In his landmark book Patient Or Pretender Dr Feldman noted that, in 1988, 55 per cent of nurses in an American study hadn’t heard of MBP. Are US trainee nurses and doctors now educated about this syndrome whilst they are in medical school?
Sadly, the answer was no. ‘There is a stunning lack of professional education about MBP. To my knowledge, it is considered a very tangential part of medicine and not covered in any depth. I think that these days more people, including doctors and nurses, have heard the term, but lack an understanding of its detection and implications. In the US, the government and private/public foundations have not funded any research into MBP, and the only educational efforts that occur are the ones arranged by speakers now and then who have become MBP-knowledgeable on their own. That is how my own education about MBP was acquired.’
I tell him that there is equal ignorance about the topic in Britain, with numerous online forums suggesting that doctors and detectives are being overzealous in accusing mothers of sick children of fabricating their symptoms. Why is the general public so unwilling to believe in MBP?
Dr Feldman notes that MBP experts in the UK have been targeted by groups promoting the concept that MBP doesn’t exist. ‘They have this belief despite open admissions of the maltreatment by some (few) perpetrators and despite the confirmatory videotapes that were originally acquired there. Many professionals have been publicly derided for their work in the field and threatened with endless lawsuits or legal challenges and personal smears, and because of these groups, which generally contain MBP perpetrators hiding from the charge of MBP, there has been a chilling effect on all child protection work. The two main figures who have been victimized have been Dr. David Southall and Dr. Roy Meadow; the latter coined the term MBP in 1977; their reputations have been ruined as a result. There have also been overzealous lawyers and biased members of the media who seek to make their reputations by denigrating the entire field of MBP. Fortunately, these efforts have been much less successful in the US, and in some cases the doctors have been able to work together with those who claim, despite the lack of evidence, that MBP is being over diagnosed.’
So how can concerned professionals differentiate between genuine and MBP mothers? Dr Feldman writes in Patient Or Pretender that ‘One way to differentiate between caring mothers and potentially lethal mothers is by being suspicious of a mother (or father, grandparent, foster parent or other) who shows a peculiar eagerness to consent to having invasive procedures performed on the child.’ He also notes that these children remain sick whilst the mother remains by their hospital bed, but recover when she goes home. ‘The mother returns after a couple of days and the child gets sick again. The symptoms closely parallel the mother’s presence.’
PREVENTING COT DEATH
Though a small number of murders are wrongly labelled as unexplained infant deaths, most Sudden Infant Death Syndrome cases are genuine and the parents are devastated when their wanted and cared for baby suddenly dies. In England and Wales 250 babies a year die of SIDS, where no cause of death can be found.
A 10-year study, reported in the Lancet in May 2008, found that many of these dead infants were carrying potentially-harmful bacteria and scientists have speculated that these could trigger a chemical storm which overwhelms the baby and results in his or her demise.
Babies born to smokers are much more at risk from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome than those born to non-smokers – around 30 per cent of cot deaths could be avoided if the mothers hadn’t smoked when they were pregnant. But making sure that the baby isn’t exposed to smoke after its birth can still make a huge difference. Infants who are exposed to 1 – 2 hours of smoke a day are more than twice as likely to die, and those exposed to a smoky home all day are eight times more likely to die.
Experts say that, to reduce the risk of cot death, parents should lay a baby on its back to sleep. (They made this easy to remember by running the Back To Sleep campaign.) Parents shouldn’t let the infant sleep in bed with them as it’s all too easy for a baby to suffocate. They should also avoid sleeping with a baby on a sofa or armchair as its possible to inadvertently crush or smother the infant to death. The free booklet Reduce the Risk of Cot Death from the Foundation for Sudden Infant Death offers further advice, and their address is listed in the Appendix.
