Mothers Who Kill Their Children

Casey Anthony Let off: List of 10 Women Who Killed Their Children

Parents were responsible for 57 percent of these murders. Women commit less than 13 percent of all violent crimes but they are responsible for about 50 percent of all parental murders.

More than 200 women kill their children in the United States each year. Three to five children a day are killed by their parents. Homicide is one of the leading causes of death of children under age four, yet we continue to "persist with the unrealistic view that this is rare behavior," said Jill Korbin, expert on child abuse, who has studied mothers who killed their children.

Here is the list of 10 women who killed their children:

Andrea Yates , a Houston resident, killed her five young children on June 20, 2001 by drowning them in the bathtub in her house. On July 26, 2006, a Texas jury found that Yates was not guilty by reason of insanity.

Patricia Blackmon , at the age of 29, brutally murdered her two-year-old adopted daughter Dominique Bryant in Dothan, AL in May 1999. She was subsequently found guilty and sentenced to death.

Kenisha Berry  killed her newborn son by duct-taping his mouth and arms, and placing him in a dumpster in 1998.

Debra Jean Milke , at the age of 25, was arrested for complicity in the murder of her only child, four-year-old Christopher Conan Milke. She was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder, first degree murder, kidnapping, and child abuse. In January 1991, Judge Cheryl K. Hendrix sentenced her to death.

Dora Luz Durenrostro  killed her two daughters, age 4 and 9, and her son, age 8, when she was 34 years old in San Jacinto, in 1999.

Susan Eubanks  murdered her four sons, ages 4, 6, 7 and 14, in San Marcos, California, in 1996 when she was 33. She was sentenced to death on April 5, 2002.

Caroline Young , at the age of 49, killed her 4-year-old granddaughter and 6-year-old grandson in Haywood, California.

Robin Lee Row  was 35 years old when she killed her husband, her 10-year-old son and her 8-year-old daughter in Boise, Idaho in 1992.

Michelle Sue Tharp  was 29 years old when she killed her 7-year-old daughter in Burgettstown (Washington County) on April, 1998.

When Women Kill Their Children – The Casey Anthony Trial ...

Whenever there is another story on the news involving a woman who has killed her child, I do everything I can not to listen or I change the channel. If I do learn any details (which seems to happen since every few months there is another incident and the media loves to give us every shocking detail over and over again) I am overwhelmed with emotions. When I heard the details about the woman who drowned all of her children in a bathtub, running after them one by one and then holding them down while the others waited their turn, I actually threw up. When I heard about the woman who put her babies in their car seats and then drove off a bridge, with one escaping to tell us the story, I could not help but have nightmares of her childrens frightening last moments.

Recently, I heard that in New York a newborn baby was thrown down a laundry chute to be incinerated. Thankfully, the chute was filled with garbage causing the mechanism to fail resulting in the discovery of the infant by another tenant following it’s tiny cries to the garbage room. In a town very near mine, a newborn baby was discovered last month near a dumpster in a parking lot. That baby also survived. However, many, many children do not.

So here we are again, another mother, accused of the unthinkable, killing her child. While I have not followed the specific’s of this case and therefore do not have a commentary on the case itself, I am wondering what has the world come to that every day there is another story on the television in which another beautiful little baby has died at the hands of it’s mother. The case of Casey Anthony has been live streamed on the web and cable. The entire trial can be watched at any given moment and every image pertaining to this horrific tragedy is shown to us.

The images evoke a deep a profound ache within my very being. It is not the images of Caley nor of Casey, but rather of the images of them together that are the most difficult for me to view.

Why is it becoming common place to turn on the evening news and see that a mother has killed her own child? I am sure that there are many contributing factors that have gotten us to this place, one of which is the shift from the family to the individual. The other factor is that we have lost our understanding of the human person. We have objectified life, seeing each other as objects for use instead of looking at a person and knowing that the reason they were created was to love and to be loved.

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Mothers who kill their children

When mothers kill, interviews from prison

Why mothers kill, a forensic psychologist's casebook