“For women, violence is a necessary resource for self protection.”
“In this country, women murder mainly as a means of survival.”
“The majority of women are in prison because men abuse them.”
“You’re innocent. You’re the victim.”
In the months leading up to her plea-bargain hearing, before anyone yet knew the facts, Homolka repeated to friends the investigator’s comment to her that she was the victim. “Clearly,” wrote Toronto journalists Scott Burnside and Alan Cairns, “those words had become a kind of mantra.” Convince the world, convince yourself.
How people come to account for themselves in the aftermath of violent behavior has been called the vocabulary of motive. This vocabulary—a set of phrases or rationales—has less to do with personal truth than with commonly held beliefs. “There exist accounts for behavior which are popularly acceptable as excuses,” notes criminologist Allison Morris. People tend to explain what they do according to cultural scripts. A girl who hits her little brother might say to her parents that he hit her first, which is what her parents might expect of boys. Therefore, her motive was self-defense. On the island of Margarita, the same girl could acceptably say that she hit her brother to parar el macho. Her motive was to keep her brother in line. Within urban American street culture, a girl could say she hit her brother because he “dissed” her. Her motive was to defend her standing. Whatever the accessible cultural rationale is, we will borrow it to explain ourselves. We use the vocabulary when we know it’s not the truth, and we use it when we don’t know what the truth is.
Until the 1970s, it was acceptable in Texas for men to say they had killed their wives as retribution for adultery. Now, they cannot as easily use that explanation, even if jealousy was the motive. They must come up with something else, both legally and culturally. So they talk of brain injury or too much sugar or a childhood of abuse. Ted Bundy blamed his attacks on women in the late 1970s in the states of Washington, Utah, and Florida on pornography. More than a few antiporn activists leapt on this confession as gospel truth. In another era, Bundy might have said he was possessed by the devil. The behavior is so complex and unfathomable, even to him, that he grasped at the slim straws provided by popular rhetoric.
Now that it’s been named, premenstrual syndrome is an easy explanation for why women get wild and angry. Is it the truth? Or is it just part of the vocabulary of motive? Two studies in England conducted in the mid-1980s found that women reported drastic mood swings related to menstruation only when they thought they were being asked about PMS; when they thought they were simply noting their moods over time, they described far more even tempers. The authors of one study concluded that “the self-reports of depression and aggression due to menstruation were influenced by social expectations.”
Criminologist Robert J. Kelly interviewed several inmates at Rikers Island, a correctional facility in New York City, and observed that “in their own words, many inmates experience themselves as putty in the hands of fate.” They blamed bad luck, coincidence, unforeseen circumstances—the victim shouldn’t have been there, the cops shouldn’t have shown up. The inmates could not explain what they did in terms of their own moral choices; they had to explain it in terms of forces beyond their control. It isn’t just because criminals aim to get away with their crimes, it’s also because they need to live with them. “A frank and sincere acknowledgment of responsibility would result in a collapse of the psyche,” notes Kelly. Criminals are compelled to reconstruct events in such a way that the aftermath is bearable. They need to maintain a sense of self-worth. Announcing to themselves in the mirror “I am evil” is not a popular option.
Violent offenders often claim amnesia during crimes, telling the police something like “The next thing I remember, she was lying there on the floor.” It is not that they actually black out. It is that they cannot permit themselves to recall what they did. The sociologist Jack Katz argues that this is particularly true of women: “They appear to have a distinct problem in self-consciously acknowledging the … rage that they were able to effect.” Rage runs contrary to a sense of the feminine self. It surprises, shocks, and ultimately shames the offender. She denies what she has witnessed in herself.
Unlike men, however, women can more plausibly use this refusal to acknowledge what they did as the basis for an insanity defense. Lorena Bobbitt, for example, was able to claim that her inability to remember cutting her husband’s penis off was, in itself, evidence of temporary insanity. She was acquitted. In Calgary, Alberta, in 1996, a wealthy, alcoholic divorcée named Dorothy Joudrie was acquitted for shooting and crippling her ex-husband in her garage because she claimed that she’d “dissociated.”
