Parents Who Kill--Shocking True Stories of the World's Most Evil Parents (2 page)

On 21 December 1996, her 60-year-old father accompanied her to The Old Bailey where she was sentenced to three years’ probation and ordered to receive psychiatric counselling. The judge was understanding, remarking on the lonely birth and adding ‘this is not something which should be allowed to cloud your entire future.’ He warned her against having further children whilst under the supervision order and the defence reassured him that she had been fitted with an IUD contraceptive device.

Born into an affluent Jewish family in 1970 in New Jersey, Stephanie fared less well at school than her twin Tracy and two older siblings. Academic excellence was important to her parents so she was often grounded for failing exams and they eventually hired a tutor to ensure that she got her high school diploma. They also sent her to a private college in Long Island as her grades were so low.

Enjoying her freedom for the first time at college, Stephanie began to drink and have sex like almost everyone else. By the
following spring she was pregnant, but would later claim that she didn’t know.

By the onset of her second year at college she was gaining in size and began to wear increasingly baggy clothes. Several of her dorm mates asked her if she was pregnant but she vociferously denied it, fearing what her family would say.

On 17 December 1990, days before college broke up for the Christmas vacation, Stephanie – now aged 20 – went into the bathroom and, after over an hour and a half in labour, delivered her baby son into the toilet. Looking under the door, her friends saw a pool of blood around Stephanie’s feet but she told them that she was just having an unusually heavy period. They thought that they heard a baby whimper, but the sound wasn’t repeated and they assumed that they must have been wrong.

Meanwhile, Stephanie stuffed seven balls of toilet paper down the baby’s throat, tore away the umbilical cord and briefly left the toilet cubicle to put the baby into a trash bag. When one of her friends returned, she called to her from the locked cubicle to say that she’d disposed of her blood-soaked clothes in the trash, and would her friend please take it down the hall to the garbage room? Her friend obliged, though she was surprised at the weight of the ruined garments. Meanwhile, Stephanie showered, reassured her dorm mates that she was fine and went back to bed.

Back at the garbage room, a janitor noticed a bloodied towel on top of one of the trash bags. He called to the cleaner and together they opened the bag to find the body of a baby boy. The policeman who was first on the scene attempted to revive the infant but the toilet paper was wedged so far down his throat that hospital staff needed forceps to remove some of it. Their belated attempts at CPR were in vain.

The house mother and the police awoke the girls and said that a baby had been found, and the other girls admitted they thought that Stephanie had given birth. She denied this, saying ‘My parents would kill me.’ But, when detectives arrived on the scene, she phoned her father, who told her not to talk to anyone.

At the medical centre, she told staff that she was frightened and asked ‘what will happen to me?’ and ‘what’s going to become of me?’ She said that she had menstruated regularly and had no idea that she was pregnant. Ironically, women who are in denial about an impending birth are apparently more likely to menstruate each month, even if it’s only very light bleeding or spotting, proof of the mind’s effect on the flesh.

Indicted for manslaughter, Stephanie Wernick moved to a different college and began a new relationship whilst she awaited trial. Her lawyer insisted that she have psychiatric treatment, and two psychologists admitted that she had poor motivation and very little insight into what she’d done.

At her trial, she wept continuously and was allegedly too distraught to testify in her own defence. Her attorneys said that she’d had a brief psychotic episode during which she’d disposed of the child but that she’d then returned to normal. The prosecution said that she was immoral, that the birth of the child was inconvenient and that she was a shallow and sociopathic young woman who thought only of her own comfort. They noted that she was fearless and seemed incapable of remorse. Found guilty, she was sentenced to one to four years in jail.

It’s easy to feel sympathy for the pregnant girl who is afraid to tell her parents that she’s been sexually active. She kills and disposes of the infant in a desperate attempt to keep their love.
She may even fear physical reprisals if she admits to her condition – as a teenager, Rose West (now in prison for aiding her serial-killer husband) was battered by her father when she told him that she was pregnant by her lover, Fred.

But occasionally a woman will commit repeated acts of infanticide, using it as a kind of retrospective contraception. She’s willing to cause pain, however fleeting, to infant after infant rather than use birth control or remain celibate. Understandably, the law judges such women more harshly than the tell-no-one teenager and sentences them accordingly.

