Published 2013 by Prometheus Books
Killer Dads: The Twisted Drives That Compel Fathers to Murder Their Own Kids. Copyright © 2013 by Mary Papenfuss. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Papenfuss, Mary.
Killer dads : the twisted drives that compel fathers to murder their own kids / by Mary Papenfuss.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61614-743-3 (pbk.)
ISBN 978-1-61614-744-0 (ebook)
1. Filicide—United States. 2. Children—Crimes against—United States. 3. Murder—United States. I. Title.
HV6542.P365 2013
364.152’3—dc23
2013007165
Printed in the United States of America
This book is dedicated to Clare, Susan, Charlie and Braden,
Laci and Conner, Betty, Stephanie and Catherine, and Jessica
. . . and to Roland, Leda, and Luke, who keep me warm through the sad times.
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1. Rage
Chapter 2. James Tells His Story
Chapter 3. Mug’s Game
Chapter 4. Homo Saps
Chapter 5. Possession
Chapter 6. Devastation
Chapter 7. Death by the Numbers
Chapter 8. Trail of Tears
Chapter 9. Control Freak
Chapter 10. What Susan Knew
Chapter 11. Gone
Chapter 12. This Modern Life
Chapter 13. Masked
Chapter 14. Clash
Chapter 15. Infidel
Chapter 16. What to Do
Notes
Bibliography
Index
It’s difficult to approach people and ask them to share the biggest tragedy of their lives with a complete stranger. It’s far harder to agree to do it. I’m tremendously grateful to family, friends, and acquaintances whose lives have been rocked by the killing of a child. This book would not exist without their steadfast loyalty to the memory of their dead, and the strength and courage to revisit a heart-wrenching horror to try to make some sense of it. Chuck and Judy Cox, Wendy Wasinski, Julieanne Malley, Marianne Quinn, Lucille Messina, James, Kayla Chuba, and Kaija Hartiala not only shared painful, detailed information but gave me a small glimpse into the profound, shattering impact of such horrific crimes on the people left behind. Bruce Montague helped tremendously by providing details about Bill Parente’s Ponzi scheme to help Parente’s financial victims, but also to aid an effort to attempt to understand a tragedy that deeply affected him. Jonathan Bachrach, Joanne Schulter, and Susan Deluca offered intriguing insights into the Parente family. Melissa Garret of the Baltimore County Police Department was particularly helpful with information in the Parente murder-suicide. I also thank the many investigators, big gruff guys whose hearts ache for child victims, who dodged official channels to talk to me and slip me information on several cases. I apologize for any oversights or mistakes. I hope in some small way this book pays tribute to family and friends’ willingness to share their pain, and to the memory of Clare Shelswell; Betty, Stephanie, and Catherine Parente; Susan, Charlie, and Braden Powell; Laci and Conner Peterson; and Jessica Mokdad, as well as all the other victims who died with far less notice or concern.
I’m also indebted to the research and perspectives of the scientists and activists who grapple with the issue of violence and child deaths at the hands of their parents. Work by Sarah Hrdy, Martin Daly (with Margo Wilson), Richard Gelles, and Neil Websdale offered fascinating platforms from which to view violence against children, and I appreciate their patience walking me through the issues and their insights. Thanks, too, to Michael Petit of the Every Child Matters Education Fund, and Amanda Parker of the AHA Foundation for their help and information, and for fighting the good fight.
Mark Mooney, now at ABC, was the New York Daily News national editor who assigned me to cover the Scott Peterson trial in California, which is where the idea for this book was born. As painful as that story was to cover, I’ll be forever grateful for that assignment. I was fueled throughout my endeavor by a supportive gang of pals and current and former colleagues willing to listen endlessly to my expositions on the problem of parents who kill their children and encourage me to keep churning through the work. It meant the world to me. You know who you are: Hannah, Mike, Elaine, Shaila and Madhav, Kipp, Patricia, Anna and Marcel, Adriana and Pablo, Livia, Linda H., Marilyn, Denise, Lisa and Lisa, Corinne, Deb and James, and even Lis, who said she’d have to read the book with her eyes closed.
Finally, I’m blessed with a family endlessly intrigued with my unusual interests. Leda kept me on my toes, Luke turned out to be a footnote meister, and Roland fortified me. This book is as much yours as mine, Rol.
The kids are frozen in time: The boy with the impossibly wide grin, the shy student, the little one, the clown, the girl with the pink bow in her hair, the girl with pigtails. They crowd together in their first-grade class photo. All but one are dead now, cut down by a semi-automatic rifle fired by suicidal gunman Adam Lanza in their classroom in Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut. As I finish writing this book, we’re still in the midst of the long, sad march of Connecticut funerals. One mom has talked of the “hole in her heart.” A father said he hoped the death of his adventurous, creative girl with the infectious laugh would inspire us to be better, more compassionate, people.
