Mother's Day Lauds Bond With Deadly Breaks

In May, Mother's Day celebrates what most of us see as a sacred bond, natural and social, between mothers and children. But that bond is more tenuous than we like to think. A study in Forensic Science International looked at filicide cases (killing of a child by a parent) between 1976 and 2007 and found they occur about 500 times a year in the United States, with more than 40% of the murders committed by mothers. Cheryl Meyer, co-author of several books on the subject, said it's probable that a mother kills a child once every three days in the U.S. Filicide expert and forensic psychiatrist Phillip J. Resnick identifies five major reasons a mother might kill her child. One motive is misguided altruism--believing death is in the child's best interest, either based on the reality of a child's terminal illness or a conviction the child needs to be saved from a cruel world, especially if the parent intends to commit suicide. Of course, acute psychosis is another explanation, such as when a mother thinks her child is demon-possessed or obeys "voices." Sometimes the killer mom just wants to be rid of an unwanted child seen as a hindrance. Or perhaps the killing is the accidental result of cruel physical abuse or neglect. The least common motive is spousal revenge a la Medea: a mother killing her child to exact revenge on her spouse. Maternal filicide is a common theme in the true crime genre, and it has played a key role in well-known fiction works such as Toni Morrison's Beloved or Dennis Lehane's Shutter Island. In recent fiction, there's Veronique Olmi's haunting Beside the Sea, which captures the twisted altruism of a single mother who takes her beloved two sons on a last fun-filled trip to the seaside before freeing them from what she sees as an uncaring and dangerous world. Best-selling author Tami Hoag offers The Boy, in which detectives must solve the question of whether a mother, who ran panicked into the night after an alleged intruder killed her 7-year-old son, is suffering an unfathomable loss or is guilty of an unthinkable crime. Little Deaths by Emma Flint focuses on Ruth Malone, a single mother in 1965 Queens, NY, who works long hours as a cocktail waitress and insists she woke up to find her two small children missing. When their bodies are discovered, the lead detective concludes Malone is the killer, but a dogged tabloid reporter questions whether the unhappy mother is a killer, victim of circumstance or pawn of something more sinister. The Big Girls by Susanna Moore addresses both the destructive power of maternal instinct and our cult of celebrity by bringing together four characters at a women's prison: a woman serving a life sentence for murder of her children; the female chief of psychiatry; a male corrections desiring the psychiatrist, and an ambitious Hollywood starlet contacted by the convicted killer. For more on filicide in America, see https://www.cnn.com/2017/07/07/health/filicide-parents-killing-kids-stats-trnd/index.html

The Special Satisfaction of Solving Cold Cases

The other day I was reading the latest mystery from Tami Hoag, The Bitter Season, including a cold-case investigation of the 25-year-old murder of a sex crimes detective, and I began to think about the fascination of cold cases. Not only are there many TV series, both the fictional and "reality" variety, built around cold cases, there are also many cold-case mysteries by top authors. For example, there is The Drop by Michael Connelly, in which LAPD detective Harry Bosch is asked to look into why DNA from a rape and murder 21-years earlier matches a 29-year-old convicted rapist. Is the new regional crime lab compromised, or is something even darker going on? Kate Atkinson launched her PI Jackson Brodie series with Case Histories, about three investigations--a little girl who went missing 30 years before, a random maniacal attack on an officer worker, and a grisly crime by an overwhelmed new mother--which turn out to have surprise connections. From Harlan Coben, a favorite for plot twists, comes Stay Close, about a detective doggedly pursuing the 17-year-old unsolved disappearance of a husband and father until the hidden secrets of past and present suburban lives disastrously collide. Laura Lippman's After I'm Gone also explores how one man’s disappearance affects his wife, mistress (who later disappears and ends up dead) and daughters, and then ensnares a retired Baltimore detective working the cold cases 36 years later. Similarly, in The Dead Will Tell by Linda Castillo, Chief of Police Kate Burkholder finds that her investigation of an old man's murder links to the tragic past of the abandoned, haunted farm where an Amish father and his four children perished, and his young wife disappeared, 35 years earlier. And finally, one of my favorite forensic mystery writers, Kathy Reichs, offers Bones to Ashes, in which forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan (the inspiration for the "Bones" TV series) works to solve the mystery of a young girl's skeleton. Could she be Brennan's childhood friend who vanished 30 years earlier? Or are the bones tied to a series of cold cases that have left three girls dead and four missing? I find there's a special pleasure in reading about the solution to a cold case. For one, there's the thrill of solving a puzzle that has baffled others. And then there's the satisfaction of the hunt, of capturing the murderer who almost got away. Most important, the long shadow of justice is affirmed, and the mystery ends with cathartic closure to tragic history. In reality as opposed to fiction, many cold cases remain unsolved, and those solved owe less to detective brilliance than to improved forensics, especially DNA, and belated witnesses or confessions. For examples of real cold case solutions, see http://www.forensicscolleges.com/blog/resources/10-cold-cases-solved