Mothers Who Kill
Mother of Two Kills her Sons and Commits Suicide
I’d prefer not to consider the subject of that unfortunate, troubled woman Mary Keegan, who killed her two sons and then took her own life. I’d prefer to leave her family their privacy. Most of all I’d prefer not to have to reflect on the isolation she undoubtedly felt, the despairing conviction that she lacked other options, in the hours preceding the tragedy.
But I don’t believe any of us have the luxury of ignoring what has happened in a Dublin suburb in view of the ramifications for everyone. If the existence of such repercussions were ever in question, we need only look at the fear and bewilderment on the faces of the children who were Glenn and Andrew Keegan’s playmates. Their universe has been tilted, their certainties jolted and some portion of their childhood lost to them. The unthinkable, the unimaginable is now among them.
When I was five, a girl a few years ahead of me in school fell over the banisters outside her classroom and plunged to her death. I still remember the terror and panic I felt, the sense of something horribly askew. School was supposed to be a safe place – how could bad things happen there? In those days our way of dealing with such unhappy events was to ignore them: don’t talk about them and they will fade from memory. Fortunately we no longer assume children forget simply because a subject is never mentioned, and we realise that a conspiracy of silence can be harmful. So the schools attended by Glenn and Andrew are openly discussing what happened and offering counselling to the children. But how can you really explain to a child an act so extreme that adults have trouble absorbing it? The only way we seem able to form a limited understanding of it is by attributing the deed to temporary insanity – and even then we shudder.
It is as if a sacred taboo has been breached and once that crumbles the abyss yawns; what else is there in life to rely on, if not a mother’s unswerving devotion?
Our vision of motherhood is a state synonymous with nurturing – we are spoon-fed the premise that a mother is hardwired to sacrifice everything for the sake of her children. She would lay down her life for her young: that’s Nature’s way in human and animal kingdoms alike. No wonder, then, that see now in Firhouse a neighbourhood catatonic with shock. Local priest Father Patrick Madden acknowledged: “This tragedy has really affected the community widely.” But the broader community has had its equilibrium jogged too. We’re shaken and apprehensive because we realise a failure has occurred – not the failure of a despairing mother tumbled over the brink but the failure of society. That such a sense of hopelessness, of helplessness, as hers could exist in the thick of our ‘you’ve never had it so good’ nation is a general indictment. It is problematic, of course, for society to admit that women can kill anyone, let alone their children. Everyone starts out utterly dependent on a woman so the notion of her turning on you is profoundly shocking.
But we must face up to the fact that children are killed by their mothers: it is not common but it does happen, and has done since the days of Medea. Some 200 children a year die at their parents’ hands in the US – that’s five boys and girls every day. A body of research there is devoted to trying to understand the phenomenon of filicide, which crosses religious, economic and race lines and occurs both in families with a history of violence and those with no such history. This is the one crime, apart from shoplifting, which women commit in equal numbers to men. Postnatal depression aside, studies of those undergoing psychiatric treatment after taking their child’s life suggest warped altruism as the most common reason: the suicidal parent thinks killing the child saves it from pain or abandonment.
A court case is currently being heard in which a Mexican woman in Arkansas is accused of killing her three children aged between six and eight. Paula Mendez, 43, swallowed poison afterwards but was revived – to the sight of her children lying dead side by side on a bed. Now riddled with remorse, she is described by her priest as a devout Catholic and a loving mother. Nevertheless she seems to have snapped when her husband, who worked away from home, mentioned divorce.
An isolated incident? Hardly. Andrea Yates, 41, from Texas is serving a prison sentence for methodically drowning her five children aged six months to seven years in a bathtub in 2001. Immediately afterwards she dialled the emergency services, was arrested and tried, her defence a severe case of postnatal depression. There are numerous cases of women behind bars in Alaska, Illinois and other states for killing their children.
Experts in the field, from social workers and psychologists to police officers, tell of an accumulation of factors that makes a parent irrationally desperate enough to kill. These include feeling depressed, isolated or suicidal. Substance abuse may also play a role or a particular triggering action.
A US study of women in jail for killing their children showed a tendency to let others know about previous incidents of abuse before they snapped. Quite simply, they wanted to be stopped. The professionals’ advice is to pay attention to friends or family who say they feel overwhelmed or their children are too much for them. Soberingly, before a death happens a number of lay people often know these women are experiencing parenting difficulties, but nobody wants to believe a friend or relative is the type to harm a child. The stark reality is there is no type.
In Ireland, as in other countries, we have an entrenched reluctance to admit parents can kill their children – and we are particularly averse to accepting that mothers are capable of it. But we must detach from the comforting, idealised belief that mother love is as universal as it is automatic. Let’s be honest, the maternal impulse is sometimes no match for emotions numbed by stress and pressure, or for depression and the deadening belief there is no way out.
We have to be educated in recognising when and how to intervene to support a child at risk. Our instincts about never interfering, about honouring the privacy of the family unit, could also stand some reassessment. Until we abandon our position of collective denial and accept that such killings are not a one-off, it's a situation we are going to be confronted with again. And nobody needs the consequences of that spelled out
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