FILICIDE: Cases reviewed

LAUREN SHER and KRISTIN BRASWELL

July 1, 2011

Nobody can imagine why seemingly loving, devoted mothers would ever harm their own flesh and blood. But more than 200 women a year kill their children in the United States, according to the American Anthropological Association.
The shocking and unimaginable crimes of child-killers have gripped the nation for decades. Here's a look back at the famous cases of mothers accused of murder.
Diane Downs
Long before the infamous cases of Casey Anthony, Susan Smith and Andrea Yates, the nation was gripped by the story of Diane Downs, who shot her three children, killing one.
In 1983, Downs, a 27-year-old divorced postal service worker, told police that a "bushy-haired stranger" flagged down her car and shot her three children on a back road near Springfield, Oregon.
Her daughter Cheryl, 7, was dead on arrival at the hospital, and her other children -- Christie, 8, and Danny, 3, were clinging to life.

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Downs' story about the stranger did not add up. Reading through her secret diaries, police found a motive: an obsession with a married man who didn't want her children. In February 1984, nine months after the shootings, they arrested her and charged her with one count of murder and two counts of attempted murder.
Downs' trial was a national spectacle that was later depicted in the TV movie "Small Sacrifices," starring Farrah Fawcett as Downs.
She was sentenced to life in prison plus 50 years. She was denied parole in December 2010 and will not be considered for parole again for ten years, when she will be 65.
Watch the full story on "20/20" tonight at 10 p.m. ET.

Casey Anthony
Casey Anthony, 25, is on trial in Orlando, Fla. on first-degree murder charges in the death of her 2-year-old daughter, Caylee. She has pleaded not guilty and has been held in a Florida prison since the summer of 2008.
Caylee lived with her grandparents and her single mother, Casey. Caylee disappeared in June 2008, but was not reported missing until a month later. Anthony told police she left Caylee at the apartment of a babysitter named Zenaida Fernandez Gonzalez, and that both were missing when she returned. Police found, among other discrepancies in Anthony's story, that the apartment had been vacant for more than 140 days.
Investigators said Anthony repeatedly misled and lied to police in the course of their work. She was named a suspect in her daughter's disappearance and charged with the Caylee's murder in October 2008.
After a six-month-long search, remains of Caylee's body were found in Orlando, Florida, in December 2008.
Casey Anthony's defense team has argued that the toddler accidentally drowned in the family pool and that George Anthony, Casey Anthony's father, helped dispose of the body.
The defense has accused George Anthony of sexually abusing Casey Anthony. They have argued that Casey Anthony hid her daughter Caylee's death in the same manner that she hid the molestation.
In his testimony before the court this week, George Anthony denied the defense's claims.

Susan Smith
In October 1994, Susan Smith drowned her two young sons, buckling them into their car seats and pushing the car into a South Carolina lake. The car sank with the sleeping children in the back.
Smith initially told police that a black man had hijacked her car and abducted the children. Americans desperately searched for the boys for nine days until Smith confessed that she killed her sons, Michael, 3, and 14-month-old Alex.
She was convicted of the two murders in July 1995 and sentenced to life in prison. A judge rejected Smith's appeal in March 2010. She is eligible for parole in November 2024.

Andrea Yates
In June 2001, Andrea Yates methodically drowned her five children in the bathtub in their Houston home. The case shocked the American public.
Yates told police and psychiatrists after the crime that Satan had ordered her to kill sons Noah, 7; John, 5; Paul, 3; Luke, 2; and 6-month-old daughter Mary, to save them from eternal damnation.
Yates, a former nurse and high school valedictorian, suffered from mental illness for years -- depression with bouts of psychosis, suicide attempts and hospitalizations.
In tapes of Yates' psychological evaluation, released exclusively to ABC's "Primetime" in 2006, she recalled details of the morning she murdered her kids, describing how she waited until her husband left the house to start filling the tub. "Drowning them" was "all I thought about," she said.
Yates was convicted of capital murder in March 2002, but an appeals court later overturned the verdict. In 2006, Yates was retried and found not guilty by reason of insanity. At the time, she was committed to a state mental hospital.
June 20 marked the 10-year anniversary of the Yates murders. Yates is now being treated in a minimum-security mental hospital in Kerrville, Texas. Her longtime lawyer, George Parnham, said he's "highly optimistic" she will be released after her recommitment hearing in November.
Encouraged by the case, Parnham formed the Yates Children Memorial Fund in June 2002 to educate women, their families and their doctors about postpartum psychosis and similar illnesses.

China Arnold
China Arnold was accused of killing her 3-week-old daughter in a microwave oven in Dayton, Ohio, on Aug. 30, 2005. Investigators said the baby, Paris Talley, was burned to death in the oven after Arnold and her boyfriend had an argument over who the child's biological father was. Arnold was sentenced to life in prison without parole Sept. 8, 2008. Judge Mary Wiseman told Arnold during the trial, "No adjectives exist to adequately describe this heinous atrocity. This act is shocking and utterly abhorrent for a civilized society."

