Infanticide, like any act of violence, is profoundly idiosyncratic. We can label it this way and that, make generalizations, but ultimately the truth is too personal. In North America, we are still in a position to draw distinctions between one woman and the next, between those who are psychotic and those who are sane, those whose stresses are insurmountable and those who choose not to surmount them. “You are,” Judge Namm told Ellwood, “an intelligent, overindulged and privileged child of two educated, upper-middle-class parents, not some lonely, undereducated, underprivileged, abandoned teenage mother alone somewhere in a dirty room.” Whether or not one agrees with Namm’s judgment, his quest was honorable: to balance within the jurisprudence the social reality of women against the right of small children to live, to be valued.
MEDEA IN HER MODERN GUISE
The Use of Children as Pawns
The ideal mother has no interests of her own.
ALICE BALIN, psychoanalyst, 1974
Powerless women have always used mothering as a channel—narrow but deep—for their own human will to power.
ADRIENNE RICH, 1975
When the paramedics arrived, the child had been dead for some time. A delicate girl, four months old, with bright clowns on her sleeper and a wisp of blond hair, she lay on the living room floor of her parents’ apartment among the unwrapped Christmas gifts. The room filled with a sting of winter air and the clamor of panic as adults rushed in and tripped over each other, shouting and muttering, reaching down to Tami Lynne to blow breath into her small blue mouth. It was December 20, 1985, nearly two in the morning in the manufacturing town of Schenectady, New York, twenty miles north of Albany.
Night sinks deeply in Schenectady in winter. The roads are poorly lit; they wind past shuttered houses and run-down malls. An ambulance siren keens through the somnolent quiet. Forty-two-year-old Marybeth Tinning was familiar with the sound of that siren. Over the years she had rushed her children to the emergency room at Saint Clare Hospital many times. Marybeth and her husband, Joe, were strong people, robust, rarely ill. But their children …
The Tinnings’ neighbor Cynthia Walter lingered with them in the hospital waiting room, stunned with fatigue, high on adrenaline, until the last thread of hope had unraveled and snapped. She didn’t want to let go of Tami Lynne, couldn’t believe the girl had simply “stopped breathing,” wouldn’t see her Christmas presents, would be covered with earth like a stone. She was grief-struck, like a mother, and although she didn’t know it, she was not the first to feel that hollow sorrow on the Tinnings’ behalf. She was, in fact, the last in a long line of wrenched souls—neighbors, relatives, friends, the withdrawn and devastated father—to watch Tinning children die.
Marybeth Tinning, an expansive, handsome woman with too-bright eyes, began a round of announcing phone calls at 8:00 A.M. It was presumed that Tami Lynne had succumbed to sudden infant death syndrome. She called her sister-in-law, who sank to the floor. She called a friend who worked in a children’s clothing shop and requested a bonnet to match Tami Lynne’s Christmas dress, which would be her funeral attire. Then she and Joe went home, and she set to work packing up her daughter’s clothes and toys in boxes. Two days later, the funeral, and the mother standing above her infant’s grave, citing a prayer in a whisper: “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.”
There were many troubled mourners at the funeral of Tami Lynne Tinning that morning two days before Christmas. People there who felt more than grief, who felt the leaden weight of realized dread. They knew this would happen, they should have done something, they didn’t. Now they were watching the last rites administered to the ninth dead Tinning child. This time, the Schenectady child abuse hotline flashed with calls. For the first time, the police department got involved. It would take investigators several weeks, but they would gradually assemble enough information to provide a grim retrospective on the maternal career of this ostensibly ordinary American housewife.
Over the course of fourteen years, police suspected, she had deliberately harmed, hospitalized, and murdered eight of her nine children, ranging in age from one week to five years. On February 18, 1986, Tinning confessed to the New York State police to killing three of her children. Ultimately there would be enough forensic evidence to convict her for the murder of Tami Lynne.