I’ve been steeped in stories of horrific murders for a year. I’ve become friends with a killer; I’ve spent the night in a hotel room where a man described by a chum as “straight as an arrow” bludgeoned and suffocated his family before cutting his own throat; I’ve chalked up hours in court listening to accounts of a man who shot his stepdaughter in the head; I’ve learned the history of a kinky father-in-law who took Peeping-Tom photos of his son’s wife, who vanished and is presumed dead somewhere in the desert ranges near Salt Lake City. As I drove home from my last interview, I learned of the Sandy Hook shootings on the car radio and was struck, again, by how unimaginably annihilating the human soul can be.
I’ve focused on child murders. Unlike the Sandy Hook victims, the children in this book were murdered by people they loved and people they thought loved them. And unlike the Sandy Hook victims, most of them died with little notice from the public, even though the toll from child abuse and neglect and h
omicide across the nation claims each week at least the same number of victims as the school shootings.
The toll is obvious in news reports. In the office where I write, I have a bulletin board of some of the victims’ faces. One of them, a photo of four-year-old Emma Thompson, reminds me of my daughter at the same age. It’s the time when a young child is truly aware of the impact she can have on adults. In her snapshot, Emma mugs for the camera, full of herself in the particular way little girls can be, delighted. Her top lip is curled above her baby teeth in a giggling grin. She was killed that same year the photo was taken, 2009, in her home in Spring, Texas, north of Houston. She had been raped, her ribs broken, her skull fractured, her lips bloodied, and her face covered with bruises. Her mom’s live-in lover, Lukas Cole, was sentenced to life in prison for the attack. Emma’s mother, Abigail Young, was handed 20 years for failing to protect her daughter. Weeks before Emma was killed, a pediatrician discovered she had a sexually transmitted disease, but the local Child Protective Services office didn’t remove her from her home.
There aren’t many pictures of happy kids on my bulletin board. In their photos, Jonathan Ramsey and Osman Irias Salguero already have the eyes of world-weary 80-year-old men, as if they can sense the dirt pressing around their graves. Jonathan died at the age of ten in his home in Ellis County, Texas, starved to death by his dad, Aaron Ramsey, who withheld food to discipline him for acting up. Doctors discovered that Osman, two years old, had more than 86 bruises, fractures, and contusions when he was rushed to a Texas hospital in 2012 after an apparent beating in his Houston home. His dad, 21-year-old Osman Irias, was charged in the toddler’s death. Snapshots don’t exist in the worst cases of abused kids; no one has bothered posing them for photos until their autopsy pictures are taken.
Emma Thompson, Jonathan Ramsey, and Osman Irias Salguero are the largely forgotten names of a stream of victims of a battle within the homes of many American families. I’ve read about and covered stories of battered and murdered children for more than 20 years as a journalist, including several horrific cases at the New York Post and New York Daily News. One summer, both papers featured one story after another, each more heart wrenching than the last, of a child injury or death at the hands of a parent. The Village Voice pointed out that there was no unusual epidemic of child abuse that summer, even though the coverage made it appear so—only that it was a “slow news” time when fewer stories competed for coverage with the usual incidents of child abuse.
In 2005, I covered the northern California trial of Scott Peterson for the New York Daily News. Peterson killed his wife, Laci, who was eight months pregnant at the time, the day before Christmas or possibly the night before that, drove her body to the Berkeley Marina, then dumped her corpse offshore from his boat. He’s now on death row in San Quentin. The case riveted the public. A young, pretty, missing pregnant wife—her family desperately searching for her at Christmas—moved people at a time when they were profoundly connecting with their own loved ones over the holidays. I was struck by how annoyed many male reporters were at being assigned to cover the trial. They preferred stories with more “impact”—yearned instead to cover Congress or battles in the state legislature or a war. Though the Peterson case only dealt directly with a handful of people and the death of a lone mother-to-be, it stood as a particularly compelling example of domestic violence.
Some criticized the fact that Laci’s case, because it involved a white woman (of Portuguese ancestry) of upper-moderate means, drew media and public attention while other similar murders were ignored. San Franciscan Evelyn Hernandez was a 24-year-old Salvadoran immigrant and single mother who was nine months pregnant when she vanished with her six-year-old son the same year Laci disappeared, and her body also washed up in San Francisco Bay. African-American Lisa Eatmon, 33, of Brooklyn was also eight months pregnant when she went missing. She was shot in the head, and her body dumped in the Hudson River. Her corpse was found as Scott Peterson was about to go on trial. Her married lover and the father of her baby, New York City sanitation worker Roscoe Glinton II, 42, was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison for the murder (his first wife also vanished, and her death was ruled a homicide, but no one was ever charged in the crime). But as one of the three cases, Laci’s, drew attention, it led to coverage of the other killings. More typically, none of them would have drawn much notice.
If budget is a gauge, America’s biggest fear is terrorism and other foreign threats. The US military budget has increased from $300 billion in 2000 to some $750 billion in 2011, close to 20 percent of the federal budget,1 and the Department of Homeland Security commanded funds close to $46 billion in 2011.2 But the closest most of us will likely ever come to terrorism is dealing with long, inconvenient security lines at airports. Most of us, however, live in towns and cities where children are being hurt and terrorized—or have been killed—by an adult in their home. As many as 20,000 children have been killed at home in the last ten years, more than three times as many Americans killed in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.3 Such violence against society’s most vulnerable at the hands of adults they love and trust in the cradle of their home is particularly crushing. We should be striving mightily to protect these children. Yet we aren’t even discussing the problem. The battle over abortion rights rocked the 2012 presidential election, with a powerful political faction pushing for more life to be brought into the world, regardless of the desires of pregnant women. But there was little or no discussion of protection for or support of children once they morphed from unborn to born.