CHAPTER NINE
CAPITAL GAINS
Killing a child for the insurance money seems to be more common in fathers than in mothers. (For details of financially-motivated fathers who kill, see the Money For Nothing chapter.) But occasionally a mother will murder her child for profit, sometimes repeating this homicidal behaviour again and again. These murders often have dual motives, with the mother enjoying her role as the bereaved victim – or taking a sadistic pleasure from her offspring’s last moments – as well as pocketing the cash.
DIANA LUMBRERA
Married at 17, Texas-born Diana gave birth to her first child, Melissa, in Lubbock the following year. The already stormy marriage grew even stormier under the stress of dealing with a new baby. Yet Melissa’s birth in 1975 was followed by Joanne’s in 1976. The teenager regularly took both babies to the doctor, complaining that they were suffering from various symptoms, but medics repeatedly found both babies to be healthy and were baffled by her obsessive behaviour. She insured her daughters for between $3,000 and $5,000 each, naming herself as the beneficiary.
JOANNE’S DEATH
When Joanne was three months old, Diana took her to the emergency room saying that she’d had convulsions and stopped breathing. The baby was dead on arrival and the doctors attributed the death to a sudden seizure. The ostensibly-grieving mother collected, and soon spent, the insurance money.
JOSE’S DEATH
The following year, Diana had a son, Jose Lionel, whom she immediately insured. When he was two months old, she brought him to the hospital, saying that he’d been having convulsions. Doctors stabilised him that same day – 10 February 1978 – and kept him in for observation and he appeared to thrive. But, after Diana was left alone with him in hospital on the 13th, the baby alarm sounded at 1am, signalling that he was having breathing difficulties. A nurse hurried to the infant’s aid, just in time to see Diana rushing from the room.
That same afternoon, Jose seemed fine yet Diana phoned her husband to say that the baby was dying. Early that evening, the alarm again sounded and another nurse almost catapulted into Diana as she raced into the corridor. Diana looked guilty and turned back towards her son’s sickbay, wailing that he was desperately ill. The nurse found that Jose was cyanotic (had turned blue through lack of oxygen) and, after half an hour of frantic resuscitation attempts, medics pronounced him dead. The official cause of death was Sudden Infant Death Syndrome and the bereaved mother again collected a few thousand dollars insurance money and went on a spending spree.
MELISSA’S DEATH
Diana’s firstborn, Melissa, was the next to die. She’d insured the baby from the start, but, on 1 October 1978, she purchased additional insurance on the little girl. The following day, she took her lifeless body to the hospital at Bovina, Texas, claiming that she’d suffered convulsions just like her siblings. Doctors attributed the death to the child choking on her own vomit and Diana Lumbrera received yet another insurance cheque.
The following year she divorced her husband and began a series of affairs, moving from state to state and, in 1980, she gave birth to the similarly-named Melinda, fathered by one of her lovers. The baby was now on borrowed time…
MURDER FOR FUN
It’s likely that – though profit had been her original motive – Diana Lumbrera found that she enjoyed murdering little children, or at least enjoyed the drama that such deaths caused in the family and in hospital. In other words, there was a Munchausen’s By Proxy element to the homicides. On 8 October, she took a cousin’s six-week-old daughter, Ericka Aleman, out for a drive, but within half an hour she raced into the local emergency room with the dead baby in her arms, claiming that convulsions had claimed
her life. Her explanation was accepted and Diana returned to her more usual role of the distraught mother, often taking Melinda to the doctor to establish a medical history, though there was nothing wrong with the little girl.
MELINDA’S DEATH
On 17 August 1982, Diana phoned the emergency services to say that the two-year-old had suffered a convulsion and died. The death was attributed to acute heart failure. Again, Diana collected the insurance policy and moved to another state. Fifteen months later she gave birth to another baby, Daniel, by a different man, and took out insurance on the child.
DANIEL’S MURDER
On 25 March 1984, Diane took Daniel to her doctor where he was treated for a minor ear infection. Three days later, the weeping mother told paramedics that the little boy was dead. The pathologist listed the death as septicaemia, despite the fact that blood tests taken at the time of his ear infection showed no evidence of this. Diana collected the insurance money and moved to Garden City, Kansas where she soon found herself a new boyfriend and got pregnant yet again.
