On the surface, the two young mothers seem to have nothin in common.
Susan Smith, who's been described as a "perfect" mother, lived a cozy, small-town life in Union, S.C., that revolved around her children, home, friends. Voted "most friendly" in her high school class, she married her high school sweetheart, gave birth to their two sons, and then three years later filed for divorce.
Rene Aulton, on the other hand, has been described as an "emotionally disturbed, stubborn" woman, a woman who moved from place to place and lived for a time with her two daughters in a Baltimore homeless shelter. She lost custody of her oldest child, a boy, and complaints of neglect have surfaced about the two girls. The three children were fathered by different men.
Two very different women; two very different lives.
And yet Susan Smith and Rene Aulton share a chilling common denominator: Both have admitted to killing their children. And both may have been trying to salvage a relationship with a man by getting rid of their children.
It seems an act that defies understanding: mothers killing their children. How could a mother do that to her children, we asked in horror after Susan Smith confessed to drowning her sons and Rene Aulton admitted setting a rowhouse fire to kill her daughters. But in some deep place we know that even if it could be explained, we still wouldn't understand the answer.
We think of the victims, so powerless and small, who trust theikiller above all others. And we recoil in shock and anger from such a violation of trust, a violation that attacks one of our strongest beliefs: the sanctity of the bond between mother and child.
Still, something broke down the bond between these two mothers and their children. But what? And why? And what can we learn about why two such different mothers arrived at the same terrible solution to their problems?
There is a name for what Susan Smith and Rene Aulton did,
although the phrase itself seems as contradictory as the act: maternal filicide. But embedded in that contradiction -- the polar images of nurturing mother vs. murdering mother -- lies our inability to master the enigma of why mothers kill their children.
When it comes to understanding maternal filicide, numbers are of little help, says Michael Lamb, a research psychologist at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in Bethesda. Part of the problem is the difficulty in gathering together reliable figures.
It is often difficult to judge the cause of fatalities in young children, and many deaths that are reported as accidents may have been homicides, Dr. Lamb says.
Still, researchers who study family violence agree that mothers killing their children is a rare occurrence.
"We're not in the middle of an epidemic," says Richard J. Gelles, director of the Family Violence Research Project at the University of Rhode Island. "Look, there are 60 million mothers in America. But only 600 or so mothers kill their children every year in America. So it's a pretty unusual thing."
The figures are from 1992, though they have stayed relatively constant over the last 15 years, he says. But the figures do not differentiate between premeditated murders and impulsive acts of violence. Nor do they separate out psychotic mothers or drug- addicted mothers who kill from those like Rene Aulton and Susan Smith, whose case is scheduled to go to a grand jury today. They seem not to fall into either category.
"These mothers don't fit the more normal pattern," he says. "And people get shocked when this crime doesn't fit the stereotype."
But Susan Smith does fit into the profile of a certain type of mother who kills her children, says Dr. Gelles.
"They grow up in blue-collar households with traditional values about the roles of women; they engage in sex earlier; they're on the clerical track in high school, not the college track; their parents probably divorced early, they probably were at higher risk of being sexually abused. It didn't shock me that Susan Smith was sexually abused as a kid."
Rene Aulton also fits into the profile. Psychologist Patricia A. Singleton, who for 12 years worked at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility with women incarcerated for causing the death of a child, points to several common factors found in mothers who kill their children. They include depression and isolation, preschool children at home, financial problems, a history of sexual abuse, violence and lack of affection in their own childhoods, a failed or failing relationship with a man.
In trying to explain the "why" of maternal filicide, some researchers point out that the crime may result, in part, from a mother trying to keep a "new man" in her life. In the cases of Smith and Aulton, such a circumstance has been cited as a motivating factor.
"Children are more likely to be killed in families where there is a new mate in the picture for the mother -- which seems to be true in both [the Smith and Aulton] cases," says Dr. Lamb, the research psychologist. "It seems to be the tendency for the new couple to clear the decks, so to speak, and take out the children."
His observations are similar to those reported by Dr. Gelles, who says that certain mothers may kill their kids in a desperate bid to keep a man in their life.
he man angle'
"I think the man angle is always an important part," Dr. Gelles says. "You should never lose sight of the fact that in a male-dominated society, girls grow up to be women basing their self-worth and value on how men see them. This puts them in a particularly vulnerable state when they're 20 years old and have two kids and the boyfriend says, 'I've been happy to live with you but I don't particularly want to deal with your kids from other relationships.' "
Dr. Mary Furth is a Baltimore psychiatrist and pediatrician who has worked with both mothers and children. She describes women like Susan Smith and Rene Aulton as "very needy and childlike. They haven't grown up. And I think the two women you are talking about wanted to have a relationship with a man and their children were a nuisance. The children are competition for women like this, and they feel conflicted about their needs and their children's needs. And because these women haven't grown up and are childlike themselves, they will take what's best for them."
