A Texas woman Kills her children with a stone and says God told her to do it. See here .
She was briefly compared to Andrea Yates, another Texas woman who killed all five of her children by drowning. Yates home schooled her children so did Laney. Yates was extremely religious, so was Laney, Yates pleaded insanity, so is laney…
What are the religious overtones implying?
What does the history of women killing their children say?
More Questions to come. This is horrible.
Terrible, truly awful.
I’m interested to know whether the occurrence of (apparently)religiously-motivated crimes like this is statistically significant… are there cases like this (in most other respects) where the offender is not religious?
Is the religion the cause of the crime or is the insanity the cause of the religion and the crime? Is there any way to tell?
I look forward to manhattan leaping into the thread to point out that this has nothing whatever to do with religion, and that we cannot draw any inferences about any other member of the same religion from this isolated incident. Isn’t that right, manhattan?
Regards,
Shodan
Googling “woman kills children” quickly brings up six other women besides Andrea Yates who killed their children. Their religion is not mentioned.
http://www.expressindia.com/ie/daily/19980411/10151054.html
http://mdn.mainichi.co.jp/news/archive/200209/11/20020911p2a00m0fp002001c.html
http://www.tennessean.com/sii/99/05/14/shot14.shtml
http://www.deccanherald.com/deccanherald/dec02/s21.asp
http://www.sfn.saskatoon.sk.ca/~ab133/Archives/Digests/v01n400-499/v01n404
http://www.click2houston.com/news/2195424/detail.html
Then there’s Marilyn Lemak and Susan Smith, who weren’t religious, either.
And there’s this.
Hope I’m not stepping on Manny’s toes by usurping his position, but I’m going to go way out on a limb here and say that a woman’s religion has nothing to do with why, or whether, she kills her children.
I submit that anyone who kills their shildren is crazy.
Many people who are crazy hear voices.
Should a person hearing voices be religious, they may very well attribute the voices to G-d.
Both women apparently home schooled their children as well.
that being said, this woman has (apparently) no history of mental illness, while Andrea Yates was a textbook case of “don’t leave her alone” She’d just gotten released from (not her first) inpatient treatment program.
I wouldn’t characterize this as a religiously linked killing, seems more like a 'this person went nuts; (I think that’s the technical term).
Shodan wadr and all, manny was suggesting in that thread that to label all (specific religious practitioners) as murderous sub humans because of the specific murderous actions of a sub group of (specific religious practitioners) would be wrong, and he brought this particular example out as an example of how wrong that would be. Or at least that’s what I got from it.
I don’t know about Marilyn Lemak, but I remember that Susan Smith claimed her babies would be better of in heaven than alive with her as a mother.
You have to be kidding. Inpatient treatment programs are not just for the psychotic. She was certainly not a textbook case for “don’t leave her alone.” She had been a loving and caring mother until she developed post-partum psychosis which is not the fault of the mother and isn’t always easy to detect.
Plant said:
You make some good points. But “crazy” is not the same as “insane.” Susan Smith wasn’t insane (which is a legal term anyway). She didn’t hear voices, for example. And she fabricated a story to tell the police. Both Andrea and Laney called the police and did so in a fairly calm manner.
One thing that interests me is how much Andrea Yates and Laney changed in appearance. They didn’t even look like themselves. And hadn’t both women had babies within the last couple of years?
My cousin’s wife is one of the brightest, kindest and most charming people I have ever known. She is a good woman and an adoring mother. At one point in her life, she began to show some signs that she was a threat to her children. They went to live with their grandparents far away until this wonderful woman could get the help she needed. It can happen to the nicest of women.
Most people don’t realize how easy it is to have your whole life turn upside down just because of changes in body chemistry.
When people educate themselves about mental illness and the undeserved stigma attached to it, the more likely people are to seek help when they are beginning to become ill. I don’t know if this is true for non-psychotics though.
I am not a psychiatrist but I am harmlessly crazy. :eek:
Just a note to crazy people: when God tells you to kill your kids, he is just trying to psych you out, like with Abraham.
Zoe, Andrea Yates was a loving and caring mother only in the sense that she struggled to take care of her kids despite crippling insanity. What is really sad is that she somehow didn’t understand that it was her right to argue with her husband and family about her needs.
