When She Was Bad

by Patricia Pearson

  As with postpartum psychosis, SIDS is not always the wrong conclusion to draw, insofar as there quite clearly are breathing and metabolic disorders in some infants that cause sudden death. In some cases, the problem may be a subtle neurological malformation affecting respiratory control; in others, a respiratory infection. Smoking during pregnancy increases the risk of SIDS. So does premature birth. Babies are also vulnerable to suffocation when lying facedown on bunched bed clothes, because they don’t have the strength to lift their faces. The peak risk age is between two and four months, with 90 percent of SIDS deaths taking place before six months. Natural infant deaths are not a fiction. SIDS itself is not necessarily a misnomer. The problem is that it’s become a catch-all explanation, used when autopsies show no clear cause of death. Coroners tend to apply the label indiscriminately. In 1995, two babies in the Boston area who suffocated in battery-operated cradles were listed as SIDS cases without death scene investigations. Another eight babies died before any connection was made to the design of the cradle.

  Death by smothering is virtually indistinguishable from SIDS at autopsy. If medical examiners don’t seek out clues at the death scene, as they do for all suspicious adult deaths, then it’s not difficult to see how infanticides by smothering are overlooked. Police investigators and academics guess that 10 to 20 percent of the six thousand to eight thousand SIDS cases reported each year in the United States conceal accidental or deliberate suffocation. “I remember handling all the deaths, and you’d get a lot of crib deaths,” recalls detective Leroy Orozco. “We had one where one gal’s baby died, then several months later, another one. We thought, this gal could suffocate her kids and we’d never know it.”

  Karisa Santiago, of Yonkers, New York, was charged with murdering her five-month-old daughter, Maria Lisa Ruiz, in 1994 after two of her other children died of SIDS—Mildred, eight months, on March 25, 1994, and Benjamin, two and a half, on November 18. Although the New York City Medical Examiner had found Benjamin’s death “suspicious” because of bruises on his nostrils, not to mention the fact that he was too old to be dying of SIDS, his case was listed as SIDS due to “insufficient evidence.” Only when Maria died were the earlier two cases reopened. Karisa Santiago pled guilty to one count of manslaughter in November 1995. “The only way you can prove [smothering],” according to Dr. J. M. DiMaio, a coroner in San Antonio, Texas, “is to show a pattern of behavior.”

  DiMaio worked on the case of Martha Woods, which set a precedent for introducing patterns of behavior in infanticide in 1973. Woods was the wife of an army officer who had harmed nine children and caused seven to die (only three were her own) over twenty-three years. In each case, she rushed the baby or toddler to the hospital in a state of oxygen deprivation, doctors performed extensive tests, found nothing wrong, the child recovered and after repeated episodes, finally died. In one instance, a doctor cited the cause of death as “status lymphaticus,” a condition that doesn’t exist. In another, a physician cited the cause of death suggested to him by Martha Woods rather than performing an autopsy. Woods eluded detection from 1946 to 1973, in part because she and her husband were moving around. Marybeth Tinning, on the other hand, was not moving around. She stayed in one place in full view of her community. “A lot of doctors,” notes Dr. DiMaio, “are very naive about these cases.… they think that all mothers care about their children and find it very hard to believe that some mothers don’t.”

  One such doctor seems to have been Alfred Steinschneider. In 1972, the pediatrician published an article in Pediatrics magazine announcing that multiple deaths in one family probably had a genetic or inheritable component—the gene of death that Joe Tinning thought he and Marybeth were carrying. SIDS, the doctor claimed, ran in families. Twenty-two years later, Dr. Steinschneider’s case study for this article, a New York State housewife named Waneta Hoyt, confessed to smothering all five of her children.

