Killer Dads (25 page)

Other family-violence experts also recognize that males play a key role in child homicides. Michael Petit of Every Child Matters told me that he views the critical danger in most abuses cases as the “isolated, alienated, immature male,” sometimes the father, but also a mother's lover who comes into a household angry, impatient, and perhaps competitive with a mother's baby or child for her attention. Richard Gelles, too, noted in an interview with me that some males have so few tools to deal with their economic or social pressures that they have only the physicality of their “masculinity to fall back on.”

Like Daly and Wilson, Websdale recognizes radically different types of family annihilators in his book. He labels familicides carried out in a rage—those triggered by a “grievance” against a wife who seeks to leave a marriage or whom her husband suspects of cheating in Daly and Wilson's research scenario—cases of “livid coercive hearts.”
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Those driven by what the killer might consider an altruistic reason to spare the family pain, like William Parente—which Daly and Wilson see as revolving around a “depressed and brooding” father—Websdale calls murders by “civil reputable hearts.”
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In his study detailing the livid coercive heart, he focuses in particular on eight cases, one involving a killer mother (92.6 percent of his 211 cases involved killer fathers, further supporting the view that family annihilations are almost always committed by dads). Three of the male killers did not commit suicide, but it wasn't for lack of trying. In one case “Ben” (Websdale uses aliases in the crimes) drove his car off a 150-foot cliff as he was traveling with his four-year-old daughter and pregnant wife, “Laurie,” 34. Ben, 37, was the only one in the car to survive. Laurie had planned to leave Ben and return to her father's home with their daughter once her baby was born. Jealous Ben suspected Laurie's pregnancy wasn't thanks to him. It was. In another case, “Oscar” killed his longtime lover and his two stepchildren and fled with his two biological kids before he was captured eight years later.

Websdale discovered that each of the men in the cases had extremely troubled childhoods and tended to be from working-class backgrounds. They entered into their own adult relationships desperate to create what they lacked in childhood—a loving, normal family that would provide them not only a warm, intimate home life, but also a place in respectable society whose price of admission is being part of an upstanding family. Websdale found that men in the livid coercive cases were almost too eager to fall in love. Their attraction to their partner often outweighed their mate's attachment to them and bordered on the obsessive. Family killer Oscar recalled the face of the woman he would later murder as being transformed as they dated. He took it as a “supernatural sign” that she was “for me.”
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He also saw her as a “passport” to a “respectable life,” even though he discovered later that she had worked for a time as a prostitute, Websdale recounts.

But it was exactly their desperate hunger for normalcy, and their constant
anxiety about losing it, that almost immediately created friction in their new families. Their grasping fear of losing what they saw as their only hold on respectability and status had the opposite result of what they sought: Instead of drawing family members closer, it drove them farther away.

“The nuclear family provided a vehicle for legitimately incorporating themselves into various social networks; in other words, the nuclear family offered a means of belonging,” writes Websdale.
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“The developing familicidal hearts often entered these relationships with alacrity, at the same time guarding lovers nervously, like a hungry predator protects its food.” Not content with the ebb and flow of love and attention common in many families, the angry husbands quickly moved to “force the hearts of their loved ones toward them,” writes Websdale. “As they forced, their loved ones resisted.” In fact, their “interpersonal domination slowly and paradoxically corrodes the love, affection and romance that the livid coercive heart initially tasted or thought they experienced and longed to retain.”
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The livid coercive men tended to resort to physical force to keep their partners and children in line with their vision of the dutiful love and respect they were convinced they deserved. The women victims in the livid coercive cases studied by Websdale stated while they were alive that they feared their husbands might kill them. Yet very few victims ever resigned themselves to that fate. They attempted to escape their relationships, or strategized within them in a bid to save their marriages while also protecting themselves.

Josh Powell met most of Websdale's markers for a “livid coercive” killer. He had a troubled childhood, likely suffered from some kind of personality disorder, and was singled out in a strange, often-abusive relationship by his father, according to family members. He appeared to be determined to marry, and marry quickly, and successfully wooed Susan Cox. But he was a dysfunctional provider, fired repeatedly from work, and furious when he imagined his wife had nothing but “utter contempt” for him because of his own shortcomings of which he was excruciatingly aware.

Josh also fit the evolutionary model of control of the female in his life. He was clearly focused on dominating Susan, even though she was the more capable parent and provider in their home. He worried about what she thought of him, and, after her disappearance, clearly harbored a
simmering fury about a wife he described as flirtatious and “highly sexual,” and feared was restless. Susan, like other victims of familicide cases examined by Websdale, worried about the violence her husband was capable of, yet had a strategy to change the situation—and leave Josh if she was unsuccessful.

But while Powell's murders and suicide are consistent with many aspects of most cases of familicides, his crime was also extremely unusual because it occurred in stages. First Susan vanished, then Powell killed his sons and committed suicide. The individual characteristics of Powell's crime is a testament to the complex challenges of understanding family annihilations and other types of fatal domestic violence because they often combine several key factors from biological forces to societal pressures, to mental illness, even while they exhibit startlingly similar patterns.

