry for our understanding and forgiveness. The Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics, ostensibly the most objective data about annual American crime rates, now contain a table that cites the percentage of incarcerated women who were abused as children. There is no comparable table for incarcerated men, even though the influence of child abuse on subsequent violent behavior is well documented for both sexes, and more boys suffer physical abuse in childhood than girls. What is implied by the inclusion of one sex and not the other in the table? That a woman who was beaten in grade school might understandably grow up to mug an old man, but a boy who was similarly treated has no such excuse for his crime? As with coercion and self-defense, we clearly seek a preemptive cause for female transgressions that preserves an emphasis on victimization. It is not the effect of abuse on future criminality that truly concerns us. It is the desire to avoid seeing women as wilfull aggressors.

  In 1991, criminologist Kathleen Daly studied the presentence investigations reports prepared by probation officers for criminals in New Haven, Connecticut. From the social and family histories garnered in these reports, she found that a larger proportion of women (one third, versus about one tenth of men) was characterized as having been physically or sexually abused as children. Daly wondered if, perhaps, fewer men had been asked by the probation officers if they were abused. Sure enough, when she put this question to the probation officers, “some said they were more inclined to probe the women’s family histories.” Embedded in the facts were presuppositions about women and men, rendering it impossible for even a fair-minded researcher like Daly to draw conclusions about how the sexes might differ in commiting their crimes. In Washington State, therapists who receive board certification to counsel sex offenders are taught that the offender’s admission that he was molested or abused as a child is to be dismissed as “rationalization.” Ditto in countless other jurisdictions for wife assault. We may leap to insist that women only commit violence because of their own abuse, but we rush in the opposite direction for men.

  The distinction we draw between men and women is stunningly evident in popular culture. In 1994, Lifetime Television aired a movie called Overkill: The Aileen Wuornos Story, a docudrama about a serial killer from Florida in the late 1980s. Aileen Wuornos was a drifter, armed robber, and sometime hooker who’d had a horrible childhood, utterly without haven. She moved around southern Florida by hitchhiking along 1-75, often drunk, usually broke. Over the course of two years, she shot seven of the men who picked her up, and abandoned their bodies to rot in the Everglades. Wuornos also robbed them of various pawnable items—a camera, a watch, a sweetheart ring, a car, which she took for a joy ride and crashed. When she was caught, she claimed self-defense.

  The real Aileen Wuornos, rangy, gritty, foul-mouthed, and fright-eningly volatile, was nowhere in evidence on television. The actress who played Wuornos, Jean Smart, portrayed her as pensive, kind, needy, and melancholic. The awful rage that the real Aileen Wuornos displayed at her trial, bellowing at jurors that she hoped their daughters were raped, snapping at her victims’ widows that they could “rot in hell,” was replaced by a TV Wuornos who handed money to homeless women at SeaWorld. The TV character has flashbacks to herself as a pretty blond girl dressing up in pearls before a mirror, trying to be a lady, as if that were all she still wanted for herself—as if the brutality of her life had not transformed her into someone monstrously hardened and destructive. The cops who pursue the TV Wuornos are sympathetic and patient, like Harvey Keitel’s character in the movie Thelma and Louise. “It’s ironic,” says the kindly wife of the lead detective, “now the biggest case of your life comes along and you’re hunting down a victim of child abuse.”

  Imagine a TV movie about the Chicago serial killer John Wayne Gacy, assaulted by his father as a boy, containing such a statement. Or the movie Helter Skelter, about child abuse victim Charles Manson, pitching him to us as pitiable. From infancy, Manson was unwanted, neglected, mistreated, bounced from one rejecting adult to another. When he was six, his mother was convicted of armed robbery and assault. The Texas serial killer Henry Lee Lucas’s mother beat him throughout his early years. Aileen Wuornos shares common origins with these men. Yet by the time they come to public attention through extreme and destructive efforts at self-empowerment, the men are full-blown predators. The woman is a child abuse victim, grown taller. In essence, she is still a child.

  What are the consequences for women when we draw such irrationally gendered distinctions in motives and causes of violent behavior? In the interest of pitying women for their relative powerlessness within our society, we reduce them to something less than themselves. Guinevere Garcia, an inmate at Stateville Correctional Center, in Joliet, Illinois, requested in January 1996 that her execution for first-degree murder go ahead as scheduled. Garcia, who is thirty-nine, was on death row for killing her sixty-one-year-old ex-husband outside his condominium while in the company of her new boyfriend. She had been out of prison for four months, having served ten years for smothering her eleven-month-old daughter. Accounts vary as to what happened at the time of the second murder, in July 1991. It may have been an argument over money. Or a robbery. Or it had to do with the fact that her husband, having visited her faithfully in prison very week, assaulted her once she got out. What was clear was that Garcia was drunk and had just come from a confrontation with the uncle who’d raped her as a girl. “I killed George Garcia, and only I know why,” she told the prisoner review board. “Do not generically label, package and attempt to justify my actions as that of an abused woman. There is a lot of rage built up inside me and if I am released in the general population that rage will present itself again.”

