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Why do parents kill their children? Warped altruism most common cause, revenge least common, experts, studies say Wednesday, July 25, 2001 By Mackenzie Carpenter, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
A 2-year-old is burned to death by her father in Arizona after he tires of her requests to see her mother.
A mother suffering from post-partum depression in Texas drowns her five children in the bathtub, while not long afterward, another mother in Connecticut beats and stabs her 15-month-old to death.
And then, over the weekend, Randy Palm hangs his 5-year-old son Skylar, and then himself in the basement of his Hopewell home.
Since the days of Medea, parents have killed their children. It's not common, but it happens. Indeed, an entire body of psychiatric literature is devoted to the phenomenon of filicide, in which the victim's killer is the mother or the father.
Sometimes, it's just the child who's the victim. More rarely, as in the Palm case, it's a murder-suicide, when the parent kills himself, too. Occasionally, it's a familicide, when the parent, usually the father, kills his spouse, all of his children and then himself. The most recent local example of familicide was in late 1999, when Louis Kramer of Baldwin Borough killed his wife, two children and himself.
But what kind of parent would do this?
Most frequently, according to homicide statistics, it's a parent with a history of domestic violence who kills in a fit of rage.
"The average mother who throws a child against the wall doesn't have a psychologist, goes to prison -- she's the most common perpetrator," noted Dr. Phillip J. Resnick of Case Western Reserve University, a national expert on parents who kill their children.
But studies of a different population -- those who underwent psychiatric treatment after they killed their children -- revealed that the most common motive was what the parent believed to be altruism, he added: The suicidal mother or father who thinks that she or he cannot abandon a child, or who kills to alleviate the child's suffering, either real or imagined.
The least common type of filicide involves revenge, Resnick found, when parents killed their offspring in a deliberate attempt to make their spouses suffer.
"Spousal revenge is very rare," he said.
In a groundbreaking article published in 1966, Resnick identifies five different types of filicide. Besides the "altruistic" and "revenge" killings, there is the "acutely psychotic" filicide, which occurs under the influence of hallucinations, epilepsy or delirium. There is the "unwanted child" filicide. And finally there is the "accidental" filicide, usually the result of a child battered to death.
Still, many experts are uncomfortable with placing parental killers into categories.
"The phenomenon of killing children is not something you can lump into one large container," said Michael Welner, a New York University associate professor of psychiatry who served as a prosecution witness in the case of convicted spree killer Richard Baumhammers. "There are always peculiar qualities to each case. There are distinctions found in the age of children killed, mental health questions, substance abuse and other factors."
"These are very rare events," added Edward Mulvey, a professor of psychiatry at Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic in Oakland, who researches the links between violence and mental illness.
"What takes a person from thinking to doing something, what the exact motivation is -- I don't know that anyone has done any rigorous work on this. There is rarely one single factor that can cause someone to become so irrationally desperate. It's usually an accumulation of factors. The person may be depressed or impulsive, or substance abuse may play a role, or a particular triggering action pushes them to the edge."
Still, studies have found some marked differences when a father kills vs. when a mother kills, Welner said.
From 1976 to 1999, of all children younger than 5 who were slain, 31 percent were killed by their fathers, 30 percent by their mothers, according to U.S. Bureau of Justice statistics.
"When a mother kills herself and a child, in cases where the child was less than 7 years of age, very often it's associated with serious mental illness. She's psychotic, or overwhelmed," Welner said. "When a father does a homicide/suicide, very often it's a result of a breakdown of the relationship with the mother, or morbid jealousy. The relationship is central."
In studies of familicide, there is often a history of domestic violence, but few warnings of any impending explosion, since the abuser may very often be despondent or withdrawn as opposed to threatening or overbearing.
"Often a slightly depressed batterer, not necessarily the more violent type, is more likely to kill himself and children," noted Lynn Hock, director of counseling services at the Womens Center and Shelter. "Women often come to us and say he has threatened suicide and we tell them to take that seriously. Often it's just manipulation, but every so often it's a real possibility."
So are there any warning signs to heed?
"Listen to family members," said Mulvey. "Acknowledge and take seriously feelings of desperation, of being overwhelmed. Very often, when this happens, we think they're not the type, they're not the person who would do that.
"But we're never sure who the type of person is."
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