Amy’s revelation came on New Year’s Eve, at a party cluttered with beer and wine coolers and most of her girlfriends, a group who dubbed themselves “The Circle of Women.” But it was a boy to whom she turned. Randy Sigurdson was in the kitchen when Amy came in, crying. She’d just had a fight with Chris, and she blurted out the news. “It was after midnight,” he told the jury at Amy’s trial, “and I don’t remember [what] led to it, but we were just talking and she said that she had a couple of problems and that she was pregnant.” Randy was sympathetic. But this wasn’t the era of the Scarlet Letter, when pregnancy out of wedlock was catastrophic, leading to social ostracism; nor even a time when immediate marriage was called for lest the girl slip away in shame to a special home. “I said there’s lots of things you can do, there’s adoption, or abortion.”
Amy Ellwood was intelligent, aware, she knew what her options were. But they were such unexpected options to confront. “You see, when I was studying biology,” she would testify, weary and defensive, “I was in tenth grade. I wasn’t exactly planning on having a baby. It wasn’t like I was learning the stuff for my own use.” Yet she understood that her decision had a deadline, less than three months to opt for “termination,” and a few months after that, the body announcing itself, and then a baby, bawling and clinging, changing her life forever.
For a time, she convinced herself that she wasn’t pregnant after all. Then, toward the end of February, when Amy’s parents went on a holiday cruise, her friend Dawn Swiatocha spent the week sleeping over at her house. One night, they decided to drive to the drugstore and pick up a home pregnancy test. The timing was strikingly teenaged, like filching from the liquor cabinet or smoking a joint in the kitchen and raiding the fridge, things to do when parents are away: making illicit runs at grown-up vice. The test was positive, and that abruptly changed the mood. “I asked her if she was going to have an abortion,” Dawn said, “and she wasn’t sure.” Mostly, she didn’t want to think about it. “I did not want to believe I was pregnant,” Amy testified.
Nevertheless, she discussed it with Chris. His response was typical of young men in these times: to become awkwardly solemn, respectful of a woman’s “right to choose,” tell you they’ll stand by you, help you with the money, drive you to the clinic, whatever. They won’t break up with you, they promise, they ask if you’re okay, they even evince shy pleasure at the fact that you’ve conceived their child. But they don’t offer to marry you, and you don’t expect them to, and they don’t stake a claim to the baby, and you wouldn’t expect that, either. At some point, after this is all over, the odds are very good that they’ll vanish from your life. Not because you spawned an incipient family together and lost it, and the relationship was strained by the trauma, but because love itself is disposable.
For the post-Sexual Revolution generation, raised on a rhetoric that celebrated sexual freedom but had no memory of what the revolution was for, there are no links between intimacy and commitment, pregnancy and childbirth, sex and the beginning of a bright, constructive love. AIDS may have made them more fearful, ushering in a fad of celibacy, but it hasn’t taught them how to care take their hearts. For Ellwood, the decision to have her child or not had to be made in a vacuum. “We talked about, I guess, the decision we had to make,” she said at trial, “and at that point the most sensible thing to do was to get an abortion.” But “sensible” was pure abstraction. “It didn’t feel like the right thing for me to do. Just the fact that it was Chris’s and my baby and I—I couldn’t do it.”
Without being able to articulate what she’d found, Ellwood held on. She held on the way that a child, discovering something of uncertain value, a beautiful shell on the beach, carries it in the palm of her hand until, unable to grasp any further purpose for it, she lets it fall to the sand. “At the very beginning, after I decided that I wasn’t going to get the abortion, it still didn’t seem real that I was pregnant.” She quit smoking, for about three weeks, then resumed, perhaps because to quit was to acknowledge the baby. “Later on, when I started to gain weight, I realized that it wasn’t going away and it was real and I was pregnant.”