Sabine Hilschinz grew up in East Germany, the product of a housewife mother and railwayman father. She married a police cadet called Oliver who later enrolled in the Stasi, the Ministry for State Security. Sabine herself trained as a dental nurse though she had an IQ of 120, which is university-level. The couple had three children together and she was originally devoted to them.

But Oliver’s work took him away from home for weeks at a time and Sabine couldn’t cope with the demands of motherhood. Bored and lonely, she regularly went drinking by herself, leaving her little ones at home alone. Soon her social drinking had escalated into alcoholism and she spent much of her life in a vodka-induced haze. The German authorities, who were monitoring the family, became so alarmed at the children’s failure to thrive that they eventually took all three into care.

In October 1987, Sabine found that she was pregnant by one of the men that she’d brought home after a night at the pub. She told no one of her condition, concealing it by wearing increasingly baggy clothes. Oliver noted that she was gaining weight, but they’d agreed not to have further children (and it’s
not clear if they were still having sex together) so it didn’t occur to him that she might be expecting again. In May 1988, she awoke in the marital bed next to her snoring husband and realised that she was going into labour. Tiptoeing into the bathroom, she gave birth over the toilet and let the baby drown in the water. Meanwhile, her oblivious spouse remained fast asleep next door. Sabine cut the umbilical cord and put the tiny corpse into a plastic bag before placing it in a large plant pot and covering it with soil. She put herbs in the pot and set it on their apartment balcony.

Three years later, in 1992, she gave birth to another illegitimate child, this time in a hotel room. She left the baby to die, brought it home in her suitcase, wrapped it in a plastic bag and hid it inside another large flowerpot which she seeded with herbs and placed alongside the previous pot.

The following year, she had another secret birth and concealed the corpse in an empty fish tank in her garage, topping it up with sand. The next year, she gave birth again and put the corpse into a large paint can. She hid another of her unwanted babies in a bucket and covered it with clods of earth. She got pregnant every year until she had secretly given birth to, and disposed of, nine newborns, the last being born in 1998.

Eventually the mother from hell moved house. Lacking room for all of the makeshift coffins, she took them to her mother Eva’s house in Brandenburg and stored them in the older woman’s shed. In the same timeframe she left Oliver and started a long-term relationship with an older gentleman called Johann, giving birth to his baby daughter. He found her to be an exemplary mother and a loving common law wife.

But Sabine’s previous less-than-motherly actions were about to catch up with her as, in 2005, Eva decided to spring-clean her shed and garden. Too old to wrestle with heavy plant pots
and a fish tank filled with sand, she paid a younger neighbour to clear the place. To his horror, he found nine tiny skeletons and called the police. They arrested the 39-year-old and asked her why she hadn’t used contraception. She explained that, after disposing of the first baby, she’d realised that a gynaecologist would know that she’d recently given birth and might ask questions about the child’s whereabouts, so she’d avoided any contact with the medical profession. She failed to explain why she hadn’t opted for celibacy or for a
non-procreative
form of sex.

Police broke the news to her husband, who was so shocked that he vomited, telling them that she’d grown – and presumably used – herbs from the plant pots containing the corpses. A pathologist confirmed that all nine infants had died within minutes of birth.

In June 2006, Sabine appeared at Frankfurt-on-Oder court, charged with the manslaughter of eight of the nine babies. Because of Germany’s statute of limitations, she couldn’t be charged with the death of the first child as it had died in 1989.

Sabine declined to give evidence but had previously told her lawyer that she’d only murdered one of the infants, leaving several of the others to die of neglect. She said that the babies were fathered by her husband, Oliver, and that she’d hidden the pregnancies from him because he didn’t want any more children. But no one who knew her believed this as she’d brought numerous men back from bars and clubs whilst Oliver was working away from home. He said that he’d noticed she had a weight problem – but it obviously hadn’t occurred to him that she’d get pregnant again when she’d been so bad at motherhood originally that all three of her children had been taken into care.

Sabine Hilschinz was sentenced to 15 years in prison. Her lawyers appealed, but in April 2008 a German court upheld
her sentence, noting that she appeared to have been fully aware of her actions and the consequences if she was caught.