Michelle Kehoe

Michelle Kehoe, 36, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole on charges of first-degree murder in the death of her 2-year-old son Seth, and an attempted-murder charge related to her 7-year-old son, Sean.
Kehoe and her sons were reported missing by her husband, Eugene Kehoe, after the boys and their mother reportedly left to go visit relatives in Sumner, Iowa, on Oct. 26, 2008. The next morning, Kehoe walked into the home of residents in Littleton, Iowa, and told them that her sons were in danger.
Seth was found dead outside the family's van. Autopsy results revealed the boy had died from severe cuts to his neck. His older brother, Sean, was found struggling for his life inside the vehicle and had suffered similar cuts.
According to the arrest warrant affidavit, Kehoe falsely claimed that her children had been abducted. "She stated that she couldn't explain why she had done it. She stated that she couldn't face anyone. She stated that she wanted to die or be locked up where she couldn't hurt anyone else," the affidivit read.
At the trial in October 2009, Kehoe pleaded not guilty. Her attorneys argued that she suffered from extreme mental illness. An Iowa jury heard a tape of her surviving son telling police how his mother covered his eyes, nose and mouth with duct tape, slashed his throat, and then did the same to his younger brother. On Nov. 5, 2009, she was found guilty of first-degree murder, attempted murder and child endangerment causing serious injury. The following month she was sentenced to life in prison and an additional 25 years.
http://abcnews.go.com/2020/infamous-convicted-alleged-mommy-murderers-infamous-cases-andrea/story?id=13956527&singlePage=true

INFANTICIDE (multiple): New York: Michele Kalina hid 5 newborn bodies

MARYCLAIRE DALE, READING, Pa. (AP) — A woman charged with killing five newborns after hidden pregnancies — and keeping their remains in a locked closet — may seek to be found incompetent to stand trial.
Michele Kalina's public defender raised mental-health issues in court Thursday, delaying the scheduled plea and sentencing of the Reading home-health aide.
Berks County Judge Linda K.M. Ludgate will pursue independent psychiatric testing before ruling on the competency issue. No new court date has been set, and a gag order prevents lawyers from discussing the homicide case.
DNA tests show Kalina, 45, conceived most, if not all, of the babies through an affair with a co-worker that spanned more than a decade. Neither he nor Kalina's husband knew about the pregnancies.
Kalina's teenage daughter found the remains in the closet last year and called police. One set of bones was entombed in cement and the others in a cooler, a plastic tub and a cardboard box.
"It may be the way in which women resolve these dilemmas: 'I'm pregnant again, and I don't want to abort the child. But I don't want anybody to know that I have the child,'" said Geoffrey R. McKee, a forensic psychologist at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine who wrote the book, "Why Mothers Kill."
Women who kill newborns are usually young, first-time mothers who are afraid to reveal their pregnancies, he said. Kalina doesn't fit that demographic, but may share a similar motivation, given the on-again, off-again affair.
Such women are rarely found to be mentally ill, and even when they are, it's often not a factor, he said.
"More often, it's (the death) designed to avoid being detected as pregnant," McKee told The Associated Press on Wednesday.
Kalina is charged with one count each of criminal homicide and aggravated assault, and multiple counts of abuse of a corpse and concealing the death of a child.
She started dating the co-worker in 1997 and soon appeared to be gaining weight. She told him she had a cyst, which she later said had been drained, according to police affidavits. The "cyst" recurred three or four more times over the years, the boyfriend told police.
Kalina, who is petite, had no prenatal care during the five pregnancies, and it's not clear where she gave birth.
In addition to those babies, Kalina had a sixth secret pregnancy that culminated with the 2003 birth in a Reading hospital of a baby girl that she gave up for adoption. That child was also conceived with the boyfriend, DNA tests show.
A prosecutor described him last year as "overwhelmed and shocked" by news of the pregnancies.
Kalina had borne two children with her husband Jeffrey, in 1987 and 1991. The oldest had cerebral palsy and died of natural causes in 2000.
In 2008, the family moved from a house to an apartment, and Kalina allegedly brought the remains with her. She warned her husband and daughter not to open the locked closet, police said.
At work, she held the same job for 15 years, earning praise from both her employer and families of the elderly patients she nursed. Yet she conceded in police interviews that she was an alcoholic, sometimes prone to blackouts.
The U.S. legal system, in recent years, has hardened its view of women who kill their children.
In 1999, 70-year-old Marie Noe of Philadelphia was sentenced to five years of house arrest and 20 years of probation for killing eight babies decades earlier.
"All I can figure is that I'm ungodly sick," Noe said in a police confession, in which she admitted smothering three of her children with pillows.
There is far less empathy today, after a line of U.S. filicide cases that includes Susan Smith, the South Carolina woman who drove her two children into a lake in 1994; Christina Riggs, who smothered her two young sons in Arkansas in 1997; and Andrea Yates of Houston, who drowned her five children in a bathtub in 2001.
Yates is serving a life sentence after the jury rejected her insanity defense. Smith, sentenced to 30 years to life, is eligible for parole in 2025.
Riggs was executed in 2000.
Kalina, like other women accused of infanticide, appears to have been socially isolated. A native of Rockland County, N.Y., she had no extended family nearby, and no close women friends have emerged.
According to McKee, more women killed or abandoned newborns before the advent of legal abortion and safe haven laws. Yet no one really knows how often it occurs today.
"It's still a huge problem in the sense that we really don't know how many abandoned neonates there are," he said.
Kalina's secrets went undiscovered for years, and were only disturbed by her daughter's curiosity, and defiance.
And another nurse's aide, this one in France, admitted last year that she had suffocated eight of her newborns, before burying the bodies in her garden or hiding them in her garage. New owners made the discovery. Dominique Cottrez, 46, told police she'd had a bad experience with doctors with her first pregnancy, and never again wanted to see one again.
Their stories stand out, even in the already disturbing caselaw on women who kill newborns.
"Neonaticides are typically committed by first-time mothers," McKee said. "It's very odd for them to continue to do this."
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gHOVZmV-CDulmY8DIh9eJ_9Ldj6g?docId=637b5147558a4f4d82025c6b841c83f7

