Fatal Maternity (part 8): Offender Rehabilitation
Of all the motives covered so far, which of these women can or cannot be integrated back into society after her crimes?
The biggest controversy in the true crime and justice world is whether offenders can be rehabilitated to the point they harmlessly and seamlessly reintegrate into society.
We know serial killers likely can’t be fixed. By the time they’re captured, they’re too far gone. The time to prevent their anti-social behavior was decades before their first murder.
Drug addicts who leave a long trail of petty crimes: do they belong in rehab or prison? Gangsters? Mobsters? Drug dealers? Sex offenders? Every offender has such a different psychology that we cannot lump all criminals into one group to toss behind bars and leave for dead.
What, then, do we do with women who have murdered their own children? If infanticide laws are indeed sexist, unfair, and insulting, does the act of admitting her to a mental health facility instead of prison pose the same issue? Or are we doing her and her surviving family a favor, and it’s the infanticide laws that need to catch up?
Most studies on filicidal mothers focus on motivation, but I did find a few that discussed the aftermath and rehabilitation.
The Aftermath
A 2006 study, called “The Aftermath: Aspects of Recovery Described by Perpetrators of Maternal Filicide Committed in the Context of Severe Mental Illness” by Josephine Stanton and Alexander I. F. Simpson, explores offenders who fell into the “acutely psychotic” classification.
Stanton and Simpson spoke to seven women who committed filicide to get a glimpse of the emotional turmoil they went through after killing their child(ren), then presented the repeating themes from those conversations. Grief no doubt looks different when you’re mourning someone you didn’t mean to kill, and hardly remember doing so.
Despite having little recollection of the murders, Stanton and Simpson found the women said they had little delay in realizing what they had done, and the horror of it all. One woman said:
“When I woke up there was a detective there and I knew I had done something. I said ‘how many’, and he said ‘two’ and I said ‘two what’ and he said ‘two boys’. Oh, you don’t know what it was like.”
The women remained aware of their crime, but overall, said they were relieved at the lack of memories, and “described the event as difficult to talk about.”
Which way to forgiveness?
Forgiveness became entangled with the women’s ability to move on and even consider motherhood again, the study found. Others described how the filicide impacted their ability to access their remaining children, stonewalled by those who believed the children needed to be protected from her, destroying her want for normal family contact, or limiting their ability to participate in school activities. One woman stated:
“…the mother of my um, niece and nephew, sister-in-law, I have heard her family saying they don’t want the kids near me. And that really hurt, you know, that really hurt.”
Another woman described getting emotional when being allowed to hold a friend’s baby:
“And I just went to pass [baby] to her and she said, ‘oh no, you hold her if you want to,’ or something, I can’t really remember, but I just remember looking at [friend], I had tears running down my eyes, and I said to her, ‘you don’t know what that means to me.’”
The contemplation of having another baby created a variety of reactions among the women. They exhibited concern about their mental illness relapsing, having another relationship, and reliving the filicide.
Unexpected Compassion
When it came to the outside world, these women expected friends and family to hate them the way they hated themselves. But, most of them described overwhelming support and love, and how big of an impact it had on them in the aftermath.
“I think the fact that nobody has turned their back on me has been a huge influence for me,” one woman said.
Another woman said she felt “smothered with love” while another described her own mother’s encouragement to forgive herself.
Therapy
Knowing these themes means therapists can help these women navigate the world better, and process the feelings as they arise. A foundation for understanding these women would set a therapist ahead and help build trust with their patient, this study suggests. It can help set the conditions under which the woman will feel comfortable discussing the murder, when she feels safe to do so.
Building trust with the patient enables the therapist to suggest treatments and coping mechanisms the woman will feel safe in using in her every day life. When a therapist can confirm the woman’s feelings aren’t isolated to her case, she will feel less alone when she otherwise believes no one wants to be around her.
“Whilst it is important to talk, it is important to recognize that some repression of horrific memory may be ego protective and adaptive, and only discussed at the person’s own pace,” the study says.
