When She Was Bad

by Patricia Pearson

  The same duality surfaced in her mothering. A telling detail in the short life of Tami Lynne was that she was always beautifully attired, according to the family, but the doctors who examined her on the night that she died found severe, untended diaper rash. “In Marybeth’s mind,” writes the journalist Joyce Egginton, “a baby was an extension of herself, and when the infant was admired it was she who received the compliments.” But what others didn’t see need not be done. Tinning showered her babies with store-wrapped gifts but often left their bottles out on the counter for a day or two, until the milk grew sour. When attention wandered from her, she upstaged other people’s events. She announced her eighth pregnancy, for example, at a christening party for her seven-year-old niece, effectively usurping the mood by casting a pall over everyone’s day. Even her murder trial, an event of justice sought for her children, became an opportunity for self-promotion. Tinning was delighted by the media. “You could paper the walls with all my photographs,” she bragged to a staffer in the courthouse cafeteria, according to Joyce Egginton.

  Some cultures invoke the belief that if you photograph a person, you steal their soul. According to J. Reid Meloy, the relationship of the psychopath to those around her is somewhat akin to the process of a body in search of a soul. People become “projective containers,” alternately idealized and devalued to sustain the fragile structure of the psychopath’s “grandiose self.” Even in death, Tinning’s children were mirrors, reflecting back a confirmation of her own importance. Tinning’s behavior at her trial was reminiscent of that of an Oregon woman named Diane Downs, whose three children got in the way (as she saw it) of her infatuation with a married man. Having showily lavished attention on them throughout their young lives, she now unhesitatingly shot them—at close range with a Colt.45—in an act of premeditated mayhem that was made to look like a carjacking. One of her children survived and eventually summoned the courage to tell investigators what happened, which led to Downs’s arrest. In 1983, Downs appeared at her murder trial pregnant and smiling serenely, having conceived a new child on a one-night stand so that she could project an aura of maternal grace to her jury. Like Tinning, she didn’t understand that her femininity had lost its currency the night she fired her gun.

  Eventually, female psychopaths unmask themselves this way. They reveal a fundamental failure to get the point about love or mothering. Even so, it takes much longer for people to see the mask slip on a woman than on a man. Marybeth Tinning confounded observers because she seemed so genuinely torn up by her losses. Emotion in predators often trips us up because we don’t expect them to be able to show it. “I’ve seen psychopaths cry like a baby,” says Dr. Bill Tillier, a forensic psychologist in Edmonton, Alberta. “But it’s the focus of the emotion you have to look for. Their emotion is flowing through an egocentric filter.” They cry in self-pity, not grief. If the difference is only remotely evident in men (Paul Bernardo sobbed hysterically the night Tammy Homolka died), it is extremely obscure in women because it plays so directly into feminine stereotypes. The people around Marybeth Tinning saw her as “childlike,” “needy,” “craving affection,” “insecure.” Add to this their preconceptions about motherhood, and a lack of suspicion turns into outright protectiveness. Even when she gave her confession, the state police investigator, William Barnes, led her to answer questions that he hoped would win her forgiveness at trial, “doing his best to elicit a confession … which might be the basis of a plea of temporary insanity.”

  The idea that Tinning was temporarily insane on eight different occasions (some suggest she had postpartum psychosis) was somewhat belied by her attempt to kill Joe, after an argument over money, which she spent copiously and recklessly. In the spring of 1974, according to Joyce Egginton, she appears to have poisoned her husband with seventy capsules of phenobarbital, a drug her nephew took to prevent seizures. Far from being suspected of attempted murder, she won pity for the fact that her husband “had tried to commit suicide”—a scenario that Joe didn’t oppose because he couldn’t remember what happened. Tinning came close to being charged with arson when, at her insistance, Joe bought and renovated a trailer that she decided she didn’t want, at which point it mysteriously burned to the ground.