  Twenty percent of the men on death row in America in 1995 permitted their executions to go forward. As a culture, we would not grant Garcia the same right to self-determination. Where women are concerned, we are not stern judges but nannies who know best. “The groups fighting on Garcia’s behalf say [that] after a life filled with tragedy she is not capable of choosing her own fate,” reported National Public Radio. Garcia did not want to take responsibility for her crimes, her advocates argued; she was entertaining a demented urge to commit suicide, and if the state of Illinois executed her, it would become “state-assisted suicide.” Garcia was furious. “This is not a suicide,” she retorted. “I am not taking my own life. I committed these crimes. I am responsible for these crimes.” She added, “Do not consider this petition based on the fact that I am a woman.”

  Everyone ignored her. Amnesty International sent Bianca Jagger to tell the prisoner review board that “Garcia is the quintessential case of a battered woman and an abandoned child.” Garcia responded, “This must be her cause for the week, rather than the Screen Actors Guild or cruelty to animals.” But Jagger proved a more effective spokeswoman for Garcia than the inmate was for herself. Jagger’s argument got picked up and played nationally by the media. “After enduring fifteen years of his alleged abuse,” NPR reported, wrongly, for Garcia had barely been released from prison, “Garcia admits she killed her husband.” The New York Times wrote, “She was a battered wife who exploded after years of abuse.” Amnesty International lawyer Jed Stone said: “This woman is a pitiful, tormented creature. When we kill the John Gacys and the Ted Bundys, there are people who stand by and cheer. But
when we kill the Guinevere Garcias, there will be nobody cheering.”

  Whether anybody should cheer an execution is another argument. The fact is that Guinevere Garcia had the right, and indeed the moral obligation, as a sane, intelligent woman, to take responsibility for her violence. She wasn’t mentally disabled or in some other way genuinely unable to be held responsible, as some criminals are. As her execution date neared, she told her prison therapist that she’d “started forgiving people whom I had hated, and I started asking for forgiveness from those people who I had not asked … before.” Not unlike Sean Penn’s character in the greatly admired 1995 film Dead Man Walking, Garcia was contemplating her life in the face of her death and seeking some measure of redemption. By depicting her as a “pitiable creature,” her supporters stole from her an elemental gesture of grace.

  On January 16, 1996, Illinois governor Jim Edgar commuted Garcia’s sentence to life in prison. He cited evidence of impulse murder, saying Garcia intended to use her gun only to rob her husband, and pointed to mitigating circumstances, such as lifelong hardship and alcoholism. He rejected, correctly, the arguments that she was a “victim of battered woman syndrome.”

  The American Civil Liberties Union told the Christian Science Monitor in January 1996, “Most death row women have killed an abusive husband.” In fact, few women are on death row for that reason. Those in Texas, California, Florida, Alabama, and Illinois have all committed savage or calculated crimes. The reality is that chivalry justice is a thriving player in death penalty cases. The reluctance of men to punish women severely—thus admitting that a woman can, in fact, be threatening to them—is alive and well at the end of the twentieth century. Only two of 379 executions in Illinois’s history have been women. Of 103 women sentenced to death in the United States since 1977, one has been executed; 47 remain on death row; the remainder were transferred out.

  Many feminists, and some criminologists, promote the notion that women are treated more harshly than men for crime: that not only is the violence they commit the fault of others’ abuse but that the system further abuses them through punishment. The evidence suggests the contrary: Women are still receiving preferential treatment in the justice system. In 1987, twenty-two out of every one hundred persons arrested for “serious crimes” in the United States were women. Yet only ten out of one hundred persons convicted for serious crimes were women, and five out of one hundred persons imprisoned for those crimes were women. In 1986, 48 percent of New York women convicted of homicide actually went to prison, whereas 77 percent of men did. By 1991, a Phoenix, Arizona, study of 2,500 felony offenders found that men were twice as likely as women to be incarcerated, and women were significantly more likely than men to plead guilty to a reduced charge, across all offense categories, whether homicide or armed robbery or extortion or simple assault. In Coramae Richey Mann’s six-city study, prison terms were assigned to women in only 41.1 percent of the cases she reviewed, and the average time served was 6.4 years. By 1995, the average prison sentence for women convicted of killing their spouses was six years, a full decade less than the average sixteen and a half years for convicted wife-killers.

  Even taking into account the argument that the female murderers in question were abused, coerced, or impoverished, one study found that men were 11 percent more likely to be incarcerated than women for violent crime. Noted the authors, “Judges viewed female defendants as less ‘dangerous’ and less culpable than their male codefendants.” Kathleen Daly observed the same sentiments at work in New Haven: “Of women I could classify, half were viewed as reformable or as being more victimized than victimizing. Court officials more frequently linked victimization and criminalization in the women’s social histories than in the men’s, according a less blameworthy quality to some women’s acts.” This is true not only in the United States. In a 1987 review of London crown courts, the British scholar Hilary Allen found a tendency “toward the exoneration of the [female] offender” by judges who “concentrated on psychological states.”