Engagement with others needs to be in a circumstance where the woman can back out before she gets overwhelmed by grief or guilt, especially in the early stages of processing.
Stanton and Simpson cite a 1995 study by O’Connor which describes the avoidance language. The women referred to the event as “when he/she died” instead of “when I killed them” and said people around them tended to do the same. But Stanton and Simpson explain that while the women used a third-person reference when discussing the offense, they verbally took full responsibility for the filicide.
“This opens up the possibility of the usefulness of working towards a dialectic whereby the women can both acknowledge their role in the deaths of their child(ren), and forgive themselves as acting on a psychotically distorted perception of their child(ren)’s best interests,” they write.
Central to recovery, they add, is the ability to rebuild a new sense of self and purpose outside of the mental illness and the filicide, so that the woman’s entire identity doesn’t remain tied to this one event. In particular, some women said that “rebuilding a sense of self as a mother would be a particularly important aspect.”
This would include reminding the women of the ways in which they were good mothers before the murder, to ensure she doesn’t focus on just the tragedy, the study explains.
“If the way is found to directly address the memories of the event, it may be that the maternal solicitude can be brought forward and the morbid and mistaken aspects understood as attributable to the influence of illness,” they write.
They add that properly managing her mental illness, directly acknowledging and treating it, would give the women further insight into themselves and why the event happened, leading to forgiveness of self.
“Managing her illness responsibly could be framed as a way a perpetrator could again become trustworthy as a mother,” they write, adding that their risk to others, specifically their children, would likely be reduced with effective treatment and self-awareness.
Human connection is also highly encouraged for the women to recover and maintain a sense of self. Of course, it’s no secret that isolation has a negative impact on mental health, so this makes sense. With a proper support network, a safety net, recovery from many things is possible, be it addiction, trauma, divorce, and yes, even for a woman in the aftermath of her having murdered her children while psychotic.
Another study from 2019 looked at eleven women who committed filicide between 1996 and 2017 in South Africa, called “A Qualitative Study of Mentally Ill Women Who Commit Filicide in Gauteng, South Africa” by Sanushka Moodley, Ugasvaree Subramaney, and Daniel Hoffman.
Regarding the filicide, the study states that among the women, “the most replicated emotions were that of regret, guilt, loneliness, and faith, inferring remorse.”
One woman described how she came to terms with the filicide while in prison, that she “deeply regretted and was remorseful for what she had done.”
Another said she called herself a murderer. “I lost my appetite. I would cry every time I saw a baby on TV, you know, it’s a terrible emotion. I had terrible emotions.”
The majority of the women opted to use faith to heal and forgive themselves, while others chose not to dwell on what happened as they moved forward, focusing on therapy and getting better.
This study also backs up the need for a solid support system. Outpatient therapy was described as effective for their recovery, too, despite some anxiety around having to return to the facility for appointments. Despite the stigma of being a state patient, the study says the women expressed gratitude for the rehabilitation services that they felt they might not have gotten in a prison.
To summarize, the women who fall into the “acutely psychotic” and even the “altruistic” classifications can recover and find a sense of self again. She can return to a community and a family that loves her and welcomes her back, should the understanding of mental illness and compassion be present. Some, like Andrea Yates, can opt to remain in a facility for the rest of her life.
So, what about the others, who don’t fall under this umbrella with which we can sympathize, the ones who turn a few darker shades of sinister?
Non-mentally ill offenders
Can a woman who abused her child to death, or scathingly stole her child’s life to retaliate against a former partner, or a woman who merely disposed of unwanted children, be forgiven and rehabilitated?
If we look at young women like Brooke Skylar Richardson, from the “Unwanted Child” post, merely a teenager who concealed her pregnancy and struggled with eating disorders, do we give her a chance at her adult life, without crushing her with stigma?
How do you forgive and extend compassion to someone like Megan Huntsman, who murdered six babies in the chaos of a severe drug addiction? Or Julissa Thaler, who shot her six-year-old son nine times to take him away from his father with whom he was close, because she feared losing custody again?
It’s easy to forgive someone when they lost their mind and self-control due to illness. But can the above women be rehabilitated?