There is a late-June high school graduation photograph of Ellwood, smiling through a bouquet of flowers on the steps of the school, surrounded by family and school chums. She is about seven months pregnant, blooming outward from her gown, her smooth, pale face still baby-round. In July, after observing her in a bathing suit, Amy’s parents gingerly asked her to take “a test.” Instead, she took off for several days with Chris. “My parents and I were pretty close,” she would later say, defending them against insinuations about the “frightened seventeen-year-old girl” who conceals a pregnancy from parents to evade their wrath. “They just, they basically let me make my own decisions and they trusted me. They felt I was responsible, [but] I never really had any problems that I would have to go to them with.” This, as the first problem, was far too disastrous to confess. Ellwood’s father said, “We goofed, that’s true, we knew she was pregnant … but we were scared if we pushed it she would end up on the road with her boyfriend.” Plus, her mother, Patricia, added, “We thought there was more time.… We’re both trained educators. But that doesn’t make us experts.”
Left to their own devices and running out of time, Chris and Amy began tossing around ideas. “I was going to go down to North Carolina to a friend of his. There’s a house down there. And I was going to put the baby up for adoption.… I kept putting it off. I just—I didn’t want to deal with it, and I just figured I would do it someday.” As the summer progressed, her friends grew increasingly worried. “In August, we were in my car,” Dawn Swiatocha told the jury, “and I said that it was getting kind of close to, you know, her pregnancy being over, and I asked what she was going to do, and she discussed—said that she had talked to someone about adoption—that she had spoken to a lady and the lady was going to take care of everything.”
But at 3:30 in the morning on September 8, when Amy sat up in her Raggedy Ann sheets, awoken by contractions, and began to pace back and forth between her bedroom and the bathroom, there wasn’t any lady to take care of everything. “I knew I was in labor,” she said. But when her mother knocked on the bathroom door around six—“Amy, are you all right?”—Amy said, “I’m fine.” She wasn’t. “I was scared.” But she’d made a decision. The baby was going to go away now. The problem was going to end. This was not going to be a live birth, it was going to be a miscarriage; that happens, doesn’t it, and isn’t the mother’s fault, is it?
The video camera rolls in the Suffolk County district attorney’s office. A pack of cigarettes, a cup of coffee, and a tin foil ashtray have been placed before Ellwood, but she touches none of them, not even to fidget. Instead, she leans forward, shoulders slightly slouched, resting her elbows on the table, and interlocks her fine-boned hands. She is concentrating hard, watchful and compliant. Because Randall Hinrichs has asked her, she says, “My water broke around five, five-thirty.” He keeps asking, and she keeps answering, detail by detail. “I went back into the bathroom, into the shower … uh, that’s when I started giving birth … my brother Brian probably left around six and my parents left around seven or seven-fifteen.… it [came out] around six-thirty, seven.… I pulled on the umbilical cord and pulled out the afterbirth, I heard it make a noise, twice, I saw one of its legs jerk … I put a towel around the baby and I picked it up out of the bathtub and I put it into a bucket, I added another towel around it and I brought it into my room … I fell asleep.”
At some point in this account, the ADA needs to clarify an issue: Was Amy Ellwood intending to be a good mother, but didn’t know enough, when she wrapped her boy in towels and placed him in a bucket?
“I just decided I could—”
“You thought you could—”
Their words overlap.
“Yeah—”
“I don’t want to put words in your mouth—”
“Get away with it.” She fixes him with a grim half
-smile and nods.
“Get rid of the baby right after it was born?”
“Yeah.” She adds, “Well, that’s not what I planned all along. You know, I wanted to tell my parents eventually, but I never, I never could.”
“And you decided you weren’t going to help the baby once it was born?”
“I didn’t know what I was thinking. I just, I thought my parents wouldn’t find out that way.”
On September 12, the Suffolk County district attorney’s office charged Ellwood with one count of murder in the second degree. A Grand Jury then reduced the charge to manslaughter.
In 1988, more than four thousand teenagers between the ages of ten and nineteen became pregnant in Suffolk County. Some had abortions, others gave their newborns up for adoption, others kept them. A handful, as Amy Ellwood did in 1989, gave birth to them and gave them back to God. A colleague of Ellwood’s father watched his daughter, Loretta Campbell, plead innocent in Hempstead to charges of second-degree manslaughter for smothering a boy she’d given birth to on January 1, 1991, at a friend’s house in affluent Hewlett and leaving him in a garbage bag. Two weeks earlier, a C. W. Post College sophomore had been charged with first-degree manslaughter for gagging her baby with toilet paper and dumping him in a dorm hallway garbage can. Then there was a twenty-one-year-old Uniondale woman who pled guilty to first-degree manslaughter for killing her newborn boy, and a twenty-year-old Brentwood woman who threw her baby out a window, and an East Northport woman who left her infant to drown in a tub. Other babies in Suffolk County were found by the police but never connected to those who destroyed them. Still others were probably never found.
