To the Bridge

by Nancy Rommelmann

After sitting for a somewhat longer period of reflection, the poet Mary Szybist wrote “So and So Descending from the Bridge” about Amanda and the children. The poem appeared in her collection Incarnadine, which won the 2013 National Book Award for Poetry.

During the years I looked into Amanda’s story, I sometimes thought of her half smile in court and wondered how deliberate the expression had been, how much control she had over

keeping her face just so. I read the John Cheever story “The Country Husband” and came across the sentence, “Her head was bent and her face was set in that empty half smile behind which the whipped soul is suspended.” I wondered whether Amanda’s soul was whipped or if she were sly, and also, whether looking into the murder of a child by its mother was like staring

into a prism in your hand: the more you turned it, the more possibilities beamed back, anguish, rage, comprehension, and untruths refracting—whateve...

Sabrina did not see Amanda as strange. She saw her as a broken person, someone who did not believe anybody loved her; someone who threw everything she loved off the bridge in order to punish herself, to punish her soon-to-be ex-husband, to punish life.

An estimated five hundred children are killed by their parents each year in the United States, according to homicide data compiled by the Federal Bureau of

Investigation. This number has been static for decades. It is also unreliable and certainly low. The picture of parents killing their children is anathema to most people and makes us susceptible to seeing even the suspicious death of a child explained away: the infant died in her sleep, the child struck his head falling off the coffee table, and who are you to say it did not

happen this way? Unless a filicide, the killing of a child by a parent or stepparent, is committed in public, we may not hear about it at all, the circumstances of anonymous people killing their kids too tawdry, too sad, too somehow private to report on. The news you read this week is unlikely t...

at least ten. The murdered children of the last week of June 2017 included a six-month-old in Fresno (June 23); a two-month-old in Hanford, CA (June 23); a two-year-old in Houston (June 24); a one-month-old in Terra Bella, CA (June 24); a two-month-old in Valdosta, GA (June 24); a fou...

Paron, AR (June 28); a three-year-old in Rancho Cordova, CA (June 28); and a three-year-old in Chandler, AZ (June 30). Taking this in requires some measure of calm and, lest we immediately be laid low, logic. Here we hesitate, since there is nothing innately logical about childr...

emotion, conjuring images of stringing up the killers or intervening in the dead children’s lives, maybe putting your arms around them and telling them how sorry you are for what they went through. This does nothing for them. It does not affect the fate of any other ch...

But I do not look away, because there is logic here—twisted logic, to be sure, but in the eyes of the perpetrators, logic nonetheless.

We know this because they killed their children. At some point, whether a year prior or a minute before, these parents looked at what they perceived to be their options and decided their children would be better off dead. Filicide is divided into three classifications: neonaticide, for children killed within the first twenty-four hours of birth; infanticide,

children killed during their first year of life; and filicide, a child from age one to any age. Younger children are killed most often, with 70 percent of filicide victims younger than six years old. Each category of filicidal parent displays certain patterns. Those who commit neonaticide tend to be young...

the killing. Often, she has hidden the pregnancy or claims to be unaware she was pregnant. She gives birth in secret, usually at home. She usually kills the child immediately. Neonates are often smothered or strangled; sometimes they are drowned. The mother then hides the body—in a du...

happ...

newborns comprise 33 percent of all victims of filicide,

Infanticide accounts for another 14 percent of murders.

the overall percentage of filicidal parents evenly split between the sexes. This seems like a remarkable number in a country where men commit nearly 90 percent of all violent crime, until you take into account that young

children are primarily cared for by their mothers. The idea that an infant can abet his or her own murder is ludicrous; nonetheless, in one study 58 percent of killers said the child’s crying precipitated the murder.

According to Why Mothers Kill by Geoffrey R. McKee, mother...

hands-on methods: children are smothered in their beds, drowned in the bathtub, their bodies sometimes swaddled and hidden inside or close to the home. These methods can be seen as a way for the mother to figuratively put the child back in the womb, though it is also the case that m...

Men also engage in higher rates of assault; children are beaten or thrown or stabbed, their bodies disposed of far from where they lived, in some cases driven hundreds of miles. Victims of filicide are four years old on average.

The average age of a filicidal parent is thirty-one. All races and nationalities kill their children. Ideology can play a part.

