Parents Who Kill--Shocking True Stories of the World's Most Evil Parents (3 page)

The distressed mother was charged with first degree murder and spent a month in a psychiatric hospital, after which she was allowed home on the proviso that she was supervised by her husband and her mother. She remained under psychiatric care.

When the case went to trial, five psychiatrists testified that she had been psychotic when she murdered her daughter, and the judge found her not guilty by reason of insanity and said that confining her to a psychiatric hospital would serve no useful purpose. She was free to go.

Though the aforementioned modern cases were treated leniently, mothers who killed their newborns in the early part of the 20th century often spent the rest of their lives in institutions. This could have happened in the British case which follows had the woman’s husband not petitioned repeatedly for her release.

Beth’s first baby, a son, was born in March 1902 in Romford, England, nine months into her marriage to Bert. The couple initially lived with Bert’s parents, but Beth and her mother-in-law often clashed, being similarly strong-willed. Later, they rented a home of their own and, in 1907, had their second child, another boy. In February 1913 the couple had a daughter and in July 1916 she gave birth to yet another son.

By now, Beth was back in the shadow of her hated in-laws as her husband had gone into business with his brother. But life was comfortable for the couple and their four children, who enjoyed the luxury of a five-bedroomed terraced cottage with a large backyard where the little ones could play.

Unfortunately, the Woods’ daughter Maisie developed the highly-infectious disease diphtheria in March 1918, a month after her fifth birthday. She was rushed to hospital and the house was fumigated, council workers burning the child’s toys, clothes and furniture lest the contagious disease spread. Maisie was placed in the isolation unit of the local infirmary, where, later that month, she died.

Beth was too distraught to attend the funeral and stayed at home with her baby son, telling him repeatedly that Maisie had gone to Heaven. Her grief was compounded the following month when her 16-year-old son left home to join the Territorial Army and she expressed fears that she’d never see him again.

In retrospect, Beth was suffering from clinical depression, finding the simplest task too much of an effort, but well-meaning relatives suggested to Bert that he should impregnate her, that another child would take her mind off Maisie’s death.

In late 1918, Beth became pregnant for the fifth time. She was now 40-years-old and in poor physical and mental health, convinced that she was going to die and that Bert would have to cope with the children without her. She cried every day and worried about whether her second-born son, due to leave school the following year, would be able to find employment in these difficult post-war times. She suffered from insomnia so would rise early and scrub the floors and the front step until she was exhausted. Her diet was meagre and, when she did eat, it was a less-than-nutritious slice of bread with margarine.

On 16 August 1919, she went into labour three weeks early. She was in pain throughout the night, though attended by a caring and experienced midwife. Everyone was expecting Beth to have one baby during the home birth, but, when her daughter was born, the midwife could see another baby girl in the birthing canal and that it was breech. She manually moved the baby into a head-down position, causing Beth further agony.

The second baby was born and, unaware that a third child was still in the womb, the midwife gave Beth a dose of the medicine ergot to help expel the placenta. This made the third baby’s heart stop beating. The uterus contracted violently and, 15 minutes later, the dead or dying baby was born, whereupon Beth haemorrhaged massively. The midwife tried desperately to revive the infant which, like its siblings, weighed only 3lbs, but to no avail.

Beth almost lost consciousness during the grisly birth, and
had to be taken to hospital in a taxi for a blood transfusion. The doctor told her that once her health had recovered she would need a major operation to restore her lacerated perineum, the area between her rectum and vagina, which was badly torn. On her return home, she was told to rest in bed for a month but found it impossible to relax and began to fret about the impending operation, telling Bert that she feared the surgery, especially as it might leave her incontinent. In the space of 18 months she had lost two children and now had premature twins to nurture, yet she had nothing left to give.

For several days she remained in the marital bedroom, following doctor’s orders, but still directed the entire household from her sickbed. In retrospect, she was either going into a manic phase or reacting to the ergot that she was being given regularly to prevent post-partum bleeding. Ergot can produce dramatic mood swings and even hallucinations or
full-blown
psychosis in some patients and, desperately thin and undernourished, Beth Wood must have been particularly susceptible to this.

When the babies were 10 days old, she awoke sometime between midnight and 4am with a terrible feeling of foreboding. Whilst the rest of the household slept, she took both of her infant daughters from their crib, dragged the tin bath into the back yard and filled it with cold water from the water butt: she would later remember that the cold had made her feel more energised than she had for months. Then she put the babies, still clothed, into the full bath and went back to bed.

