Phillip Markoff, the med student who killed a craigslist hooker, robbed another, killed himself in his jail cell. Of course the speculation is running rampant. The prosecution claims it was a clear sign of guilt, which implies this guy had a conscience and the guilt just got to be too much. Sounds good, but I doubt it's true, the guilty conscience part. I've read a few articles that seem to think dude was all bereft over losing his fiance. He did have a bunch of her pictures around him and had written her name in his own blood. So according to the prosecution and several news outlets, this scumbag was an enigma, kind of Jack the Ripper meets Romeo. Might make for a good movie, but those theories mostly self serving horse shit. Which is why you rubes come here, to get the real skinny. No Seacreast.
Being in jail isn't like being in prison. If you are a high profile detainee, county jail time is even worse than if you are just a regular inmate. SHU program, 23 hour lock down. So there you sit, nobody to talk to but yourself and the hacks, who probably have nothing but contempt for you. So I say our boy took himself out as a last act , a self serving grab for attention and to inflict pain on the ex fiancee and his own family.
But remorse it ain't.
Shaquan Duley, the South Carolina mother who is all over the news for killing her 2 babies with her bare hands, is said to be remorseful. She sobbed in court. The judge, the prosecutor, even the sheriff who arrested her, all seem willing to cut her a little slack. The explain away her horrific act by alluding that her mother was hard on her, demanded that she man the fuck up, act responsible, be a mother. They say the pressure was too much, she folded under the weight. She snapped. So when she sobs in court, it means she has remorse, she is sorry.
What Shaquan has isn't remorse. She shares something with the Craigslist killer. She has regret. Regret she was caught. Regret that her thin cover story didn't hold water. Regret isn't remorse. If you are capable of taking a life to suit your own selfish desires, you are incapable of remorse.
End of story.
Mark-Can you imagine the kind of demons Shaquan must have running around in her head to put her in the mindset to snuff her own children....with her bare hands?
ReplyDeleteI cant.
You cannot compare that poor woman with that disgusting asshole Philip Markoff. Until you understand what it feels like to deal with severe PPD, you cannot pass judgement. I usually love your POV, MM, of course...but you are dead wrong when you say that Shaquan isn't remorseful. You have NO IDEA what that woman went through in her life that led her to kill her children. NONE.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you as long as it is clear that neither of these two are not clinically insane. When someone is truly contrite of heart they are compelled to admit guilt, not ask for leniency and generally acknowledge that they deserve worse. Mitigating factors from a person's childhood that ultimately might reduce their culpability (as in their eternal reward or punishment) are not thrown up as a defense for the truly remorseful; they take full responsibility regardless of those factors.
ReplyDeleteWoops. That first sentence will make sense if you remove the "not".
ReplyDeleteThey only show remorse after being caught. If they truly were remorseful, they would have turned themselves in. End of discussion.
ReplyDeleteFaith,
ReplyDeletePPD...kind of like the twinkie defense. Reasonable women seek help with severe PPD. They don't kill their kids.
Truth be told, there is no excuse. I would say she is worse than the craigslist killer. Had she been a man that snapped and snuffed out his kids your opinion would be different.
Masorti, with all due respect, I don't think you know what you're talking about. My twin was suffering from severe PPD after her 2nd child was born. She and her (now ex) husband were fighting constantly, to the point where he would hold her down to spit on her, push her down stairs, shove her into door jams. (Yes, he was charming like that. He always said that she started it, so it only made sense for him to abuse her, I guess.) They would call me at separate times in rages trying to get me to settle things...all the way from Boston. As if that could possibly help! (They were in California.)
ReplyDeleteShe told me months later, after she had moved out (temporarily) to save both herself and her children that she had planned several times to drown the kids in the tub, and then lock herself in the garage with the running car. She blamed me and the rest of our family for not knowing she needed help. I threw my hands up in despair because, how the hell was I supposed to know she needed to be committed??? I was in Boston! They had always fought like cats and dogs, and they somehow stayed together for reasons I couldn't figure out. It wasn't MY place to fix them. Honestly, I don't know how she got through those times without some sort of mental assistance, but I thank God she did.