Although self-justification is universally human, the vocabulary of motive is different for male and female offenders. Because we won’t concede aggression and anger in women, the language we use to describe what they do is much more limited, and much more exonerative. There exist perhaps three or four rationales for the whole, extraordinary diversity of violent acts women commit, and they all play into preexisting prejudices about female nature. The operative assumption is that the violent woman couldn’t have wanted, deliberately, to cause harm. Therefore, if she says she was abused/coerced/insane, she probably was.
Allison Morris cites the example of premenstrual syndrome. In 1980, Sandra Craddock pleaded not guilty to murdering a fellow cocktail waitress in London on the basis of PMS. Her plea was accepted. Christine English also successfully pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of manslaughter that year, for crushing a former lover against a telegraph pole with her car. Men simply cannot say in court, “I killed a guy because my testosterone levels were too high.” He may be playing into the notion that men are governed by their hormones, but he is also working against the belief that men are willfully and rationally aggressive. Therefore his motive is not believable.
On the “Sally Jessy Raphael” show, October 25, 1995, the theme was “My Teen Is a Terror.” The three thirteen-year-old girls who came on with their mothers sat cross-armed and sullen, smirking at the audience. One had threatened to kill her mother with a lead pipe and had beaten her little brother, in spite of his brain tumor; a second had sent a sixty-five-year-old babysitter to the hospital; a third had beaten her sister beyond recognition and told the show, “I like to kick ass.” The audience responded to these various tales with laughter, derision, and scolding. By the end of the show, they had decided collectively that one girl was “forgiven,” “sympathetic,” and “understandable” because she burst into tears and plaintively blamed her behavior on a mother who “never disciplined me.” The other girls were more stoic, unwilling or unable to express their own hurts, more like boys. They availed themselves of no vocabulary and so were heaped with scorn.
If prejudice about female nature is the gift of misogyny to women who want to get away with crime, it doesn’t necessarily follow that women themselves believe in their guilt. The effect of cultural explanation for individual behavior tilts women toward an interpretation of themselves as fundamentally innocent. What they do (what we all do) is to equate powerlessness with innocence. In acts of violence, this is not only an expedient, but a necessary, means of self-justification.
Various guises of madness, coupled with abuse and coercion, are the most prominent rationales within the female vocabulary of motive. A fourth is the concept of failed suicide. A woman will claim that she meant to kill herself but somehow wound up taking someone else’s life instead, a claim that arises from a woman’s sense that it is more socially acceptable to self-destruct than to be outwardly destructive. Jean Harris and Betty Broderick, both white, upper-middle-class Americans who traveled considerable distances to enter without invitation the homes of their ex-mates and shoot them dead, claimed that they actually intended to kill themselves. In Broderick’s case, she was ready to take her own life but suddenly “panicked” and fatally wounded her ex-husband, Daniel, and his new wife, Linda, while they slept
in their bed. In Harris’s case, the gun “went off accidentally” and doomed the disoriented, pajama-clad Herman Tarnower. The judge at her trial felt moved to apologize to the criminal before him. “It’s unhappy that you have to be sentenced, Mrs. Harris,” he said, as if it were all some unseemly mistake, “[but] the best of luck to you.”
“Many women who kill their abusers start out intending to commit suicide,” wrote one battered woman syndrome expert. But they don’t. Men are far more apt to kill themselves in the aftermath of family violence. An extraordinarily high number of Chicago men turn guns and knives on themselves after killing their mates: more than 25 percent of white men, about 29 percent of Latino men (who otherwise have a low suicide rate), and 10 percent of black men. Less than 2 percent of women in all race categories do. What may be going on is that women more comfortably label their violent impulses as self-destructive. Suicide is a social script they can follow before they strike, to formulate intent, and after the deed, to provide a rationale.