At 4.30am she woke her sleeping husband and said agitatedly that she’d left the babies downstairs. He explored the downstairs rooms then went out into the yard and found them, drowned, in the tin bath. He confronted Beth with this
but she denied it, saying that she’d merely bathed them and left them downstairs. Increasingly confused, she began to weep.

The police were summoned and Beth was taken to the local hospital, by which time her mental health had deteriorated further. She talked to babies that only she could see, complained of pains in her head and retreated into a world of her own.

A fortnight after the murders, the coroner held an inquest. But when he saw how weak Beth was, he said that she did not have to give evidence. She could only walk by leaning heavily on a nurse and was still too sick to have the operation on her perineum.

Unfortunately, it would be 1922 before the law was changed to allow for a manslaughter charge in such post-natal depression cases, so Beth was charged with double murder. On 17 October 1919 she appeared, still desperately frail, before the local magistrate. She was remanded in Holloway Prison until her trial and was allocated a cell in the hospital wing where she spent most of her time weeping and expressing both grief and remorse.

Whilst she was in prison, the babies – named Queena and Freda – were buried next to their sister Maisie. (In those impoverished days, insurance companies refused to insure a child under three-months-old for fear that the parents would be motivated to murder it, so the Wood family had to pay the cost of the double funeral from their savings and didn’t have enough left over for a headstone, though one was bought at a later date.)

On 31 October 1919, Beth went on trial at Essex Autumn Assizes, knowing that the jury could find her guilty and that she’d face the death penalty. She pleaded not guilty. The
prosecutor was sympathetic, outlining the death of five-
year-old
Maisie, the dead newborn triplet and injurious birth. The defence echoed these statements, noting that Beth had borne no malice towards her babies, had drowned them whilst in an enfeebled state of mind.

The judge told the all-male jury that, if they believed Beth had intended to drown the girls, they must find her guilty of murder – only then could they deal with whether she was responsible for her actions. The jury found her guilty but said that she was not responsible.

In a compassionate society, the courts would surely have decided that Beth had suffered enough and allowed her to return to her loving husband and sons. Instead, she was sent to Broadmoor, the psychiatric hospital, where she joined a hundred other women who had murdered their children whilst in the grip of post-natal psychosis, in those days known as puerperal insanity. Some of these women would remain there for the rest of their lives…

Though she recovered physically and mentally, Beth had no memory of drowning the two girls. She told other inmates that she must have done it because everyone said that she had, and she sometimes expressed the wish that she’d been given the death sentence. Meanwhile, her husband sank into a deep depression which lasted a year and the children had to be raised by his mother and an unmarried sister. After this, he got a new house for his family and began to petition various legal bodies for his wife’s release.

On 4th December 1921, 43-year-old Beth was allowed home to her ecstatic husband and sons. Prematurely grey and somewhat depressed, she remained an inveterate worrier for the next 30 years.

Bert died when Beth was 71 and she married an old friend, but her mind began to unravel. When she tried to set fire to her underclothes, she was committed to a psychiatric hospital. She was frequently visited by her concerned relatives but soon she no longer recognised them. She died of a pulmonary embolism on 15 September 1957, aged 79, but her memory has been kept alive in her great-granddaughter Sian Busby’s
beautifully-written
book on the subject,
The Cruel Mother,
subtitled
A Family Ghost Laid To Rest.

T
hough hormonal changes – and generalised stress – in the post-partum months are the most common cause of mental breakdown in mothers, a small percentage develop severe mental illness that isn’t necessarily associated with childbirth.

Originally an intelligent woman who was studying for a master’s degree, mother-of-two Viviane Gamor became delusional in 2003. The student, who lived in Hackney, East London, insisted that she had met various famous people and would talk at length about these fictitious relationships. She began to stare at strangers intently for no apparent reason. More chillingly, she shaved off the hair on one side of her baby daughter’s head.

Over the next two years, Viviane’s mental health deteriorated further and she changed her name by deed poll to Mother Nature Viviane and said that Jesus was her twin.

In early 2006, she was sectioned under the mental health act for threatening her half-sister with a knife. The father of her son and daughter, Gabriel Ogunkoya, took the bewildered children to live with his parents. They were also cared for by himself and his girlfriend. Yet, despite the crucial role he played in his children’s lives, the authorities didn’t tell Gabriel why his ex-partner had been sectioned or that she’d been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic.

