Parricide, the murder of a parent—or the more specific patricide for the murder of one’s father, and matricide for the murder of one’s mother—are ugly words for ugly acts.
Until recently, parricide was an almost unheard of crime, deserving of prominent mention only in Greek mythology, where the tale of hotheaded Oedipus’s unwitting murder of his father and marriage to his mother provided the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, with a name for a favorite complex.
In real-life America, the most notorious accused parent killer in criminal history is Lizzie Borden, the Fall River, Massachusetts, spinster who was charged with using an axe to chop to death her father and stepmother on a stifling hot August day in 1892. Although Lizzie was exonerated following a sensational jury trial, today, a century after the dreadful double murder, crime historians still disagree about the identity of the axe murderer. Lizzie’s older sister, Emma; a housemaid; and a mysterious tramp have all at one time had a finger pointed at them as the possible killer. But many, perhaps most crime buffs who have studied the case, are convinced that Lizzie did, indeed, murder her parents.
What could have led the thirty-two-year-old Lizzie to commit the horrendous act? Suggested motives have
run the gamut from her admitted jealousy and dislike for her stepmother, to her father’s miserly ways and threats to disinherit her, to a quarrel over her embarrassing spinsterhood, to premenstrual syndrome, and a torrid lesbian love affair.
Whatever the motive, and whoever the real killer may have been, the grisly double murder that shattered the peace of Fall River a century ago has become a dark piece of American folklore. And the one-time local mainstay of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and devoted churchgoer, even has her own Lizzie Borden display in Fall River’s Historical Society Museum. She is indisputably the town’s most famous citizen.
One of the reasons that the Lizzie Borden case attracted so much attention a hundred years ago was because parricide was such a rare crime. It wasn’t that savage, brutal murder was unknown in the United States then, but the killing of one’s parent or parents was almost unthinkable.
Unfortunately that is no longer true. Today parricide is no longer a rare crime, and it’s unlikely that accused killers of parents will be remembered with historical displays in their hometowns. Parricide is spreading like an out-of-control virus. Parents are being murdered by their progeny in alarming numbers over such seemingly trivial factors as disagreements over domestic chores, boyfriends and girlfriends, other dating restrictions, curfews, spending money, and driving privileges.
In Colorado, a fourteen-year-old boy beat his hardworking single mother to death with a barbell after she refused to buy him a waterbed. A ten-year-old boy in Houston, Texas, picked Mother’s Day to shoot his father to death and fire four shots into his mother because she wouldn’t let him play outside. In Wolcott, Kansas, a hulking 310-pound high school honors student calmly shot his father, mother, and sister to death. Then he
explained to authorities that he was practicing to become a professional hit man in Chicago.
These are simple, obvious motives and explanations most quickly and easily discernible to investigators and shocked relatives, neighbors, and friends. But they don’t always tell the entire story.
The underlying motivations are sometimes complex and evasive. And a child whom it seems suddenly and inexplicably erupts into a rage and bludgeons his mother to death because she won’t buy him a waterbed, has likely been nursing other more deep-seated resentments for months or years. Law enforcement authorities, sociologists, and mental health professionals agree on some of the underlying causes, and disagree on others. The family background, emotional history, and intelligence of each child who kills a parent is different. And parricide is a crime, as well, that spans both racial and socioeconomic lines.
In my own research I have found that most children who commit parricide fit into one of five major categories:
• Children who have been exposed to sexual, physical or emotional abuse and violence in the household. Most often when violence occurs it is directed from the father toward the mother and the children. But in some households everyone fights. It is a short step for a child who grows up surrounded by violence and abuse, to perceive violence to be a proper way to deal with problems.
