On 4th December 1921, 43-year-old Beth was allowed home to her ecstatic husband and sons. Prematurely grey and somewhat depressed, she remained an inveterate worrier for the next 30 years.
Bert died when Beth was 71 and she married an old friend, but her mind began to unravel. When she tried to set fire to her underclothes, she was committed to a psychiatric hospital. She was frequently visited by her concerned relatives but soon she no longer recognised them. She died of a pulmonary embolism on 15 September 1957, aged 79, but her memory has been kept alive in her great-granddaughter Sian Busby’s beautifully-written book on the subject, The Cruel Mother, subtitled A Family Ghost Laid To Rest.
CHAPTER THREE
MENTAL BREAKDOWN
Though hormonal changes – and generalised stress – in the post-partum months are the most common cause of mental breakdown in mothers, a small percentage develop severe mental illness that isn’t necessarily associated with childbirth.
VIVIANE GAMOR
Originally an intelligent woman who was studying for a master’s degree, mother-of-two Viviane Gamor became delusional in 2003. The student, who lived in Hackney, East London, insisted that she had met various famous people and would talk at length about these fictitious relationships. She began to stare at strangers intently for no apparent reason. More chillingly, she shaved off the hair on one side of her baby daughter’s head.
Over the next two years, Viviane’s mental health deteriorated further and she changed her name by deed poll to Mother Nature Viviane and said that Jesus was her twin.
In early 2006, she was sectioned under the mental health act for threatening her half-sister with a knife. The father of her son and daughter, Gabriel Ogunkoya, took the bewildered children to live with his parents. They were also cared for by himself and his girlfriend. Yet, despite the crucial role he played in his children’s lives, the authorities didn’t tell Gabriel why his ex-partner had been sectioned or that she’d been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic.
UNSUPERVISED ACCESS
Viviane seemed to respond well to medication and after five weeks the authorities let her out. A condition of her release was that Hackney social services would oversee any contact that she had with her children. But staff shortages meant that the supervision only extended to the first visit, after which a social worker mandated that she should be allowed unsupervised access to Antoine and Keniece. The children’s father was so alarmed by this that he sought legal counsel, but the solicitor said that, if he kept them from their mother, he would be virtually kidnapping them and breaking the law. Gabriel was so concerned that he gave his 10-year-old son a mobile phone and told him to call at any time.
The 29-year-old’s first two unsupervised access visits in January 2007 with her children passed without incident – but, unknown to Hackney social services, she’d stopped taking her medication. On 24 January, she was seen by a psychiatrist who said that she had a positive outlook and did not pose any further risk. Two days later, during the children’s third overnight visit, she flew into a psychotic rage and began to beat 10-year-old Antoine with a hammer. Neighbours heard his agonised screams and called the police. They arrived at Viviane Gamor’s flat but by then she’d killed her son and had wrapped cling film around the face of her three-year-old daughter, Keniece, suffocating her to death. She told horrified police officers: ‘I don’t care. They’re not mine.’ She was sent to a psychiatric facility.
From the start, she freely admitted both murders and later pleaded guilty to manslaughter due to diminished responsibility. She appeared, flanked by psychiatric nurses, at The Old Bailey in June 2008 wearing a red leather jacket and a scarlet T-shirt, seemed indifferent to the proceedings and was detained indefinitely under the mental health act.
Afterwards, the grieving father said ‘I obeyed the law and let them go. I wish I had not done that. The system that I obeyed has frogmarched my children to their deaths. They assessed her and found nothing wrong. This is pure negligence which will not be tolerated.’
In August 2008, an inquiry concluded that mental health services should have taken more account of Viviane Gamor’s bizarre behaviour towards her children – but, surprisingly, it failed to identify a single decision which could have prevented their deaths. The children’s father, now 33, branded the inquiry a whitewash and said ‘My family and I feel totally let down. It is a system which has failed my children.’
DEANNA LANEY
A religious obsessive, Texas housewife Deanna Laney named her three sons after Biblical characters. As the years passed, her mania deepened until she believed that she was hearing messages from God. He told her to kill the boys and said that, if she resisted, they would meet a more unpleasant death. Reading her bible more obsessively than ever, she began to lose weight and would later say that she smelt sulphur and interpreted this as proof of the Devil. Over time, she saw signs that God wanted her to kill the boys with rocks, and she hid one away in her baby’s room.
On 11 May 2003, she put the three children to bed at 9pm before retiring for the night herself. But she awoke at 11pm and went to her 14-month-old, Aaron, who was asleep in his cot, fetched the rock and brought it down hard on his skull. He began to scream and her husband woke up and asked her what was wrong. Calling that everything was fine, she put a pillow over the baby’s face to muffle the noise. He was left partially blind and with permanent motor control disabilities as the result of this brutal attack.