FILICIDE: The Worst Mothers in History

 Justin Thomas

At some point, everyone thinks that their mom is one of the worst mothers in history. Fortunately, that’s not the case. There are some truly awful mothers in history who have become famous for killing their children, eating their babies, torturing their offspring, and just being terrible people. Take a look at this collection of the worst mothers in history, and it’ll be much easier to show your appreciation for your mother, who (hopefully) didn’t murder you, on Mother’s Day. Here are the worst mothers in the history of mothers:

Medea

Medea (not to be confused with Tyler Perry’s Madea, who is also on this list btw) is a woman from Greek Mythology. Medea was married to Jason of Jason and the Argonauts fame. In order to obtain the infamous Golden Fleece, Jason was assigned a number of seemingly impossible tasks, but Medea fell in love with Jason and helped him. After Jason was victorious, he married Medea and they had two children together. Medea killed and dismembered her own brother and had a penchant for poisoning people with narcotics in order to aid Jason on his quests, but Jason eventually left Medea (with their two children) when he was offered the hand of a princess. Medea got so pissed off that she murdered the king and the princess, then murdered her own children and rode out of town in a golden chariot pulled by dragons. And you thought your mom was crazy.

Marybeth Tinning

When you’re mom sent you to your room for doing something bad, you probably thought she was the worst mom in the world. Just be happy she didn’t smother you to death, like Marybeth Tinning did with 8 of her children between 1972 and 1985. Marybeth’s M.O. was pretty simple: she would have a child, and then within a year of the child’s birth, Marybeth would come rushing into the emergency room carrying a dead or dying baby. Her story was the same every time: she would claim that the baby just stopped breathing. Somehow, this had to happen 8 times before people started getting suspicious, and Marybeth eventually confessed to murdering 3 of the 8 children who definitely died at her hands. She’s still in prison and has been denied parole consistently since her incarceration.

Susan Smith

Susan Smith is the Poster Girl of crazy moms. In 1994, Susan murdered her two sons, ages 3 and 1, by locking them in her car and rolling the car into a lake. Susan then reported the children as missing to the local police, claiming that a “black man” had stolen her car with the children inside. The story gained national attention, and concerned mothers across the country were on the lookout for Susan’s stolen car, her missing children, and anyone who could be described as “a black man”. Within a couple of weeks, though, Susan admitted to murdering her own children, and everyone in America wanted to kick her ass. According to Susan, she killed her children in order to attract an older man who wasn’t interested in taking on a family, so Susan thought “oh, that’s perfect! He never said anything about not wanting to be with a murderer, so I’ll just kill my family and then we can be happy forever!” Obviously, Susan suffered from some mental problems. She’s still in prison today, and she probably will be for the rest of her life.

OctoMom

Octomom (aka Nadya Suleman) didn’t kill any of her children, but some might argue that what she did is even worse: despite already having six children, she basically overdosed on fertility drugs in order to give birth to a set of octuplets so that she could become famous. She’s the second woman to give birth to octuplets in America, and her 8 babies have a record survival time, meaning that usually octuplets die shortly after birth. Nadya’s plan worked perfectly, and within a few weeks after giving birth to the octuplets, Nadya was an international celebrity. Shortly after that, people began to learn about Nadya’s life, and that’s where she began to lose fans. It turns out that, even before she was artificially impregnated with the octuplets, Nadya was a single mother to 6 previous children, was unemployed, and was living on welfare. That’s not exactly the best time to be popping out eight more hungry babies. Nadya makes the list for putting her own personal lust for stardom in front of her babies, her 6 older kids, and any sense of moral dignity. Then again, considering that Nadya has 14 kids, she doesn’t look bad at all.