A striking example of this is the Texas murder case of thirty-five-year old Yolanda Saldivar, who killed the rising Tejano music star Selena with a .38-caliber revolver. The crime took place outside a Corpus Christi, Texas, motel on March 31, 1995. Saldivar had been an avid fan of the Grammy Award-winning singer. She contacted Selena and offered to found a fan club for her, eventually becoming close to both Selena and the singer’s extended family. For various reasons, Saldivar was on the verge of being fired by Selena and expelled from the tribe when Saldivar shot her beloved singer in the back. She then got into a tense, ten-hour standoff with police, holding the gun to her head and insisting that Selena’s father, Abraham Quintanilla, had raped her and “made me shoot her.” This, then, was the first motive that leapt to mind: the popular belief in male coercion. Trying to talk her down, the police offered Saldivar another explanation. “Maybe it was a mistake,” negotiator Isaac Valencia told her, “maybe it was an accident.” Once he had provided her with this idea and implied that it was acceptable, she adopted it, telling everyone thereafter that she actually meant to commit suicide, “I couldn’t live no more,” but the “gun went off” accidentally and hit Selena. At her trial, officers involved in the standoff testified that Saldivar was practiced with her revolver, having skillfully cocked it when they approached her pick-up truck, then uncocked it as they backed away. She was too competent to have killed by mistake. Her victim was a widely loved young woman. Saldivar was convicted of murder.
The failed suicide rationale was also raised by Susan Smith as an explanation for why she drowned her two sons in a lake in South Carolina. One of Smith’s defense attorneys, Judy Clarke, promoted the claim at her trial: “Hopelessness is not malice. She went to the ramp to commit suicide and take her children [with her], but she failed.” Indeed, she did. In Newsweek magazine’s cover story on the case, reporters picked up on the rationale without examining it logically. “Some severely depressed parents kill their children in a bungled attempt to kill themselves,” the story read. “Susan Smith told authorities that’s what she had in mind when she drove to the lake. [But] unable to take her own life, she found herself rolling the car with her sons into the lake instead.” Notice the implication of passivity in the phrase “found herself.”
Newsweek then quoted Northeastern University criminologist James Allan Fox describing the act as “murder by proxy.” Well, really it was murder by murder. But how, in any event, does the murder of children accomplish the objective of suicide? Newsweek doesn’t explain. Perhaps the killing of the child ameliorates the need for suicide, in that the presence of the child is the problem in the first place. Describing what Smith did as “bungled” suicide simultaneously positions women as inept and self-effacing, both qualities that our culture can accommodate.
Newsweek also fit Susan Smith into “the sad subset of mothers who kill their kids in a vain attempt to win approval from their new man.” The magazine quoted the sociologist Richard Gelles as saying: “Her identity comes from pleasing the men in her life. The boyfriend says, ‘Jump!’ and she says, ‘How high?’ “The magazine didn’t offer any statistics on how many men make infanticide a prerequisite for dating, but it did illustrate how limited our vocabulary of motive is for women. We struggle to describe their aggression in tortuous terms, as if speaking a foreign language, not one rich with literature about violence, morality, and crime.
Speaking of men in the world wars, the historian John Grey wrote: “It is a crucial moment in a soldier’s life when he is ordered to perform a deed that he finds completely at variance with his own notions of right and good. Probably for the first time, he discovers that an act someone else thinks to be necessary is for him criminal.… Suddenly the soldier feels himself abandoned and cast off from all security. Conscience has isolated him, and its voice is a warning. If you do this, you will not be at peace with me in the future. You can do it, but you ought not. You must act as a man and not as an instrument of another’s will.”