In psychiatric parlance, Marybeth Tinning seems to have had Munchausen syndrome by proxy. The phrase describes a condition that is a spin-off from Munchausen syndrome, in which a person self-inflicts injuries or invents symptoms in an unceasing quest for attention from family and doctors. Unlike the expressive self-destruction of angry women, Munchausen syndrome is “instrumental” aggression, meaning that it’s calculated, strategic—a deliberate and manipulative deception. In Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a person inflicts injuries on someone else—specifically, a child.
MSBP is almost exclusively the province of women who find themselves in maternal roles, either as biological or adoptive mothers or as babysitters or caretakers. They are very often nurses or are married to doctors. They have an expert grasp of medicine and a keen sense of medicine’s power. They know that if they do certain things, or administer particular drugs, they can elicit seizures, respiratory arrest, or stomach problems that will enable them to rush their children to hospitals, enacting a dramatic last-minute rescue on a brightly lit stage. The psychiatrists Herbert Schreier and Judith Libow describe MSBP as “a ‘career’ pursued by ostensibly wonderful mothers who repeatedly offer their children’s bodies to entice and simultaneously control their powerful, professional victims.” Their victims—the targets of their power plays—are doctors. Their children are pawns. Although some of them kill their children (the death rate ranges from 10 to 30 percent), most keep them alive through careful dosing, tossing them with stunning cruelty into constant states of peril.
In 1991, Schreier and Libow sent out questionnaires about MSBP to all 870 pediatric neurologists in the United States. Of the 190 responses they got back, 107 doctors reported 89 confirmed cases and 198 suspected cases. Pediatric gastroenterologists responding to the same questionnaire reported 267 cases of the syndrome. Though there is still no accurate tally in the United States of how common this phenomenon is (estimates run to about 500 new cases a year) “we can safely say that the disorder is far from rare, and that it is frequently missed.” In 1995, the FBI issued a report on MSBP to police investigators, citing “a growing list of cases” being brought to their attention by medical personnel. “This disorder represents a substantial challenge to the criminal justice system,” the report cautioned. MSBP women are such effective liars that police officers have to pursue their suspicions with a firm handle on the complexity of the suspect.
Marybeth Tinning began this strange dance in 1972, when she had her labor induced to make, of her third child, “a Christmas baby.” Newborn Jennifer died (naturally) of meningitis within days, and Tinning seems to have become abruptly fed up with the point of children, as if they no longer served a purpose. She was enraged by Jennifer’s dying, then depressed, and finally overwhelmed by the sympathy and adulation she received as a grieving mother. The funeral, some who attended remembered years later, seemed in an odd way to cheer her up. Events unfurled from there with lightning speed. Within a matter of weeks, Tinning burst through the doors of Saint Clare’s emergency room with Joe Jr. in her arms, the toddler gasping for breath as his mother screamed for help. Joe was admitted and recovered immediately. He went home. A few days later he was back. This time, the oxygen deprivation had gone on too long. By daybreak he was dead.
Two months went by, another funeral, and at the end of February, Tinning arrived at the emergency room with five-year-old Barbara in convulsions. The little girl was having seizures, bucking and writhing. She, too, was stabilized by hospital specialists. She, too, went home to recover and came back in the same state. By March, she, too, was dead. Marybeth Tinning had discovered i
n the ambulance siren her song, a triumphant cry to the world: I command your attention. I give life, and save it, and take it away.
The gap between what we assume of all mothers and what some of them actually feel was the space that Marybeth Tinning passed through. If Amy Ellwood committed her crime because her pregnancy had lost its meaning, Tinning suffocated her infant daughter because power was more important to her than love; ego gratification more compelling than toil. She was a predator. Had she been a man, she might have been a particularly ruthless entrepreneur, an organized criminal, a serial rapist. But she was a woman, and she located her well-spring of power in maternity. Not in the mundane, thankless mothering that most endure invisibly, without admiration, as our children flourish and grow. Tinning was drawn to the currency of motherhood, to the cultural prestige of pregnancy, the public admiration of a newborn, and the vast communal sympathy surrounding loss. Asked why she continued to get pregnant, given the alleged gene of death that seemed repeatedly to strike her, she replied: “Because I’m a woman, and that’s what women are supposed to do.”
