Killer Dads (2 page)

Emma Thompson, Jonathan Ramsey, and Osman Irias Salguero are the largely forgotten names of a stream of victims of a battle within the homes of many American families. I've read about and covered stories of battered and murdered children for more than 20 years as a journalist, including several horrific cases at the
New York Post
and
New York Daily News
. One summer, both papers featured one story after another, each more heart wrenching than the last, of a child injury or death at the hands of a parent. The
Village Voice
pointed out that there was no unusual epidemic of child abuse that summer, even though the coverage made it appear so—only that it was a “slow news” time when fewer stories competed for coverage with the usual incidents of child abuse.

In 2005, I covered the northern California trial of Scott Peterson for the
New York Daily News
. Peterson killed his wife, Laci, who was eight months pregnant at the time, the day before Christmas or possibly the night before that, drove her body to the Berkeley Marina, then dumped her corpse offshore from his boat. He's now on death row in San Quentin. The case riveted the public. A young, pretty, missing pregnant wife—her family desperately searching for her at Christmas—moved people at a time when they were profoundly connecting with their own loved ones over the holidays. I was struck by how annoyed many male reporters were at being assigned to cover the trial. They preferred stories with more “impact”—yearned instead to cover Congress or battles in the state legislature or a war. Though the Peterson case only dealt directly with a handful of people and the death of a lone mother-to-be, it stood as a particularly compelling example of domestic violence.

Some criticized the fact that Laci's case, because it involved a white woman (of Portuguese ancestry) of upper-moderate means, drew media and public attention while other similar murders were ignored. San Franciscan Evelyn Hernandez was a 24-year-old Salvadoran immigrant and single mother who was nine months pregnant when she vanished with her six-year-old son the same year Laci disappeared, and her body also washed up in San Francisco Bay. African-American Lisa Eatmon, 33, of Brooklyn was also eight months pregnant when she went missing. She was shot in the head, and her body dumped in the Hudson River. Her corpse was found as Scott Peterson was about to go on trial. Her married lover and the father of her baby, New York City sanitation worker Roscoe Glinton II, 42, was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison for the murder (his first wife also vanished, and her death was ruled a homicide, but no one was ever charged in the crime). But as one of the three cases, Laci's, drew attention, it led to coverage of the other killings. More typically, none of them would have drawn much notice.

If budget is a gauge, America's biggest fear is terrorism and other foreign threats. The US military budget has increased from $300 billion in 2000 to some $750 billion in 2011, close to 20 percent of the federal budget,
1
and the Department of Homeland Security commanded funds close to $46 billion in 2011.
2
But the closest most of us will likely ever come to
terrorism is dealing with long, inconvenient security lines at airports. Most of us, however, live in towns and cities where children are being hurt and terrorized—or have been killed—by an adult in their home. As many as 20,000 children have been killed at home in the last ten years, more than three times as many Americans killed in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
3
Such violence against society's most vulnerable at the hands of adults they love and trust in the cradle of their home is particularly crushing. We should be striving mightily to protect these children. Yet we aren't even discussing the problem. The battle over abortion rights rocked the 2012 presidential election, with a powerful political faction pushing for more life to be brought into the world, regardless of the desires of pregnant women. But there was little or no discussion of protection for or support of children once they morphed from unborn to born.

New studies in the wake of the 2008 recession have shown that economic stresses are boosting violence at home, which is already surprisingly high in America.
4
Unlike during the Great Depression, when the public believed Wall Streeters were jumping from windows following economic ruin, the toll this time around could be more bruised, battered, and murdered children. A particularly disturbing development has been an increase in “familicides” by dads who kill everyone in their families, sometimes before committing suicide. The number of children killed has increased at least 10 percent in the last four years.
5
Though they represent a small subset of child fatalities, the puzzling murders hold clues to the stresses families face and hint at the troubling potential for deadly violence.

It's the particularly confounding cases that I've focused on in this book. Child abuse and murder by parents grappling with drug or alcohol abuse, mental problems, poverty, and rage is less puzzling than that by parents who appear to be caring, good providers who suddenly “snap” and abuse their children or murder them. Examinations of these “extreme” cases hold some of the most dramatic clues to dynamics within families and within men that can explode into violence. I've focused on child homicides, only some of which were preceded by abuse, and I've picked homicides by fathers because I believe their role in child killings has captured less media attention than deadly mothers.

I've chosen key cases based on “types” of fathers who kill, including a father who kills his stepdaughter, a suicidal family annihilator driven by apparent concern for his loved ones, a family annihilator driven by rage, the murder of a pregnant wife by a psychopath, and a killing in heartland America initially branded by law enforcement officials as an honor killing. I've also focused on studies and theories of family violence by experts, and possible strategies proposed by those battling to save children's lives to stem the tide of violence at home. What activists fighting to protect kids from violence fear now is that the economic upheavals that may be triggering increased violence against children and fatalities are at the same time constricting budgets for social services, policing, and court supervision that could save lives.

