Medea, Perspectives on a multicide

Published in Australian Journal of Forensic Sciences

Summary: A mother killed her two children and the woman that her husband preferred. Her actions and motives paralleled those of Medea, in the various versions of that myth. Her actions and intentions were interpreted in quite different ways by her husband, by the police, by each of the psychiatrists who examined her, by the jury, by the sentencing judge and ultimately by the Court of Appeal.

Greek myths, bible stories and legends lend names to complex patterns of behaviour and to categories of homicide: Oedipus is a metonymy for patricide, Electra, Cain and Abel for matricide, and fratricide respectively. Othello conjures up pathological jealousy; the Cinderella myth represents a neglected maligned sibling. A "Delilah Syndrome" [[1]] was proposed by a psychiatrist to defend a man who killed his nagging wife, but it was "politically incorrect" and it was abandoned after a feminist protest. A "Medea complex" [[2]] has been described to account for vengeful filicide. This paper seems to be the first report of killing 'the other woman' and her own children with the stated motive of revenge. A "Medea Prototype" is not proposed as a defence to multiple homicide but the suggestion is made that a myth and its interpretations can provide an explanatory model for intention that, although clearly articulated, has nonetheless remained incomprehensible to some of those who have to assess it.

The facts:

On a Monday in the spring of 1990, Glauce, a twenty-six year old Australian school teacher, wife of Creon and mother of his children was reported missing from a modest house in the Western suburbs of Sydney.[[3]] The last call that Glauce had received was from her husband's sister, Medea. The sisters-in-law were close. Medea sometimes referred to Glauce as "my sister, my best friend" and two days earlier they had spent the evening at Medea's house, sharing a pizza with their children while their husbands were otherwise engaged. On the previous day, a Sunday, Medea had enjoyed an outing after church with her husband, Jason, and her two daughters. No warning of the events to come was ever identified.

Glauce wanted to divorce Creon and was on her way to an appointment with a solicitor when Medea phoned asking her to come by to read a letter for her. Glauce sat on a kitchen chair and Medea put a rope around her neck and tried to choke her, without success. Medea then took a knife and cut Glauce's throat and killed her. She wrapped her body in orange plastic and hid it between the back fence and a brick wall. Medea then mopped up her kitchen and the garden path and drove Glauce's car to a nearby parking lot where she abandoned it.

That night Medea put her eight year old daughter Althea to bed to read her a story. She sat behind her and cut her throat, then stabbed her chest and covered the body with blankets. When Jason came home, Medea told him that his daughter was asleep.

On Tuesday, Medea picked up nine year old Cleopatra who had been away at camp. While Cleopatra was lying on her bed, she told her to close her eyes and she cut her throat and covered her in a blanket also.

That night, Jason and Medea discussed the disappearance of Glauce. He asked after the children, but did not ask to see them.

On Wednesday morning Jason found two similar notes, to the effect of:

"Darling sorry we had to go early. We will see you tonight."

Jason went work and returned an hour later to find that both the notes had gone. He searched the house and found the bodies of his children.

The police were called. Medea arrived in her car; Jason went to comfort her. She said: "I did it."

Glauce's body was soon found. The various knives Medea had used were still in her kitchen and a new one was found in her bag together with a hand written confession.

In the presence of her solicitor, Medea gave an interview in which she reported that she had killed the children because her husband Jason was wanting to sell up in Sydney and was insisting that she move to Perth with him and the children. At every opportunity she later had she told anyone who would listen that Jason had threatened to kill members of her family, or to send George, an underworld connection, to kill them if she did not go. She believed that he would take her children away if she did not go to Perth with him.

The story

Over the next ten months Medea was seen by seven psychiatrists.

The story of her early life was unremarkable with no suggestion of any prior psychiatric disturbance or personality disorder. She described a religious and traditional upbringing as one of six children of a loving Maronite Christian family. She had wanted to be a teacher or to work with computers but her education had been disrupted by the family's emigration and she had worked in factories.

Her problems started with her marriage. Twelve years earlier she had met Jason, an Australian of Lebanese origin. Her family's investigations revealed that Jason was divorced and that his wife had left him and disappeared taking their child. Her parents had advised:

"He is no good. You should marry someone else."

Medea reported that Jason had told her that he had searched for his first wife for three months to kill her.

Jason courted Medea secretly and they eloped to Queensland, where she stayed with his family until a traditional marriage took place a month later.

At first they were happy. Jason and Medea both worked hard and stayed out late at night socialising and playing cards. When Medea became pregnant her husband stayed out alone. His habits did not change when the children were born. He was rarely at home and would call in for half an hour occasionally and briefly for meals. Medea made her own life on this basis and maintained a strong relationship with her own extended family. Jason's trade prospered so he gave her a car and they owned two houses but she had little money for herself. By all accounts, Medea was a devoted mother who dressed her daughters impeccably. She believed that Jason loved his children but she said they were scared of him because they had seen him treat her badly.

