Fatal Maternity (part 2): Altruistic Filicide
When a mother believes only she can save her children by murdering them
For a mother to take the life of her children, believing wholeheartedly that she is rescuing her beloved babies from a fate worse than death, is unfathomable to most. It is a twisted form of a mother’s unconditional love, one that takes her children to the grave with her.
“To take the child with them is to do the child a favor. Among child murderers it’s pretty common. I remember a mother left a suicide note after killing her child that said, ‘bury us in one box. We belong together, you know.’ I’ve seen a couple like that.” - psychiatrist Phillip J. Resnick, the Los Angeles Times, 1992.
Resnick is the director of forensic psychiatry at Case Western and, accompanied often by fellow psychiatrist Susan Hatters Friedman, has done extensive research on filicide.
Altruistic filicide is classified by Resnick as a form of murder that occurs when a mother who is lost in the pits of despair, desperation, severe mental illness, and is often already suicidal, murders her children as an act of what she believes is saving them. Resnick notes that almost half of all filicidal acts can be categorized under this title. He further breaks up Altruistic Filicide into two sub-types.
Filicide associated with suicide
A suicidal mother may come to the final decision to kill herself, and take her children with her, believing she can’t abandon them. She kills them to keep them from suffering a life without her. The mother may also believe her children are an extension of her herself, and that when she is miserable and in pain, so are they.
The mother comes to believe that leaving her children behind when she kills herself is a fate worse than death. Perhaps she feels agonizingly alone in the world. Maybe the father isn’t present in the kids’ lives, or something makes her believe they won’t be safer with him then they are with her (even if, logically, he has done nothing to warrant this belief).
To further the tragedy, a 1991 Swedish study on the subject found that five older children in different cases had witnessed and reported their mothers committing filicide—suicide.
According to “Child murder by mothers: Patterns and prevention”, a study by Resnick and Hatters Friedman, between 16 and 29 percent of filicides end with the mother’s suicide. Many mothers survive the suicide attempt. This study also states that when a young mother with young children commit suicide, about five percent kill their children, too.
Resnick’s studies linked 67 percent of maternal filicide cases to women with a history of mental illness.
In “Filicide as part of extended suicide: An experience of psychotherapy with the survivor” (M. Manjula and C.R. Chandrashekar), the writers cite a 1990 study by Bourget and Bradford which found that 31 percent of parents who committed filicide were diagnosed with major depression.
One woman Manjula and Chandrashekar spoke to survived the filicide—suicide she committed, though both of her children died from injections and drugs she gave them. After discovering her husband’s affairs, living with his alcoholism and verbal abuse, and with the marriage falling apart, the mother had decided to kill herself. But she believed the children wouldn’t be safe with their father, and couldn’t fathom another woman taking care of them should their father remarry.
As in many cases, mental illness had a long history in her family. She felt trapped in the marriage due to her husband being so possessive. To her, there seemed to be no way out, and she couldn’t abandon her children with a man who had been so cruel to her. Abusers isolate and possess and make their victim believe they are alone. It’s essentially a form of brainwashing. Even when a victim has people who care about them, they come to believe their abuser that they have no one and aren’t worthy of having anyone else in their life.
In the aftermath of surviving the filicide-suicide, this woman continued to be suicidal, and grieved for her children. She was interviewed in the days following the events.
“The patient was allowed to talk about her children – happy moments, current feelings, death, and burial,” Manjula and Chandrashekar wrote. “In the process, she experienced difficulty to think that their bodies were decomposing, dreamt about them, and felt their presence around. She held her husband responsible for the incident, and felt that curse of those suffered from his hands has taken her children.”
And despite blaming her husband for her actions in killing the kids, she still chose to go back to him. It was all she knew. Part of her wanted to punish him and make him hurt the way he had hurt her, overlapping with the spousal revenge category.
Not every woman who commits filicide with the intent to attempt suicide is in an abusive marriage. This can overlap with the mother being acutely psychotic (which we get into next time), which can mean she has postpartum depression or psychosis or other mental problems.
Lindsay Clancy had what appeared to be a solid and healthy marriage when she strangled her three kids in January 2023 before trying to kill herself by jumping out of a second story window while her husband was out running errands. But her defense attorney has been quite vocal about her postpartum depression diagnosis and how over-medicated she apparently was, which he believes led her to her actions that day.
“Our marriage was wonderful and diametrically grew stronger as her condition rapidly worsened. I took as much pride in being her husband as I did in being a father and felt persistently lucky to have her in my life,” Patrick Clancy said of his wife.
In fact, Patrick told the media that he forgave her.
“I want to ask all of you that you find it deep within yourselves to forgive Lindsay, as I have. The real Lindsay was generously loving and caring towards everyone - me, our kids, family, friends, and her patients,” he said. “The very fibers of her soul are loving. All I wish for her now is that she can somehow find peace.”
Tranyelle Harshman shot her four kids before turning the gun on herself and taking her own life in Wyoming in Feb. 2025. She called 911 and while the dispatcher pleaded with her to stay on the phone, she told the dispatcher it was too late. Sure enough, when police arrived at the home, only one of the children showed signs of life, though later succumbed to her injuries. Harshman was married and appeared to be on civil terms with her ex-husband. Cliff Harshman, her second husband, discussed her struggles with postpartum depression and PTSD.
“Most people don’t understand how that affects the brain. It’s a chemical imbalance. And it can be exacerbated by trying to fix it with medication,” he told Cowboy State Daily, adding:
“My wife was not a monster.”
Filicide to relieve pain and suffering
In a mortifying way, one could look at this form of filicide as euthanasia, where the mother murders her child to alleviate a child’s illness, pain, or suffering. The difference here is that this isn’t about the mother’s pain, but about what the child, or what the mother believes the child, is going through.