It's been a long year. I gathered the information in this book by interviewing more than 65 people and reaching out to scores of others. I've talked to friends, family, co-workers, neighbors, investigators, scammed clients, and experts who daily confront the face of child murder by parents. I've racked up trial hours, pored over news reports, police reports, court transcripts, and stats on international and US child abuse and homicides. I talked to one of the killers in depth, and we're still e-mailing and phoning each other in a continuing relationship that has taken me by surprise. One of the victims—the wife of a suicidal husband who killed their two children—who is missing and presumed dead, has spoken to me from beyond the grave in a series of compelling e-mails that reveal her as a strong, articulate, intelligent woman who wanted desperately to save her marriage, but not at any cost. Throughout it all I've seen the little ghosts and grieved their lost faces, the lost years, and the lost promise of children who should not have died.

I'M A NORMAL GUY WHO MADE A BIG, BIG MISTAKE.

—James, 2012 phone interview with the author

James is a soft, hulking man with a boyish face who spends afternoons and evenings bent over a tiny seed-bead jewelry loom on a desk or on his metal frame bed at the state prison that's his home for the next several decades. Beneath a bright, cold overhead light and the warmish glow of a tiny desk lamp on his wispy brown hair, the 31-year-old convict carefully threads minuscule pieces of colored glass or rainbow-hued plastic on a needle and line, meticulously adding bit by bit of red or gold, green and blue in intricate patterns to create bracelets and pendants in a ten-by-twelve-foot room behind electronic doors and a tiny window that he shares with his “cellie.” He uses beading patterns the convicts trade, or those he has gleaned from books, and he sometimes sketches his own patterns to re-create an arresting image he sees during the day, like the spiky yellows of the heavy dahlia heads that recently lined a row of one of the gardens in the sunny field where prison cattle used to graze. He has made a tiny American-flag pendant, an iris-patterned bracelet, and earrings using Native American designs provided by an inmate member of the Crow nation.

The intensive labor on the loom is James's calm after a murderous storm, an emotional tsunami that seems now like a half-remembered dream. The beading quiets his mind. “I'm usually too fidgety to read,” he tells me in one of several phone conversations we've had about his crime and his life behind bars. “It focuses my brain and I'm calmer and can think about things.” Not everyone can do seed-beading in the prison, where crafts are a necessity
for inmates killing endless years in stir. It takes keen eyesight, and dexterity not well suited to the many thick fingers in the prison. He's worried about what he'll do if he gets arthritis later on in his 55-year sentence. It runs in his family. James spends other hours picking up litter, sweeping the cement pathways outside, and cutting the grass on the prison field. In winter he shovels snow. It's a cherry job at the prison because it affords several extra hours outdoors. He has to watch his back, though, because his particular work assignment is so coveted that other prisoners might tell lies about him to get him bounced off the detail so they can get it for themselves. As appealing as the job is, for months at a time, he usually works less than 20 hours a week, which still leaves long stretches of time to fill when remorse can suddenly fill James with dread. “I can't shake this feeling of sadness,” he tells me.

James enjoys talking to the guards, seeing what's happening in their lives. Most are civil, though some are “meaner and more ill-mannered than the inmates they look after,” James believes. His fellow cons gets annoyed when he chats up the guards. “There's a real us-and-them attitude here, and some inmates get mad at me because I'm friendly to the guards. I don't get it. Why make things uglier than they have to be?” he asks me. One guard told James recently that he “doesn't seem to be the kind of guy who belongs behind bars,” James recounted. “I didn't tell him what I was in for.” James considers himself a “normal” person with “control issues” who made a “big, big mistake.” He's on antidepressants because “my life here is pretty depressing,” he notes. The other inmates often confound him. They're hard to read because, he suspects, many of them are grappling with severe mental illnesses. “They're your best friend one minute, then trying to beat the crap out of you the next,” he explains. He had a cellmate for a time who was “too hyper; he made me nervous,” says James, so he asked to move out. He gets along with his current cellie, who has been in one prison or another since the age of 16. James has taught him how to string seed beads. The two never talk about their crimes.

James communicates with his elderly mom, who lives in Kelowna, British Columbia, but it's hard for her to travel to see him. He never hears from his sister, Tammy, who stood by helplessly when James's young victim
died. Before the murder, they used to talk weekly, and he was closer to her as an adult than to any of his other three siblings and stepbrother. “It's hard for me,” says James. “But it's probably much harder for her to deal with what happened.”

James is being held in the protective custody West Block section of his prison, some five acres from the 1,500-man “mainline” facility, because his crime was so horrible his co-convicts want to murder him. He has asked me to use only the name James to identify him in case a copy of this book gets into the hands of fellow inmates. He knows his crime would be easily discovered through an Internet search, but cons at his prison have only e-mail access and can't search the Web. He also believes prisoners won't easily identify him from photos reprinted here because he's slightly older now and his appearance has changed. From his first day alone behind bars in an intake prison facility, other inmates, told of his crime by the prison guards, shouted to James from inside their cells what they planned to do to him when they got the chance.