A DOUBLE MURDER
Leaving little Aaron with severe injuries, she woke six-year-old Luke and told him to follow her into the garden. He did so. She ordered him to lie down with his head on top of one of the largest stones in the rockery. When he was supine, she picked up another rock and smashed it into his head: though he sustained massive injuries, the unfortunate child didn’t die right away. But, when he did expire, his mother was unconcerned as her god had promised that the little boy would be resurrected on his birthday in two months’ time. She dragged him into the shadows, where his brother wouldn’t see him, and put a large boulder on his chest.
The 39-year-old then fetched eight-year-old Joshua from his bed and led him to the garden where she brought another rock crashing down on his skull, fatally injuring him. Pulling him into the shadows to lie beside his brother, she put a large boulder on his chest.
Returning to the house, the devoted choir singer calmly phoned the operator and said that she’d killed her three boys. Detectives arrived to find the oldest two dead and the baby fighting for his life. When they asked her why she’d done it, she replied ‘I was told to do this by God.’ A week later she told a court appointed psychiatrist ‘I know that murder is illegal under man’s law, but I was answering to a higher authority.’
She repeated her religious arguments during her trial in May 2004, telling the jury ‘In our faith we believe the word of God. This word is infallible. I feel the Holy Spirit springs up within me when I speak of him.’ She said that she expected to become ‘God’s witness to the end of time.’ Her husband, who had promised to stand by her, broke down several times as jurors were told of his sons’ painful and frightening deaths.
The jury took seven hours to find her not guilty by reason of insanity and she was shipped off to a mental hospital indefinitely. Afterwards, her brother-in-law, a pastor, said that Deanna wasn’t responsible as she had been possessed by a demon at the time.
CHAPTER FOUR
BRAND NEW BOYFRIEND
Childfree organisations warn women not to have children if they aren’t prepared to end up as single parents: after all, even the most committed mother can lose her partner to death or divorce. Single mothers who find that they cannot cope tend to relinquish custody to the child’s father or to their own parents or, much more rarely, to the state.
But Susan Smith and Diane Downs rejected these options in favour of murdering their children and pretending that a stranger did it. This gave them the opportunity to reinvent themselves as free and single, something which their n
ew boyfriends desired.
Both women had difficult childhoods which included sexual abuse: they were left with borderline personalities in which they swung from the emotional state of ‘motherhood is everything’ to wanting their offspring permanently out of the way.
Borderline personalities can put on a wonderful act, in this case acting out the role of the perfect mother, but deep down they are completely self-absorbed and have very little to give to other adults, far less a needy child. They feel totally adrift as single parents and will do anything to attach themselves to a man and to keep him, even when he wants to leave. Chillingly, both Smith and Downs have expressed the desire to have further children – and, during a brief escape bid, Diane Downs did her utmost to become pregnant again.
SUSAN VAUGHAN SMITH
Susan was born in 1971 in the small town of Union, Southern Carolina. Her mother was a teenage bride and housewife, her father a mill worker and volunteer fireman.
Susan was their third child but their first daughter and was very close to her father. He taught her how to speak and how to read. But the couple divorced shortly before her seventh birthday and, a month later, he put his shotgun to his temple and committed suicide. (As a teenager, Susan would form intense attachments to men whom she regarded as father figures. But, when they couldn’t fulfil her many unmet needs from childhood, she would angrily end the relationship and go in search of another male.)
When Susan was seven, her mother married a man from a wealthy family called Bev Russell who was very active in the Christian Coalition. Susan’s mother, Linda, was also religious, a stalwart at the local Methodist church. Outwardly they were a respectable family, but by 13 Susan was so unhappy that she took an overdose of aspirin. When she recovered, she threw herself back into her school activities, joining numerous after school and leisure clubs.
When she was 15, Bev started coming into her room and night and fondling her. Out of her depth, Susan would pretend to be asleep. At 16, she told her school counsellor and Bev admitted the offence. The family went for counselling but the abuse wasn’t reported to the police. Susan continued to spend her evenings and weekends in frenetic activity as if by filling every waking moment she wouldn’t have time to think.
At 18, she started dating an older married man and was deliriously happy – but when he ended the affair, she took an overdose and spent several days in hospital. She again went into therapy.
At 19, Susan became pregnant by David Smith, a year her senior, who already had a fiancée. Susan was working as a checkout girl at the local supermarket and David was the assistant manager. The couple had a church wedding in March 1991 and their first son, Michael, arrived in October. Susan was a good mother though she worried constantly about money and was very jealous when David spoke to other women, sometimes hitting him and accusing him of cheating on her.
Two days after their first wedding anniversary, the couple split up but they later reconciled and created a second son, Alex. But, shortly after his birth in September 1993, they split up again. Susan no longer wanted David, but she hated to see anyone else with him and did everything that she could to break him and his girlfriend up. By now she was having full consensual sex with Bev, her stepfather, who was still married to her mother. She also had relationships with various other men in town.