Andrea Yates

Andrea Yates is another baby-killer who drew national attention and quickly became a household name, at least when your family was having conversations about filicide. Andrea had a long history of depression, mental disorders, and diagnosed psychosis. Numerous doctors had warned her and her husband that her psychosis could prove dangerous to her children, but Andrea and her husband ignored the warnings. Then, in 2001, Andrea’s craziness got the best of her. She methodically drowned all five of her children in the bathtub in the span of one hour. The children ranged between 7 months and 7 years old. Andrea drowned the younger children first and saved the 7-year old for last, then she creepily laid all the bodies out on her bed. Despite her blatant craziness, her husband still talked about having more children with Andrea all through the trial. And you thought your mom was nuts for making you take a shower every day.

Diane Downs

Diane Downs was basically the protege for the more infamous Susan Smith. In 1983, Diane shot her three young children, ages 4, 7, and 8, then drove them all to the hospital and reported that her car had been hijacked, that the hijacker had shot all of her children, and that she had narrowly escaped, suffering only a bullet wound to the arm. One of her daughters was pronounced dead on arrival, and the other two children were in critical condition. At first, doctors and police had no reason to doubt Diane’s story. After all, it was the 80′s and people weren’t very intuitive back then. It wasn’t until Diane visited one of her surviving daughters in the hospital that they became suspicious. Even though Diane’s daughter was incapacitated, she became terrified at the presence of her mother. After some further investigation, they soon discovered that Diane was carrying on an affair with a guy in Phoenix, Arizona. If she ever wanted to be with him, she’d have to get rid of this pesky family she’d built. Diane was sentenced to life in prison, and she’s been denied parole numerous times. She’ll be in prison for the rest of her life. Still, it might be a good idea to not let your mom watch the Lifetime Original Movie of Diane Downs, just to be safe.

China Arnold

If you were making a list of “Things Not To Do With a Newborn Baby”, the number one item on the list would be “Don’t put it in the microwave”. Unfortunately, China Arnold left this all-important rule of her list and microwaved her newborn baby to death in 2005. The grisly murder occured when China was “intoxicated” and got into a fight with her boyfriend regarding the baby’s paternity. China placed the baby in the microwave and fired it up. She then took it to the hospital the following day, where the baby died from injuries. China was convicted of murder in 2008 and is currently serving a life sentence, but here conviction was recently reversed, so China’s heading back to the court room for a third trial. Good luck ever enjoying a Hot Pocket again.

Rosemarie Fritzl

Most of us will remember the creepiest news story to come out of 2008. The story was about Josef Fritzl, an Austrian man who built a secret sex dungeon in the basement of his house, locked his favorite daughter in that sex dungeon for 24 years, and continually and repeatedly raped, sodomized, and molested that daughter, fathering 7 incest children with her. Three of those incest children were kept in the basement dungeon with their imprisoned mother for their entire lives. They had never seen daylight. One of the worst aspects of this nightmarish story is that Josef Fritzl had a wife who was essentially complicit in the acts of her husband. At least, the courts concluded that she would’ve had to go out of her way to ignore the fact that her own daughter was being held prisoner in her basement for over two decades. The next time your son, daughter, niece, or nephew complains about having to do chores, just ask them if they’d rather be imprisoned, enslaved, raped, and molested for 24 straight years.
http://egotvonline.com/2011/05/05/the-worst-mothers-in-history/

FILICIDE: Discussion of post-partum depression as cause

April 27, 2011 :  Thomas L. Hafemeister ( associate professor at the Law School, as well as the director of legal studies at the Institute of Law, Psychiatry and Public Policy.)