• Sociopaths. Sometimes children, those from privileged families as well as the underprivileged, simply seem to grow up without a conscience. They are cold, uncaring, and have a total disregard for the needs, rights, and welfare of other people. It is a term that no one likes to use, but it seems that some children are simply “bad seed.” They are born to evil. In Colorado a teenager was charged by authorities with enlisting
three friends in a bizarre plot to murder her mother, after a mechanic tipped off the woman that someone was trying to kill her. The three girls and a boy were accused of lacing the woman’s coffee with nicotine, sabotaging her car in an effort to blow it up, and scheming to strangle her or beat her to death with a hammer. A sheriffs detective said that the nineteen-year-old simply didn’t like her mother. And in perhaps the nation’s most horrific case of parricide, Jack Gilbert Graham hid a bomb in his mother’s luggage to blow up an airliner shortly after it left Denver. Graham’s mother and forty-three other innocent people were killed as part of the depraved insurance scheme. The bomber was executed.
• The mentally ill. This can but need not include those who have deliberately burned their brains with LSD and PCP or softened their minds with other damaging drugs. Sometimes it is a combination of both. The mentally unstable turn to drugs, which complicate already severe problems and send them off into a terrifyingly capricious world of delusions, paranoia, and violence. They may hallucinate or hear disembodied voices that command them to kill.
One of the more notorious cases that fits into this category drew wide attention from the press because the killer was the son of then President Ronald Reagan’s personal attorney, Roy Miller. Michael Miller was described by his own defense psychiatrist as one of the “most severely mentally ill individuals I have had the opportunity to examine,” after the tragic twenty-two-year-old beat his fifty-two-year-old mother, Marguerite, to death with a club. Miller was convicted of first-degree murder, but the judge ruled that he was insane at the time of the crime and committed him to a state psychiatric hospital in California. Young Miller was declared not guilty of raping the victim, who was found nude and bludgeoned in
the master bedroom of the family’s exclusive Palos Verdes Estates home in March 1983.
• Children who have become dangerously involved in devil worship, blood cults, or obsessed with certain heavy metal music sometimes described as Satanic rock. Promises of power, sex, and freedom can be strong lures to impressionable adolescents who are drawn to the mysterious rituals of Satanism and other blood cults. The degree to which these desires may be supported and nourished by the arcane metaphors and symbolism of the lyrics and music of some heavy metal—or by the popular intellectual fantasy game Dungeons & Dragons—is controversial. But there is no question that police have found quotes from rock lyrics referring to Satan, blood, and human sacrifice in diaries or other journals kept by certain young parricides. And some ritual killers have talked openly to police and to psychiatrists of messages from Satan in heavy metal or punk rock lyrics. Even before the advent of heavy metal, Charlie Manson and his freaky family of flower children were convinced that the Beatles had hidden secret messages in some of their lyrics.
• Children who kill for greed. In most instances these parricides, like Jack Graham, are adults or are near enough to adulthood to qualify for inheriting the estates of their parents with few strings attached. Some of the more notorious cases, which have been chronicled elsewhere, include those of New York socialite Frances Schreuder, who dispatched her son to murder her father, a multimillionaire and hardworking auto parts dealer in Utah; Steven Wayne Benson, who blew up his wealthy tobacco-heiress mother and her adopted son with a pipe bomb in Florida; and Cynthia Campbell Ray, who conspired with a former lover to kill her lawyer father and her mother in Houston.
Incredible as it may seem, children convicted of killing parents sometimes walk out of mental hospitals or prisons after a few months or years and inherit the estates of the victims. In Indiana, survivors reacted with outrage when an appeals court ruled that a Greenwood man who shot his parents to death when he was nineteen was entitled to his inheritance from them, as well as a share of a life insurance policy on his mother.
There was similar public reaction in Wisconsin when a teenager who stabbed, slashed, and shot to death his foster parents and foster brother in their rural Mineral Point home when he was fourteen filed claim for their near $400,000 estates. The claim was filed a month before his scheduled release from a boys’ school when he reached the age of nineteen, in accordance with the juvenile court statutes he was sentenced under. And in California, a sixteen-year-old boy who stabbed his mother and sister to death, theqn burned down the family home to hide the grisly crime, was freed after five years and paid $21,500 in Social Security benefits because he was an orphan. Another fourteen-year-old California boy who fatally blasted his father with a shotgun, was freed after four years in custody and collected $8000 in Social Security survivors pay.