Her illness was detected early, and detected often. Her entire family (which included a few schizoid siblings) and her husband were well aware of her problems. Despite this, they refused to acknowledge how serious her problems were, and expected her to care for her ill father (until his death shortly before the tragedy) and to homeschool her children.
If you have access, I urge you to read the medical records presented at her trial.
It’s easy to imagine that if the Yates had attended a real church, with a large congregation, Andrea might have met parishioners who would have helped her stand up to her husband and get the medical care she so desperately needed.
One of the points I was trying to illustrate is that both women - Yates and Laney - were trying to give their children a decent upringing. Relying hevily on God to take away hardships and Cure thoughts of sinning. Yates exclaimed in her early interviews with psychiatrists that "…the devil was in me … the God couldn’t keep the devil out…’
This to me shows a reliance on God, a dependance on God, that left unfettered can result in unhealthy acts.
Laney’s infanticide - though the boys were older than infants - was particularly gruesome. Not a drowning, but she weilded large stones and crushed their heads in.
If she wanted the help of God to stop her, she was taking her leave a little late. This is truely horrible.
Zoe - I’m not sure where you got the idea that I felt it was Andrea’s fault.
She was, indeed, the poster child for “do not leave her alone” - IIRC, she was pyschotic a month before, had been on serious psychotropic meds, and IIRC, there was something about that as well (I have this vague recollection that the new doc changed her meds, they’d said ‘gee, this worked for her in the past’, but they were changed).
In any event, my feelings about that case were completely hashed out in those threads. I do not hold her responsible for her illness, at all.
yes, when she was well, she was a very good mother. when she was well and she was most assuradly not well at the time (and for a significant period of time before, certainly was not well when she was discharged from the hospital and left alone to tend 5 kids.)
Actually, I’ll go further than Wring and say that Andrea Yates was not a good mother. She simply was not able to be. She was, pretty much, the best mother she could be, but that wasn’t very good. I think we’d all agree that a drug addict or anyone else with problems that prevent them from living normally cannot be the parent they should be and need special help.
God says to Abraham, “kill me a daughter”,
Abraham says “I don’t think I aughter”
I was at a meeting w/ the psychs from the Yates case. Actually, she smothered 2 or 3 w/ pillows. She didn’t drown all 5. It will be a replay of the 1st trial. Did you notice Yates had the same attorney who defended the Texas lady (Harris?) who drove over & killed her hubby in a parking lot,after she saw him w/another woman. Yep, he lost that one too. Amend the above, replay but w. new atty.
The way it happened:
God :Abraham!
A: Yes, Sir?
G: Don’t fo it. It was a test.
A: Thanks. Now Issac, we don’t have to tell your Mother about this…
The way it might have happened:
God: Abraham!
A: (WHACK!) Yes, Sir?
G: Never mind.
Incidentally, Isaac was a grown man when the situation in question happened.
Certainly big enough to carry the wood for the fire. I’ll check with the Rabbi. 
Isaac was a grown man when it happened? I’d always assumed that, well…he wasn’t. That he was either a child, or an infant. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because I just pictured him as being rather passive, not really there, just filling up space. Like a side of meat, simply there for Abraham to prove his fidelity to God, but not there in his own right. And I kind of pictured God staying Abraham’s hand as in a cartoon, when the little baby is about to [fall off bridge/stick fork in outlet/anything that would qualify it for Darwin award], and some kindly person just pulls it out of the way just in time. So, in my mind, that would make him pretty small, vulnerable, unable to defend himself.
i don’t recall the book and verse , but there’s a verse in the old testament which says that if a couple have a son who won’t mind them they should
take him to the village gate where the men o the village shall stone him to death!
that probably wouldn’t stand up in the courts today altho most judges would say they are god fearing believers in the bible.
what’s a person to do? you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t .
the bible has a lot of interesting stuff like that…somewhere it says
god creates the good and the evi. if you pin down one of the bible thumpers they will say something like “well the jewish word which translates as evil really means something else”!
on oahu there is a town named eva…i have read that the town is really pronounced ewa because the hawaiian language doesn’t have a v in it! i tell you, people are no damned good except for you and me and i’m not so sure about you!