We got lucky. My sister was able to move out and leave the children with her husband for a few months as she sorted out the fucked-upness of her brain. Many women don't have that out. Many women have to deal with the depression and confusion and the pain that goes along with it. God forbid they be out of work with no form of support along with it.
There is no such thing as "reasonable" when you're in the throws of severe PPD. People shouldn't contribute to a conversation in such absolutes if they don't know any facts about the issue. And way to go with telling me what my opinion would be if the situation involved a father and his children. Are you the one giving me headaches off and on with the ever-so-impressive ability to be inside my brain? If so, can you stop it, please?
Faith-
ReplyDeleteFirst, my empathy to you and your sister. Mental illness, be it PPD or another disorder, can be devastating to families. (Been there. Got the t-shirt(s) as both child of, sibling of, and parent of people with multiple disorders.) So, I'll stipulate that there is little if any rational thought pattern in those with mental illness.
Having said that, I have never understood how someone can kill their children. Want to? Sure. Actually do it? No. To me it is the ultimately selfish act - your life is fucked up so you kill the kids? I understand suicide as an option there (not condone, but understand) but not murder. The kids have a whole future ahead of them- it's not like they're being killed to save them from the rampaging zombies. The fact that this woman didn't even have the guts to check out with the kids and lied about what happened until the evidence contradicted her just furthers my conviction that she is a selfish, cold-blooded killer. That may or may not be due to mental illness...
As for the Craigslist fuckwad , I think MM has it right- just one more grasp for a headline. A coward taking the coward's way out whose only regret was getting caught.
Yup, I suffered ridiculously severe PPD- I had lost a baby at 8 or 9 weeks, then gotten prego again less than 2 months later AND lost my Mom that same year. Add to that the lovely way my husband and I got along? Things were, to put it simply, very hard.
ReplyDeleteI didn't want to drown the girls, I wanted to hook them into their car seats late at night, drive them around until they slept and then park us in the garage with the windows down and the door closed.
Obviously NONE of it was right, NONE of it was normal and yes I did blame my family for not taking the steps I was too ashamed to admit I needed: hospitalization. Moving to an apartment (that was literally directly across the street from my husband and daughters) for 5 1/2 months seemed to separate me from the 'issues' causing me to not see clearly. I saw my daughters every day for a couple hours but the rest of the time they were with their Dad and his family.
I agree with Faith: until you can experience what someone with extreme hormonal imbalance along with other added stresses can? You have no right to compare the lives of someone like the Craigslist Killer and a mother who takes the lives of her own children. Even though I was crazy at the time, I somehow was lucky enough to recognize the reality of the situation and what the consequences would be. I still look back on that time with huge shame and can honestly say I am crying right now thinking about it. Maybe because it is such a different kind of crazy people can't see why they shouldn't be compared? Or that PPD *is* an actual craziness even if Tom Cruise doesn't believe in it? I can't say. But please don't try to tell me that the mother who acts on the demons in her own mind can't feel remorse- because I still think back to how I treated my poor girls (I was NOT a calm and generous Mom) and get choked up wishing I could go back. All I can do is make healthy decisions now and hope that time in their lives are easy to forget.
But if it helps people see the human side of something like this, I will tell my story any time at any cost.
Faith,
ReplyDeleteI do know alot about the topic and I maintain the fact that is no better than the twinkie defense. Your sister did the right thing. She left. All mothers who want to hurt their kids should follow suit.
I've had several patients suffering from PPD. I do not discount it as a valid disorder. What I am saying is any crackpot that kills their children pulls that as a defense. I chalk it up with most insanity pleas as a 'please let this con work' defense.
I find it curious you were offended when I assumed your response if it were a male who hurt his kids as opposed to a female. I still believe you would have a different reaction, as would the rest of the general public.
Faiths twin: Your choice of words concerning Tom Cruise and is belief or disbelief in PPD...are you implying I am a scientologist? Quite the opposite. However, I will chalk it up as a failed attempt at humor. Kudos for not killing your kids twin...that enough shows that there is no excuse for what that other woman had done. It proves how strong you are...and how there is no comparison between you and her...but there is one between her and the craigslist killer.