A NEW START
In September 1994, Susan filed for divorce, though this was against David’s wishes. She took a secretarial job with a fabrics firm and began dating Tom Findlay, the boss’s son. She often left the children with friends whilst she went out to party, sometimes spending her evenings at a popular country and western club. But when Tom realised that she wanted a serious relationship he admitted that he didn’t want to settle down with someone who already had children. He wrote her a very complimentary farewell letter, telling her that she’d ‘make some man a great wife.’ He could have played her along, but instead decided to be honest – yet he’d be left with feelings of guilt over what happened next. For, instead of finding someone who was happy to join a readymade family, Susan decided to get rid of her existing one. If she was single, Tom – who was affluent and attractive – would hopefully want her again…
On the evening of Tuesday 25 October 1994, a week after the break-up, she drove 14-month-old Alex and three-year-old Michael to John D Long Lake. Parking on the bank, she got out of the car, took off the handbrake and watched the vehicle roll into the water and eventually sink out of sight. Racing to a nearby house, she begged them to contact the police, saying that she’d been carjacked at nearby traffic lights by a black man, and that he’d made her drive into the country at gunpoint, whereupon he’d taken control of her Mazda and driven away with both of her sons.
Police – aided by hundreds of concerned local people – mounted a huge search of the area, and photographs of the boys and descriptions of what they were wearing were broadcast on national television. Susan and David (who had no reason to doubt his wife’s version of events) made a televised plea for their safe return. Susan said ‘I have prayed that whoever has them, that the Lord will let him realize that they are missed and loved more than any other children in this world.’ After further religious sentiments she added ‘I just feel in my heart that you’re okay.’
For nine days, Susan stuck to her story whilst her son’s corpses decomposed in John D Long Lake – divers had searched parts of the lake but it was an enormous stretch of water and they failed to find the Mazda. She slept a lot, though she became upset when she had to take a lie detector test. David told her that, when they got the boys back, they would reconcile as a family and she replied that he and she could do so even if they didn’t get the boys back.
LIE DETECTOR
But the authorities were becoming increasingly aware that Susan’s story wasn’t adding up. She failed two polygraphs and, despite careful questioning, could give only the vaguest details of the supposed carjacker. Still she stuck to her story, telling reporters that ‘whoever did this is a sick and emotionally unstable person.’ After lots more religious rhetoric, she added that she had ‘put her faith in the Lord.’
Finally, Sheriff Howard Wells, who had been outwardly supportive, told her that her story didn’t add up. Why were three hours of her evening unaccounted for? Why was she allegedly driving to a friend’s house when she was carjacked, on a night when her friend was out? Why had no one else seen a black man acting suspiciously in this overwhelmingly-white community? He said that they were going to have to contact the media and tell them the truth.
At this stage, Susan broke down and asked if she could have his gun so that she could shoot herself. She confessed and showed detectives where the car had entered the water: they fished it, still containing the children strapped into their car seats, from the bottom of the lake. The toddlers’ faces were so bloated after nine days in the water that they had to have closed caskets and their distraught father was unable to kiss them goodbye. His mother, a Jehovah’s Witness, tried to console him by saying that he’d ‘see them again on Resurrection Day.’
Sheriff Wells also looked for a supernatural solution, saying on national television: ‘I think we need to continue to pray for these two children, and pray for this mother and this family.’
The public were incensed that Smith had blamed a black man for the carjacking, seeing this as act of racism. But Susan hadn’t previously been racist, and had briefly dated a black man during her teenage years, despite the fact that this was frowned upon in her racist neighbourhood.
As well as wrongly labelling her a racist, sectors of the media also said that she’d lied about being sexually abused as a teenager. They came to this conclusion as Susan had apparently retracted her claims of abuse. In reality, she was probably trying to spare her mother the shame of being married to an adulterer, for appearances were vitally important to Susan’s religious family.
Awaiting trial, the double killer spent her time reading the Bible in her cell in the Women’s Correctional Centre in Columbia.
She wrote David a note saying that her life would be hell from now on and that no one cared a damn about her. He visited her and she said that, when she got out, she’d like to have further children with him. He was lost for words.
After much thought, he gave his support to a campaign to seek the death penalty for his wife. He explained this decision in a later book, Beyond All Reason, writing that Michael and Alex – not their mother – were the victims. ‘They are the ones who died awful, unspeakable, senseless deaths, suspended upside down in their car seats, as the water seeped into the Mazda and rose above their little heads.’
TRIAL
Six months after the murders, Susan Smith went to trial. The defence portrayed her as a victim of her unhappy childhood and cheating husband. David Smith was understandably enraged at being painted as the bad one – after all, he had been a loving parent to his sons.
Her stepfather, Bev Russell, took the stand and admitted abusing her when she was 15 and continuing an incestuous relationship with her. He said that it had ended shortly before she drowned her sons. Looking at Susan, he said ‘My heart breaks for what I have done to you.’ The prosecution, determined not to paint Susan as a victim, got him to admit that the sex had been consensual though this didn’t make it right on account of her age and the fact that he was in loco parentis and married to her mother.
Parents Who Kill--Shocking True Stories of the World's Most Evil Parents Page 4
