Killer Moms

In one prominent case, in Sacramento, 25-year-old Diane Bobo was convicted of first degree murder for the stabbing deaths of her three children, even though it clearly was proved she had hallucinations.

Hard to get sympathy

What makes it hard for defense attorneys to win these court cases is that killing your child is so heinous, it’s hard to get much sympathy from jurors, said Brown.

In the days after the Daly City deaths, an officer working the case called the murders of the children “evil.”

But many experts disagree with the officer’s assessment.

“The act is evil,” said Brown. “But we can’t rush to judgment on assessing the individual. My hunch is that there is something driving her around the bend.”

“These women are not monsters,” said Sanford. “They are so remorseful. I get lots of letters from women in prison. The letters are so tragic.”

Why women kill their children is complex.

The majority of the cases are impulse killings, like the classic shaken-baby syndrome in which a mother acts out of a spark of rage or frustration, said Mike Rustigan, a criminologist who teaches at S.F. State.

But about 30 percent, he said, are the premeditated murders that grab headlines. Again, the reasons here are varied.

A common impulse, believe it or not, said Rustigan, is love. In this scenario, the mother feels she is saving her child from a horrible life like she had, or from a life without her. The mothers in these cases are almost always suicidal.

Another scenario is revenge, known as Medea killings. In these murders, named for the ancient Greek myth, the mother kills the children to punish the husband or boyfriend who is philandering or abusive to her.

No chance for happiness

Yet another impulse is the narcissistic, self-centered one, said Rustigan, in which women perceive the children as stymieing their chance at happiness.

Susan Smith, the South Carolina mother who strapped her two young sons in their car seats before sinking the car in a river, is the most famous such case. Smith was infatuated with a man who didn’t want to get involved with a woman with children. In another case, a Florida death row inmate nicknamed the Black Widow threw her paralyzed, 19-year-old son out of a canoe to cash in on his $125,000 life insurance policies.

Although killing an offspring seems diabolical and a symptom of a troubled society, it is not a new phenomenon.

Historically, the family’s survival in times of hardship and poverty often necessitated the sacrifice of children, said Carol Sanger, a Columbia University law professor with an expertise in infanticide.

Primitive tribes often sacrificed the female baby to assure the survival of the male children, who were considered more essential to the tribe’s survival because they would grow to be hunters and providers, she said.

Abandoned on roadways

In ancient Roman times, children were abandoned on the side of the road on the pretense that someone would find them who could better care for them. In modern, overpopulated China, where families are discouraged by the government from having more than one child, daughters still are abandoned on roadways.

The spread of Catholicism in Europe in the 1500s through 1700s saw the start of foundling homes in convents where women would drop off their illegitimate children, said Sanger. Disease was so rampant that abandoning the children there almost always meant death.

Later, in Victorian England, with high prostitution rates and strict morality, so many illegitimate children were drowned or smothered that the government instituted mandatory registration of births, she said.