Increasing attention is being given to the occurrence of postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis, driven by reports of women who have killed their infants a relatively short time after birth. 
 For example, in Lakeview, Illinois, a North Side neighborhood of Chicago, a thirty-year-old woman who was reportedly suffering from severe postpartum depression was charged this month with first-degree murder in the suffocation death of her eight-month-old son in February of this year.  The woman had a college degree, no prior criminal history, and the Illinois child protective services agency had apparently not received any prior reports of child abuse or neglect as it had no contact with the family preceding this incident.  Jason Meisner, Cops: Lakeview Woman Suffocated 8-month-old Son, Chic. Trib., Apr. 14, 2011.
Conjecture has also swirled about the mental state of Lashanda Armstrong, who drove her minivan off a boat ramp in Newburgh, New York, on April 12th, killing herself and three of her four children, ages five, two, and eleven months, with a ten-year-old child able to roll down a window as the vehicle hit the water and escape.  James Barron, Woman Tells of Boy’s Plea for Help After 4 Drownings, N.Y. Times, Apr. 13, 2011. This event has sparked a discussion of how often mothers kill their children, what causes it, and how it can be prevented.  For a widely circulated report, see Jocelyn Noveck, Moms Killing Kids Not Nearly as Rare as We Think, Assoc. Press, Apr. 16, 2011. 
Probably the most well-known related case involved Andrea Yates, who drowned her five young children, ages six months to seven years, in the bathtub of her suburban home outside Houston in 2001.  Yates had been suffering for years from very severe postpartum depression and psychosis, with a psychiatrist urging her after the birth of her fourth child not to have any more children.  Her initial conviction of capitol murder and a sentence of life imprisonment was overturned on appeal.  At her second trial, Yates was found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed to a state psychiatric facility, where she remains today.  Associated Press, Woman Not Guilty in Retrial in the Deaths of Her 5 Children, N.Y. Times, July 27, 2006.  See also Christine Michalopoulos, Filling in the Holes of the Insanity Defense: The Andrea Yates Case and the Need for a New Prong, 10 Va. J. Soc. Pol’y & L. 383 (2002-03; Kristine Esme Nelson, Postpartum Psychosis and Women Who Kill Their Children: Making the Punishment Fit the Crime, 23(2) Dev. Mental Health L. 23, 36 (2004) (“The American legal system as it currently exists is not equipped to respond in an appropriate fashion to these crimes.”). 
In 2010, as part of The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), section 2952, entitled “Support, Education, and Research for Postpartum Depression,” was enacted.  This provision was based on the Melanie Blocker Stokes MOTHERS Act, a bill that had been stalled in Congress for a number of years, in part because of concerns that it would result in mandatory mental health screening for all new mothers.  As enacted, however, it has a much narrower scope.  This section encourages the Secretary of Health and Human services “to continue activities on postpartum depression or postpartum psychosis . . . , including research to expand the understanding of the causes of, and treatments for, postpartum conditions.”  Activities that are encouraged include “[t]he development of improved screening and diagnostic techniques” and “[i]nformation and education programs for health care professionals and the public.”  Congress authorized $3 million to support these activities for fiscal year 2010.  It also charged the Secretary to conduct a study on the benefits of screening for postpartum conditions and to submit a related report to Congress within two years of the enactment of this bill.  For the text of just this portion of the PPACA, see PerinatalPro.com, Melanie Blocker Stokes MOTHERS Act Signed Into Law!, Mar. 21, 2010.  For the PPACA in full, see here. 
An associated Congressional Report states,

In the United States, there may be as many as 800,000 new cases of postpartum conditions each year. . . . Postpartum depression occurs after 10% to 15% of all deliveries and after 26% to 32% of all adolescent deliveries.  The majority of patients suffer from this illness for more than 6 months and, if untreated, 25% of patients are still depressed a year later. . . . The most severe postpartum condition is postpartum psychosis.  A comparatively rare disease, it complicates only 0.1% to 0.2% of deliveries. 

H.R. Rep. No. 111-48, at 4-5 (2009.
This provision had been pursued in memory of Melanie Stokes, who committed suicide in 2001, three http://www.law.virginia.edu/lawweb/faculty.nsf/FHPbI/1169425months after giving birth to a daughter.  Stokes, in her late 30s, managed a sales team at a pharmaceutical company and was married to a urologic surgeon.  The couple had tried for several years to get pregnant and Stokes purportedly greeted the news with joy.  However, after giving birth to her child, she was unresponsive when the doctor told her that her new child was a girl and within days began talking of killing herself.  Hospitalized four times, she threw herself from the twelfth floor of a hotel a week after her last discharge.  Lisa Pevtzow, Law Gives $3 Million to Educate, Research Post-Partum Depression: Dedicated Mom Spent Nine Years Working to Pass ‘Melanie’s Law’, Chic. Trib., May 21, 2010.
Historically, a diagnosis of postpartum depression has received limited weight in conjunction with criminal justice proceedings.  A ruling by the Iowa Supreme Court suggests that courts may be changing their views somewhat.  The court noted that the defendant in this case, Heidi Anfinson, had told officers that she had left her two-week-old son alone in the bathtub so that she could use the telephone in another room.  When she returned, the baby had drowned.  Panicked, she took the body, drove it to a nearby lake, left it in the water, and drove home.  Anfinson pled not guilty to charges of first-degree murder and child endangerment.  Although her lawyer was aware that Anfinson probably suffered from postpartum depression following her son’s birth, the lawyer summarily dismissed the notion that this condition could http://www.law.virginia.edu/lawweb/faculty.nsf/FHPbI/1169425be used in her defense.  Further, he failed to investigate Anfinson’s medical history, or the extent of her symptoms and how they might otherwise explain behavior the jury might find unnatural or unforgiveable.  Although the first trial resulted in a mistrial as the jury was unable to reach a unanimous decision, the jury at a second trial convicted her of second-degree murder.
On appeal, Anfinson argued that she had received ineffective assistance of counsel.  Upon reviewing the matter, the Iowa Supreme Court determined that Anfinson’s attorney was aware of the probability that she suffered from postpartum depression after her child’s birth, but “categorically rejected any suggestion that this condition be explored in her defense.”  The court acknowledged that the evidence of postpartum depression would not have qualified Anfinson for either an insanity or diminished responsibility defense in this particular instance, but determined that it likely would have affected the outcome of her case by bolstering her claim that the death was accidental and by explaining to the jury why a mother would neglect her newborn while it was in the bathtub, why she would irrationally bury the body in a lake following the drowning, and why she would appear emotionless about the ordeal when questioned later that day.  Courts are generally reluctant to find a lawyer’s assistance ineffective when it reflects a tactical decision; however, the court in this case determined that the lawyer’s decision to present no evidence of postpartum depression called into doubt the fairness of the outcome of Anfinson’s trial and remanded the case for a new trial.  Anfinson v. State, 758 N.W.2d 496 (Iowa 2008),
Anfinson ultimately entered into a plea in October of 2009, a week before her third trial was scheduled to begin.  Her original conviction carried a fifty-year mandatory sentence.  Under her plea, she received a fifty-year non-mandatory sentence.  With time already served, it was reported that she could be paroled within one to four years.  EveryPurpose.org, Plea Bargain Reached (Oct. 28, 2009).  This website also provides links to accounts by Anfinson’s husband, sister, and brother-in-law.
http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/healthlawprof_blog/2011/04/postpartum-depression-and-women-who-kill-their-children.html