Across the country, according to the National Center on Health Statistics, the killing of infant children climbed 55 percent between 1985 and 1988, until it was several times the rate at which adult women were murdered. Nearly half of the child maltreatment fatalities between 1985 and 1992 in the United States involved infants up to a year old. According to data compiled by the World Health Organization, infanticide was (as recently as the mid-1970s) as common as or more common than the killing of adults in most of the industrialized nations, from Canada to Austria to Japan. In the United States, more infant boys are killed than girls. The gender of the perpetrator varies. An American one-year-old is as likely to be attacked by a woman as a man, while the vast majority of murdered newborns are victims of women. A wide consensus exists within the community of academicians who try to track neonaticide that many “neonates are discarded but not found, making the overall rate … considerably higher than the data suggest.”
Ever alert to the possibilities of a new trend, the media turned their short attention span to this issue in the early part of the decade. In April 1991, for example, the Saint Louis Post Dispatch ran a story headlined “Infanticide Increasing, Experts Fear.” The story cited more than a dozen cases in Missouri and southern Illinois in the previous five years and commented, “Authorities have no idea how many have gone undetected.” The cases reported by the Dispatch echoed those in Long Island—babies born in dorm rooms and disposed of in trash cans. A forensic psychiatrist at the Menninger Clinic told the newspaper, “Most of the women who kill their newborns are quite young, single, uneducated and desperate. The child is obviously a burden to them, and they get rid of the burden the only way they can think of, by killing it.”
Amy Ellwood’s parents retained for her a lawyer, Eric Naiburg, who told the media that he planned to launch an “unwed mother syndrome defense.” He explained that women who deny their pregnancy and neglect their newborns suffer mental derangement caused by being young and single. “In the mind of a frightened seventeen-year-old,” Naiburg said, “the realization of pregnancy is not like flicking on a switch.” Amy was troubled, he explained, because her parents didn’t approve of her boyfriend. “She tried to please her parents a lot.” Her father thought of her as his “good little girl.” The suggestion of a wrathful father lurking behind the scene added a frisson of drama.
What Ellwood did on the day that her son lived and died was as follows: “I went and got garbage bags from my garage so I could put the baby in them. Then I … got a Styrofoam cooler and put another garbage bag inside of it and then I put the other garbage bag inside of that one. I put the cooler in the hatch back of my car. Then I took a shower, and I washed my sheets. Then I went to my friend Cheryl’s house. I told her that I had a miscarriage and that I’d been to the hospital the night before. We went to 7-Eleven and got something to drink and then we went back to her house and watched TV for a while. She wanted to go swimming so we went down to Laurel Lake.… We only stayed there for about a half hour. Then we went and she got ice cream and then I went and dropped her off and then I went home.”
Having driven around all afternoon with a dead or dying infant in the car, Amy decided to call Chris. “I told him the same thing that I’d told Cheryl because I didn’t want them to know, you know. He asked if I was okay and he asked why they didn’t make me stay in the hospital.” A couple of hours later, she met him at the A & P parking lot. “[Then] he went to Greenport to one of his friends’ house, and I went to Riverhead with my friend Cheryl.” Emotion momentarily flushes into Ellwood’s voice, triggered, seemingly, by the memory of Chris going off with his friends—the revelation that the intimate links are, indeed, so eroded that a man makes no connection to the child he’s just lost and cannot rearrange his social schedule to console the mother, any more than she could connect with the child or reveal his fate to the man.
The parents went their separate ways along Main Road, leaving their son behind in a two-dollar cooler in Amy’s parked Toyota.