Sometimes the pain is real. Sometimes is could be part of a delusion that the child is sick. Alternatively, the mother could believe she is saving her children from hell.
Dr. Shabehram Lohrasbe, a prominent forensic psychiatrist in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, is quoted on the Canadian Domestic Homicide Prevention Initiative website:
“This finding of altruism – killing because of concern that they are suffering – doesn’t sit well in society as a whole. It is hard for most of us who have had kids or loved kids to fathom how someone would regard it as something positive, but that is the reality – predominantly among women who kill their kids.”
This again can overlap with psychosis, where the mother might believe she needs to save her children from going to Hell, from Satan or some other malevolent force or being, or that her kids need to be with God in order to be truly safe from the world. She could experience voices or hallucinations telling her to do it. This discussion will be explored in-depth in the next installment of this series, which focuses on Acutely Psychotic Filicide.
Case Overview: Andrea Yates
She spent her life wanting to be a “supermom”, after graduating valedictorian in a high school class of 608, and going on to become a nurse at a Houston cancer center. But motherhood didn’t go as beautifully as she wished. Andrea Yates drowned her five kids in her bathtub on June 20, 2001. It became a highly publicized case, the trial broadcast live much to the morbid fascination and mortification of the entire nation, perhaps the world.
Despite being a wonderful mom, as described by those who knew her, she became depressed and overwhelmed. A friend testified at the trial how Andrea became like “a zombie” after the birth of her fourth child.
Andrea claimed that Satan wanted her to kill her children. She instead overdosed on medications to prevent herself from hurting her kids. She survived, and despite her psychiatrist warning against it, she and her husband had a fifth child.
Andrea had been hospitalized four times, the final being five weeks before the murders. She hid her psychotic symptoms from both her husband and doctor. However, it is important to note here that her physician also took her off her anti-psychotic meds in the weeks leading up to the murders. So, it could be surmised that she feigned being better while obsessing over filicidal ideations.
Phillip Resnick evaluated Andrea Yates, finding that she “believed deeply that killing her children was the right thing to do,” and that she “believed that Satan had taken over her body and soul and was eyeing her children's souls next.” She said that by killing her children while they were young and innocent, they’d go to heaven and she’d have saved them from Satan.
By turning herself in immediately, Resnick said “she thought her own death would fulfill a Biblical prophecy: If she were executed, Satan would be executed.”
He diagnosed Andrea with schizoaffective disorder, and severe depression with schizophrenic symptoms, which mixed with postpartum depression and psychosis.
Andrea was convicted of three counts of capital murder in 2002, and sentenced to life in prison. However, in 2006, her conviction was overturned during a new trial that found her not guilty by reason of insanity. She was transferred to a mental health treatment facility, where she remains. A 2022 People article discussed how Andrea has the option to request a review to be released yearly, though she turns it down every time. Her defense attorney, George Parnham, who stays in touch with her, told ABC news:
“She’s where she wants to be. Where she needs to be. And I mean, hypothetically, where would she go? What would she do?”
A New Plymouth, New Zealand, mother has second thoughts
On July 28, 2015, this mother, who remains unnamed in the press, tried to kill herself and her three children via carbon monoxide poisoning after using a vacuum hose to draw in fumes from her running car in the garage. She wrote out a suicide note, spread flower cuttings throughout the house, collected the baby, and joined her other two sleeping children in a bedroom after turning on her car.
But she panicked, and instead called an ambulance. When first responders arrived, her youngest was unconscious, but they all survived. The mother pled guilty to three charges of attempted murder, and was sentenced to two years of intensive supervision, instead of the maximum fourteen-year sentence the judge could have handed down. The judge said:
“There can be no doubt, and your plea accepts this, that you made deliberate, though misguided decisions to take your own life and to kill your children… But, this is not a typical case.”
The woman had suffered abuse as a child, according to her psychiatrist, and had a history of depression. With the stress of having a third child, marriage problems, and the fear of losing custody of her kids, the psychiatrist commented that the mother was vulnerable to relapse. The judge acknowledged the altruistic nature of this crime:
“Events had conspired to such a degree that you genuinely believed the only way in which you and your children should be kept safe was for you to take your own life and those of your children.”
Susan Hatters-Friedman also remarked on this case, something that echoes across all three of these cases, and many others:
“It’s often a really depressed, maybe psychotic, out-of-touch-with-reality, mum, doing what they would call an extended suicide, where their primary motive is they are going to kill themselves... but then they love their children so much, they worry what will become of them.”
Final Thoughts
I could list so many cases that fall into this Altruistic classification, each one as heartbreaking as the last. Ladies, please. If you are in that postpartum stage and having disturbing thoughts or bouts of depression, please get help. Your life matters, as do those of your children.
Personally, I have seen two friends suffer from postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis. The first fell into depression right after giving birth to both of her kids. She’s doing better, but we had to work over her husband being anti-medication and me practically begging her to go see a doctor. My other friend awoke me at 1 a.m. once, shortly after having her second child, rambling about delusions of God and fate and otherwise. She called a few people that night, I heard later. She was hospitalized and got the help she needed, thank goodness, and blogs about her experiences. It’s an important discussion to have, and it’s so vital that women in these circumstances know they aren’t alone. Catching these conditions early on could save their lives, and that of their children, before they become another tragic news story.
As always, thank you for reading. Next time, we’ll venture into Resnick’s next classification: Acutely-psychotic filicide.
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Other Cases
Sources
“Child murder by mothers: patterns and prevention” Susan Hatters Friedman and Phillip J. Resnick
Canadian Domestic Homicide Prevention Initiative
Andrea Yates