When did people begin to suspect that something was amiss? Not after these first three children died; at that point, everyone was struck by the tragedy. How could a mother lose so much, so fast, and keep her wits about her? People pitied and admired Marybeth, which inspired her to do it again. A fourth child lived and died. Then a fifth. A sixth. Several nurses at Saint Clare were suspicious and called the child abuse hotline at various times, to no avail; Tinning’s pediatricians were stalwart in their support of her. As the sorrow of a mother is presumed, so is her tender protectiveness. The death of a healthy child must, by cultural dictate, be proclaimed a natural mystery. If a pattern emerges wherein nature strikes one family more times than the odds would allow, then suspicions are quickly quelled by the interplay in our culture between two icons: the saintly mother and godly doctor. Munchausen syndrome by proxy thrives in the context of medical arrogance, where doctors cannot admit to the failure of their expertise. They cannot admit to being mystified. They cannot say “I don’t know.”
Although there was never a clear cause of death in Marybeth Tinning’s children, the pathologists who examined each child resisted writing “Cause of Death: Unknown” on the death certificates. Barbara and Joseph and Timothy and Nathan and Michael and Mary Frances and Jonathan and Tami Lynne were listed, variously, as victims of SIDS, pneumonia, and Reye’s syndrome. In retrospect, it was apparent that none of these labels fit. What the children had in common when they died was signs of asphyxiation. They were smothered. Had the pathologists and pediatricians involved been less preoccupied with science, they might have thrown up their hands and so opened the door to an investigation. Still, one wonders if any serious investigating would have taken place. The culturally celebrated mother at the center of tragedy is one of our most potent symbols.
The name Munchausen syndrome by proxy was coined in 1977, around the same time as battered woman syndrome. The label is hugely misleading, insofar as it implies a treatable illness from which someone suffers, presumably without control, without the ability to make moral and rational choices. Many MSBP mothers suffered as children from neglect or abuse, but by the time they are adults, they are no more treatable than a serial killer like Paul Bernardo. Indeed, the psychiatrists Schreier and Libow contend that MSBP “may be a gender related form of psychopathy.” In a moral context, we might simply call it evil. The term psychopath was introduced in the late nineteenth century but is best described in a 1941 book called The Mask of Sanity, by American psychiatrist Hervey Cleckley. As Cleckley defined it, psychopathy covers a cast of characters whom we traditionally understand to be men and might recognize in a villain such as Bluebeard: people without conscience, who, in the clinical phrasing, lack “empathy” for and “insight” into other human beings. They are perfectly sane individuals, Cleckley argued, except for their inability to love. They are hollow.
Since Cleckley, various scholars have narrowed in on the telltale traits of the psychopath. Among the most consistent behaviors are pathological lying, short attention span, grandiosity, manipulativeness, recklessness, remorselessness, and an absence of fear. According to biocriminologists, psychopaths are physically incapable of getting nervous. They don’t experience the physiological arousal that goes with fear and anxiety, such as racing blood and sweaty palms. When people talk about “cold-blooded criminals,” they are intuitively describing a very real biological phenomenon. They may be referring to a lack of compassion, but they are also picking up on the lack of reaction. Psychopaths will as calmly murder a child as eat their supper. In fact, it is often remarked upon in accounts of serial killers that after the crime, they forget all about it and sit down to dine.
Dr. Robert Hare, of the University of British Columbia, has been analyzing psychopathic speech patterns, using functional magnetic resonance imaging scans to monitor brain wave activity. Theorizing that a vital link is missing between emotion and language in the neural structure of their brains, he shows psychopaths words, like “wood” or “hat” or “love” or “death,” to see if their brain waves distinguish emotionally resonant words from neutral ones. Most of us react differently to “love” than to “wood.” The psychopath does not.