JOSE ANTONIO’S MURDER
On 21 February 1986, she gave birth to her sixth child, Jose Antonio. (The fact that she called two of her sons Jose, and called her daughters Melissa and Melinda suggests that they were interchangeable to her, pawns in her game rather than individuals with distinct identities.) Before long, she was lying to her employer’s credit union, saying that the little boy was suffering from leukaemia. Colleagues were sympathetic and her workplace gave her several hundred dollars in sympathy loans to help pay for his treatment. Diana also secured money by pretending that her father had died in a horrific car crash.
Jose Antonio survived for four years and three months before Diana took him to her GP on 30 April 1990, claiming that he was suffering from mysterious convulsions. The doctor could find nothing wrong with the child, but wrote a prescription for antibiotics which would kill off any infection that might be making him feverish. But Diana didn’t bother to fill the prescription as she was simply creating a medical smokescreen for Jose whom she had decided to kill, having previously insured him for $5,000.
The following day she carried his corpse into the Emergency Room in Kansas, wailing that he’d collapsed and expired. But this time medics didn’t believe that a healthy four-year-old boy had suddenly died of natural causes. They called the police who began to do background checks in Texas and Kansas, discovering that all six of Diana Lumbrera’s offspring – and her cousin’s baby daughter – had mysteriously died in her care.
CHARGES
Belatedly, the authorities realised that the grieving mother was actually a for-profit serial killer. She was charged with the deaths of her six children plus the death of Ericka Aleman.
The prosecution in Garden City, Kansas, said that Jose Antonio had been smothered, whilst the defence said that he’d died from a viral infection. The jury took less than an hour to find her guilty and she was sentenced to life imprisonment with the proviso that she serve at least 15 years before becoming eligible for parole.
Lumbrera then went on trial in Texas and confessed to Melissa’s murder to avoid the death penalty, whereupon prosecutors dropped the charges for Melinda and Joanna’s murders. She was again sentenced to life imprisonment. Lubbock County handed her a third life sentence after she pleaded no contest to Jose Lionel’s death. Castro County, which had charged her with Ericka Aleman’s murder, waived charges to save on court costs.
In June 1991 Diana Lumbrera began serving her time in a Kansas jail.
JANIE LOU GIBBS
Though she went on to murder three children and a grandson within 18 months in her native Georgia, Janie’s first victim was her husband of almost 20 years – she had been a 15-year-old bride. She put arsenic in his lunch on 21 January 1965, and he promptly collapsed and died. As the couple were devout Christian Fundamentalists and Janie had devoted her life to running a day-care centre, no one suspected foul play. The doctor put the death down to previously-undiagnosed liver disease and the 34-year-old collected the insurance money and gave a tenth of it to her church.
MURDERING HER THREE CHILDREN
Almost a year later, Janie started to poison her 16-year-old son’s meals. He began to have headaches and dizzy spells, eventually dying in agony. Pretending to be prostrate with grief at his funeral, she benefited from his insurance policy. Later that same year she murdered her 13-year-old son in the exact same way. Again, she gave a tenth of the insurance money to her beloved church. By now the insurance companies were suspicious but Janie Lou blocked their requests for autopsies, objecting on religious grounds. Her Christian friends still refused to believe that she was a serial killer, convinced that she had merely been unlucky to lose a husband and two sons in such a short space of time.
In August 1967, Janie’s 19-year-old son Roger and his wife presented her with her first grandson, Raymond. Janie seemed delighted at the prospect of becoming a grandmother and talked at length about the impending birth. The boy was born healthy yet by September he was dead. Even more strangely, Roger himself died an agonising death in the same time period. Janie’s distraught daughter-in-law, inexplicably twice-bereaved, suspected her mother-in-law was responsible and insisted that the authorities carry out autopsies, despite Janie Lou’s continuing objections to this.