FILICIDE with Suicide: the issue discussed

OAK HARBOR -- Alan Atwater abused his wife Dawn, forced her to quit her job and encouraged her to have sex with one of his friends, family friends told authorities.
But despite problems in their marriage, Atwater told his aunt he was determined to change and make his wife understand she and their children were most important to him.
Dawn Atwater, however, told him and her friends she wanted to separate, according to Ottawa County Sheriff's Office reports.
These details, released last week, provide some possible explanation as to why Alan Atwater might have killed his wife and then himself with a gun April 16. Dawn Atwater told a friend her husband had threatened to commit suicide if she ever left him, according to reports.
"I'm just sick," Colette Yontz, a friend of Dawn Atwater, told investigators. "Just sick because we all knew this was going to happen."
What is more of a mystery is why he turned the gun on the couple's children, Ashley, 4, Isaac, 2, and Brady, 1.
Killing the children doesn't fit with the normal profile for murder-suicides related to marital problems, said Katherine van Wormer, professor of social work at the University of Northern Iowa and author of "Death by Domestic Violence: Preventing the Murders and the Murder-Suicides."
In cases where men kill their entire families -- an action known as familicide -- usually the man has lost his job or has other financial problems where he feels he can no longer provide for his family, she said.
"He may have killed her and felt he couldn't leave them," van Wormer said of the Atwater children.

Reasons for killings

There are five things that motivate people to kill their children, said Phillip Resnick, professor of psychology at Case Western University.
They are: Altruism, the idea the children are better off dead; revenge against the spouse, often over a custody battle or infidelity; the perpetrator is acutely psychotic; unwanted children, usually newborns killed by unwed mothers; and child battering, where a parent goes too far with disciplining a child and accidentally kills the child.
"If a man kills himself along with the children, it's more likely to be altruistic," Resnick said. "A man believes his family is better off in Heaven than in the world."
Resnick, who said he likely has interviewed more parents who killed their children than anyone else in the United States, is considered an expert on the subject. He testified for the defense in the trial of Andrea Yates, a Texas woman who drowned her children in a bathtub in 2001, and consulted on the case of Susan Smith, a South Carolina woman who murdered her two young children in 1994.
In 95 percent of familicide cases, men are the perpetrators, he said. Two-thirds of the time, a man who kills his children and himself also kills his wife, he said.
"Women may kill their children and themselves but rarely will kill their husbands," he said.
Men tend to feel responsible for the entire family and do not want to leave them behind, Resnick said. In situations with domestic problems, the men sometimes feel they cannot live without their partners or consider their partners the source of their pain, van Wormer said.
"Often these are men who are very dependent emotionally on their wives," she said. "They justify it as saying she's killing him, so he's going to kill her because she's the source of his pain.
"Once they take this first step, they feel they have to take the second step (suicide)."
Although Alan Atwater may not have planned to kill himself, he apparently had settled on doing so when he called the sheriff's office to report the deaths of his wife and children.
In that call, he calmly admitted to killing them and then said he was going to kill himself. Then he hung up.
Resnick, speaking in general, said people who commit suicide may be agitated at first while trying to decide whether or not to go through with it.
"Once they make a decision to do it, they feel at peace," he said.

