WHY SOME MOMS KILL THEIR KIDS
Albertan Allyson Mcconnell among list of killers who defy logical explanation
On a chilly spring night in 1979, after an afternoon at the swimming pool, Harjit Kaur Bhuller Brar drove from her home in northwest Calgary to a parking lot near the Prince’s Island footbridge, and unloaded her four young daughters from the car.
A passing jogger noticed the mother and her children standing on the bridge, then watched in horror as Brar picked up the girls one by one and threw them off the bridge into the freezing water.
Six-year-old Ravinder. Four-year-old Savinder. The toddler, 18-month-old Sukhjit.
Then Brar jumped in, clutching her two-monthold infant, Amrit, in her arms.
One of the girls had her hands bound, but the rest offered no resistance.
The deaths were described as Calgary’s worst murder-suicide, the city’s biggest mass drowning.
“I don’t know why it happened,” Staff Sgt. Roy Evans said at the time.
“I don’t know why they didn’t resist. I can only think it was because they trusted their mother.”
While police looked into a theory that Brar, 32, was suffering from “a depressed state some mothers suffer as a result of body changes after giving birth,” her family and friends could not understand how a woman who seemed so happy and loving could do something so terrible.
“She was always laughing,” one relative said at the time.
“We never noticed anything.”
Killing a child is one of the most despicable crimes, an act of aggression against vulnerable and innocent victims.
When a mother kills her own children, the crime is even more reviled, because it violates not only society’s desire to protect children, but also our most basic expectations of women and mothers.
“I think we have a very traditional sense of femininity and motherhood,” says Hannah Scott, author of The Female Serial Murderer: A Well-kept Secret of the Gentler Sex.
“When we think of women, we think of them as nurturers and we think of them as mothers,” says Scott, an associate professor at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology.
“The idea that a woman could kill a child, much less her own child, seems so out of context or unbelievable that when it does happen we are quite shocked.”
Yet the killing of children by their mothers is not unheard of.
On Friday, 33-year-old Allyson Mcconnell was convicted of two counts of manslaughter for killing her young sons, Jayden and Connor. Mcconnell drowned the boys at the family home in Millet in 2010, then tried to take her own life.
In Canada, child homicide victims are most likely to be killed by a biological parent. About 20 per cent of the solved child homicides committed in Canada in the past four decades were perpetrated by the victims’ mothers.
Forensic and perinatal psychologist Susan Hatters Friedman says women’s potential for violence against their children often goes unrecognized, and therefore, untreated.
“It’s so opposite of how we would see the role of the mother, as the nurturer, the protector, the one who would never harm their child,” says Hatters Friedman, who has been studying the issue of maternal homicide in the U.S. for about a decade. “A lot is tied up with our societal notions of the perfect mother.”
According to the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics, 2,897 children were killed in homicides in Canada between 1974 and 2010. In the 2,623 cases where charges have been laid, almost half of the children were killed by a biological parent, with fathers killing their children only slightly more frequently than mothers.
Parents pose a far greater risk to their children than strangers, who are responsible for about 11 per cent of child homicides in Canada.
Phillip Resnick began studying maternal homicide as a young psychiatrist working on a women’s psychiatric ward in the 1960s, where he was treating two patients who had killed their children.
“What struck me was that these were women who loved their children very much,” Resnick says. “It is the most dramatic thing you can imagine. A mother who loves her children and has taken their lives, and has survived her own suicide attempts, and now has to deal with having lost what she valued most.”
Since the publication of his seminal research paper about maternal filicide in 1969, Resnick has become one of the world’s foremost experts on the subject, and has been involved in some of the most high-profile cases in the U.S.
Resnick testified in the case of Andrea Yates, who killed her five children in Texas in 2001; he did assessments of Susan Smith, who drowned her two young sons in 1994, claiming the boys had been abducted when her car was stolen by a black man.
Resnick says the majority of parental child killings are battery cases, where a child dies unintentionally after an act of sudden violence or severe long-term maltreatment by a parent.
But the cases that make the biggest headlines are often the planned or intentional killings of more than one child, such as those committed by Brar, Yates, Smith and Mcconnell.
Planned, intentional killings most often fall into a category called “altruistic filicide,” where a mother kills her children because she believes it is in their best interest, Resnick says.
In such cases, a mother may think she is saving her children from a worse fate in the future, or believe that they feel the same depression she does.
“The woman may look at the world though her depressed eyes and believe the child is suffering the same symptoms,” he says. “That the child will never be happy in this world and is better off dead.”
Resnick says a woman who is planning to kill herself may think her children will not be properly cared for without her, or may feel so attached to her children that she wants to keep them with her.
Mothers who commit altruistic filicides are in their late 20s, on average, and often have a history of failed suicide attempts. Most are described as mentally ill or severely depressed before the killings, and they often occur in the midst of a relationship breakup and while the women are suffering financial hardships and other stressors.
Resnick says the first question he puts to a woman who has killed her children is: “Whose life did you decide to take first, the child’s or your own?”
A 2004 study of homicides in Canada found that 60 per cent of parental killings during that year were motivated by “frustration/ despair,” and another 20 per cent were related to mental illness.
A study by Resnick and Hatters Friedman found that more than 40 per cent of depressed mothers have had thoughts of killing or harming their children at some point.
Hatters Friedman says part of dealing with maternal homicide is getting past the deep stigma around such feelings, so women can get help before they harm their children or themselves. “Studies indicate that more women have these thoughts than psychiatrists realize,” Hatters Friedman says. “It’s not that uncommon of a thought, or a way for a woman to feel when she’s under a lot of stress when she’s parenting.
“I think that’s something that we need to recognize and support more as a society, and as psychiatrists and psychologists we need to advocate for these moms to get the care they need so that it doesn’t come to tragedy.”
About one-quarter of parents who kill their children commit suicide immediately afterward. Many others, like Allyson Mcconnell, attempt suicide but survive. For those women, that means living to face the consequences, dealing with estrangement from family and friends, and the media spotlight and public attention that invariably comes with such high-profile crimes.
Resnick notes that “baby killers” are looked down on in prison and can face violence and threats and be ostracized by other inmates and staff while in custody. “Even criminals are disapproving of child killers,” he says.
Broader society can be similarly unforgiving — even in cases where the woman is found to be not culpable for her actions.
Andrea Yates was found not guilty by reason of insanity in her children’s deaths, after it was shown she had been suffering severe postpartum depression and psychosis when she killed her children. Still, Yates continued to get hate mail while in a mental hospital, even years after the slayings, and has described herself to Resnick as “the most-hated woman in the world.”
“She has to make peace with that somehow,” Resnick says.
In his closing arguments at Allyson Mcconnell’s trial, Edmonton defence lawyer Peter Royal admitted to feelings of hostility, even repugnance, toward his client because of her crimes.
As Royal spoke, Mcconnell sat slumped in the prisoner’s box, eyes fixed on the floor. She had already testified that all she expects now in her life are more suicide attempts.
“It is hard to remain untouched by what has happened here,” Royal told the court. “Criminal acts which are truly horrifying. How can we, as lawyers, begin to understand how Ally, a fine woman, a mother, could do this terrible thing?”
It is a question Resnick has heard many times, and one for which there are no easy answers. It’s a question killers — and mothers — like Allyson Mcconnell have to live with for the rest of their lives.
“For any mother, to have a child predecease them is one of the great tragedies of life,” Resnick says.
“If you imagine having taken your child’s life, and every birthday, every Christmas, you are coping with how old the child would have been.
“Think of the horror and tragedy of it. That’s why it’s been the subject of movies and books, because it is a great human tragedy.”