Sometimes a mother murders her children and takes her secrets with her to the grave, as in a recent British case where a woman in her seventies died, having gone through three marriages which produced eight known children. In May 2008, one of her adult daughters was clearing out her late mother’s house in Manchester when she found an egg crate hidden at the back of a wardrobe. The crate held two
towel-wrapped
toy boxes which she opened to reveal two decomposing babies. The remains were at different stages of decomposition so the children hadn’t died at the same time. The crate also contained a newspaper from 1956.

Police said that they’d have to do DNA tests on the remains to establish that they were indeed the woman’s children, adding that the dead woman’s family were deeply shocked as they were aware that the infants were probably their siblings. They would never know why she had killed two of her infants yet let others live.

An 18-year-old boy had a similarly gruesome experience in Wenden near Frankfurt in May 2007 when his 44-year-old mother was away from home and he went rooting deep inside the family freezer in search of a pizza. Instead, he unearthed three tiny corpses wrapped in plastic bags.

His alcoholic mother, Monika Halbe, admitted secretly giving birth to a baby in 1986 and to two more between 2003 and 2007. She said that she had hidden the babies but that she hadn’t murdered them. However, the prosecution countered that the first had died of suffocation or neglect and that one of the others had been drowned.

She was jailed for four years and three months for the most
recent deaths, but wasn’t tried for the baby born in 1986 because of the statute of limitations, more than 20 years having elapsed.

There have been similar cases elsewhere in Europe, with families belatedly realising that their mothers were effectively serial killers.

G
iving birth can be a challenging experience which leaves the new mother physically and emotionally exhausted. This low state is compounded five days later when oestrogen and progesterone, which have been up to a thousand times their normal level, drop back to their pre-pregnancy state. Such huge changes in the endocrinal system cause spontaneous bouts of weeping in three-quarters of women, a condition colloquially known as the baby blues.

The majority of mothers recover within a couple of days, but up to 10 per cent go on to suffer post-natal depression with symptoms which include fatigue, insomnia, anxiety and loss of appetite. Thyroid problems brought on by the pregnancy can also cause low mood and lethargy. Half of this depressed 10 per cent will require psychiatric care, either in hospital or on an outpatient basis.

Fortunately, only two mothers in a thousand actually suffer a psychotic episode, in which they lose touch with reality, as a result of post-natal (also known as post-partum) depression.

Women who come from families with a history of psychiatric illness are up to 80 per cent more likely to suffer an episode of severe post-natal psychoses than women without such histories. Unfortunately, a new mother who suffers such a depressive episode is 50 per cent more likely to suffer a recurrence in subsequent pregnancies.

Though they have originally looked forward to
motherhood
, a small number of these temporarily-psychotic mothers kill their babies and, sometimes, themselves.

In other instances, clinical levels of depression aren’t necessarily hormonal, instead being caused by the woman’s situation: a poor marriage or relationship, bad housing, poverty and the lack of a supportive mother figure can all contribute to feelings of anger and hopelessness.

A Newcastle barmaid, Danielle had a history of failed relationships which had included violence. She was known to social services and to mental health charities.

When she was 20, she found out that she was expecting her first child – her sister-in-law would later say that she’d deliberately become pregnant in order to hold on to her new boyfriend, 22-year-old Robert Gallon. But, a few weeks later she said that she wanted a termination; that she couldn’t cope with a child. Her boyfriend looked shocked and talked her out of it, promising that they would be a family. He had already fathered a son, now two, that he didn’t see because the mother had moved away, but he liked the idea of fatherhood.

The couple moved in together and Danielle gave up work but she called Robert so often at the building site where he worked that his boss became furious. She bombarded his family with phone calls and texts and wanted to know where he was at every moment of the day, often accusing him of being
with other women. She also phoned various Newcastle pubs asking if he was there and telling the bar staff to send him home. She went on drinking binges throughout the pregnancy and became deeply depressed, professing that she no longer had a life.

In March 2005 she gave birth to a son, Alexander, but was unable to cope with his crying and sent texts to her boyfriend repeatedly asking for him to come home from work and help out. When he couldn’t, she alternated between tears and threats. She went to her doctor and told him how useless she felt and he was sympathetic, explaining that she had all of the symptoms of post-natal depression. He prescribed
anti-depressants
but she only took them for 10 days, later saying that they had made her feel drowsy and that she was afraid that she would fall asleep whilst bathing the child.

One day, when Robert was caring for Alexander, she arrived home drunk and caused a scene. He called the police and they let her off with a caution. On another occasion she phoned him at work and said that she’d thrown the baby down the stairs. He raced home to find the infant unharmed.

