In human culture, the notion of the idealized mother–the lifegiver, nurturer, protector–is such an icon that when a mother is accused of killing her children, as Marilyn Lemak was on Saturday, it seems to upset the very balance of nature.
Yet in reality, experts say, mothers kill their children more often than was once believed, whether in a methodical fashion, as is alleged in the deaths of Lemak’s three children in Naperville, or in a way that makes the deaths appear accidental.
And while each case is unique, and unfathomable at some level, some patterns or common elements throughout history distinguish the act known as “maternal filicide,” even if only from the murders of children by their fathers.
At the same time, there is little question that a complex array of factors, including a host of mental disorders and troublesome domestic situations, can conspire to produce what remains a shocking and rare crime.
Dr. Jan Ophoven, a pediatric forensic pathologist in St. Paul, Minn., said a growing body of evidence and a number of high-profile murder cases have reshaped the thinking of medical researchers, police and prosecutors.
“The latter part of the century we have had to come to terms with the fact of our own prejudices of the gentle mother, a prejudice held by our society and culture,” Ophoven said. “We have to realize that women do kill their children.”
Two multiple child-murder cases in Upstate New York in the 1980s and mid-1990s contributed to that realization.
In one, in 1987, Marybeth Tinning was convicted of killing one of her children. Prosecutors, however, suspected, though they could not prove, that she was responsible for the deaths of her eight other children, none of whom lived beyond age 5.
The Tinning case, and others like it, involve the killing of children one at a time over a number of years–sort of a parental serial killer–and often are motived by mental illness, sympathy or greed for insurance money.
What makes the murders of the Lemak children so unusual, experts said, were two factors: the relatively older ages–3, 6 and 7–and that the children were all killed at once.
In a case that might have elements closer to the Naperville killings, last November in St. Paul, Minn., Khoua Her pleaded guilty to six murder counts for strangling her children, ages 5 to 11, at their apartment. She tried to strangle herself with an extension cord and was semiconscious when police arrived. Police said she was estranged from her husband, who was not living with the family.
Lemak, a 41-year-old nurse, gave her children a mix of aspirin derivatives to make them drowsy, then suffocated them one by one, prosecutors alleged. She was estranged from her husband, David, an emergency room doctor.
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After her children died, Marilyn Lemak also tried to injure herself, according to sources, when she slashed an artery in her arm.
Research has shown, according to the New England Journal of Medicine, that most infant homicides are perpetrated by parents or stepparents, and that the mother is the likely killer in homicides that occur in the child’s first week of life.
When children are killed after the first two years of life, the perpetrator tends to be unrelated to the child, according to researchers.
There is little scientific knowledge about parents who commit multiple child murders, and no hard statistics that track the phenomenon.
While no one knows the number of children murdered by their mothers each year in the United States, one 1995 study put the number at more than 600. But some experts believe that estimate might be low as a number of accidental deaths become reclassified as homicides.
The act of a mother killing her child is known as the Medea syndrome, after a woman in Greek mythology who murdered her children as revenge against her philandering husband, Jason.
Perhaps the best-known modern-day Medea was Susan Smith, the South Carolina mother who strapped her two sons into the back of her car and rolled it into the lake in October 1994. Smith had bailed out of the car before it plunged into the water, but her sons drowned.
Smith, according to prosecutors, was estranged from her husband and killed the children when they got in the way of a love affair.
Another high-profile case of a mother killing her children also involved a husband and wife who were medical professionals.
In Prairie Village, Kan., Dr. Debora Green was sentenced to life in prison in May 1996 for killing two of her children, ages 6 and 13, in a fire in their home. Green, a former oncologist, also was accused of earlier poisoning her estranged husband, also a doctor, who survived.
Dr. Stuart Asch, a psychiatrist at Cornell University’s medical center in New York City, has studied mothers who kill their children for nearly half a century. He is alternately sickened and fascinated by the betrayal.
In the Medea syndrome, often one of the spouses, perhaps both, has a lover, Asch said.
“In the Medea cases, what we see is the woman becomes crazy, furious and kills the children out of revenge,” he said.
One defense often used for women who kill their infants is postpartum depression, which hits most mothers in mild forms and strikes about 1 in 10 with serious symptoms. Marilyn Lemak’s father-in-law has said his son told him she suffered from severe depression after the birth of their third child three years ago.
Although the condition is no longer defined as postpartum depression one year or more after a baby’s birth, some experts said effects from such an episode may linger for years.
“If you’re ever going to get depressed, or psychotic for that matter, it’s most likely going to happen postpartum,” said Dr. Miggie Greenberg, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Chicago who specializes in the causes of child abuse. “The odds increase with each child you have.”
Robert R. Butterworth, a psychologist on staff at the Metropolitan Psychiatric Hospital in Los Angles, in 1995 surveyed the limited body of research on mothers who murder their own.
The research, Butterworth said, showed that maternal filicide fits one of six broad categories: the mentally ill mother who kills because she is acutely psychotic; the mother with an unplanned pregnancy who abandons her newborn in places such as garbage cans or church steps; the merciful mother who kills a sickly or diseased child; the battering mother who kills in a fit of rage because of a child’s constant crying or disobedience; the retaliating mother who kills because she is jealous of her husband and takes her anger out on the child; and the depressed mother who kills because her outlook on life is bleak.
More than one-third of mothers killed their children while depressed or in state he termed an extended form of suicide, Butterworth said.
“In a distorted sense, a mother believes by killing her children she is saving them from a life that she sees as black and very bleak,” Butterworth said. “And, too, in a divorce, she is keeping them forever from their father.”
Sometimes more serious clinical conditions play a role. One in 1,000 mothers experience what’s known as postpartum psychosis, marked by delusions and distorted perceptions of reality.
“They can make themselves think their babies are gods, or devils, that they can fly or are invulnerable to certain things,” said Michael O’Hara, an expert on postpartum disorders and chairman of the psychology department at the University of Iowa.
Depression alone is an inadequate explanation, some experts said, because few people who are depressed commit murder. In fact, someone with severe depression may be less likely to do harm because the condition is so debilitating that even getting out of bed requires monumental effort.
Depression is a common forerunner of suicide, however. In rare cases, a mother may make the seemingly rational decision that the world is so awful that she is doing her children a favor by killing them.
“Often the time of greatest risk is when someone is recovering, as they get enough energy that they can go get poison or start a plan,” Greenberg said.
Researchers have found two glaring distinctions between a mother who kills and a father who kills.
Often, Butterworth said, the father not only will kill his children but will kill his wife as well. And, he said, the method of death preferred by men tends to be more violent, such as using a knife or shotgun.
Women are likely to chose a more “gentle” or what seems to be a more humane method, such as drowning, poisoning or suffocation, he said.
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Ophoven, the pediatric forensic pathologist, had testified last month in a federal trial in Chicago that Dina Abdelhaq’s two infant daughters were suffocated.
Ophoven said her experience has shown that women tend to be tidier in their crimes, although they certainly have been known to use violent methods.
“We have to change our immediate, natural reaction that if a man is around, he’s the perpetrator,” she said. “My experience has been in multiple child deaths, it is much more probable that Mom did it.”