“What is love?” a psychiatrist at the Penetanguishene Mental Health Center in Ontario asks a psychopath in a videotaped interview done in the 1980s.
“Having someone put dinner on the table,” the young man guesses.
“What is trust?”
This gives pause. “It’s just a word,” he replies, after mulling it over. “It doesn’t mean anything.”
The psychiatrist J. Reid Meloy compares the structure of the psychopath’s brain to a reptile’s. A cold-blooded animal like an alligator has a fixed set of instincts, “such as home site selection, establishment and defense of territories, hunting, feeding, mating, competition, dominance, aggression.” What a reptile doesn’t have “is a parental response to its offspring.” The analogy reveals why it’s so difficult for people to picture women as psychopathic predators. All women are presumed to have a parental response, even if it’s an anguished response or a crazy one. Even if a woman grows wild and furious with her child, that, at least, is engagement. But what if the child has no ability to affect her at all? That child is invisible, annihilated. The most painful cases of child abuse to read about are the ones in which a child was simply ignored. Nothing can be so threatening to one’s remembered childhood ego as the idea of maternal indifference. Yet neglect, not just by psychopaths, is one of the most common forms of maternal aggression. “Neglect is continual,” argues Dr. Mindy Rosenberg, a child psychologist in Oakland, California; “it’s pervasive, it’s chronic, it’s insidious. And it’s far more common than abuse.” The Swiss psychoanalyst Alice Miller has defined neglect as “soul murder.” Often, neglect is expressive of sublimated rage or depression, but it can also be instrumental. The starved, discarded child in the closet frequently has well cared-for siblings. The mother is using this one child for some other purpose: to punish the father, perhaps, or to disavow an aspect of herself. At any rate, her obliteration of the child is careful, considered, and prolonged. And so horrifying, we can barely even conceptualize it, which goes some way to explaining why the psychopathic mother is a type found virtually nowhere, in either literature or medicine.
What would a psychopathic mother look like? How would she talk and act? Meloy points out that psychopaths “share with the reptilian [brain] an inability to socialize in a consciously affectionate and genuinely expressive manner.” Because they cannot feel affectional emotions, only boredom, exhilaration, and rage, psychopaths become mimics of human behavior in order to fit in. This is what Cleckley meant in his title by “mask of sanity.” Through careful observation, psychopaths learn to appear to be loving, principled, and kind. They are predators in disguise. When Schreier and Libow describe Munchausen syndrome by proxy as “a form of mothering imposture,” they could be describ
ing the mask that is donned by a female psychopath. If these women resemble anyone, if they summon any particular stereotype, it is that of the culturally celebrated mother.
There is a photo of Marybeth Tinning, taken perhaps in 1970, with her eldest daughter Barbara, who looks to be about four years old. The girl wears a perfectly pressed dress tied in the back with a bow. Her hair has been brushed until it gleams. Mother Marybeth sports an expression of cheerful concentration as she shows Barbara how to work a toy. Her own dark hair falls to the shoulder, then bounces with an insouciant flip, like Mary Tyler Moore’s in “The Dick Van Dyke Show.” Barbara would live for roughly one more year.
As if auditioning for parts in a play, Marybeth Tinning pursued roles that she identified with femininity and nurturance: She was the president of a girl’s club in her high school called Future Homemakers of America. She was a mother, nursing assistant, school bus driver, and volunteer ambulance attendant. One year, she got a job as a waitress and seemed to imitate the idea of waitress, painting on her eyebrows and dying her hair. She also engaged in a full repertoire of feminine self-denigrations, displaying tears, a chin cocked downward, a hope for approval. Yet, alone with Joe, she had a violent temper, once kicking her foot through their TV.
When She Was Bad Page 12
