She killed her children!

It was in June 2001, that Andrea Yates drowned all five of her children, claiming that she was saving them from hell. Marybeth Tinning apparently killed nine of her children, though not in one fell swoop. She enjoyed doing it for over fourteen years. (Bad habits are hard to break). You may remember Susan Smith; she strapped her two boys in a car and pushed it into a lake, claiming at first that a man had abducted them – “a black man,” said the racist murderer.

Deena Schlosser, a true believer, used a knife to amputate both arms of her eleven-month old, who then bled to death. Cops found her singing to Jesus. Robin Lee Row proved that lightning can strike twice; she collected on a life insurance policy in 1980 when her son died from a fire and then twelve years later turned off the smoke alarm and burned her husband, son and daughter alive. The lightning struck twice; the insurance company didn’t.

Frances Newton can’t tell us why she did what she did: the state of Texas executed her in 2005 for shooting to death her husband, her seven year-old son and twenty-one month-old daughter in 1987. Susan Eubanks out shot Newton: she killed four sons, execution style, blaming her alcoholic parents.

In 2005 China Arnold did the poodle-in-a-microwave urban legend one better: she stuffed her four week-old daughter in a microwave oven and zapped her to death.

In an average year over two hundred (200!) mothers kill their children. Last night I went to see the story of perhaps the first maternal filicide, Euripides’s Medea, as performed by London’s National Theatre and shown in auditoriums around the country in High-Def. It was a brilliant production and still packs a wallop 2,500 years later, even though the oncoming murders are telegraphed throughout the play. You know what’s coming but are still horrified by it when it arrives.


A friend of mine used to come to New York annually and was in the habit of asking me to recommend THE show she should see. One year I told her that the current Medea was getting rave reviews; she went.

And hated it. She said, as above, “She killed her children!” Well, yes, I thought, she’s Medea, while asking, “Wasn’t it a great performance?”

My friend couldn’t get past the murders. She never again asked me for a recommendation.

For my part I thoroughly enjoyed last night’s brilliantly staged, locomotive-fast Medea. And you know, I can’t get it out of my head as I read about Tom Cutinella, a 16-year-old Long Island high-school football player killed on the field this week. Another sixteen year-old, this one from Staten Island, and a twelve year-old from New Jersey also died during football practice recently.

Is it a stretch to say that mothers who allow their teenage sons to play football are killing them? Maybe. Maybe not.

RIP Tom