What prevents such women from growing up and developing mature relationships with their children and the men in their life, says Dr. Furth and others who have studied parent-child bonding, is that they never got the nurturing they needed from their own parents.
"What happened to the parent-child bond in cases like these is that it broke down at least a generation before," Dr. Furth says.
Often such children develop into adults who are not capable of a mature man-woman relationship. What women like Susan Smith and Rene Aulton continue to look for in all their relationships is the parent they never had.
"They want to be loved," Dr. Furthsays. "And often these women get into one abusive relationship after another looking for what they didn't get -- and not getting what they didn't get."
They are the kind of women, usually blue-collar or low-incomwomen, whose lives have not been reshaped by the women's movement -- specifically its message that women do not need a man to complete or reinforce their identity.
Manhattan psychologist and author Penelope Russianoff wrote a book that was one of the first to identify this problem: "Why Do I Think I Am Nothing Without a Man?" She says that for some women, nothing much has changed in the intervening years.
"Women still look for their identity through the love of a man," Dr. Russianoff says. "Men look to other men for their identity. But a woman is still validated by a man.
One of the most celebrated cases of maternal filicide occurred in 1983 when 27-year-old Diane Downs blamed a "bushy-haired stranger" for the shooting death of her 7-year-old daughter and the wounding of her two other children in Springfield, Ore. But Downs was convicted of murder after a surviving child testified that her mother had shot all three of the children. She is serving a life sentence.
'Small Sacrifices'
Author Ann Rule based her book "Small Sacrifices" on the Downs case (it later was made into a television movie starring Farrah Fawcett). She remembers how Downs described the kind of love she was looking for from a man.
"She described it as 'heart love,' " Ms. Rule says. "And on the witness stand she said, 'Heart love is the kind of love where I don't have to give anything back. Where someone will just love me no matter what I do.' "
Still, most mothers and fathers, even those who did not have good parents, do not kill their children.
And even though many columns and articles written about Susan Smith described her as the "mother next door," suggesting there is only a thin line separating us from her, most authorities in the field of family violence take issue with that idea.
"I don't think we could all be like that," says Dr. Bennett Leventhal, professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the University of Chicago Medical Center.
"Quite the contrary: Because most of us have boundaries and support systems and psychological systems that don't allow us to cross those boundaries. Most parents say something intemperate, may think something intemperate, but when it comes to acting it out, they don't. They might get to the lake, might stand there and look at the water, but they wouldn't drive the car into it. They just wouldn't do it."
Dr. Furth, the Baltimore psychiatrist, says that mothers who fit into the Susan Smith mold are probably sociopathic -- people without a conscience who can kill without feeling remorse.
"They don't feel bad," Dr. Furth says. "They don't feel guilty. They don't feel sorry. But most of us have a conscience that would not allow us to do such things. . . . We know what is right zTC and what is wrong and we abide by it. And that comes from the parenting that you got. Or didn't get."
Still, the most obvious question about Susan Smith and Rene Aulton is: Why didn't they give their children away instead of killing them?
Each woman had such an option. In Susan Smith's case, it was the father of the children; in Rene Aulton's, the maternal grandmother who already had custody of her son.
Richard Gelles, the family violence expert, offers a chilling explanation:
"Good mothers don't give their kids away. It's actually more acceptable for mothers like this to kill the kids than give them away. And at a psychological level, this kind of mother may have a real difficulty seeing boundaries between herself and her children. It's not like you're killing anybody. You don't see the children as distinct entities. You see them as your property."
Patricia Singleton, the psychologist who has worked with mothers incarcerated for killing a child, says she has a hypothesis about why Susan Smith did what she did, based on what she knows about Smith's life history. Smith's father committed suicide when Susan was 5, an act that, Dr. Singleton says, constituted abandonment to the young girl.
The abandonment issue
The issue of abandonment and depression, she says, may have played critical roles in driving her to kill her children.
"And there is something else about her," says Dr. Singleton. "This is a girl voted 'most friendly.' Very necessary for her to be liked and to be accepted. She probably didn't have a good
sense of autonomy and identification.
"And I have seen women like this who, when a man says, 'I don't want to be with your children,' their need to be part of a man is so great that it pushes them to do anything they have to do. They do not use rational judgment in acting out. So we have here a history of depression, early abandonment -- all these things. My suspicion is that no one read the signs."
It is this isolation from a larger support system that often makes these high-risk mothers so vulnerable to abusing or killing their kids.
"The question society ought to be asking about cases such as these is: What can we do to prevent this from happening in the future?" Dr. Singleton says. "You know, there's a saying, 'It takes a whole village to raise a child.' What we need are places where parents can bring their children to stay for a day or a week when the parent is under stress.
"What we need to do is not look the other way when we see a woman with a screaming baby in the supermarket but to say instead, 'Can I help you out?' What we need to do is to not relegate mothers like Susan Smith to the class of demons."