While I have compassion for women going through post-partum depression, I cannot sympathize with a woman who murders her children. I read that the 2 year old even had defensive marks, so he fought for his life.
ReplyDeleteThere are always options - they can go to social services and tell them what they are contemplating and SS will take the kids away from them. But, my theory (my opinion only) is that most of them won't seek out that help because that would take away their control over the situation, maybe the only control they think they have left. But the bottom line is they put their own needs before the lives of their children.
Here's the thing, Faiths twin didnt kill her kids. Thankfully the majority of women don't do heinous shit like kill their kids. Mostly it's us, men, who do the crazy shit like smokin your entire family. Like Susan Smith, this "poor woman", formed a plan, smothered her babies, concocted a story, drove the car in the lake, dead babies strapped in their seats.Had she killed herself, then I might believe she had some remorse. Instead she lies about what happened. There is not a single shred of humanity shown by this woman from the begining to the point she was standing before the bench. I don't need to be a mother or woman to recognize a callous, heartless, act.
ReplyDeleteRead this post http://midtownmiscreant.blogspot.com/2009/01/answers-in-little-blue.html
Local woman kills her baby and herself. Maybe she felt some remorse, had a moment of clarity. Difference is, the woman in the above post just wanted to be unburdened maybe get a little payback on her own mother.
I admit I *do* see the difference between myself and someone who actually goes thru with it- and I never thought of ending just their lives. It actually was my life I thought of first then thought, "But I would be leaving them in this horrible situation with this man who I can't trust entirely..." I obviously can't go thru the entire range of emotions, thoughts, etc that crossed my path. I can only say on some level I understand the 'defense' of someone who says they did what they did because of the post partum.
ReplyDeleteI was not implying anyone as anything outside of having a lack of true understanding of what it is like to suffer from any type of depression. I went on to take prozak due to horrible PMS. Once a month I became absolutely irrational for about 3 to 5 days. It was truly embarrassing and those pills were a miracle to me. I stopped taking them about 7 months ago (due to a mix up at Kaiser...) and have been doing fine. Every now and then I see myself slipping during that pms time and I am able to catch it and reign it in. The minute I can't? I won't hesitate to call my docs.
I have been a diabetic for 30+ years now as well. I have only known one doctor out of at least a dozen who has expressed honest frustration over knowing how hard this disease is to deal with. He suffered long term illness as well, not diabetes but kidney issues, so he had a 'feeling' for how his patients felt. I am not saying you can't as a doctor know how your patients feel unless you have what they are suffering as well, but it sure would help.
For someone to be in the profession of helping people yet refer to anyone as a 'crack pot' basically tells me you have no idea what you are talking about. I don't care what defense someone says they have. If you have treated anyone with this syndrome you should have far more sympathy than you are exhibiting here. I can't say I know about 100% of these cases and I am sure neither can you yet you say everyone who has done such a thing as kill a child then uses this PPD as a defense is a crack pot?
I just can't subscribe to this point of view.
Midtown: true, I did not kill my children. But the shame and, yes, remorse I feel at even having the thought? It helps me understand how someone can say that even though they did such a terrible, unthinkable thing. Just because I found the ability to get away and fix myself before I did anything so terrible doesn't mean the women who do such things aren't any worse than I was.
I do, agree, however that this one is far worse off than I ever imagined myself to be. Whether she is actually suffering anything out of her control we will never know- but it is not for me to see a person crying in a courtroom to say they are only doing so because they feel like it is what they should be doing in response to the situation and not as a response to what they actually did. It's just too hard to tell.
Murder is never an option. There is nothing in the world that can excuse it, no condition that can soften the edges and make it seem less heinous than it really is. Not mental illness, not anything.
ReplyDeleteAt the end of the day, the mother killed her kids. Strangled them with her bare hands. One had defensive wounds that indicated she struggled. Can you imagine what that must be like? The very person who is supposed to protect you from everything, has her hands around your neck and is choking your life away. Staring in those cold eyes as you become dizzy, and then everything goes black.
She killed her kids, pure and simple. I have no sympathy for her. None. She should be penalized to the fullest extent of the law.
This wasn't a question of having sympathy for the woman, though. MM said that she wasn't remorseful. THAT is what the discussion centers around. That she is somehow incapable of remorse because of the heinous act she committed.