Medea was deeply unhappy and wanted a divorce. She saw a solicitor. Jason warned her:

"Remember, I told you, if you leave me, I won't let you survive."

She told her cousin but abandoned the idea of divorce.

Three years before these tragic events, Jason had experienced a conversion, becoming a born again Christian. Nevertheless, his habits still did not change. He still left Medea at home on her own. Instead of gambling, he went to prayer meetings every night. She often wanted him to stay with her and recriminations, arguments and fights would start. Medea complained that Jason was violent, that he used her sexually against her will, often after having abused her. They had slept in separate rooms for three years. She consulted another solicitor, complaining to her husband,

"I married you for love, I'm like a servant. You come home. You stay for minutes. You live as if you don't have a wife."

Her brother's wife, Glauce, an Australian, was better educated and more independent than was Medea. Jason made no secret of his approval of Glauce. He never stinted at giving Glauce his time, helping her with house hunting and with repairs. He diminished Medea by cruel comparisons saying: "She's better than you, I wish she was my wife". Medea felt that her husband was having an affair, but, having no proof of a sexual relationship, she was reluctant to admit her belief because of the family connection.

Over a series of interviews with doctors and lawyers, Medea volunteered a number of different accounts for her actions. She admitted that she had made plans to kill. She gave several versions involving a number of time frames, and at various times she admitted having thought about what she would do for two days or even two weeks before she did it. In one version she planned all the killings together and their culmination was to have been her suicide. In another version she planned to kill only Glauce because Jason liked her better. In a third version, she said that after she had killed Glauce she knew that she would be imprisoned, so she killed the children. She rationalised her actions by saying:

"It is better for them to go to God than to be in his hands."

Medea remained euphoric, contented, unconcerned, and was dissociated from the reality that she had to face for nearly six months. Slowly she came to grieve normally, both for her children and for her own predicament. She then adopted the position that she must have been "mad" and could not imagine from where the strength had come for her to do what she had done. Whenever it was put to her, she readily agreed that she should have killed her husband and not three innocent people. She accounted for her choice by saying that she had killed the people whom he most loved and he would suffer having to be alone. She explained her actions by saying:

"I wanted to hurt him as much as he had hurt me. I did not care about myself"

In later interviews with examining doctors she adopted the position that she could remember nothing of the period over the killings. When asked about her thoughts and feelings over those three days, Medea said that she had felt no emotions at all, nothing.

The Trial

Medea pleaded "not guilty by reason of insanity." She sat through her trial in weeds, her bowed head covered with a black lace veil.

Jason

Jason went into the witness box, perhaps to defend himself against her allegations of untoward behaviour. His evidence went some way towards convicting his wife, even while he was professing his desire to reconcile with her and to have more children. It turned out that Medea had not revealed the extent of Jason's religious preoccupation to any of the psychiatrists who had seen her, so Jason's reason for wanting to live in Perth did not emerge until the trial. Jason told the court that God had spoken to him to reveal that He wanted him to start a church in Perth, a whole continent away from Sydney. Jason claimed, both in the witness box and at subsequent press interviews, that God had forgiven her and that he had forgiven his wife. He was adamant that she had never hated him. Jason told the court that he believed that Medea had been in frequent contact with Creon, her favourite brother, and that she had been worried about his impending divorce from Glauce.

The psychiatrists

The seven psychiatric formulations ranged from "no psychiatric disorder" through "depression," and "manic depressive psychosis" to "schizophrenia."

In the women's prison she told the first examining psychiatrist that a man in a track suit had directed her in these killings. In conjunction with her inappropriate, dissociated affect, this was taken to be a hallucination and the initial impression that she created was that she was mentally ill and treatment with major tranquillisers was instituted. But before her trial, Medea had admitted that the story of the man in a tracksuit was a fabrication and that some person had suggested that she should tell such a tale as it would make herself appear mad. With that confession, the evidence for mental illness disappeared. The ploy was to stand her in good stead, in an unexpected way. The initial attempt at simulation, by agreement between the Crown and Defence, was not brought up at the trial.

This first psychiatrist who had treated her later gave evidence in the Supreme Court to the effect that Medea was not, and had not been, mentally ill.

Another psychiatrist took the position that to have done what she did she must have been depressed, therefore her happiness, after having done it, was evidence of mania. His formulation of 'manic depressive psychosis' lacked reference to the social context of her symptoms.