Viviane seemed to respond well to medication and after five weeks the authorities let her out. A condition of her release was that Hackney social services would oversee any contact that she had with her children. But staff shortages meant that the supervision only extended to the first visit, after which a social worker mandated that she should be allowed unsupervised access to Antoine and Keniece. The children’s father was so alarmed by this that he sought legal counsel, but the solicitor said that, if he kept them from their mother, he would be virtually kidnapping them and breaking the law. Gabriel was so concerned that he gave his 10-year-old son a mobile phone and told him to call at any time.

The 29-year-old’s first two unsupervised access visits in January 2007 with her children passed without incident – but, unknown to Hackney social services, she’d stopped taking her medication. On 24 January, she was seen by a psychiatrist who said that she had a positive outlook and did not pose any further risk. Two days later, during the children’s third overnight visit, she flew into a psychotic rage and began to beat 10-year-old Antoine with a hammer. Neighbours heard his agonised screams and called the police. They arrived at Viviane Gamor’s flat but by then she’d killed her son and had wrapped cling film around the face of her three-year-old
daughter, Keniece, suffocating her to death. She told horrified police officers: ‘I don’t care. They’re not mine.’ She was sent to a psychiatric facility.

From the start, she freely admitted both murders and later pleaded guilty to manslaughter due to diminished responsibility. She appeared, flanked by psychiatric nurses, at The Old Bailey in June 2008 wearing a red leather jacket and a scarlet T-shirt, seemed indifferent to the proceedings and was detained indefinitely under the mental health act.

Afterwards, the grieving father said ‘I obeyed the law and let them go. I wish I had not done that. The system that I obeyed has frogmarched my children to their deaths. They assessed her and found nothing wrong. This is pure negligence which will not be tolerated.’

In August 2008, an inquiry concluded that mental health services should have taken more account of Viviane Gamor’s bizarre behaviour towards her children – but, surprisingly, it failed to identify a single decision which could have prevented their deaths. The children’s father, now 33, branded the inquiry a whitewash and said ‘My family and I feel totally let down. It is a system which has failed my children.’

A religious obsessive, Texas housewife Deanna Laney named her three sons after Biblical characters. As the years passed, her mania deepened until she believed that she was hearing messages from God. He told her to kill the boys and said that, if she resisted, they would meet a more unpleasant death. Reading her bible more obsessively than ever, she began to lose weight and would later say that she smelt sulphur and interpreted this as proof of the Devil. Over time, she saw signs that God wanted her to kill the boys with rocks, and she hid one away in her baby’s room.

On 11 May 2003, she put the three children to bed at 9pm before retiring for the night herself. But she awoke at 11pm and went to her 14-month-old, Aaron, who was asleep in his cot, fetched the rock and brought it down hard on his skull. He began to scream and her husband woke up and asked her what was wrong. Calling that everything was fine, she put a pillow over the baby’s face to muffle the noise. He was left partially blind and with permanent motor control disabilities as the result of this brutal attack.

Leaving little Aaron with severe injuries, she woke six-year-old Luke and told him to follow her into the garden. He did so. She ordered him to lie down with his head on top of one of the largest stones in the rockery. When he was supine, she picked up another rock and smashed it into his head: though he sustained massive injuries, the unfortunate child didn’t die right away. But, when he did expire, his mother was unconcerned as her god had promised that the little boy would be resurrected on his birthday in two months’ time. She dragged him into the shadows, where his brother wouldn’t see him, and put a large boulder on his chest.

The 39-year-old then fetched eight-year-old Joshua from his bed and led him to the garden where she brought another rock crashing down on his skull, fatally injuring him. Pulling him into the shadows to lie beside his brother, she put a large boulder on his chest.

Returning to the house, the devoted choir singer calmly phoned the operator and said that she’d killed her three boys. Detectives arrived to find the oldest two dead and the baby fighting for his life. When they asked her why she’d done it, she replied ‘I was told to do this by God.’ A week later she told a court appointed psychiatrist ‘I know that
murder is illegal under man’s law, but I was answering to a higher authority.’

She repeated her religious arguments during her trial in May 2004, telling the jury ‘In our faith we believe the word of God. This word is infallible. I feel the Holy Spirit springs up within me when I speak of him.’ She said that she expected to become ‘God’s witness to the end of time.’ Her husband, who had promised to stand by her, broke down several times as jurors were told of his sons’ painful and frightening deaths.

The jury took seven hours to find her not guilty by reason of insanity and she was shipped off to a mental hospital indefinitely. Afterwards, her brother-in-law, a pastor, said that Deanna wasn’t responsible as she had been possessed by a demon at the time.