  Clearly, chivalry justice will continue to operate as long as the justice system has a host of exonerative excuses for female behavior and a highly simplistic vocabulary of motive. “This is a masculine system,” says Justice Michael Corriero of State Supreme Court, Manhattan. “When a woman enters into it, your train of thinking gets derailed. All the more acutely when it’s a girl.” Women are the ones in a position to argue for our own individuality and tumult, to promote ourselves as unique, some worthy of punishment, others forgiveness, to propose a deeper story about someone like Karla Homolka and why she did what she did.

  Rates of rising crime by women, coupled with a mid-1990s backlash against the “abuse excuse,” press the issue of how long women have left to benefit from chivalry justice, and whether it is, or ever was, in our interests. Within criminology, this has given rise to the “equality/difference debate.” Should we protest leniency in honor of female equality, or let it continue, in honor of the view that women are less responsible when they transgress against their society?

  Perhaps that is not the most compelling question. Perhaps what we need to ask is whether all women, by dint of their sex, should be treated and perceived as one woman: Guinevere Garcia, in her candor no different from Karla Homolka with her lies; Homolka no different in turn from Francine Hughes, and no woman as victimizer distinguished from the victims she harms.

  THE PROBLEM THAT STILL HAS NO NAME

  Women Who Aggress Newborns & Infants

  With regard to the public, [infanticide] causes no alarm, because it is a crime which can be committed only by mothers upon their newly born children.

  SIR JAMES FITZJAMES STEPHEN, eighteenth-century jurist

  The power of the mother … is to give or withhold survival itself.

  ADRIENNE RICH, twentieth-century writer

  The day that the baby was found, naked, entangled in the reeds along the shore of Laurel Lake, the heat was almost unbearable. It was September, but the affluent towns of Long Island’s North Fork, across Montauk Bay from the celebrity-crowded Hamptons, were doing brisk business at the ski and board shops, as local teens traversed Main Road from the salty Atlantic to the freshwater pond tucked in behind Laurel Lake Vineyards. A couple of swimmers splashing through the sandy shallows noticed Michael James Ellwood, of indeterminate age—a day, a month, it was hard to tell—no one was going to stare into a dead child’s face.

  The news got around pretty fast, bouncing through Peconic, Mattituck, Cutchogue, and Greenport as people stopped in at The Cider Mill, Wayhouse Antiques, and McDonald’s, until eventually it reached Michael’s mother, who was hanging out at her friend Cheryl’s house. Amy Ellwood, the eighteen-year-old, college-bound daughter of two local teachers, summer employee of Dave Allen’s Tent and Party Services, was shocked. Not by the news itself—she knew where she’d disposed of her son on the day of his birth—but by the fact that people she didn’t know, adults in suits with somber faces, were making inquiries. She hadn’t anticipated an investigation. “I couldn’t imagine,” she later explained, “why the police were involved.”

  Amy Ellwood, of English rose complexion and long blond hair, inhabited a corner of the universe so tidy and safe that she might have been Betty, denizen of Riverdale in the Archie comics. Hers was a world of trim, white sidewalks shaded by apple and elm trees, a community both prosperous and placid: a world in which the teen still reigns supreme. Parents are benevolent but unobtrusive, providing their kids with cars, kisses, and spiffy clothes—not negligent parents, just confident ones, who smile over the good report cards issued by Mattituck-Cutchogue High School, which itself could have been in Riverdale, with its red-brick facade, white-pillared entrance, and glossy green lawns.

  So it was that for several months in 1989, Amy Ellwood went about the earnest tasks of doing homework, getting good grades, co-editing the school literary journal, and attending the German club, all the while growing progressively rounder with child, and not one adult—her par
ents, her gym teacher, wives who work part-time at the A & P mall, where she hung out—remarked on her condition. Under the circumstances, the idea that she was now a suspect in a criminal investigation came as a hair-raising surprise.

  Ellwood’s bemusement is evident on September 12, 1989, in a videotaped statement taken by the Suffolk County district attorney’s office after her friend Cheryl tipped off the police about who the Laurel Lake baby’s mother might be. Assistant District Attorney Randall Hinrichs interrogates Amy politely. She responds in kind; neither is remotely overheated. They could be going through a theft complaint. Amy peers upward at Hinrichs through her bangs, a poised young woman whose expression suggests she’s just found herself on Mars and is trying to avoid sudden movements lest she aggravate the aliens.

  Her story, as it unfurls through this interview and at her subsequent trial, began in August 1988, when she met nineteen-year-old Chris Wilshusen. He was a maverick, a pretty cool guy who had recently been expelled from the high school where Amy’s father served as principal. That lent their romance a Romeo and Juliet quality; it had to be kept secret from her family. They began dating, she said, “four days before my seventeenth birthday”—the sort of detail so treasured by young women in love they consider it rightfully theirs to insist upon, a date to celebrate as an “anniversary,” whereas the right to insist upon birth control is neither owned nor remembered.