Statistics elusive

Every year, more than 32,000 people commit suicide, and another 18,000 are victims of homicide, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Determining how many of those deaths result from homicide-suicide cases, however, is more difficult.
The CDC's National Violent Death Reporting System collects data from 16 states -- not including Ohio -- so numbers from those states cannot be considered representative of the entire country. In 2008, 175 people in those states died of homicide followed by suicide, according to the system.
What is known about these cases is that a past history of domestic abuse is the biggest risk factor, according to the National Institute of Justice, which is part of the U.S. Department of Justice. A study about murder-suicides conducted by Jacquelyn Campbell, professor at Johns Hopkins University's School of Nursing, showed domestic violence had been a past problem in 70 percent of the cases.
However, 25 percent of these incidents of violence showed up in police arrest records, according to the institute. The researchers in Campbell's study learned about the past incidents after interviewing family and friends of the homicide victims, according to the institute.
http://www.mansfieldnewsjournal.com/article/20110505/NEWS01/105050330/Experts-weigh-murder-suicide-northwest-Ohio?odyssey=tab%7Ctopnews%7Ctext%7CFrontpage

Psychiatrist Phillip Resnick on Why Parents Kill Their Own Kids

By Maia Szalavitz  February 1, 2011

On Jan. 27, Julie Powers, 50, a mother of two in Tampa, drove her 13-year-old son, Beau, home from soccer practice and allegedly shot him in the head "for talking back" to her. Then she went upstairs and shot Calyx, her 16-year-old daughter dead as she sat at her computer doing her homework, according to an arrest affidavit. At the time, her husband was serving in Qatar as an army colonel. Powers said her kids were "mouthy."

But what kind of parent would possibly murder her own children for mouthing off? TIME spoke with Dr. Phillip Resnick, director of forensic psychiatry at Case Western and a leading expert on parents who kill their children. He testified for the defense in the case of Andrea Yates, who was convicted in 2002 of drowning her five children in the bathtub. The murder conviction was later overturned and she was found to be not guilty by reason of insanity — as Resnick had argued. Over the course of his 40-year career, Resnick has worked on 40 to 60 cases involving parents who killed their children. Although he cannot offer a mental diagnosis or legal opinion in the Powers' case, he can discuss the motivations of parents who kill and what we know about them. About 250 to 300 children are murdered by their parents each year.

Does this seem to be a typical case of a mother who kills her children?
It's aytpical. Younger children are much more likely to be killed than teenagers. If a child is killed for being "mouthy," the remark that came out here, that's more likely to lead to fatal battering. [Usually, in such cases,] a 3-to-5-year-old is thrown against a wall in an overzealous attempt at discipline and dies — as opposed to [a parent] planning to kill and shooting them with a gun.

You have identified five main circumstances in which parents kill their children.
The first is "altruistic." The classic case is the mother who plans to take her own life and believes that the children are better off in heaven with her. Number Two is the case in which the parent is acutely psychotic. The third type is fatal battering [as described above]. the fourth is [to get rid of] an unwanted baby, for example an infant born out of wedlock. The final category is spousal revenge, [in which a parent kills the children to hurt the partner], typically after infidelity.
What we know so far about the Florida woman doesn't fit easily into any of these categories. If the children were much younger, it could be maltreatment, but at this age, that does not fit how it usually works. My guess is that eventually we will have a much better picture. It might be very severe depression. It might be [that she thought they were] possessed by a demon. A lot more will come out than just this idea that you kill a kid because he's mouthy.

I've read that mothers who kill their older children are likely to be married and employed, which was the case here and seems kind of strange to me.

Mothers with preschool children are less likely to be employed [than those with teenagers, so it could just reflect the population]. A single mother is more likely to be overwhelmed because there's no one to help, but that's with younger children. The newspaper said [that classmates and teachers described the children as] polite and good students. It is not an example of delinquent kids who are out of control and the mother doesn't know what to do with them.

I've also read that murders of older children are more likely to be extremely violent.

Actually, the degree of violence depends very much on the child. A 3-year-old you can easily strangle or overdose. Teens are not going to cooperate in being killed so the use of a knife or gun is more necessary. In some cases of fathers who kill teenagers there has been a real standoff and hostility, but for mothers that's not the usual pattern. I would not say the method of death expresses rage — it's just what's needed to take the life of older children.

Any speculation about what might have happened here?
[Again,] my hunch is that a lot more is going to come out than this early statement, which sounds outrageous. Either we will find out that she was either depressed or psychotic, or something else is cooking.
As I understand it, there was a note left that said she planned to kill herself after killing the children, so the question becomes: was the primary issue that she was going to take her own life and then decided to take the children's lives, or did she decide to take the children's lives first and couldn't go on after that?

