Isn't it amazing the number of people who can very successfully manage to murder somebody else, then botch the attempt at suicide? One would think it would be the other way around, but it happens with depressing regularity. Makes me think they really aren't trying too hard to kill themselves, it's an attempt to garner sympathy for the crime they've committed.
Alison
It is, I believe, significantly easier to kill someone else (particularly a child), than it is to kill oneself. In this case, the mother strangled the child, a simple enough operation when determined, especially when the victim is a child, but a method that is impossible to apply to oneself. An overdose is, I understand, the most common method women choose for suicide, though why she didn't also choose it for her son is debatable. Perhaps because she knew it wasn't as reliable as throttling him and ensuring he was dead before she attempted to take her own life. Taking an overdose and risking death unsure of his fate would be uncaring...
Call me a misogynist, but I still hold to the idea that women are generally unlikely to murder their own children - well, not in a 'I have a plan to get away with this' way. Actually, call me a feminist on the same count, since it's from that quarter we now get the converse argument that men are more likely to harm children, and more likely to kill children since their violence is, Goddess be praised, so much more dangerous than women's.
I don't think anyone takes an overdose with any other message in mind than 'I would rather be dead'. For that to fail (and it is quite difficult to kill yourself) and to be met with 'Try harder, ***' perhaps isn't the response that such troubled people really need.
If I really wanted to kill myself, I'd jump off the top of a very tall building. It's a pity this woman didn't do that before she decided to murder her son.
Alison
Do you have access to the top of a very tall building, Alison? It's not a simple as you'd like it to be - throwing yourself in front of a train is quite popular, at least in the part of London that both lies on my rail route and, perhaps coincidentally, has a large immigrant population involved in arranged marriages and honour killings. Unfortunately, even that is not reliable - any more than attempting to find a high place you can access and in which you can be reasonably sure of not being prevented from your aim. That's if you could face the idea, and didn't instead opt for an overdose - which is also perhaps the method that is least troubling to the rest of the world...expecting anyone else to witness your death plunge, and then for some poor schmuck to have to scrape you up, may not occur to a lot of people.
But you wish her dead - I can understand that.
Do you have access to the top of a very tall building, Alison?
The building I worked in before my current job. I know it's layout like the back of my hand since I worked there for 16 years, and it's got easy unlocked access to the roof. Or throwing myself off the top of a grain silo, that's a pretty successful method of suicide for the farmers in the area I grew up in.
Not that I intend to do any of the above, I'm just saying it's a pity that murder-suicide perpetrators didn't carry out the suicide part first. Their life is the only one they should be allowed to waste, imho.
Alison
In the case of mothers, I can understand that they feel unable to leave their children to the vicistudes of fate after their own death. I can also understand how a mother might believe the life of a child was her own property, to waste as she wished. YMMV.
Your Mileage May Vary...meaning you may get different results, in this case that someone else may not have met enough evil bitches to have dissuaded them of even the generalised 'truth' of the nursery propaganda 'sugar and spice and all things nice'.
Curiously, *** singular got starred out, bitches plural is ok...
Sorry to sound contrare and definitely not defending this b itch. But just to offer motive for the killing of the child. Could she have felt that with her suicide,there would have been no one to care for her son,the way that she felt she cared for him. And that was her reasoning. It happens with fathers who kill their families all the time.
No jury will have mercy on her even considering my motive. But for those who cant understand why someone would do that, will this explain. Of course if she had been in a more correct frame of mind, she would have turned him over to authorities.
oops I see Marcia had already posted ,something similar. Pardon
YMMV = your mileage may vary
Shite , note to self: read the whole thread before you post,DA
Sorry to sound contrare and definitely not defending this b itch. But just to offer motive for the killing of the child. Could she have felt that with her suicide,there would have been no one to care for her son,the way that she felt she cared for him. And that was her reasoning. It happens with fathers who kill their families all the time.
The trouble I have is that I feel too many of these "failed suicide attempts" are not truly attempts at all. They have no intention of killing themselves. It's calculated to provoke just the sort of response we've been discussing, that of the poor desperate individual who feels there is no other way out. Which will then get them off the charge of cold-blooded murder and make them able to plead to the lesser charge of manslaughter because "I just snapped after years of battling alone, etc etc."
I'm not saying that there are not truly cases where people just can't cope and do indeed murder on the spur of the moment and then really regret it. But there are also those others who use it as a get out of jail earlier card so they can get on with their lives. And the failed suicide is just a little too convenient to my mind.
Just another act by people who are already very agile at manipulating public opinion.
Alison
Sorry to sound contrare and definitely not defending this b itch. But just to offer motive for the killing of the child. Could she have felt that with her suicide,there would have been no one to care for her son,the way that she felt she cared for him. And that was her reasoning. It happens with fathers who kill their families all the time.
The trouble I have is that I feel too many of these "failed suicide attempts" are not truly attempts at all. They have no intention of killing themselves. It's calculated to provoke just the sort of response we've been discussing, that of the poor desperate individual who feels there is no other way out. Which will then get them off the charge of cold-blooded murder and make them able to plead to the lesser charge of manslaughter because "I just snapped after years of battling alone, etc etc."
I'm not saying that there are not truly cases where people just can't cope and do indeed murder on the spur of the moment and then really regret it. But there are also those others who use it as a get out of jail earlier card so they can get on with their lives. And the failed suicide is just a little too convenient to my mind.
Just another act by people who are already very agile at manipulating public opinion.
Alison
That is probably true in a great percentage of these cases
Right, and wrong...alas, neither is an absolute.