Like many uneducated people, they believed that a supernatural being would save them from poverty if they could only find the right words or actions. As such, they set up a black magic shrine in their rat-infested lounge and spent some of their welfare money on witchcraft paraphernalia rather than on food.
John, who had grown up in a superstitious household, told a relative that he kept hearing the voices of his dead relatives and that they sometimes spoke to him through his unfortunate offspring. He added that the children were possessed. He later told police that his wife had asked him to kill the babies because they were evil and wouldn’t get to heaven.
On 10 March 2003, he battered the children’s hamsters with a hammer then poured bleach on them in a bizarre exorcism before turning his attention to the children. He suffocated three-year-old Julissa for four minutes, telling his wife that the struggling little girl had the devil in her, that she didn’t want to die. He then stabbed the child 20 times and beheaded her by sawing through her tiny neck with his knife, before he and Angela had sex, rolling around in the toddler’s blood. Next, John Rubio suffocated, stabbed and beheaded his two-month-old baby daughter, Mary Ann, after which the couple had sex again. Finally, he murdered one-year-old John junior in the same way.
The couple had a bath, put their blood-stained clothing into the water to soak and had sex for the third time as they knew that they wouldn’t have the opportunity once they were arrested. Later, they put the severed heads of their three children into a rubbish bag, leaving John junior’s decapitated body at the end of the bed.
A day after the triple murder, John’s brother visited the tiny apartment and was sickened to find it covered in blood, with John junior’s headless body still propped up in the bedroom. He raced out and flagged down a passing police car, and officers investigated to find the three mutilated corpses. Angela told one of the horrified policemen that they’d killed the children because they couldn’t afford to feed them – but John’s wallet was found to contain $146. In custody, she admitted that the motive had been religious, saying that someone had put an evil spell on the children and that they’d had to be killed brutally in order to cast the evil out. John – who believed that his late mother and grandmother had both been witches – told the same story, explaining that the children were possessed.
RUBIO’S TRIAL
The couple were tried separately, with John Rubio pleading not guilty by reason of insanity. After eight hours of deliberation, the jury rejected his insanity plea and found him guilty of the triple homicide. He asked for the death penalty, saying that God had forgiven him and that he wanted to be with his children in heaven. The jury granted his wish and he was sent to Death Row to await his date with a lethal injection. But this ruling was later reversed by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in September 2007 on the grounds that his defence lawyers hadn’t been given the opportunity to cross-examine his common law wife during his trial.
After mental health tests, he was told that he was competent to stand trial. In June 2008, he was told that this new trial would be held at Cameron County, a venue he objected to. In July 2010, a Texas jury rejected John Rubio’s plea of not guilty by reason of insanity and convicted him of murdering all three children. He is currently on Death Row in Texas, a state which executes by lethal injection.
CAMACHO’S SENTENCE
Angela Camacho pleaded guilty to three counts of capital murder to avoid the death penalty and was given three consecutive life sentences. She will be eligible for parole in 40 years.
STUART & LESLIE GREEN
In October 1982, the Greens were living in Stonegate, a fundamentalist Christian household near Charleston, West Virginia. Along with other Christian parents, they occupied a 27-roomed house run by the group’s leader Dorothy McClellan and her accountant husband John. For years the McClellans had been taking in troubled teenagers, often drug addicts, and persuading them to live a religious life. It was often a struggle, the families surviving by doing farming and construction work.
Dorothy McClellan’s ethos was that children should be subjected to corporal punishment to enforce obedience and each parent had their own monogrammed paddle which they carried around with them. These were used frequently and with severity – on one occasion in September 1982, McClellan beat her grandson, Daniel, for four hours.
On 5 October 1982, the Greens’ 23-month-old son, Joseph, hit another child (the way that he’d seen adults treat children) and refused to apologise, whereupon the Stonegate community formed a circle around the boy as his 25-year-old mother, Leslie, and began to beat him on the buttocks with a paddle. Later his father, Stuart, age 28, took over the paddling whilst both parents ordered him to say sorry to the other child.
After two hours of intermittent beating and demands that he apologise, Joseph went pale – he had gone into shock. One of the fundamentalists fetched the group leader, Dorothy McClellan, and she told the parents to halt the paddling and administered first aid, but it was too late for the not-quite-two-year-old who died in hospital from loss of blood. The Stonegate community tried to pass the death off as an accident, but the child’s internal injuries revealed exactly what had taken place.
The couple were convicted of involuntary manslaughter and both served a year in jail and paid a $1,000 fine. Controversially – given that she hadn’t even been in the room whilst Joseph was being beaten – the religious group’s leader, Dorothy McClellan, was also found guilty of causing the boy’s death. Stuart Green spoke out against her in court, saying that she had encouraged parents to beat their children until the little ones apologised. His wife, Leslie, had joined McClellan’s household when she was only 15 so was very much under the older woman’s spell. After their release from prison, the Greens left the religious community and set up home together in Baltimore.