Altogether three of the psychiatrists thought her to have been depressed, perhaps to a psychotic degree. Their evidence for depressive illness lay in her saying that she believed that her husband would harm her and that her children would be better off with God. Her reports of her husband's relationship with Glauce were taken to be evidence of depressive delusions. Only one psychiatrist of the three who considered her to have been 'depressed' had elicited a report of a small change in her weight, and a brief period of loss of appetite and of poor sleep before the killings. She had said to that psychiatrist:

"[I killed Glauce]...because of my husband. I decided to kill the children and myself. Because the children were going to die, I did not want to live any more."

No other examiner was able to elicit a history of weight loss although the issue was thoroughly explored each time. The report of her normal social interactions with her family in the days before she killed was ignored. Her reports of her husband's attitude and behaviour towards her remained consistent. She did complain of being profoundly unhappy, rejected and enraged. She repeatedly expressed satisfaction at having rescued her children from their fate of being left with their father and with having killed the very people her husband loved.

Two psychiatrists formulated a schizophrenic illness, using secondary evidence put on file by others to support their conclusions. One adopted Medea's position, namely that she must have been mad to have done what she did. He argued from her act rather than from his examination of her mental state.

"Her thought processes in terms of her inability to problem solve indicate[ed] a bizarreness and illogicality that is totally inappropriate."

His evidence for such thought processes lay in his perception of Medea's

"...capacity to kill her children without feeling any emotional response whatsoever, and similarly undertaking an act of murder upon her sister-in-law this act is a clear illustration of a bizarre mental attitude found in a severely disturbed psychotic."

He noted that she had told him:

"I did not care about myself. These three people were the people whom my husband loved most. I wanted to destroy him, to hurt him as much as he had hurt me. These deaths will hurt him more than if he had been killed. I am happy. I am secure. I am at peace. My husband should be here and I am here because of what he has done."

The other psychiatrist who had formulated a schizophrenic illness admitted that he found no evidence of it on his own examination of her. He argued that

"The killings were deliberate, coldly executed and bizarre - typical of those expected from seriously disturbed schizophrenics."

He cited her 'inappropriately cheerful affect and lability of mood' and the reported "delusions" about the man in a track suit. He was unaware that she had already revealed that man to have been a fabrication and he made no attempt to discover if her complaints about her husband's behaviour were based in reality. He disregarded the possibility that her affect was hardly "inappropriate" if the observer accepted that she was, as she stated, at least initially, happy at having extracted her revenge. This psychiatrist did express his reservations that both her stated motive of revenge and a psychotic illness were operating together.

Two psychiatrists conceded her profound situational unhappiness and accepted her dissociated state but their opinion was that there was no mental illness so no defence was available to her.

No psychiatrist, when pressed, could say that killing one's children was 'normal behaviour'. No two could agree about what type of psychiatric abnormality it was that her behaviour had expressed.

The police

Neither Medea's stated intentions nor the extent of Jason's disturbance had escaped the police who perceived the parade of psychiatric evidence as faintly ridiculous. In their preferred scenario, Creon, Medea's favourite brother, was distressed because Glauce, intent on divorcing him, would lay claim to half of his property, so Medea had acted in what she had perceived to be her brother's interest. They believed that it was only after Medea had killed Glauce that she considered the consequences of her action on the children's future and so she had killed them.

Creon remained abroad for the duration of the trial.

The jury

The jury delivered a verdict of murder in each of three cases.

The judge

The sentencing judge described Medea as "a loving and caring wife and mother." Notwithstanding the verdict of the jury, he accepted that "she was suffering a major depressive illness" and he sentenced her to sixteen years. With remissions, she could have expected parole in ten.

The Appeal Court

The appeal was based, inter alia, on the fact that the trial judge was in error in summing-up on the basis that the evidence of the [treating] psychiatrist could not be relied upon to support a verdict of diminished responsibility, having regard to her evidence.[[4] ] The Court of Criminal Appeal overturned the verdict of "murder" and substituted "manslaughter" on three counts. This allowed her sentence to be reduced to ten years with minimal term of six. The appeal judge noted that the multiplicity and variety of expert opinions could hardly have been of assistance to the case. Arguing from the deed itself, as had some of the experts, he said:

"There seems to have been a strong prima facie case of some form of mental disturbance..."

He substituted his opinion for that of the jury

"I would regard the conduct of the appellant in relation to that killing, the manner of its execution, the extraordinary steps that were taken about the disposal of the body and her subsequent conduct as indicating abnormality of mind"

On that assumption the appeal judge adopted the treating psychiatrist's initial, but repudiated view, that she had been psychotic on arrival in prison. The appeal judge noted, but failed to understand, the reason for the discrepancy between the initial opinion of the treating psychiatrist and the evidence that the same psychiatrist later gave in court. Unaware of the reasons for the change of opinion, he took as 'admitted' that Medea had been psychotic when she arrived in prison. Medea's self confessed attempt to play 'mad' had not been revealed to the jury as neither Crown nor Defence saw it in their interests to bring it out. The appeal judge, while citing Medea's own reason for her actions, namely her intention to punish her husband and her lack of effort to cover up her crime, still felt that the reason for killing her children was 'more obscure' than her motive for killing her sister in law.