Most states now allow minors to be tried as adults on charges of murder, but obtaining convictions can be difficult. Juvenile killers know how to take advantage of their innocent appearance, and prosecutors can have trouble convincing a jury of adults that a sobbing or frightened boy or girl willingly committed such a horrible crime as parricide. Dead parents can be accused of physical or sexual abuse, or of dreadful emotional bullying, and there is no way they can be called on to refute the testimony.
Even when convictions are obtained, judges can sometimes be reluctant to sentence teenagers or preteens to adult prisons, where they can face terrible sexual abuse or at the very least spend their time sharpening
their criminal expertise in anticipation of an early release.
One of the alternatives is dealing with the child through the juvenile system of the individual states. But murder, especially the murder of one’s parent, is a horrendous crime that in most instances justifies severe punishment. And punishment is a valid response by society to violent crime, even when the offender is not yet an adult. But punishment available through juvenile court action is severely restricted in every state, and less than five years in a boys school—the punishment for the rural Wisconsin youth—hardly seems adequate for the cold-blooded slaughter of three family members.
A recent study indicated that the average time served by youngsters sent to California Youth Authority lockups for first degree murder was less than four years. Not only law and order hardliners, but others who are concerned about the rising tide of violence, question if less than four years of CYA supervision for murder is proper punishment to fit the crime.
There’s no question that the best course in dealing with the shocking increase in parricide and other family violence is identifying causes and attempting to prevent the crime from occurring. Sociologists are quick to point to the breakup of traditional families, single parent households, latch-key children, and the lack of affection and participation by parents in the lives of their youngsters, as contributing causes to violence. But it appears highly unlikely that any major changes in the situation are about to occur soon. And it is not only the United States that must deal with the breakdown of traditional family structure and violent behavior.
A lack of affection and emotional support by the parents of a fourteen-year-old boy was blamed in Japan, where murder is almost unknown compared to the United States, when he exploded in an orgy of violence, killing his mother, father, and grandmother. After the massacre, the teenager’s mother was widely condemned
in the national press for being a kyoiku mama, an education-obsessed parent who was so intent on getting her son into the proper schools that she constantly badgered him to study for tests. She reputedly never eased up on the boy for a moment. The press criticized his father for being a classic Japanese workaholic husband, who devoted so many hours to his job and to socializing with clients and business associates that he had no time for his son. One night after both his mother and father scolded him for not studying harder, he stormed into their bedroom with a kitchen knife and a baseball bat and bludgeoned and stabbed them to death. Then he killed his grandmother, the one family member who had actively provided affection and emotional support, because she witnessed the crime.
The tragedy set off a round of self-criticism and examination in Japan, with the nation’s newspapers, educators, and business leaders questioning the trend in their society to focus too strongly on their children’s intellectual and career abilities, while neglecting their emotional growth.
The press and other self-appointed experts had clearly decided that it was the parents’ own fault that they were murdered by the son whose professional future they were so diligently attempting to turn toward success. It was portrayed simply as a case of good intentions gone terribly awry. The young multiple-killer was treated as the victim.
Perhaps he was. But the parents were also victims, and so was the grandmother. Whatever the motives and the underlying causes of the parricide in Japan, and those that are occurring with disturbing regularity in the United States, they are difficult to isolate. And even when they are known, the question remains: How can the information be used to stem or slow down a continuation of the family tragedies?
Answers won’t come easy, either in Japan or in the United States. Concerted efforts to find solutions must
nevertheless be pursued by professionals in criminology, corrections, sociology, mental health, and other concerned methodologies.
Last year more than one million violent assaults by children against their parents were recorded by police agencies in the United States. An alarming number of the assaults were fatal.
Clifford L. Linedecker
Lantana, Florida