The couple continued to argue, and Robert moved out to live with his grandmother when Alexander was six weeks old, whereupon Danielle threatened to take an overdose, saying that she’d done so before. The house had been rented to Robert by his employer, so a Catholic charity found Danielle a house for single mothers at the other side of Newcastle.

For the next two months she lived alone, frequently sending texts to Robert Gallon. She made up stories about being mugged whilst out shopping, and, when that didn’t win him back, she pretended repeatedly that the baby was ill. Her own mother had seven children to care for so couldn’t babysit as
often as she’d have liked, but Danielle was given various appointments with social services. Unfortunately she often didn’t turn up for them.

On Father’s Day in June she texted Robert again and he came round after work and spent the evening with his child. He continued to visit Alexander, but before long Danielle’s jealousy resurfaced and she kept asking him if he was seeing other girls. She told him that the baby was ‘a devil’ when he wasn’t there and it was obvious that she hadn’t bonded with the child. In August she phoned him when the infant wouldn’t stop crying and a neighbour overheard her screaming ‘Do you want me to throw this bairn down the stairs? Do you want me to stot its head?’

On Saturday 27 August 2005, she sat alone, brooding. She needed to be with someone, preferably Robert, but the baby had become an obstacle and her life was an endless round of nappies, bathing and feeds. She could hear Alexander in the next room, screaming, and sent his father yet another text. It said ‘You hurt me so bad. I can’t think of anything else to do. I’m sorry. I hope you remember that me and the bairn love you. It’s best I leave this way. I love you, always have and always will.’

She’d hoped that her veiled threats would bring him around, but he didn’t respond, so she called and sent texts to him all of the following day, but he’d had enough of her manipulation and stayed away.

That evening, she laid her four-month-old-son on the settee and set fire to an armchair in the room with her cigarette lighter. As the flames took hold, she phoned 999 from her mobile and screamed at the operator to save her baby, saying that he was at the other side of the lounge from her and that
they were separated by a wall of flames. The horrified operator could hear little Alexander shrieking as the fire spread. Tearing the cord from the landline, Danielle Wails used it to tie her wrists then ran into the hall and began screaming for help through the letterbox.

Firefighters kicked in the door and put out the flames whilst an ambulance took her, and her badly burnt baby, to hospital. There she was questioned by police and told them that two masked men had burst into the house, kicked the baby and punched her in the face. She’d regained consciousness to find herself tied up and the house on fire, and had only managed to phone 999 by using her tongue to press the buttons on her mobile phone.

Within hours, Robert was informed by Danielle’s mother about the fire. Police confirmed that the baby had died of his injuries and he went to Danielle to comfort her. The couple reconciled and went to stay at her parents’ house.

For the next three days, Danielle was almost constantly in tears and Robert and her family were hugely sympathetic. Police spent these three days searching for the intruders and investigating the supposed crime scene. Danielle had said that the intruders had locked her in – but they found her key in the laundry basket. The fire alarm had been checked by the charity the previous week, yet now the batteries were found in a kitchen drawer. She said that she hadn’t heard the intruders enter the premises because the radio was playing, but no radio was found at the property. She’d described how the men had viciously knocked her unconscious, yet she had only light bruising to her face.

It was clearly a fabrication, so police arrested her on suspicion of deliberately starting the fire and murdering her son. She vehemently denied this throughout hours of questioning, was charged and remanded in custody. Several of
the other female prisoners hissed ‘child killer’ at her in prison and she was put into isolation for her own safety: ironically, women who have abused and neglected their own children are the prisoners who are most likely to attack a mother who has killed, as it’s easier for them to scapegoat someone else than to examine their own shortcomings.

The following month, handcuffed to a police officer, she attended Alexander’s funeral and read out a poem which said that they would be reunited in an afterlife. Robert visited her, hoping for answers, but eventually caused a scene and was barred from the prison.

As her trial date neared, her legal team told her that her story didn’t add up, that there was no sign of the supposed masked men. Belatedly, she admitted that she’d started the fatal fire by herself.

At Newcastle Crown Court in August 2006, her family and friends there to support her, she pleaded guilty to infanticide. Two psychiatrists testified that she had been suffering from post-natal depression at the time that she murdered Alexander, that her mind was disturbed after the birth. Her QC echoed this, saying that she was comparatively isolated and had struggled to care for her son.