  Over the years between 1972 and 1985, Tinning hinted to people that she might harm their children—or may have killed her own. She placed these warnings in the mouths of third parties, as if commenting on unfounded accusations against her. Her favorite book was Where Are the Children? by Mary Higgins Clark, in which the heroine is falsely accused of killing her children and must keep on the run from police sirens, fugitive-style. Joyce Egginton interprets these dark insinuations to be her cry for help. But do people who want help indulge in multiple murder as a means to that end? Psychopaths don’t want help, they want power. One suspects, instead, that Tinning was flexing her muscle—boasting, as nearly as she could without getting caught, of her magnificent accomplishment. What could ever be so potent as to kill?

  When Medea used her children as pawns in her war with Jason, she became one of the last figures in Western culture to mirror the truth that women can be strategically aggressive toward children, that their violence isn’t always personal, private, or impulsive, that sometimes it is expressly political—a means of making a public statement, furthering an ambition, punishing a man. Greek and Roman mythology is fairly plain on this point, with an abundance of wrathful godesses and heroines who imperil children in pursuit of some other goal. The fate of the child is irrelevant to the mother. The child is a vehicle for her own empowerment. Yet if all this was quite explicit in early Western mythology, it has since disappeared. Apart from the wicked stepmother, who is not biologically related to the child, one searches literature in vain for an archetype of instrumental maternal aggression.

  Perhaps one reason for the absence is that maternal aggression isn’t always physically explicit; the injury is less visible than Medea’s slaughter of her sons. Instead, it takes the form of pushing or forcing children to behave a certain way. Sons throughout history have been pushed into wars and other conflicts by their mothers, for the sake of her honor or aggrandizement, only to lose their limbs or their lives. In her book about the history of motherhood, Shari Thurer comments that “the Roman mother’s use of her own sons toward the attainment of power was elevated to a high art.” The same could be said of several other epochs and cultures. Adrienne Rich understood this in terms of sublimation of forbidden emotion: “A woman whose rage is under wraps may well foster a masculine aggressiveness in her son.” But less purely emotional motives come into play as well. Women use children to express their will to power.

  One of the most influential explanations for crime in the twentieth century is anomie theory, which holds that criminality is a response to frustrated ambition. Men who hope to achieve success will turn to crime if no other route is available. At the same time, anomie theory has been used to explain why women do not commit crime: Since their ambitions are to marry and raise children, “extremely accessible” goals, they are less likely to be frustrated in their aspirations. Applied this way, anomie theory becomes the economic version of the psychological theory of relationalism—women’s point of reference is the family and the home; therefore, they are less inclined to be antisocial and destructive. Both theories miss the point. Social and economic arrangements do not, in themselves, erase a woman’s will to power. What they do is shape her concept of empowerment and redirect her efforts.

  Is there a connection between the ambitious woman who endangers the life of her child to enhance her own prestige and the MSBP mother? It’s important to make the distinction between two bids for power: One aims for vicarious access to the masculine world, such as the mother who pushes her son into war, politics, or sport because she cannot pursue power directly. The other bid is to project feminine power into the masculine world—to remind men, as it were, that women have control over life and death itself. This was Medea’s strategy, and it is the far more
fearsome of the two, for the power is more potent and the tactic more ruthless. Unconscious of her mythic ancestress and, perhaps, of her own motive, a woman like Marybeth Tinning promotes herself in much the same way. Working within the conventional boundaries of femininity, a psychopathic woman who is searching for an arena in which to aggrandize herself may well be attracted to the grandiosity of the medical establishment because it has become the locus of power and prestige for the traditional maternal role.

  The rise of MSBP coincides with the ascendance of medical control over motherhood and the rise of so-called scientific mothering. Before this century, women largely raised their children through a combination of experience, common sense, and collective wisdom. By the time Marybeth Tinning joined the Future Homemakers of America in high school, male doctors’ influence was paramount. Women were responsible for children, but they were not in control. Motherhood was a career, for which they had to train, in perpetual apprenticeship to doctors.