  In the meantime, however, Steinschneider’s article was widely influential, preventing coroners and doctors across North America from entertaining suspicions when multiple babies perished in a family. After a Chicago woman named Deborah Gedzius lost her fifth child, a healthy two-year-old, to mysterious causes in 1979, her husband requested an investigation. Their pediatrician, Dr. Eugene Diamond, phoned Steinschneider, confirmed that SIDS ran in families, ruled that all five toddlers had died naturally (in spite of the fact that they were well beyond the SIDS age bracket), and published his own journal article about it. Then a sixth child died, and Deborah Gedzius’s husband, who in grief and disgust was planning to divorce her, was shot in the head while he slept. Gedzius collected one hundred thousand dollars in life insurance. She wasn’t charged with the crime. Nor would the attorney general’s office prosecute her in connection with the deaths of her six children. Their reasoning? They’d heard expert testimony at a preliminary hearing (which determines whether there is sufficient cause to go ahead with a criminal charge) that was based on Steinschneider’s article.

  If Marybeth Tinning was able to get away with murder for so long, the SIDS-in-families theory was certainly one of the culprits. It wasn’t the only one, of course. The child welfare system failed the Tinning children by repeatedly erasing its records of abuse calls, creating for itself a continuous tabula rasa about her behavior. Given the virtually invisible nature of certain forms of female-perpetrated abuse, the mistake is perhaps unsurprising.

  When Marybeth Tinning began to kill, infanticide and child abuse had not yet come to the fore of American social politics. By the time she was arrested, questions about how citizens treated their children were urgently being posed. Reports of child abuse increased 50 percent nationwide between 1986 and 1992, with a total of 1,160,400 children confirmed as abused by investigators—a 10 percent increase over 1991 alone. In terms of fatal child abuse, a 1993 Department of Justice report, “Murder in Families,” states that mothers were more likely than fathers to be the perpetrators of child homicide. Smaller samples by scholars show conflicting results, concerning nonfatal abuse, with men found to be more responsible for “shaken baby syndrome,” while mothers more commonly commit general assaults—or vice versa, depending on the research. Women appear to be more responsible for the severe physical abuse of American children, with sons being more frequent targets than daughters. Female involvement in sexual abuse, virtually ignored in the discourse, is more common than previously believed. A number of new studies have focused on female child molestors, though the incidence rate remains controversial—ranging upward to 25 percent of all cases.

  There is a marked tendency to preface the admission that women abuse children with a reminder that they spend more time with them. This is akin to insisting that men are more violent in war only because they are the ones to be drafted. It is hardly an explanation. We obscure the role of women in child abuse and neglect because it doesn’t fit well with current rhetoric on violence. “Women are linked more intimately into networks of interpersonal ties, and their moral decisions are more influenced by an ethic of caring that inhibits criminal activities that hurt others,” noted two crime scholars in 1993, echoing the thinking first elucidated by Harvard psychologist Carol Gilligan. Crime runs contrary to “the values of womanhood.” Anyone who has been physically or sexually assaulted by her mother or a female caretaker knows that this truism has too many exceptions to hold.

  There are compelling reasons to resist an exclusive emphasis on maternal child abuse. Freud began a long tradition of blaming everything that went wrong in human development on Mom. But what is vitally important about acknowledging female contributions to family violence is that mothers can act as powerful forces of socialization, either teaching a child through the trauma she inflicts how to behave in the wider world, or compelling that child, who is damaged, to wreak destruction in turn. Alice Miller has traced the links between child abuse and violence particularly eloquently. “When a person cannot talk about the cruelty endured as a child,” she writes, “then he or she must demonstr
ate cruelty.” Miller cites the case of an eleven-year-old Newcastle girl named Mary Bell, who strangled two small boys, aged three and four, and left their small bodies amidst litter in a junkyard. Her mother had given birth to her at seventeen and immediately rejected her, shouting “Take it away” when the baby was brought to her in the hospital. Several times she left her small girl in adoption offices, simply walking out. The child was returned to her repeatedly, and ultimately she tried to kill her. Strikingly young, Mary Bell began to kill in turn. “A child who has been mistreated at such an early age,” Miller wrote, “must be able to tell in some way or another about the wrong that has been done her, about the murder perpetrated on her.”

