Murderous Mothers Fourth Part

Puerperal psychosis

• ” It has fallen down, it has fallen down!” Giusy, the mother from Bergamo accused of having thrown her six-month-old child from a window

• ” I didn’t intend to hurt my child, I only tried to make her stop crying,I picked her up into my arm, I shook her a bit and in fact she stopped.”Anna Dolce from Novara arrested with the charge of having beaten her daughter causing her mortal lesions.

• “She didn’t feel well, they didn’t understand “ Silvio Andreola, the mayor of Santa Caterina di Valfurva where Loretta Zen lived, referring to the latter.

• “I’m sorry I can’t say anything, I received precise instructions”. The specialist of the Psycho-Social Centre of Bornio where the woman was cured.

• “Puerperal psychosis”,Giovanni Battista Cassano with regard to the last case of a newborn baby probably killed and put in a washing machine, that followwed Loretta Zen’s after few days.

• ” Undoubtedly this is a suggestive effect of contagion, of emulation[1].It happened many times in the past: we have lived the time of newborn babies left in rubbish bins, babies thrown down from a window, but also stones thrown from an overpass”. Giovanni Battista Cassano, with regard to the same case.

• She was very depressed, she couldn’t stand , alone, the great responsability that was fallen on her shoulders” Mai Xiong, Khoua Her’s friend,

Khoua Her

the mother of Loatian origin who, after being abandoned by her husband in extreme poverty, strangled, one after the other, her six children in the American town of Saint Paul (Minnesota).

Khoua-her-victims

• “A tragedy of despair in USA”. Il Messaggero[2], with regard to the same case.

• ” No alarmisms, but better treatments” Livia Pomodoro, the Chief Judge of the Juvenile Court of Milan, with regard to the father, with psychic problems, who killed his son of six years of age while sleeping, trying, in a very soft way[3], to commit suicide[4].

• ” She didn’t feel well, nobody understood and could help her” Maria Rita Parsi, a psychotherapist, with regard to Olga Cerise, the woman from Aosta who drowned her two children.

• ” I don’t hate my children, but my family doesn’t understand me” Olga Cerise, in a letter sent to her relatives where she expressed her intention to commit suicide together with her children.

• It’s evident the disproportion between the wrong suffered and the reaction adopted. It’s evident the lack of inhibitory impulses, and not even the family ties could contain the inquired’s personality” Fabrizio Gandini, the investigating magistrate of Aosta who signed the order of preventive detection in jail for Olga Cerise.

• “The mother from Aosta didn’t want to kill her children, but wanted to commit suicide with them because she suffered and those who were around her couldn’t understand her” Maria Rita Parsi, a Psychotherapist, always with regard to Olga Cerise.

• ” I killed them because I didn’t want to go back home”[5] The mother from Aosta

• ” I’m the victim of an injustice. I want to start again and have a child soon” Paola Mantovani, at the door of her house with her husband, just after being released from house arrest at some relatives, where she had been imprisoned for nine months on the charge of having killed her autistic son of 14 years of age[6].

Loretta Zen’s crime, who drowned her-eight-month-old daughter with a short cycle of washing in a washing machine, stroke public opinion for its apparent exceptionality. And yet in 1996 and in 2001 in Italy there had already been two newborn babies killed in a washing machine and in Detroit in 1987 and in China in1991 a girl and a boy had been killed with the same system. In Detroit a washing machine had been the punishment inflicted by a twenty-six-year-old mother on her daughter of three years of age for getting herself wet. In China the mother, actually, was innocent since her responsability had been to have said to the baby-sitter of sixteen years of age: ” After the laundry wash the child,too”. The girl had literally considered these words and together with the dirty clothes she had slipped also the child into the washing machine.

 [1] More than emulation we prefer telling about culture of the murderous mother meaning, with this concept, some innate tendencies which exist in the population and at the slightest stimulus they turn into the precise action of killing their own children. The last newborn baby killed by her mother would be put in a washing machine after being choked, therefore the similitude with the case of Loretta Zen whose daughter, on the contrary, had made a real cycle of washing, is very superficial.

Medea

[2] A Roman Daily

[3] By swallowing some ammonia,

[4] Eugenio Podio 44 years old, many admissions to the Mental Health Centre of the General Hospital of Milan, a difficult relationship with the child’s mother, soon after the homicide he put about eighty holy pictures of hinduist religion all around the corpse and waited for the following morning to inform his cousin, a doctor, about the event.

[5] A Title of the “Corriere della Sera” of 28^th June 2002.

[6] The woman, together with her husband, announced legal consequences and went on accusing of the event a gang of Slavs who would have broken into her house to burgle it.

Translated from “Il Virus Intelligente” by Enrica Narducci

To be continued in:

5) Murderous Mothers Fifth Part

6) Murderous mothers Sixth Part

See also:

1) Murderous Mothers First Part

2) Murderous Mothers Second Part

3) Murderous Mothers Third Part