Around 10:00 P.M., Ellwood returned from Riverhead, where she’d been hanging out with friends at The Circle, a traffic roundabout with a rock in the middle. She picked up her car, drove around for about ten minutes, and made her way through darkness to the lake. “I parked my car and, uh, I shut my lights off and I opened the back and I took the cooler out and … I waded into the water and I dumped the cooler.” Later, in her defense, the pastor at Amy Ellwood’s family church wrote a letter to her judge describing what she’d done in the lake as “a baptism.”
At the end of his interrogation, ADA Hinrichs holds up a police photo of a dead infant for the video camera to zoom carefully in upon. Across the bottom, written in Ellwood’s flowery hand: “This is the baby I gave birth to.” She will not look at her son.
Long Island Newsday ran an editorial at the time of Ellwood’s trial that was sympathetic to her refusal to face what she’d done: “Almost everyone practices denial at one time or another. We may put off calling the plumber in hope that the leak will go away; or avoid breast self-examination because we don’t want to find cancer.… Amy Ellwood is troubled, not malicious.” The view is shared by Suffolk County detective lieutenant John Gierasch, who investigates the babies abandoned in his county. “I think it’s a matter of, it’s like having a simple problem, your car doesn’t work, and you’re not a car person, so you just let it go, and the next thing you know you’re broken down on the side of the road. You’re procrastinating, you just defer and defer and pretty soon you have a mess on your hands. They must make some half-assed attempt to determine that they are pregnant, just to confirm in their own minds, so it’s not like they’re denying that they’re pregnant to themselves. They’re denying it to the world. They’re just not going to deal with it, which maybe young females are more inclined to do than other people. I don’t know if you can call that aggression. But if you shove toilet paper down its throat because it’s crying to shut it up, that crosses another line, that’s aggression. I mean Ellwood just wrapped it up, put it in a bag and disposed of it; there was no overt homicidal act.”
The community perspective on Ellwood’s act of neonaticide raises some important questions about who is in denial here. Our myths about maternal grace—under pressure, pure as nature—are so deeply ingrained that infanticide is the one crime to be all but ignored in discussions
of violence. Murdered infants show up on the evening news with surprising frequency. But to most of us, they aren’t reflective, somehow, of female aggression. We only prick up our ears to what, as French historian Michel Foucault once said, is “In The Truth.” Another young offender on a shooting spree? Look at what’s going on with kids today! Another woman raped in Central Park! A new serial murderer! It is as if the killing of newborns and infants fails to compute. As a result, every time a new case compels our attention, we are left to grasp at a few clichés, to point fingers and to invent syndromes, as the moral ground shifts beneath our feet.
When women like Amy Ellwood commit neonaticide, they tend not to be considered women, exactly. They are “young” and “unwed.” They are “uneducated.” They can’t think what else to do with newborn children except stuff them in Dumpsters—they’re dumb. In other words, they are not mothers in a culturally understood and celebrated way. Mothers are strong, long-suffering, altruistic, and resourceful. Mothers are never callous; they are not indifferent. Ellwood seemed to understand this distinction and to play to it when she testified in her own defense, on March 5, 1991. She brought tears to the eyes of Suffolk County Court jurors when she told them that she thought she had miscarried, thought her baby was premature and stillborn when it arrived. She knew nothing of biology. She had imagined that her baby “had gills in the back of its neck and that’s how it breathed in the fluid.” Had she known that her son was alive, she told the jury, when he made his plaintive sounds and kicked his feet, “I would have picked the baby up and loved it like any mother would.”
Ellwood was guessing what any mother would have done. She was guessing, though she knew differently from her own experience, that “any mother” loves her baby at the instant of its birth. References to maternal instinct are so commonplace in our culture that most of us assume there’s some basis for the belief that women instinctively bond with babies and small children in a manner that is inherent to our sex. Is motherhood instinctive? If we are to speak of instinct, which is to say preconscious impulses governed by the limbic brain, we cannot look to the animal kingdom for an axiom about maternal behavior. Most mammals are instinctively protective but selectively so. Animals will foster, reject, or devour their young depending upon circumstances, and females of several species are actively hostile to the young of rival females. But we shouldn’t speak of instinct, because women cannot be simplified that way. To say so debases the interplay of our psychological, moral, and intellectual faculties.
When She Was Bad Page 9