New studies in the wake of the 2008 recession have shown that economic stresses are boosting violence at home, which is already surprisingly high in America.4 Unlike during the Great Depression, when the public believed Wall Streeters were jumping from windows following economic ruin, the toll this time around could be more bruised, battered, and murdered children. A particularly disturbing development has been an increase in “familicides” by dads who kill everyone in their families, sometimes before committing suicide. The number of children killed has increased at least 10 percent in the last four years.5 Though they represent a small subset of child fatalities, the puzzling murders hold clues to the stresses families face and hint at the troubling potential for deadly violence.
It’s the particularly confounding cases that I’ve focused on in this book. Child abuse and murder by parents grappling with drug or alcohol abuse, mental problems, poverty, and rage is less puzzling than that by parents who appear to be caring, good providers who suddenly “snap” and abuse their children or murder them. Examinations of these “extreme” cases hold some of the most dramatic clues to dynamics within families and within men that can explode into violence. I’ve focused on child homicides, only some of which were preceded by abuse, and I’ve picked homicides by fathers because I believe their role in child killings has captured less media attention than deadly mothers.
I’ve chosen key cases based on “types” of fathers who kill, including a father who kills his stepdaughter, a suicidal family annihilator driven by apparent concern for his loved ones, a family annihilator driven by rage, the murder of a pregnant wife by a psychopath, and a killing in heartland America initially branded by law enforcement officials as an honor killing. I’ve also focused on studies and theories of family violence by experts, and possible strategies proposed by those battling to save children’s lives to stem the tide of violence at home. What activists fighting to protect kids from violence fear now is that the economic upheavals that may be triggering increased violence against children and fatalities are at the same time constricting budgets for social services, policing, and court supervision that could save lives.
It’s been a long year. I gathered the information in this book by interviewing more than 65 people and reaching out to scores of others. I’ve talked to friends, family, co-workers, neighbors, investigators, scammed clients, and experts who daily confront the face of child murder by parents. I’ve racked up trial hours, por
ed over news reports, police reports, court transcripts, and stats on international and US child abuse and homicides. I talked to one of the killers in depth, and we’re still e-mailing and phoning each other in a continuing relationship that has taken me by surprise. One of the victims—the wife of a suicidal husband who killed their two children—who is missing and presumed dead, has spoken to me from beyond the grave in a series of compelling e-mails that reveal her as a strong, articulate, intelligent woman who wanted desperately to save her marriage, but not at any cost. Throughout it all I’ve seen the little ghosts and grieved their lost faces, the lost years, and the lost promise of children who should not have died.
I’M A NORMAL GUY WHO MADE A BIG, BIG MISTAKE.
—James, 2012 phone interview with the author
James is a soft, hulking man with a boyish face who spends afternoons and evenings bent over a tiny seed-bead jewelry loom on a desk or on his metal frame bed at the state prison that’s his home for the next several decades. Beneath a bright, cold overhead light and the warmish glow of a tiny desk lamp on his wispy brown hair, the 31-year-old convict carefully threads minuscule pieces of colored glass or rainbow-hued plastic on a needle and line, meticulously adding bit by bit of red or gold, green and blue in intricate patterns to create bracelets and pendants in a ten-by-twelve-foot room behind electronic doors and a tiny window that he shares with his “cellie.” He uses beading patterns the convicts trade, or those he has gleaned from books, and he sometimes sketches his own patterns to re-create an arresting image he sees during the day, like the spiky yellows of the heavy dahlia heads that recently lined a row of one of the gardens in the sunny field where prison cattle used to graze. He has made a tiny American-flag pendant, an iris-patterned bracelet, and earrings using Native American designs provided by an inmate member of the Crow nation.
The intensive labor on the loom is James’s calm after a murderous storm, an emotional tsunami that seems now like a half-remembered dream. The beading quiets his mind. “I’m usually too fidgety to read,” he tells me in one of several phone conversations we’ve had about his crime and his life behind bars. “It focuses my brain and I’m calmer and can think about things.” Not everyone can do seed-beading in the prison, where crafts are a necessity for inmates killing endless years in stir. It takes keen eyesight, and dexterity not well suited to the many thick fingers in the prison. He’s worried about what he’ll do if he gets arthritis later on in his 55-year sentence. It runs in his family. James spends other hours picking up litter, sweeping the cement pathways outside, and cutting the grass on the prison field. In winter he shovels snow. It’s a cherry job at the prison because it affords several extra hours outdoors. He has to watch his back, though, because his particular work assignment is so coveted that other prisoners might tell lies about him to get him bounced off the detail so they can get it for themselves. As appealing as the job is, for months at a time, he usually works less than 20 hours a week, which still leaves long stretches of time to fill when remorse can suddenly fill James with dread. “I can’t shake this feeling of sadness,” he tells me.
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