In preparation for Bernardo’s trial, attorneys for both crown and defense hired a number of forensic psychiatrists to examine Karla Homolka and confirm that she had acted “as a woman,” as an instrument of Bernardo’s will. The reports they received back were unexpected. Dr. Nathan Pollock described Homolka as an “immature, moody, shallow, rigid, hostile individual preoccupied with themes of violence and victimization.” He disagreed with the characterization of her as a battered woman. The evidence, he wrote, “is not sufficient to conclude she was suffering from battered-woman syndrome, or that she was in such a confused and hopeless state of mind that she was unable to govern her own behaviour.” Dr. Angus McDonald concurred: “Her presentation clearly suggests a degree of callousness and insensitivity of major proportion.… Her behaviour, to my mind, simply cannot be explained solely on the basis of intimidation or abuse from Paul Bernardo.” According to a third psychiatrist, Dr. Alan Long, Homolka “views the world as a threatening place and sees herself as having been unjustly blamed for others’ problems.” Concluded Dr. McDonald, “Karla Homolka remains something of a diagnostic mystery.… There is a moral vacuity in her which is difficult, if not impossible, to explain.”
Had she been male, the explanation might have been that she was a psychopath or in some other way criminally indifferent to the feelings of others. Intricate theory abounds for male offenders. But she was female. The only available explanation in the 1990s was that she had acted against her own, inherently nonviolent inclinations, either because she was insane or because she had been coerced. None of the psychiatrists were called into court. Their reports were never mentioned.
The weight of evidence cannot tip justice when the weight of prejudice is on the other scale. “If it happens we have to go against each other,” Los Angeles murderess Carol Bundy wrote to her coconspirator, Doug Clark, from jail in 1982, “remember, I look innocent. Impression is worth as much as facts.” She announced at his trial: “Mr. Clark had virtual total control over my personality and behavior, my wants, my desires, my dreams.”
When Homolka appeared on June 19, 1995, in Room 6-1, Ontario Court, General Division, to blame the sexual assault and slaughter of three young women on Paul Bernardo, her face was as blank as a doll’s. She seemed eerily plastic, her hair shiny, her smooth skin artificially tanned, as if everything that made her human had been air-brushed away. Her language, too, had been carefully rinsed of the idioms and inflections that colored her early police statements. It was as if she had taken special note of a book she was reading in prison, Perfect Victim, which documents the case of a California teenager who was kidnapped and kept in a box for three years: “ ‘What made the victim convincing [in court]?’ someone asked in the book. [The juror] replied: ‘Her deadness. Her stillness.’ ”
Wherever Homolka was getting her ideas while she ticked away the days of her plea-bargained sentence—The Battered Woman by Lenore Walker was another favorite book—the erasure of her character in service to her innocence was well under way by th
e time she arrived in the courtroom. The young woman that we had been watching for a month of trial proceedings in home videos shot by Paul Bernardo—assertive, vivacious, demanding of the camera’s attention, her makeup bright, her body bruiseless—did not exist. What we saw, we were told by crown attorney Ray Houlahan, was an illusion.
There she was on December 23, 1990, prancing about her parents’ home, singing out raucously “Christmas is fun!” hours before she and Paul raped, sodomized, and killed her little sister. The video revealed a comfortable, high-spirited woman ordering her boyfriend around as he taped—“Paul! Over here!” But, said the crown, Homolka had merely been “scripted” by Bernardo to perform. In letters and notes entered as evidence, her voice was exuberant, lustful, sarcastic, snobbish about people she worked with (“Secretaries have to be the most boring nowhere people ever”), jealous of her lover’s time, angry when he got mad at her “for a fucking ridiculous reason,” unmoved when he pouted—“Boo Fucking Hoo”—and often, very often, self-involved and vain.
But, said the crown, this voice was the product of a Svengali ventriloquism. It wasn’t Karla’s voice. Karla had no voice. Karla was a battered woman. Everything she said and did was at the bidding of her man. “Paul did it,” she would say on the witness stand. “He made me do it.” “He kept bugging me.” “Just do it.” We deduced here a plot as densely tragic as of Medea, reduced in its narration to a jingle.
When She Was Bad Page 6