Fathers are more likely to wipe out the whole family. In 95% of those cases, the fathers are the killer. The father may feel, I can't support my family, I'm responsible for them, I'll take all of them out with me. Whereas [murders by a] mother with this age children are "altruistic — they murder out of love, not out of hate — and they genuine believe that they are doing the children a favor. [But if that was the case here,] you would not expect the remark that they were "mouthy." If she did do it for that reason, you'd expect her to put a better face on it. In one case I had, a woman killed a 3-year-old and herself. The note said, 'Bury us in one box, we belong together.' In that type, it's kind of an extended self [the mother sees the child as part of her]. It's not necessarily negative; the mother may well think of young children as extensions of herself and feel that her children would be lost without her. [She thinks that] even if the husband remarried, they'd have a mean stepmother and so the children would be better off with her in heaven.

Are these crimes ever religiously motivated?
I would not say there are religious motivations, but with religious people, the nature of the psychosis may encompass religious themes. Andrea Yates came to believe that her children were engaged in such bad behavior that they were going to end up in hell. She believed that she was doing them a favor by killing them before the age of accountability so that they could enter heaven.

But if you don't believe in heaven or hell, you wouldn't kill for those reasons...
Yes, a strong belief in the hereafter may have an influence.

Is there any way to prevent these types of crimes?

It's a complicated question. There are broad issues, such as easier access to mental health care, which is a problem right now with state cutbacks becoming severe. Another thing is awareness. If a woman is very depressed and she has young children and makes a suicide attempt, there is 1-in-20 chance that she will try to take the kid with her. Specific inquiries about thoughts of harm toward children should occur in any evaluation of a seriously depressed [mother].

Have you had any cases similar to this one?

There was the case of 10-year-old [and a younger child, whose mother attempted to kill them both.] The mother was found legally insane. She was psychotic. She was severely depressed and then had this sudden belief that this is what she had to do. She did it with a knife, very suddenly, and then called the police after she stayed overnight with her dead child. There was no effort to flee. It wasn't like, I'm going to kill the children and take off and have a good life. She was a physician and she was married to a physician. One of the children survived the knifing.

Are these parents mostly sent to mental institutions because they use the insanity defense — or do they go to prison?
The vast majority of parents who kill their children go to prison rather than mental institutions. I just saw an article written by the FBI: for women who kill their children and are not found insane, the mean length of their prison sentence is 17 years; in women who kill newborns, the mean length is 9 years. However, out of all homicide [perpetrators], none have a higher incidence of being found insane than mothers who kill their children.

Killing newborns is much more common than killing older children.
As far as death by homicide goes, you're more likely to be killed on the day you are born than on any other day of your life.

Are these mothers dangerous to people other than their own children?

They are not a general danger to the community. There are infanticide laws in 22 countries, including England, Canada and Australia — instead of women being charged with murder, [if the child is] under 1 year old, they are charged with infanticide. In the U.K., the vast majority get probation rather than prison. The recidivism rate is very low. The risk of suicide is substantial, however.

Is the bad economy likely to lead to more of these cases?

Suicide does increase some when there are more people losing their jobs, so there might be little an increase in familicide where the father is unemployed. As far as mothers go, if she's the sole support, I don't know if that will increase.

 http://healthland.time.com/2011/02/01/psychiatrist-phillip-resnick-on-why-parents-kill-their-own-kids/#ixzz1D6oMTqp1

FILICIDE: USA: statistics teenage children murdered

By Richard Martin and Caryn Baird, Times Staff Writers
In Print: Saturday, January 29, 2011
About 200 children are killed each year in the United States by their mothers or stepmothers, according to government statistics. In the large majority of cases, the victim is under age 6. It's rare for mothers to kill teenagers.
According to data from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, about 3 percent of murder victims ages 15 to 17 are killed by a parent or stepparent. Among victims ages 12 to 14, about 11 percent are killed by a parent or stepparent.
The federal data analyzed the cases of 52,300 children murdered in the United States between 1980 and 2006. Of the 38,700 cases in which the killer was identified, about a third were killed by a parent or stepparent. That agency groups all parent murderers together, but other research suggests mothers are the killers in about half the cases. Among the highest-profile cases in recent years:
October 1994: Susan Smith pushes her car into a South Carolina lake, drowning her 3-year-old and 14-month-old sons.
June 2001: Andrea Yates drowns her five children, ages 6 months to 7 years, in the bathtub of their Houston home.
May 2003: Deanna LaJune Laney confesses to using rocks to bash the heads of her three sons in the yard of her Tyler, Texas, home, killing two of them, ages 6 and 8.
May 2007: Gilberta Estrada of Hudson Oaks, Texas, fashions nooses for her four children, ages 8 months to 5 years, hangs them, then herself. The infant was the only survivor.
February 2008: Leatrice Brewer drowns her three children, all under 6, in the bathtub of her New Cassel, N.Y., apartment.
Times researcher Shirl Kennedy contributed to this report. Richard Martin can be reached at rmartin@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8330

http://www.tampabay.com/news/data-mom-killing-a-teen-child-is-rare/1148392