ReplyDeleteI don't feel sorry for anyone that takes another person's life, save those who do it out of self-defense. (Which I think is pretty rare, and mostly only happens in movies, maybe.) I didn't say I felt sorry for Shaquan, I said that we can't sit here and compare her to someone as disgusting as that Craigslist killer asshole. They aren't comparable situations, pure and simple. You can't possibly know what that woman is feeling about what she did/what she was thinking when she did it. (Just like you, Masorti, cannot tell me that I would feel differently if it were a man being accused of killing his children. If you're a medical professional of any kind, particularly in the mental health arena, you should know that projecting your opinions onto someone else is never a good idea, eh? You don't know me. You definitely AREN'T me, so how the hell can you say what I would be thinking in any given scenario?)
Faith,
ReplyDeleteI read your blog and comments sweetheart. Thats how I can assume.
I am not in the mental health field, though alot of my patients are suffering from some sort of mental disorders.
I will admit I have no sympathy for someone who takes the lives of their children. I've shown up on calls where a child died of natural causes, through an accident, and murder. Treated all my patients the same though, I am not ashamed to admit, treated the parents differently once I was advised what the MOI was.
I will say this to you..Until you do what I do..until you see the world as I and those in my profession do..you cant begin to understand why we have the opinions we do. The harsh truth is, we see the worst of the worst of most scenerios..the sad result is we tend to be a bit testy..especially when it comes to people killing their kids, and the wonderful men and women who defend those people.
My response is the same...Her kids are dead..May the bitch rot in hell.
WHOA!! If you've never suffered from PPD or was close to someone who suffered from it, you have no idea what you're talking about. It is a severe issue and it turns you into someone that you don't recognize! It is horrific! To compare someone suffering from PPD with a cold blooded killer is unfair and almost immoral. In my humble opinion!
ReplyDeleteSo let me get this straight.
ReplyDeleteCraigslist Killer takes the life of a stranger.
Mother kills her children.
And I'm out of line for comparing this stellar woman and mother to a guy who killed a stranger.
I've slandered a baby killer.
Not for nothin, but I can live with it.
The CL killer, for whatever reason couldn't live with it.
The baby killing mother is still breathing so she can live with what she did.
While I admit to knowing very little about PPD, I do know a little about court rooms, post arrest remorse, and criminal nature.
The vast majority of women who have PPD do not kill their children. As offensive as my post may be, I find the defense of this woman to be equally offensive.
Masorti. Don't condescend to other commentors with the " Swetheart" talking down bullshit. You are kind of a whack job in your own right.
jess sayin.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteBe that as it may MM, she still doesn't get respect or sympathy from me for her murder. As for calling faith sweetheart...im a bit concerned you took that as talking down to her. However, I will extend my apologies to her for using that term if it offended her. Makes me wonder though.. XD
ReplyDeleteI agree with all sides here, on some level. We have asshole #1 who killed a random stranger. I don't believe he had remorse. I think that he probably killed himself because he knew he was going to rot in prison for the rest of his life. Either that, or he was going to become someone's bitch, and he couldn't handle that. Haha.
ReplyDeleteThen we have asshole #2 who killed her child. The mere thought of harming my own children or taking their lives, makes me physically ill. I want to go in there and pick them up and drag them in bed next to me, and snuggle up next to them. So I have absolutely no sympathy for her.
That said, I totally suffered from PPD. It was an awful feeling. I remember being home after a week, with #2 and just bawling my eyes out. I wanted to send BOTH of them back to the hospital. Did I contemplate taking their lives? No, but could I see how someone is so far down the pit of despair that they could do it? Yes. Especially if they've got some other factor thrown in, like an overbearing family who has high expectations, or an abusive partner. I can't fathom what goes through their head. Maybe they want to spare the child, maybe they just want out of their life? Maybe they truly are a sociopath.
So with that, I totally think that the PDD defense is a twinkie defense to some extent. If you start giving it to every woman who kills her kids, it's just asking for trouble. But there probably are women out there that absolutely are remorseful for killing their kids.
2015-7-21 xiaozhengm
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