To the Bridge

by Nancy Rommelmann

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.

Those who commit neonaticide tend to be young, in their teens or early twenties. It is nearly always the birth mother who does 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 dumpster, in a coffee can under the sink—and carries on as though nothing has happened.

While newborns comprise 33 percent of all victims of filicide, the true number of neonates can never be known. We cannot account for the murder of a human we do not know exists.

Infanticide accounts for another 14 percent of murders. While these youngest children still tend to be killed by their mothers, fathers are gaining, with 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.

58 percent of killers said the child’s crying precipitated the murder.

mothers tend to kill with 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.

figuratively put the child back in the womb,

Victims of filicide are four years old on average. Boys are killed very slightly more often than girls. The average age of a filicidal parent is thirty-one. All races and nationalities kill their children. Ideology can play a part.

China’s one-child policy, which ended in 2016,

In New Zealand, the law covers a murder of a child up to the age of ten. These exceptions are made only for mothers, not fathers.

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...

the fact that she has to live with what she has done and live childless and so forth, that’s the tragedy in its own right.”

“There have to be reasons. Just a normal person doesn’t walk down the street and start wanting to kill people,” he said. “One of the things that happens when I start working with a client, and the things we do with a jury, is called humanizing. We show them it’s not just this monster. You’ve got to start showing how they were raised, the problems that came up, if they had fetal alcohol syndrome. It’s sure not their fault if their mother was drinking John Barleycorn while they were in the womb. That doesn’t excuse them; that doesn’t get them off. That doesn’t send them home.”

When I was Trinity’s age, my father told me something, a realization he had come to when he became a father. He said, “I could have taught you and your brother that ‘yellow’ was called ‘red’ and you would have believed me.”

My father told me this story more than once, not because he wanted lauding for not having tricked little children, but as an example of how power might be misused.

Power was being misused today. Randy Leonard had, if unintentionally, dissembled about hearing a 911 tape when asking for votes for the boat. Jason spoke of how tragedy brought the family together when the families had never been further apart. And he spoke of how full of joy his daughter was as we watched Trinity look as mis...

When she told the crowd, “my whole entire family is here to come onto the boat,” she might have expected this to be the case. Or maybe this part of the entire family had been scrubbed from her mind; we could not know. Those in attendance may not have noticed that when Trinity saw her mother’s family she stopped crying. It was at this moment that Keli told Jackie Dreiling, a woman to whom she had never spoken or been acquainted, “Leave.”

“This may sound corny and optimistic (because it is), but there will be enough people suggesting to this girl that she is broken and doomed to a lifetime of victimhood and therapy. I hope instead she rages!”

“We go through life mishearing and mis-seeing and misunderstanding so that the stories we tell ourselves will add up. Trial lawyers push this human tendency to a higher level. They are playing for higher stakes than we are playing for when we tinker with actuality in order to transform the tale told by an idiot into an orderly, self-serving narrative.” —Janet Malcolm, Iphigenia in Forest Hills