The nation is always shocked by criminal cases such as Andrea Yates, a mother of five who methodically drowned all of her children in a bathtub then calmly called police, but mothers killing their children are more common than we might think.
According to the American Anthropological Association, more than 200 women kill their children in the United States each year. Three to five children a day are killed by their parents. Homicide is one of the leading causes of death of children under age four, yet we continue to “persist with the unrealistic view that this is rare behavior,” says Jill Korbin, expert on child abuse, who has studied mothers who killed their children.
We should detach from the idea of universal motherhood as natural and see it as a social response,” Nancy Scheper-Hughes, medical anthropologist 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.”
A look at the rolls of women who are currently on death row, and the crimes that put them there, shows that women who kill their children are indeed not as rare as we would like to believe. Of the 49 women on death row, 11 killed children:
- was 29 years old when she killed her 2-year-old adopted daughter in Dothan, AL in May 1999.
at age 20, covered her 4-day-old son with duct tape resulting in his death.
was 25 when she killed her 4-year-old son in Arizona in 1989.
Dora Luz Durenrostro
killed her two daughters, age 4 and 9, and her son, age 8, when she was 34 years old in San Jacinto, California in 1994.
Caro Socorro
was 42 years old when she killed her three sons, ages 5, 8 and 11, in Santa Rosa Valley, California in 1999.
Susan Eubanks
murdered her four sons, ages 4, 6, 7 and 14, in San Marcos, California, in 1996 when she was 33.
was 49 in Haywood, California when she killed her 4-year-old granddaughter and 6-year-old grandson.
was 35 years old when she killed her husband, her 10-year-old son and her 8-year-old daughter in Boise, Idaho in 1992.
Michelle Sue Tharp
was 29 years old in Burgettstown, Pennsylvania when she killed her 7-year-old daughter.
was 21 when she murdered her husband, 7-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter in Houston, Texas. Update: Frances Elaine Newton was executed on September 14, 2005.
was 26 in Rowlett, Texas when she was convicted of killing her 5-year-old son.
Teresa Michelle Lewis
killed her 51-year-old husband and 26-year-old step son in Keeling, Virgina when she was 33 years old.
Korbin says there are usually clues that are obvious to those around parents who end up killing their children. “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,” she said in an AAA press release.