  The anthropologist Rima Apple has unearthed magazine advertisements from the twenties, thirties, and forties that encapsulate the paradox. In one ad, dating from 1938, a woman is portrayed at a table flipping through an expert’s child-rearing text. She is telling her daughter, “I wish I’d had this manual when you were born!” Beneath the tableau runs the caption: “Add science to love and be a ‘perfect mother.’ “Apple cites an advice columnist who tells her women readers, “Ideal motherhood, you see, is the work not of instinct, but of enlightened knowledge conscientiously acquired and carefully digested. If maternity is an instinct, motherhood is a profession.”

  Psychopathic women might be attracted to the concept of scientific mothering because of its assumption that maternal behavior isn’t instinctive but is, instead, something they could train for. They might also calculate its power-play potential: If maternity in the guise of medical knowledge is prestigious, they can appropriate that knowledge and empower themselves in a male world. They can win, all at once, the adulation of the feminine and the power of the masculine, usurping both control and prestige. There is an intriguing overlap in the behavior of mothers with Munchausen syndrome by proxy and nurses who commit multiple homicides and are known, euphemistically, as angels of death: Both pursue acts of feminine nurturance, a role that, if disconnected from true or spontaneous compassion, has the appearance of compassion, and more than that, the prospect of heroism—the potential for the caregiver to be adored and respected for the rescue of life itself.

  Take a tour of a hospital pediatrics ward, and you begin to see the discrepancy in status between nurses and mothers, on the one hand, and doctors, on the other. So it seemed one afternoon at The Hospital for Sick Children, in downtown Toronto, which had its own brush with an angel of death. Sick Kids, as it’s known, is a light, airy, plant-filled oasis for ill and wounded children from around the world. Their dramatic tales often get newspaper play: the South Asian Siamese twins who were successfully separated; the Ghanaian boy who recovered from a rare cancer. On 7D, the general pediatrics ward, the doctors make their early morning rounds through the white corridors, pushing a computer on a trolley past posters of Babar and Winnie-the-Pooh. They are accompanied by two junior residents, an intern, and a visiting doctor from Poland. Everyone is well dressed beneath their white coats, young urban professionals whose identical stethoscopes mark them as members of the medical elite.

  Every few feet, the group pauses to discuss the patients whose names they see slotted into plates beside each doorway. One doctor pulls up the relevant file on her computer, and the group debates diagnoses. Could five-year-old Brian indeed have cystic fibrosis, as “Chest” insists? A second doctor feels the child also suffers “clinical malnutrition.” Were the liver biopsy results back from G.I.? The junior resident notes that Brian hasn’t been “tolerating his feeds.” The first doctor worries about that, tapping at her keyboard, “We need him to be optimized for his operation.”

  As the highly clinical medical scrum goes on, nurses in sweatpants and running shoes squeeze by with muttered “excuse me’s” to get into the patients’ rooms. They carry Monopoly boards and teddy bears, bottles of juice, packs of crayons. They sit the children on their knees, cradle them in their arms, and, when the children vomit or soil themselves, the nurses roll up their sleeves and clean it all away. The contrast is striking: Authority and respect is on the doctor’s side, toil and sentiment on the nurse’s. It runs parallel to the division of esteem in the traditional home.

  In 1979, the Hospital for Sick Children was plunged into crisis. Twenty babies died in a handful of months, apparently from overdoses of a heart medicine called Digoxin. For a time, code blues were sounding almost every day. Ultimately, a nurse was charged, but was released for lack of evidence; the deaths were never solved.

  In 1981, officials at Bexar County Hospital in San Antonio, Texas, telephoned the Hospital for Sick Children for advice when a large numbers of children in their ICU began perishing unexpectedly as well. Usually, the pediatrics unit had two or three code blue resuscitations in a month. In August of 1981, they had nine; in September, thirteen. The children were hemorrhaging internally or dying of cardiac arrest. Without exception, the dramatic emergencies took place on a shift under the supervision of a nurse named Genene Jones, who appeared to be flourishing in her role at the center of crisis.