  A recent study of rapists and child molestors found that fully 62 percent of them had been sexually abused when they were young, by female caretakers as well as male. Studies of wife-assaulters frequently reveal a majority who were abused as children—as often, if not more often, by mothers than fathers. Research on the relation between child abuse or neglect and female criminality shows that twice as many girls who were mistreated were later arrested for adult crime. Men and women who were abused themselves are far more likely to fatally assault or neglect their own children. It is not that bad men are the fault of evil women, but to separate one sex from the other as virtuous or blameworthy is to follow a false trail in understanding the causes of violence. If a man learned physical or sexual violence from his mother, how useful is it for us to blame it on his maleness, to educate him about not being sexist, to decry “violence against women,” as if women weren’t contributors to the trajectory of his rage? If we are to understand his crimes, we might just as well understand his models. “Only the last murder,” writes Alice Miller, “the final act in a very long chain of events, is punishable by the court.” The first, the neglect or abuse of the child, goes unremarked, and “spreads over the world like a plague.”

  If the formation of the child—morally, emotionally, and socially—is a more plausible cause of violent behavior than testosterone, say, or patriarchy, how much weight should we lend a child’s abuse in our perception of the adult offender? It depends on the point of the perception: prevention or justice. Where prevention is concerned, we must obviously assign it a lot of weight. Justice is more problematic. Maltreatment teaches, but it does not decree. Millions of battered children grow up to be compassionate adults, and if their relationships are difficult, they have nevertheless chosen to try to construct for themselves loving and ethical lives. Abuse interacts with a number of other factors, both external to the growing child and intrinsic to her personality, which complicate cause and effect. In describing MSBP mothers as once-neglected children who are “hurting for love,” Schreier and Libow assign to these women a childlike innocence that the criminal justice system cannot, as a matter of principle, concede. Childhood is no longer the sum of who adult offenders are. The court could no more exonerate Marybeth Tinning than the court in Canada could acquit Paul Bernardo. Their deeds may have been only the last in a long chain of events, as Miller says, but they must be punishable. Otherwise, the chain extends, unbroken, through a long line of harmed and harming souls.

  BALANCING THE DOMESTIC EQUATION

  When Women Assault Their Spouses or Lovers

  We must not keep to ourselves the shameful secrets of men.

  ANN JONES, NEXT TIME, SHE’LL BE DEAD, 1993

  Why are we, as a culture, loath to expose the responsibility of women in domestic abuse?

  JUDITH SHEVRIN, clinical psychologist, 1994

  Before his life fell to ruins, Peter Swann inhabited a world that felt good to him, purposeful and clear. As he entered his thirties he had solid work as a municipal engineer and was raising his seven-year-old daughter, Grace, in a house perched high on the grassy bluffs of Lake Ontario, east of the city of Toronto. From that untroubled vista he could pursue his love of the natural world, taking Grace up onto the roof on clear summer nights to show her the stars through his telescope, riding their mountain bikes through the sprawling ravines of Toronto’s Metro Zoo. He filled the house with small wonders—an aquarium full of rare fish, a collection of rocks. Sometimes he’d dig out the treasure of his mother’s phonograph, to teach Grace what snatches of old songs he knew.

  Peter had always wanted to be a teacher, preferably of science. In the manner we associate with men, he felt most comfortable connecting to others through the learning of facts and the doing of things. Social politics intimidated him. Interior landscapes mystified. A little shy, emotionally awkward, he wasn’t one to navigate the swift headwaters of intimacy with anything approaching skill.

  As Grace approached puberty, with all its attendant moods, he began to look for a relationship, hoping to find a woman who might act as a mother figure to her. Her own mother had vanished, not long after the Catholic Children’s Aid charged her with abuse and transferred custody to Peter. He had been immensely relieved to have Grace back. Her upbringing was his mission. He had been given up for adoption as an infant. His daughter would stay with her own flesh and blood. “Mr. Swann,” a counselor wrote some years later, “presents as a mature, warm and caring father.”

  In 1989, a mutual friend introduced Peter to a thirty-year-old clothing store manager named Dana, whose marriage was on the rocks. Dana was a bright and charming woman, and if her temper seemed extreme, Peter reasonably attributed that to her frustrations with her husband, who was something of a boor. “They fought all the time,” he remembers. “She used to beat him up on the couch. Hit him in the face. He thought it was a joke. The rest of us …” Peter makes a face of consternation. “But I felt, I’m not like him, so it won’t be like that for us. I’m more easygoing, not the same personality.”