In 1969, Dr. Philip Resnick developed five categories of motives to explain why mothers kill their children. In altruistic filicide, a suicidal mother feels it will be too cruel to leave the child in the world without her,

or she feels the child has a disability, real or imagined, that will make the child’s life intolerable moving forward. Acutely psychotic filicide is the result of a psychosis: the mother kills the child with no rational motive. Unwanted child filicide, while most often involving neonaticide, can also include the murder of a child who is seen as a burden. Accidental filicide occurs

when a child is unintentionally killed as a result of abuse; these include deaths as the result of ...

Most rare, according to Resnick, is spouse revenge filicide, wherein the

child is killed to punish a partner. That Resnick classified 49 percent of the maternal filicides he studied as altruistic reflects the belief that parents, mothers especially, are hardwired to protect the child. Seen this way, her actions are an extension of motherly love,

The laws in a number of countries support this belief.

Though the United States has no such law, our bias toward mothers is clear in the ways we punish filicidal parents. Resnick found that mothers were sent to mental institutions 68 percent of the time and to prison 27 percent of the time, whereas fathers went to prison 72 percent of the time and to hospitals 14 percent. “We still view children as the mother’s property,”

wrote Dahlia Lithwick in a 2002 Slate article about filicidal parents. “Since destroying one’s own property is considered crazy while destroying someone else’s property is criminal, women who murder their own children are sent to hospitals, whereas their husbands are criminals who go to jail.” A default determination of “crazy” can feel like security, a fence between mothers

who kill their children and the...

But it also removes a person’s will from ...

Medea, who after murdering her two children to punish Jason’s infidelity flies away in a golden chariot driven by dragons, and does so without remorse. Her rational choice to sacrifice her children has made Medea one of the great pariahs of literature. If we have no trouble seeing her act as one of unmitigated revenge, we have a harder time ascribing the same intention to real

filicides. Mothers who mean to commit suicide after killing their children rarely succeed, scholars argue, because they have already killed what is most important to them. Their suicide, in other words, becomes redundant. Five decades after Resnick’s seminal work, the motives for filicide have grown to eleven, to seventeen, depending on

current perceptions and psychological diagnoses. A 2012 study of fatal child abuse, for instance, found that perpetrators in more than 90 percent of filicide...

that 38 percent abused alcohol; and that 46 percent were perpetrators or victi...

Risk factors for those who kill their children include social isolation, mental illness, a pattern of unemployment or underemployment, and psychological stresses, such as financial hardship, housing problems, marital difficulties, and a lack of...

are

all factors that can move a mother closer to ki...

I did not see a paradox in wanting to understand why Amanda had killed yet condemning Helen’s killer to death. I thought people had the right to as many views as the human heart could summon.

Amanda had seemed unmoored in court. Had anyone allowed her to express her grief? Were mothers who killed their children allowed to grieve? Did their culpability render it grief qua grief, and if so, how did they go on?

what Andrea Yates did was exceedingly rare, so rare that she landed in the national consciousness and stayed there. We would struggle to understand how she could commit an act so horrific. We would learn her mind had been struggling for a long time, about her firm diagnosis of postpartum psychosis,

of depression that had rendered her catatonic, of her multiple suicide attempts and hospitalizations in the years before she killed her children. We would learn that she was deeply religious and believed her children were not developing correctly according to God’s law. “My children were not righteous. I let them stumble. They were doomed

to perish in the fires of hell,” Yates told a prison psychiatrist the ...

in 2002, a jury judged Yates responsible for her actions and sentenced her to life in prison. Dr. Phillip Resnick, sometimes referred to as the

father of maternal filicide, disagreed. On a 2013 CNN program, “Crimes of the Century: Andrea Yates,” he spoke of what Yates told him during an interview a month after she killed her children. “She believed that one son would become a serial killer. One son was going to become a mute homosexual prostitute, and she had these fantastic beliefs that

each of her children was going to end up in some evil way and would literally go to hell,” he said. “She did not show remorse. She did not show regret. She believed that she had arranged for her children to go to heaven.” He went on: “I find her quite sympathetic. And not only do I...

live with what she has done and live childless and so forth, that’s the tragedy in its own right.” Resnick had advocated to have Yates’s sentence overturned, and in 2006, a second jury decided she was insane at the time of the killings, a decision that sent her from prison to a mental hos...