The judge said that Dorothy McClellan was a strong-willed and manipulative woman who had instituted a policy of discipline which led to Joseph Green’s terrifying ordeal and untimely demise. She was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in 1985 and her 1987 appeal was turned down.
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
MEDICAL NEGLECT
In 2008 a woman complained to the British Medical Council that she had been given a blood transfusion whilst unconscious and that the transfusion was against her Jehovah’s Witness religion. Surgeons responded that the transfusion had been necessary to save her life. In principle, an adult should be allowed to refuse treatment and live – or not – with the consequences, but it should surely be illegal for a parent to withhold vital treatment from a child. Yet several American states still have a religious exemption clause, allowing parents to put their sick children through agonising days or weeks, followed by an entirely-preventable death.
DAVID & GINGER TWITCHELL
Two-year-old Robyn Twitchell became ill in 1986, screaming and vomiting. He’d developed a twisted bowel which would have been easily corrected in hospital, but his parents were Christian Scientists, bound to a religion which believes that only prayer should be used to heal.
By the second day of Robyn’s illness, he was in such pain that the Twitchells, who lived near Boston, phoned the worldwide public relations manager of the Christian Science church for advice. He assured them that solely using prayer to treat symptoms was permissible, both morally and under the law. The suffering child was attended to by a Christian Science nurse (surely a contradiction in terms) who must have noted signs that he was becoming seriously dehydrated and that acid from his vomit had stripped the skin from his lips and chin, leaving it bright red. By now his screams were so loud and disturbing that the next-door neighbours closed their window to shut out the sound.
On the fourth day, Robyn was still in agony and unable to eat, but the Christian Science nurse force fed him and ordered his mother to give him food every half hour. By now, three wounds had appeared on his thigh, possibly suggesting septicaemia (blood poisoning).
By day five, his scrotum had blackened where the blood sup
ply had been cut off and he began to vomit excrement. Later that same day, he died. Christian Scientists believe in resurrection so the Twitchells waited patiently by their son’s corpse, expecting him to come back to life again. Rigor mortis had set in by the time they finally admitted defeat and called the emergency services.
The couple were charged with manslaughter, with Massachusetts prosecutors contending that they were guilty of child neglect and the defence countering that the Twitchells had a right under the First Amendment to treat their son’s illness solely with prayer. The Christian Science nurse said that she’d healed Robyn and that he’d been playing with his cat a mere 15 minutes before he died. But an autopsy had shown this was impossible, that the child’s intestines were jet black and ruptured. He would have been in such agony that he’d have tried to avoid any movement at all.
The couple were sentenced to 10 years’ probation, but this was overturned on a technicality in 1993. Thankfully, due to a public outcry over Robyn’s protracted suffering and unnecessary death, Massachusetts legislature repealed the religious exemption in their criminal code.
WILLIAM & CHRISTINE HERMANSON
1986 also saw a similarly-preventable death in Sarasota, Florida, when seven-year-old Amy Hermanson began to lose weight and became increasingly lethargic. She had developed diabetes but her Christian Scientist parents refused to seek medical care. A neighbour saw Amy crawling on her hands and knees, too weak to walk, and begged her mother to take her to a doctor but her mother refused. She was seen by an aunt the day before she died, and the woman observed that the seven-year-old had become incoherent and could no longer focus her eyes.
After her death, her parents were convicted of felony child abuse and third degree murder, but, in 1992, the Florida Supreme Court overturned their conviction because of a religious exemption in Florida’s legal code.
THE DEATH TOLL MOUNTS
Parents who live in a religious commune can find it almost impossible to seek medical aid for their child, as the group reinforces their already rigid anti-interventionist belief system. Fifty-two people in the Faith Assembly communes have died, most of them children, as the group professes that ‘only God can heal.’ One woman begged to see a doctor as she lay writhing in agony, but the group refused and continued their ostensibly-healing prayers until her death.
UNWANTED CHILDREN
In the aforementioned cases, the parents killed out of a misguided belief system; though their children suffered terribly as the result of their inaction, they didn’t actually want them to die. But in the following case the couple didn’t refuse medical aid out of some confused religiosity. Instead, they just didn’t care.
ROBERT & SABINA HIRST
Three-year-old Tiffany Hirst had a nursery place but her 22-year-old mother Sabina and 54-year-old stepfather Robert couldn’t be bothered to take her there and instead locked her up for days on end in her bedroom above the pub that they ran in Upperthorpe, Sheffield. Passers-by often saw her thin, unsmiling face at the window, but apparently didn’t realise that she was half-starved. The Hirsts often ignored the child and she was covered in insect-bites as the filthy room was infested with beetles. They also neglected and locked-up a one-year-old child who cannot be identified for legal reasons.
The couple kept their dogs in another room which was covered in faeces and urine: the stench was appalling. The first floor flat was also a potential death-trap for children, with live wires protruding from the walls.
