Murderous Mothers Third Part

marie noe

In spite of the great deal of cases, the cultural concept of murderous mother takes a lot of years to impose itself: the exeptionality of the events and also the explanations of the experts set these events in the general problem of human insanity.

But slowly the murder of children from their parents and particularly mother, assumes a shape of a specific category[1]. This process of transformation is accompanied and in our opinion slowed down by the psychological explanations of every single event which prevent them from being set in a general phenomenon.

In America the beginning is with Marie Noe, a mother from Philadelphia who in twenty years, from ’49 and ’68, eliminated eight of her ten children.

Times change and society accelerates and not to wait too long Susan Smith, a twenty-three-year-old girl from South Caroline, fastens her two children to the safety belt of her car sinking into a lake. Then she simulates an accident[2].

Susan Smith

Andrea Pia Yates kills her five children whose age went from six months to seven years by drowning them, one after the other, in the bathtub of her villa at Clear Lake, a rich suburb in South Houston.

In Italy with the increasing of cases of murderous mothers ( and fathers ) the great mass of experts’ comments starts:

• “Children become less and less numerous, therefore more rare and precious. Disturbing fetishes rather than little pets who once could survive through seduction. A father from Civitavecchia (after being left a widower he stabs to death his three daughters while sleeping and tries to commit suicide) I hope he intended to do an extreme love gesture:the world is nasty, I can’t leave my children here alone and so I’ll take them with me to death..What caused the breaking of his balance:his wife’s death, the loss of his job, a serious depressive crisis, the fear of poverty, maybe all these things….”. Gianna Schelotto, a Psychotherapist.

• 

  postpartum depression

• Fire and knife. Great aggressiveness and contempt. Like the parents who abandon Le Petit Poucet in the clutches of the ogre, also armed with a knife, like the father from Civitavecchia….Since he feels persecuted by a God who deprives him of his wife, his job, his house he returns his own life and his daughters’ to this God so that he can calm down….the knife, the oldest arm for the most ancient crime: the one of Abraham and his tribe, but in the tales of the third millennium there are no people around the horror. There is nobody any longer”. Maria Rita Parsi, the Psychotherapist as to the same case.
• “She killed them fearing to lose them”. Doriana Tomaselli, Idranka Kuleva’s friend, the Macedoenian woman, thirty-six years old, who stabbed to death her two children of four and six years of age.
• ” I had to do so, I had to kill my two children”. Idranka Kuleva.
• She felt inadequate to bring them up, she killed them for too much love. Gemma Marotta, a Psychologist and University Teacher of Criminology at Rome University La Sapienza with regard to Jadranka Kuleva. ” It’s clear – Marotta, a lady doctor says – the woman suffered from a serious mental disease, a psychotic form together with a strong depression. I don’t think we can speak of puerperal psychosis since the disease reveals itself in pregnant women and explodes in all its violence soon after the chilbirth or during nursing.

Post partum depression

• ” It’s a purperal psychosis”. Giovanni Battista Cassano, a Psychiatrist with regard to Loretta Zen, the mother that, in Sondrio, killed her eight-month-old daughter by making her do a complete cycle in the washing machine. ” A trouble – Cassano asserts – which may happen after a childbirth….may last even for years,now we don’t care any more.
• Depression isn’t involved: we are in the presence of a schizophrenic delirium”. Massimo Fagioli, a Psychiatrist, as to Jadranka’s crime and others which have, as protagonists, murderous mothers ” Homicides – Fagioli goes on – to impute to the murderous normality, to cold and anafective reason that completely annuls the psychic reality of the other”.
• It’s better thinking of an act of madness( sic ) Gianna Schelotto, a Psychologist, with regard to the same case.
• An act like that can’t be explained with a simple depression, I’d say not even with the gloomiest desperation: behind it there may be only madness or better Satan’s hand” A neighbour of Loretta Zen’s.

[1] We will define just murderous mothers.

[2] In the jail Susan Smith will be able to get pregnant by an attendant

susan-Smith

More than emulation we prefer speaking of culture of murderous mothers and with this concept we intend some innate tendencies existing in the population and at the slightest stimulus they turn into a precise action of killing their children. The last newborn baby, killed by her mother, should have been put in a washing machine after being choked, but the similitude with Loretta Zen’s case where, on the contrary, her daughter had done a real cycle of washing, is very superficial.

Translated from “Il Virus Intelligente” by Enrica Narducci

To be continued in:

4) Murderous Mothers Fourth Part

5) Murderous Mothers Fifth Part

6) Murderous mothers Sixth Part

See also:

1) Murderous Mothers First Part

3) Murderous Mothers Second Part