The answer to Brooke’s case is “yes.” The roots of recovery would be to treat the eating disorder and give her a sense of purpose; similar to the women who fall into the mentally ill category. It could be argued she fits there, too.
When we begin discussing women like Megan and Julissa, we’d have to take a deep dive into their backgrounds, the traumas and triggers that led them to the point where they could take a child’s life.
Drug addiction on its own is a symptom of severe unresolved trauma. A 2010 study called “Substance use, childhood traumatic experience, and Post traumatic Stress Disorder in an urban civilian population” (Lamya Khoury, Yilang L Tang, Bekh Bradley, Joe F Cubells, and Kerry J Ressler) discusses the links between PTSD and substance abuse, and has a lot of really intriguing graphics to show their findings.
According to this study, around 59 percent of young people with PTSD go on to develop substance abuse problems. It adds:
“Additionally, women who used drugs were found to have significantly higher mean scores for total PTSD symptom severity and were more likely to meet the criteria for a diagnosis of PTSD compared to nonusers.”
Substance use, it continues, becomes a way of easing mood symptoms and self-medicating. This dysregulated biological stress response is even more disrupted if substance use starts young.
“Researchers have reported that in cocaine-dependent patients whose PTSD precedes substance abuse, the trauma is most commonly childhood abuse, whereas in those whose substance abuse precedes PTSD onset, the trauma is most commonly associated with the procurement and use of substances,” the study says.
It stands to reason, then, that treating the trauma treats the addiction which in turn should provide the woman with a renewed sense of self. In recovery, she may find the supportive community she needs in other people who have also made drastic mistakes under severe addiction.
And what of abusers and revenge killers?
It would be naive and ridiculous of me to slap a mental illness sticker onto abusers. The truth is, not every abuser is mentally ill. Maybe they have narcissistic or anti-social traits, but neither can we slap them with a full personality disorder in every case (and a personality disorder in and of itself doesn’t mean someone is an abuser).
Many abusers come from adverse childhood experiences themselves, but even that alone isn’t grounds to demand forgiveness.
Nancy Erickson, an attorney and consultant on domestic violence legal issues, told domesticshelters.org about the studies she’s done over the years.
“I found that about half of abusers appeared to have no mental disorders. The other half had various mental disorders, including but not limited to psychopathy, narcissism, PTSD, depression and bipolar disorder.”
But she also adds: “Domestic abuse is a behavior, not a symptom of a mental illness.”
The website cites another study by Andrew Klein for the Battered Women’s Justice Project, which states that abusers run the same likelihood of being mentally ill as the general population.
In short, some people simply enjoy the power trip and control that comes with being an abuser. If they don’t want to change their toxic behaviors, and they refuse to acknowledge that they’re abusive, then they cannot be treated. Even if they do come from a traumatic background, there comes a time in life when they have to choose to be responsible for their actions.
We dove into the Shanda Vander Ark case, in which her and her son, Paul’s, abuse led to the tragic death of her other son, Timothy Ferguson. Shanda is actually trying to gain her parental rights over her other children back — which would require her to get a whole new trial, based on evidence that she didn’t murder Timothy and obtain a not guilty verdict on all charges.
But she never showed remorse for Timothy. In any of the videos where she testified in court, she never cried, apologized, or expressed sadness or regret at her actions. Her testimony was filled with denial, plenty of talking about herself, and blaming Paul for everything.
Shanda, as we learned in “The Case Files,” had a history of abusing her kids. She lost custody of the youngest ones before. Timothy only got sent to her when his father no longer wanted to care for him. She always spoke of him as though he was a burden, a problem she couldn’t handle, and wanted to, literally, lock away in a closet in a forget.
Some people simply cannot be rehabilitated, and this is a woman who should never again have, or ever be near, children.
As for revenge killers, we turn to one more study: “Filicide as part of extended suicide: An experience of psychotherapy with the survivor” by M. Manjula and. C. R. Chandrashekar. Here, they spoke with a woman who survived the filicide-suicide attempt that killed her two children after discovering her husband’s affair. He promised to be loyal, but broke that promise, and her patience.