Powell's killing of his two young sons is more typical among dads who murder their children to punish an unfaithful wife or a mate who is leaving or about to leave. Such a “reprisal murder” was suspected in the Michigan case of John Skelton, whose three young sons, Andrew, Alexander, and Tanner, disappeared while he had custody of them over Thanksgiving in 2010 after his wife had divorced him. He was sentenced to up to 15 years in prison after pleading no contest to an unlawful imprisonment charges. The prosecution case was hurt because the boys' bodies were never found. Skelton claimed he had given his sons to some unidentified organization to protect them from his ex-wife.

But Susan Cox Powell was already dead when Braden and Charlie were killed, so there was no errant wife to “punish.” Josh Powell was enraged with several other people, however, whom he wanted to “show”—his in-laws, his own estranged family members, civil authorities who were barring Powell from his children. Powell also faced intrusive court-ordered tests to determine if he was capable of incest or sexually attracted to children. Powell may have been so humiliated by the prospect that he would have to submit to the tests—or, perhaps, that he would be exposed as a pedophile or incestuous father—that he opted for murder-suicide. He was likely also infuriated by the thought that he would be denied access to his own kids. The fact that he not only killed himself and his kids, but also used a gas-fueled explosion to do so added a special emphasis to his deadly “message,” the kind of “overkill” that police were struck by at Chris Foster's estate.

Bill Parente was far more typical among his “genre” of family annihilators, and he shared several aspects of familicidal “civil reputable hearts” studied by Websdale. Interestingly, there are more mothers who commit this type of family annihilation than in the livid coercive cases (though they don't kill their spouses). Websdale argues that in either situation, a parent appears to be “overwhelmed by their gender calling”—in the case of a male, a sense of failure at being a good provider, while women may be ashamed—or angry—because a husband is leaving her.

“The vast majority of familicidal hearts experienced acute shame at failing to live up to the imperatives of their gendered callings as providers, lovers, fathers, husbands, wives, mothers or partners,” the author writes.

Parente was regarded as a good provider, a solid citizen, a devoted dad and husband, and a religious man. If anything, he was too “enmeshed” with his family and seemed to have little life beyond his work and wife and daughters. He also suffered a devastating turnaround in his fortunes and was about to face major ignominy and community revulsion with what had to be imminent arrest to be followed by the hurt, shock, and humiliation of his family. He may have truly wanted to spare them the shame of his actions, or perhaps he couldn't bear to imagine them angry and disgusted by him after his suicide. Or, as Gelles has noted, he simply regarded the family as a single entity, and that his suicide inevitably in his mind involved a “family suicide.”

Parente, as other similar killers, was clearly not as stable as he might have appeared to be to many. “Civil reputable” killers are affected, as are the livid coercive murderers, by a sense of alienation, anomie, and alienation, Websdale has concluded. These “perpetrators appear conformist, proper, respectable, almost emotionally constipated or tightly constrained,” noted Websdale.
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“By virtue of their social locations, upbringings, physiologies and temperaments, civil reputable hearts subdue extreme emotions such as rage, or perhaps experience them much less than the livid coercive heart.” Yet evidence suggests that many “lived lives full of tension and apprehension about the future, often quietly worrying about their days,” he adds. Unlike livid coercive killers, the Parente genre of family annihilators tend to live in “well-to-do or at least upwardly mobile or economically aspiring families,” and are “well thought of in their communities, sometimes pillars
of them,” notes Websdale. “They have much farther to fall than their livid coercive peers. Indeed, the prospect of losing face, of falling from grace, looms large” in their lives.
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Their murder-suicides are particularly shocking to the community and friends and acquaintances, whose very concepts of relationships and human behavior are profoundly shaken by the attacks, says Websdale. “When men and women of honor and respectability commit familicide it raises the possibility that other like-situated persons have the same potential, and it makes us doubt the genuineness of manifestations of honor, civility, caring and nurturing,” he points out in his book.
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One of the most famous cases of a family annihilation was New Jersey accountant John List's murder of his wife, his mother, and his two sons and a daughter in 1971. He fled, assumed a new name, and wasn't apprehended for 18 years. By then he had a new family. Like Parente, he was the only son of a devoted mom. He was a loner whose social life hinged on his family. When he lost his job, he didn't tell his wife, pretended to go to work each day, and sank deeper and deeper into debt. “My professional career had reached a dead end, but I was too proud—or ashamed—to admit it, even to myself,” he said in an interview after he was busted.
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When he shot his family, he arranged their bodies under blankets, and left classical music playing for them on the radio. Like William Parente, he planned his attack, and, as Websdale notes, “killed with care.”

It's not only modern society that may have some link to family annihilations, but, Websdale fears, something in particular about relationships forged in America, the birthplace of familicides, that fuels the murderous intent. He suspects the problem may be more pronounced in this country, though no international evidence has yet been gathered to support that view. The “don't tread on me” and “rugged individualist” aspects of US culture may be particularly demanding for families under stress. A culture formed in the “white heat of individual responsibility” sees “less willingness to recognize the importance of community and caring for others,” argues Websdale.
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“Rather, we see enormous expenditures on the criminal justice juggernaut and incarcerations, and an abject failure to connect individual malevolence and pathology to social, economic and political arrangements.”

THAT'S WHEN I REALIZED. SCOTT SAID THAT SHE WAS “MISSING.” AND I JUST, I JUST KNEW, I KNEW SHE WAS MISSING.

—Sharon Rocha, mother of Laci Peterson, in testimony at the 2004 murder trial of her son-in-law Scott Peterson