  The parallels of character between Jones and Tinning are striking. Genene Jones was a “charming and manipulative” liar, who, like Marybeth Tinning, “told colorful stories about her life and exaggerated illnesses to her friends and children.” In Jones’s first two years as a pediatric nurse, she proved unreliable and arrogant, making several serious nursing errors, showing up for her shift drunk, swanning dramatically off to Bexar County’s outpatient clinic and emergency room a total of thirty times for mysterious ailments, and presiding with operatic flair over the children on the unit. At one point, presumably for thrills, she announced to a mother and father that their child had died when he hadn’t.

  Everything about Genene Jones’s behavior should have sounded alarms when the code blues sprang up on her shift, but at the same time, it seemed implausible that a woman who so clearly relished the rescue of children could be causing them harm. Eventually, hospital administrators agreed that Jones was too strong a suspect to ignore. Doubtless armed with words of caution from the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto about pegging the wrong person, Bexar County fired all of the nurses in the ICU rather than risk litigation for firing Genene Jones alone. Within weeks, she’d moved to a private pediatrics clinic in a small town, hired by one of Bexar County’s former residents, who was apparently unaware of, or who dismissed as unfounded, suspicions about her conduct. In less than a month, four little patients went into respiratory arrest, exactly the type of code blue that had occurred at the hospital. Then a girl who was tagging along with her mother to the doctor’s office suddenly developed breathing difficulties after sitting on Jones’s lap alone in the waiting room. The doctor sent the girl to San Antonio for investigation, and on the trip, accompanied solely by Jones, she had a heart attack and died.

  The parents took out an ad in the local paper thanking the doctor and her nurse, Genene Jones. The local medical community responded differently. They forced the head of the clinic to investigate her nurse. The doctor found vials of Anectine, a drug that causes muscle paralysis and respiratory arrest, and Jones was charged with two counts of murder. Shortly after her conviction, a Texas Department of Corrections official wrote to the Bexar County Hospital District to ask if there was any problem with inmate Jones being assigned to the hospital dispensary.

  Mothering, whether in the home or on the hospital floor, is a much more common route to power for psychopathic women than is commerce or sex. That route should be clear. That it’s so veiled is less a comment on the cunning of the women themselves than on the prejudices of our culture. As Schreier and Libow wrote about MSBP, “That we have so much difficulty seeing these mothers as charades says as muc
h about our wishes and needs as it does about the women themselves.”

  In recent years, academics have tried to uncover MSBP rates by tracking cases of confirmed abuse or death in children and then researching the fates of their sisters and brothers. Dr. Roy Meadow, a professor of pediatrics at St. James University Hospital, Leeds, England, who coined the phrase Munchausen syndrome by proxy, reported in 1990 that of twenty-seven children who had been suffocated by their mothers, he’d found eighteen siblings who had died “suddenly and unexpectedly in early life.” Three similar studies found high rates of unexplained sibling demise. Chicago, which has one of the highest unexpected infant death rates in the world, was the subject of a 1985 study by the Committee to Prevent Child Abuse. Twenty-two percent of the crib deaths recorded in a two-year period, the committee found, “were related to suspected child abuse and neglect.” Though not all of the suspicious Chicago cases were the result of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, the data reveal how easy it is to harm children, and particularly babies, without falling under suspicion.

  According to Dr. John Emery, testifying at Marybeth Tinning’s trial, the term sudden infant death syndrome was coined at the turn of the century in the state of Washington. “As deaths due to what you might call classic disease such as pneumonia disappeared,” Emery explained, “relatively larger numbers of children died unexpectedly … at home instead of at hospital.” Without any obvious or medically understood cause of death, parents became suspects in neglect, either for “sleeping on top of them, or being drunk or disorderly.” A group of Seattle doctors “said let us, as it were, invent a term which could be used to describe babies that are found unexpectedly dead, and we will say that this is a natural cause of death so these parents shall not be harassed. Eventually they called it sudden infant death syndrome, and this had a very fine effect.”