“It is quite surprising how many children survive in spite of their mothers.” Norman Douglas

I received this in my email: "Repost this bulletin with 'How Can a Mom [Andrea Yates] Kill Her [five] Children?' It shows pictures of the children smiling in much happier times and gives part of Andrea's court testimony. "But if you feel she wasn't guilty THEN YOUR A PRETTY MESSED UP PERSON AND FOR THAT YOU NEED TO DELETE ME AS ONE OF YOUR FRIENDS." Normally I dismiss this as over reaction but I decided to investigate further. The murder of five children on June 20, 2001 is not an isolated incident.


March, 1985—Debra Gindorf fed her two small children, Christina, 2 and 3-month-old Jason lethal amounts of crushed sleeping pills, tucked them into bed, and tried to kill herself by swallowing the same medication. She awoke the next morning with the sickening realization that she was still alive and her children were dead.


Kathleen Folbigg murdered three of her children Patrick, Sarah and Laura - aged between eight and 19 months and a fourth, Caleb (just nineteen days old) over a 10 year period beginning in 1989.


Jan. 4, 1989—Sheila Epker killed her four children and fatally shot herself. 8-year-old Kacey, was drowned. Two other daughters, Shannon, 5 and Mandy, 2 1/2 and a son, 16-month-old Lance, were all shot to death.


April 9, 1998—Bethe Feltman killed her children, Benjamin, 3 and Mariah, 3 months. Benjamin was strangled and Mariah suffocated. Both children may also have had drugs in their systems.


July 17, 2002—Dee Etta Perez, 39, shot her three children, ages 4, 9 and 10, and then wounded the children's father, before killing herself.


Deanna Laney beat her two young sons, Luke, 6 and Joshua, 8 to death with stones in East Texas. A third son, 14-month-old son Aaron, who remains nearly blind and brain-injured, just "wouldn't die."


Lisa Ann Diaz drowned her two daughters– Kamryn, 3, and Briana, 5, wrapped them in blankets and laid them in a back bedroom. Ms. Diaz had 25 cuts and superficial, self-inflicted stab wounds on her neck and chest. She later said that she wanted to commit suicide to be with her daughters.



Nov. 22, 2004 Dena Schlosser fatally severed her 10-month-old daughter's arms with a kitchen knife.




December 24, 2004—A New Zealand mother killed her two children and then herself in a pre-Christmas tragedy.




May 30, 2005 –Gilberta Estrada hung herself and her four young daughters in a closet. Gilberta, 25 and three of the girls were dead; their ages were 5, 3 and 2. The youngest, 8-month-old Evelyn Frayre, was alive but in dire need of medical care.




February 28, 2007— a Brussels, Belgium mother killed her five children, then tried to commit suicide. The four girls and a boy, aged between 4 and 14, were stabbed with a knife. The woman called emergency services, and then tried to kill herself.

Aug. 14, 2007—32-year-old Nimisha Tiwari bought a can of gasoline, shut herself in her bedroom with her two young children—son, Vakadham, 4 and 18-month-old daughter, Anayaand and set a blaze that killed all three.




It is shocking to read of these deaths by the hand of the children's mothers who had held the in their arms, nursed them, bathed then and stayed up nights and cared for them when they were sick. What happened? Did the mothers say, "I quit." Insanity? Postpartum depression or just plain old fashion murder?




More than 200 women kill their children in the U.S. every year. Between three and five children are killed by their parents in the U.S. every day. A California man lit a barbecue inside his home knowing it would asphyxiate his sleeping children. Why wasn't his case saturated with media coverage in the same way? We have a cultural view of good motherhood and it acts to the detriment of women and fathers who are having substantial problems parenting, says Jill Korbin, member of the American Anthropological Association and a child abuse expert who spent a year interviewing mothers in prison for killing their children.




"We end up with a lot of dead kids in this country, yet we persist with the unrealistic view that this is rare behavior. These are not the isolated cases we would like to believe." Homicide is one of the leading causes of death of children under age four.




Parenting in the U.S. is extremely difficult, Korbin says. Prevention is the key. Prior to a homicide, lots of lay people know these men and women are having difficulty parenting. "The public has to be better educated in recognizing how to intervene and how to support child abuse prevention."




Nancy Scheper-Hughes, medical anthropologist, believes that mother love is not universal. The idealization of women as natural loving mothers is a cultural belief that gets us into trouble. "We should detach from the idea of universal motherhood as natural and see it as a social response," Scheper-Hughes says. Women in jail reported that no one believed them when they said they wanted to kill their children. "There's a collective denial even when mothers come right out and say 'I really shouldn't be trusted with my kids.' "




K.