The judge noted that she had already spent over a year in jail and sentenced her to a three-year community order, which included three years’ probation and supervision at a bail hostel. After the trial, Det Supt Barbara Franklin, who led the enquiry, said ‘Danielle can only be described as an attention seeker.’

En route to the hostel by train, Danielle Wails went on a drinking binge and gave an interview to a woman’s magazine. (The previous month, the baby’s father had told his side of the
story to a different woman’s weekly.) The magazine stated that she wasn’t paid for her story, but the authorities were enraged as she’d given the interviewer information which she hadn’t given to the police or the courts. A local MP demanded an enquiry as to why Danielle hadn’t been escorted all the way to the bail hostel, and she was briefly returned to jail for breaking her bail conditions by abusing alcohol.

Twenty-four-year-old Sheryl and her husband were elated when she gave birth to their first son in March 1987. The couple returned to their home in Anaheim, California with their new baby, Michael, only to find that colic made him cry for up to 18 hours a day. Sheryl took him to the doctor several times but was told that he was healthy, that he would grow out of the almost-intolerable wailing. (Most babies only suffer from colic for the first three months of life.) Meanwhile, she was so exhausted that she couldn’t eat or sleep.

After a month of this mayhem, the former beautician became so confused that, according to her later testimony, she began to hear voices telling her that Michael was in pain and that she should put him out of his misery. Afraid for what she would do, she tried to return him to the hospital where she’d given birth, but they turned her away.

On 29 April, whilst in the grip of a full-blown psychosis, she decided to kill the child for his own good. She threw the six-week-old infant in front of a moving car, but the driver managed to swerve and miss him. After picking the baby up, the 24-year-old took him into her garage where she grabbed a blunt object and hit him over the head. He was still alive as she put him behind one of the rear tires of her vehicle and backed over him. The petite blonde then disposed of his body in a nearby trash can.

When her husband got home from work, she appeared dazed and told him that Michael had been kidnapped. At the police station, she elaborated on her story telling them that her son had been taken by a black object with orange hair and white gloves who wasn’t really a person. Shortly afterwards, the psychosis passed and she became deeply distraught and made a full confession. At her trial in November 1988, she pleaded insanity.

There’s little doubt that she’d suffered a full-blown psychotic episode and had been deranged at the time of the murder, yet the jury rejected her plea and found her guilty of second degree murder. A sympathetic Superior Court Judge, Robert Fitzgerald, rejected the jury’s verdict and found the unfortunate young woman not guilty by reason of insanity.

Californian law at that time stipulated that a criminal defendant given such a sentence must spend at least six months in a psychiatric hospital, but the judge rejected the requested period of commitment and ordered Sheryl to spend a year as an outpatient attending a counselling centre. Afterwards, she was required to attend various treatment programmes, all of which she completed successfully. She divorced and later remarried, having a daughter with whom she forged a loving relationship.

In May 2008, Sheryl, now 45 and living in San Bernardino County, asked for a court order which would recognise that she is now sane and release her from further treatment. A leading mental health authority supported her application, stating that she no longer requires therapy. At the time of writing, the Deputy District Attorney had yet to decide whether or not to oppose her request.

Beverly and her husband badly wanted children but he was sterile so they opted for artificial insemination by a donor and, on 3 May 1986, she gave birth to a daughter, Laura, in a Nebraskan hospital. A few days later, the nuclear family returned to their Lincoln home.

Thirty-three-year-old Beverly went on maternity leave from her job as deputy superintendent of a wildlife centre but found it almost impossible to sleep and on the rare occasions when she did drop off, she had terrible nightmares. She lost weight and became obsessed with the idea that artificial insemination was immoral and that her husband would leave her because Laura wasn’t his biological child. As the days progressed, her mental health worsened and she apparently heard a voice telling her that her infant daughter was evil, that she had to die. On 24 May she visited her physician and told him of her paranoid thoughts but he said that she shouldn’t worry, that it was just the baby blues.

On 26 May, Beverly drowned her 23-day-old daughter in the sink: medics estimate that it takes as little as 60 to 90 seconds for a small baby to die by drowning. Forty minutes later, she made a confused call to the local emergency services who arrived to find the infant dead, wrapped in a nightdress, nappy and a towel.