News Media Ignores Cluster of Murderous Moms

You did not heard about it, but America has been recently subjected to a stunning cluster of murderous mothers. I’m not talking about killers like Susan Smith, who in 1994 blamed a black man for kidnapping her children when she in fact drowned them in a lake. Nor am I talking about Deanna Laney, whose Bible told her to smash her three sons’ skulls with rocks in 2003, killing two of them and leaving the third with severe brain damage; nor Dena Schlosser of Plano, Texas, who cut the arms off of her eleven-month-old girl as she listened to religious hymns last November.

No, I’m talking about horrific tales about brutal abuse by mothers just in the last few weeks. Consider the following cases:

• February 2, 2005: Christine Bednar, 25, hid her pregnancy and killed her newborn baby by smothering it in sweatpants and hiding it under a sink.

• February 4, 2005: Nathshay Ward, 33, starved her three children (ages 9, 10 and 11) to death; police found the bodies several days later.

• February 7, 2005: Lynn Giovanni, 45, of New Jersey, used a hammer and shovel to bludgeon her 14-year-old daughter to death as the girl slept.

• February 9, 2005: Beverly Joy Bacon, 32, a Portland (Oregon) woman, killed her newborn baby girl by abandoning it and leaving it to starve to death.

• February 10, 2005: Minneapolis mother Sheila Palma Williams, 23, beat her three month old baby Erik to death. Williams reportedly admitted that she had slapped, punched and choked the child before throwing him against the wall and placing her hand over his mouth.

• February 11, 2005: Donna Marie Norman, 19, and her boyfriend Ivan Castaneda, are charged with severely abusing her 6-month-old daughter. The baby had been sexually abused, had two fractured legs, a fractured arm, a fractured skull, a fractured vertebrae and a healing rib fracture. The infant's tongue had been sliced down the middle. Police say that Norman either participated in or knew of the abuse and did not protect her baby.

• February 11, 2005: A woman claims to have seen a newborn thrown from a moving car. A national outcry followed, but the report turned out to have been made up; the woman, Patricia Pokriots, 38, just wanted to get rid of the child, fearing she would harm it.

• February 11, 2005 : Dover resident Mallory McLaughlin, 25, allowed her son Josiah to drown in a bathtub while she took drugs. She has been charged with murder by neglect.

• February 13, 2005: Tonya Neihart, a 32-year-old mother, drowned her six-year-old daughter, Alexa, in a bathtub in her Dover, New Hampshire home.

• February 17, 2005: A woman tried to kill herself and her six-year-old daughter by jumping off a bridge in Akron, Ohio. Shea Harris, 23, tried to jump from the All-America Bridge with her daughter but both were rescued.

• February 22, 2005: New Jersey woman Alice O'Donnell gave her 6-year-old son Phillip a drug overdose and smothered the child with a pillow.

That’s a dozen children killed or nearly killed by their mothers in the first three weeks of February alone. There may be even more; that’s all I found in a cursory news search of headlines.

A few years ago I had a discussion with sociologist Barry Glassner, author of the excellent book The Culture of Fear, and one of the topics that came up was the news media’s tendency to link media stories that may or may not be related. Journalists will, for example, often refer to a series of unrelated and random tragedies as a “rash” or “cluster.” There is no doubt that rashes and clusters do occur, particularly in the case of copycat crimes and suicides (see Loren Coleman’s book The Copycat Effect for a good discussion). But the human tendency to infer patterns where none exist is strong, and magnified by a news culture that values sensationalism more than accuracy. One killing is a tragedy, but if it can be (actually or artificially) linked to other murders and framed as a cluster, that’s a ratings boon.

The topics change with the times. For a while, it was suicides. Then it was school shootings. Then it was workplace shootings. Then it was workplace shootings again, specifically postal service workers. Then it was road rage incidents. I discuss this trend in my book Media Mythmakers:

Even the PBS series Frontline, usually a bastion of level-headedness, jumped on the hysteria bandwagon with its January 18, 2000, profile of teen killer Kip Kinkel titled “The Killer at Thurston High.” Frontline correspondent Peter J. Boyer gave in to hyperbole with material like, “Schoolyard shootings. A violent choreography that in the course of a school year became stunningly commonplace. In homes across America, there was an awakening to a most unwelcome thought: Our schools are not the safe havens we had come to assume them to be.…What would you find if you opened the door into a young life that had produced an unspeakable horror?” Despite Boyer’s breathless prose, statistically schoolyard shootings were—and are—anything but “stunningly commonplace.”

I’m not suggesting that the series of murderous mothers listed above were ignored by the news media; I’m saying that they have not been given the standard, alarmist “crisis cluster” treatment one might expect. The interesting question to me is why the news media have yet to identify and publicize this obvious rash of killings. I think there are several reasons, but perhaps the most salient is that it goes against the grain of many media scripts. One horrific news story is shocking enough: a mother is supposed to protect her children, not torture and kill them. But highlighting these isolated and unconnected incidents might show that they are not as rare as we might like to believe. And that may not be a stone that journalists are interested in turning over.

As we can see, the phenomena of clusters is in many ways an artificial one created and perpetuated by the news media. The facts are right there. Are we truly in the midst of an epidemic of hideous abuse by murderous mothers? Or is this just an unusually bloody snapshot of randomly-distributed killings? Or is this pattern actually a sign that mothers abuse and kill their children more often than most people realize? You’ll have to decide for yourself; the news media won’t tell you.