The results proved inconclusive so the hospital called in the state crime lab which found that the pair had been poisoned with arsenic. The other Gibbs bodies were exhumed and fatal levels of arsenic were also found.
At Christmas 1967, the devout Christian was arrested and admitted to murdering her family. She didn’t give a motive but the prosecutor noted that she had gained a total of $31,000 from the deaths, a sizeable sum in Georgia in the 1960s. In February 1968 she was found guilty and received five life sentences.
RELEASED
The insurance killer served out the next 30 years in prison and was expected to die there. But she was released on compassionate grounds in 1999, age 66, suffering from Parkinson’s disease.
CHAPTER TEN
MERCY KILLINGS
When Joanne Hill drowned her four-year-old daughter Naomi in her North Wales home, much was made of the fact that the little girl had cerebral palsy. Lawyers noted that Hill was ashamed of the child and had wanted to give her up for adoption, but was over-ruled by her husband, who loved Naomi very much.
But this was in no way a mercy killing. Naomi’s disabilities were mild – she needed leg braces to walk and had hearing difficulties – and she was a happy and contented child who loved spending time with her father. She made up stories to entertain him and was described as a chatterbox.
It’s likely that Joanne Hill would have struggled to bond with any child as she had a history of mental problems and depression. After the murder she continued to display bizarre behaviour, going out drink-driving for eight hours with her daughter’s corpse in the boot of her car. At Chester Crown Court in September 2008, a jury decided that she was not mentally ill at the time that she drowned her daughter and she was sentenced to serve at least 15 years. But medical experts said that she was now suffering from a serious mental illness and she was flanked in court by two nurses and a security guard. The 31-year-old had been in prison on remand, but, after the trial, the judge ordered that she be taken to a psychiatric facility.
Women (and men, as a later chapter will delineate) who resort to genuine mercy killings tend to fall into two camps. Some are caring for a terminally-ill child and are desperate to spare them further suffering or indignity. The second group are looking after adult children with multiple disabilities who are evidencing distress. As these women grow old and less able, they fear for the future of their handicapped son or daughter. These are genuine fears, as care in the community can be woefully inadequate.
WENDOLYN MARKCROW
Wendolyn and her architect husband Paul managed to give their son Patrick, who was born with Down’s syndrome, a happy childhood. A high-functioning teenager, he was even able to attend coll
ege. The family, which included two other sons, lived in the picturesque village of Long Crendon, in Buckinghamshire, England. But, in his twenties, Patrick developed autism and his behaviour deteriorated markedly.
He became even more unstable in his thirties. After going to bed at night he would sleep for two hours, then wake up screaming – and his screams would continue until breakfast time. The daytime was little better as he would often shout out the same word again and again. He also began to batter himself about the head, punching himself in his right eye and causing permanent blindness in July 2003. It was very hard for his ageing mother to control him as by now he weighed 16 stone.
Wendolyn had respite during the day when Patrick went to a care centre, but this support ended in 2003 due to funding cuts. As the months passed, he became increasingly self-destructive and was evidently deeply distressed. He also hit his parents if they tried to intervene. Wendolyn took him to a doctor who was very sympathetic (during the visit Patrick punched himself in the face 20 times) and admitted in a report that even controlling the heavily-built thirty-something for a few minutes in the surgery had been impossible, that he had no idea how Wendolyn coped.
But still social services refused to provide respite care, though she wrote to them again in 2004, noting ‘The crisis is not going to go away. I really must have some support very soon.’ An internal county council email in May of that year acknowledged this, stating that the situation was urgent. Wendolyn and Paul were now in their mid-sixties and ill with exhaustion. Like 72 per cent of full time carers, Wendolyn was also deeply depressed.
Parents Who Kill--Shocking True Stories of the World's Most Evil Parents Page 10