The Hirsts apparently started locking Tiffany in her room on a regular basis in August 2006, though a health visitor saw her in February 2007 and said that she was happy and healthy. But the lock-ins continued, as did periods when the couple failed to provide the child with adequate food or water. By mid-2007, the three-year-old weighed the same as a two-year-old. In September she developed pneumonia, but her mother and stepfather were too busy to notice, far less seek medical assistance. When they found her body in October, she had been dead for up to two days. They phoned paramedics who arrived to find what looked like a porcelain doll lying amongst filthy bedclothes. They picked her up and were shocked at her low body weight.
An autopsy revealed abnormalities in her bones, showing that she’d been given so little food at times that she’d stopped growing. At other times, she had been fed and her body had responded with a growth spurt. Pneumonia, brought on by a lack of food and water, was the cause of death.
The couple were initially charged with murder, but Robert Hirst’s lawyer pointed out that he had recently started a new job which took him away from the pub for 13 or 14 hours a day, so it was up to Mrs Hirst to care for her daughter during these hours. (Apparently she had cared for Tiffany until meeting Robert Hirst.) His charge was then changed to ‘neglect’. Sabina Hirst’s charge was also reduced, in her case from murder to manslaughter. Whilst awaiting trial, the couple moved to Barnsley and began to run another pub.
At Sheffield Crown Court in June 2008, Robert Hirst pleaded guilty to neglecting Tiffany, whilst Sabina Hirst pled guilty to her daughter’s manslaughter. They were remanded in custody. Later that month, she was sentenced to 12 years for manslaughter and he to five for cruelty, with Judge Alan Goldsack describing the case as ‘about as bad a case of child manslaughter as there can be.’
PART FOUR
REALITY CHECK
CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE
SAVING LIVES
As the previous chapters have shown, parents kill for a wide variety of reasons. Whilst some of these killers are arguably untreatable, such as psychopathic parents who kill for the insurance money, others could have been prevented from harming their children, or, indeed, from having children at all.
NOT EVERYONE IS PARENT MATERIAL
In an ideal world, every baby would be a wanted one, born to emotionally-mature parents who can cope with 18 years (or more, if the child has to be supported through college) of enormous personal sacrifice. The reality is very different – the more intelligent a couple is, the less likely they are to procreate.
Our society is culpable in promoting the myth that everyone is parent material. Soap operas and other simplistic television programmes give the impression that a baby will bring a straying boyfriend back to the fold. In truth, he’s more likely to flee into the arms of an unencumbered girlfriend who is free to party. On Britain’s sink estates (and in American ghettoes) it’s not unusual for a man to have fathered children with half a dozen women, each of whom has convinced herself that a baby will glue together an unstable relationship. Many muddle through, but a significant percentage take their anger, loneliness and frustration out on the child with sometimes fatal results – more than one child a week (70 a year) in Britain is murdered by its parent and, in under-fives, this parent is usually the mother. Uneducated teenage girls with a poor support network are especially likely to abuse their child.
Ironically, though a young woman may be beating her toddler or toddlers, she often goes on to have another baby. Such women love their children when they are infants, but become enraged or withdrawn when they grow into toddlers with their own personal likes and dislikes. They feel rejected – and can become violent – if the child refuses food or wants to spend time with anyone else.
Even if the man does stay around, the partnership doesn’t return to its pre-baby happiness until the children have left home. In a survey of 600 parents in the UK conducted by Home Start, only 4 per cent said that child rearing had lived up to their expectations. And, when Good Housekeeping magazine questioned 1,000 of their readers in 2003, 61 per cent of mothers admitted that their family life had been damaged by having a baby, 60 per cent had lost friendships and 12 per cent found that having a baby had led to separation or divorce. An American survey conducted in the mid-1970s went further, asking the question ‘if you’d known what parenthood was going to be like, would you have had children?’ A resounding 70 per cent said no.
There is surely scope for a social care programme which takes babies into schools on a regul
ar basis to show teenagers just how demanding childcare is. At the moment, modified versions of this exist where children are given a bag of flour and told to carry it around for a week, and to arrange for a babysitter whenever they want to go out. But a bag of flour doesn’t cry all night, or defecate, urinate and vomit on its carer, involuntary acts which immature parents often misinterpret as deliberate wickedness on the part of the child.
Good contraceptive advice is also vital, as is free contraception – there have been instances of boys in their early teens using chocolate bar wrappers in place of condoms because they didn’t have access to the latter. Purists may argue that these teenagers are too young to have sex but, hormones and emotions being what they are, some teens will become sexually active before it’s legal. Surely it’s better that they use a sheath than create a tell-no-one baby which they murder as it takes its first breath?
A SAFE HAVEN
But, let’s assume that the worst happens, and a young woman gives birth alone and feels she has no option but to dispose of the child. In an effort to cut down on infanticide, America has made its fire stations available to new mothers. A girl can safely leave her newborn at any of these buildings, knowing that he or she will receive immediate care.
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