She overdosed her children on injections and drugs before trying to do the same to herself, convinced that her husband, if she killed only herself, would remarry and not care for the children. But the study also notes:
“The reasons explained by her and written in the death note were that she did not want her children to suffer because of the bad and irresponsible nature of the husband, and also that he would remarry and not care them. She wanted to punish and teach him a lesson through this.”
Therapy sessions with the woman involved much of what those in the “acutely psychotic” classification had to process: openly discussing the murder, processing feelings of guilt and remorse, but with one difference: the woman in this study blamed her husband for the murders, not taking accountability for her own actions.
“She held her husband responsible for the incident, and felt that curse of those suffered from his hands has taken her children. But questioned why in her hands? Why her good deeds, honesty, dedication, and commitment for work, did not help?” Manjula and Chandrashekar write.
Julissa Thaler decided to murder her son and take him away from his father instead of choosing to co-parent in a civil manner that would have been a healthy balance for her son. Women of this motive category must take accountability for their actions in order to heal, or else they risk remaining bitter and filled with rage, prone to further toxic behaviors in the future. She must choose to pursue therapy for her issues, and to actively maintain that. No one can do the recovery work for her.
That being said, Julissa is another who never took accountability for her actions. To the bitter end of her trial, she blamed her son’s father, and shouted “fuck you” at the court room when the jury convicted her. Her ego, her need to possess and dehumanize her son, her need to destroy her ex at any cost, doesn’t promise much for rehabilitation.
Elaine Campione could be a different story — again, if she gets proper treatment for her issues. She has never publicly discussed the murders of her girls in the years since it happened, though her ex-husband has gone to become an activist of sorts to prevent more filicides from happening as a result of children being the custody of the wrong parent. She has never publicly, to my knowledge, taken responsibility for the murders or expressed remorse at her actions.
And that accountability has to be one of the first steps to understanding how they got there, and where they can move forward. If they don’t even take accountability, the chances are low for any chance of rehabilitation.
I think it says a lot when the women who committed filicide during a psychotic break and couldn’t remember the crime appear more likely to express remorse and responsibility than those who were not mentally ill and knew what they were doing.
So, these notorious women can change - only if they want to. Do they necessarily deserve forgiveness and a second chance? Well, no one can force victims or others impacted by the crime to offer forgiveness. That’s not owed. But if she were to put in the work to become a better person, become self-accountable, and truly turn her life around, then yes, she could see some redemption in society. She also has to accept the fact that surviving victims and anyone else impacted doesn’t owe her forgiveness.
Women like Lindsay Clancy, Andrea Yates, and Carol Coronado all reportedly expressed remorse at the aftermaths of their psychosis. Lindsay Clancy’s husband has said he forgives her, and wants others to do the same. Andrea Yates remains in the same mental facility where she was re-sentenced to despite long being eligible for parole. Carol Coronado’s husband also forgave her and spoke of her mental issues to media.
These women stand a chance at rehabilitation and being able to function in society. However, women like Thaler and Shanda Vander Ark showed their true colors when they so cruelly and sadistically murdered their sons, knowing full well what they were doing.
They aren’t likely to see life outside prison walls again. And perhaps that is for the best.
Final Thoughts
Next time, we look at wrongful convictions of women accused of committing filicide. Then, the child survivors of filicide will be the final post. I think it’s fitting we finish this series with the victims at the heart of it all.
When we focus on the survivors, we’ll look at: How did they recover? What did their relationship with their mother look like, if the mother didn’t kill herself? How do the surviving siblings feel? How does this impact their relationship with the other parent? How are these kids treated in therapy for surviving such a horrific trauma? And for the acutely psychotic cases, how do kids come to understand that their mother was sick when she tried to kill them?
I’m not going to lie, this series became a much longer rabbit hole than I ever expected it to be. Hopefully, you have learned from this, and it hasn’t been one droning incoherent rambling about a criminal psychology obsession. Or that it’s at least coherent.
And as always, thank you for coming along.
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