  Once Peter and Dana got involved, their relationship deepened quickly. Within months she’d moved into his home on the bluffs, continuing to work in retail, a job that she loved and was good at. They appeared to be a well-adjusted couple: two professionals raising a child. Three full and busy lives. There was only one, very private problem. Dana’s temper, which Peter had attributed to her anger at her first husband, didn’t go away. Far from calming her down, his more peaceable (and avoidant) temperament seemed to fuel her. “She’d start making an anthill into a molehill into a mountain,” he says. Then he abruptly switches to the present tense, as if he’s returned to that place in their kitchen, or his basement office, where something he said or did tripped an invisible wire. “She comes home from work, comes downstairs, and starts screaming at me, kicking holes in the walls. I don’t know what to do. What’s bugging her now? Somethin’ at work, or what? I cleaned the kitchen, I paid the bills … It’s goin’ through my mind, and I’m just sitting there stymied, you know? I just don’t know what to do. How do I calm her down? It just didn’t work. Wham, bam. I’m getting hit.”

  Peter should have seen, he adamantly tells himself, that Dana’s violent outbursts would continue, that his disinclination to respond with crude jokes and counterpunches, as her ex-husband had, would serve him no better in checking a fury that was essentially impersonal, an unresolved maelstrom of emotions from childhood. But Peter was stunned by her anger. He tried to appease her. “I became more passive.” Whatever wound Dana up to the point of violence, he would simply refrain from; it wasn’t worth it. “Our honeymoon was the only time we got along. It was like passing through an empty space, and then, Bang! Back into the hard stuff again.” The list of nixed activities grew longer. He didn’t go off on his bike rides with Grace; he didn’t go out with his friends by himself; he didn’t go out with his friends at all. Eventually, he didn’t even wander out of sight in the supermarket, lest it start another fight he couldn’t win.

  “She couldn’t compromise,” he explains. “It was her way or no way. She controlled me, hit me, controlled me, hit me. Any excuse would do. She told me I was no good, that I drank too much, my family’s no good, I’m useless. She’d throw metal address books at my head, ashtrays. Oh, bruises, right?” He lights an
other cigarette and rubs his forehead, his embarrassment rising. “I go to work, and guys say: What happened? ‘Oh, I fell down,’ whatever. Later I told them. They said, ‘Get out of it.’ “He flicks his cigarette ash, missing the ashtray, then wanders over to pick up his pet guinea pig. “I tried to get out, but I didn’t … I just didn’t know how. We’ve got a town house, my daughter’s there, between us we’re making fifty-two grand a year. I started giving her the paychecks. I had to ask her for a pack of cigarettes. ‘Please?’ you know, like a dog. I didn’t realize it, I was stupid, okay? I’m a wuss, okay? It’s hard to say it. It’s hard for a man to say that.”

  But Swann has to say that now, because Grace is gone. So is his job, his house, his telescope, everything he owned, even the phonograph, and Swann is sleeping in a boardinghouse with the guinea pig as his sole family. One night in that paltry place, he fumbles with the screw-top of an unrefrigerated bottle of wine, pours another splash into a coffee mug, and stammers out the simpleness of what he’d hoped: “A family is supposed to be a family. You know? We all get along.” He waves his hand feebly, his voice weepy, his words slurred. “I want to be responsible for my daughter. Is something wrong with that, did I do something wrong?” What Peter Swann did was to meet and marry a female batterer, a woman who was angry, controlling, abusive, and manipulative, and who ultimately walked away with everything in his life, including his thirteen-year-old daughter.

  Husband abusers aren’t supposed to exist, but they do.

  The idea that domestic violence refers exclusively to wife abuse or to violence against women is so deeply ingrained in Western consciousness that it is impossible to grapple with Peter Swann’s story without first unraveling some potent conventional wisdom. Most of us believe that masculine power is the fountainhead of private, as well as public, violence. Spouse assault is what men do to women, women from all walks of life, getting punched in the face by the dark fist of patriarchy. Even if we concede that women batter their children, we cannot take it a step further and picture them battering men. We might learn that a man’s nose was broken, that he lost his job, that he was emotionally devastated, but we still think to ourselves: He’s a man. He could have hit back. He could have hit harder.