The Appeal Court's interpretation of their evidence surprised at least two of the psychiatrists who had given evidence on behalf of the Crown as it took their evidence as support for a verdict of Diminished Responsibility.

Discussion

I called her Medea because she killed both her children and the woman that her husband preferred. Her husband had hurt, threatened insulted, enraged and rejected her.

Homer's Medea [[5]] was a sorceress, a serial killer and mass murderer, avant la léttre. She helped Jason to steal the Golden Fleece and escaped with him, diverting her father, who pursued them, with pieces of the body of her brother whom she had killed for that purpose. Homer's Medea persuaded the daughters of Peleas to hack him to death to avenge the murder of Jason's parents. She killed again to secure the throne of Corinth for her husband. When Jason wished to leave her for Glauce, the daughter of the king, Medea sent a poisoned garment which burst into flames, killing Glauce and the entire court; Jason alone escaped. She then executed her children by Jason. This spirited behaviour, not uncharacteristic of the mores of Mount Olympus, attracted the attention of Zeus, who desired her. After further mayhem, she fled to Athens where she married King Aegeus.

Euripides' drama, "Medea" [[6]] and the many operas on her theme [[7]] interpret her story in a way that forces the audience to empathise, and even to identify with her. Distraught and wounded by her husband's defection, this tragic Medea killed in a passion of grief and rage.`

Resnick [[8]] investigated the motivation of women who killed their children and categorised their reasons into accidental, psychotic, altruistic, unwanted child and revenge against a husband. He also noted that in cases where a woman has killed a child, more than half the families returned to living together after the event. The unexpected prevalence of reconciliation is consistent with an often occurring, but sub rosa, acknowledgment of joint moral responsibility.

The Australian Medea, if one took her at her word, seems to have been driven by a desire for revenge, although she invoked motivation involving both fear and altruism.

A plausible but unexplored explanation for her failure to reveal Jason's reasons for moving to Perth might have been that she was in a folie a deux with him and that she saw his position as supported by God's revelation, and consequently unassailable. Her husband's sanctimonious religiosity, his insensitivity to her feelings, his violent threats, altogether presented an insoluble conflict. Relief from the tension of her daily life materialised in a tragic solution for the problems of her world. She displaced her homicidal rage onto the three people whom her husband loved; by killing her children, she sent them to God and saved them from him; by killing Glauce as well she caused Jason to face the world alone. At some level she might have acted as her distressed brother's proxy when she killed the wife who sought to divorce him and take his children.

After all this she found herself to be the beloved of her God, saying:

"I have talked to God. I am safe. I have my bible and Jesus has forgiven me and given me everlasting life."

The role of the expert

When a crime that contains a story is in the public eye, a guilty plea is rarely taken to a charge of murder. If lawyers cannot see another way to get the story before the judge and jury, they will use an expert witness. The official role of the expert in a criminal trial is to give an opinion on the presence or absence of mental illness in the perpetrator. The intention of such expert testimony, as feminist legal theorists see it, is to answer the question uppermost in the minds of the judge and jury, "Why did she kill?" and to persuade them to see the defendant's "crime", in the particular situation she faced, as a reasonable and justifiable act. [[9]] Sometimes this technique is successful and it seems to have been successful here. Juries are unpredictable and are bound neither by legal precedents, nor by judicial instructions. Judges can sentence as they see fit and Appeal Courts might be even more empathic.

In Medea's case, clemency in sentencing was achieved. The judge and the appeal judge both adopted the view of the psychiatrists who said that she had been depressed, arguing that it would be expected in her situation. By definition, this is reactive unhappiness, by most accounts not a disease of mind. The phenomenology of her profound unhappiness and ungovernable rage might well have scored as a "major depression" in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association so prominently displayed at the right hand of the defence barrister. [[10]]

The defence had produced the report of the psychiatrist who had based his opinion on what he saw as her "inappropriate affect" and her religious beliefs to make the diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. It was his report that detailed most of Medea's self-revealing statements.

The defence did not grasp at the straw of a defence of "automatism" consequent on her being, as was generally agreed, in a dissociated state. There had been no precipitating psychological blow, such as the law demanded, for that defence to succeed. If she were to be believed, there had been multiple and probably cumulative psychological blows over the years, but the notion of multiple psychological blow automatism is not, at this stage, admissible in Australian law.

By the time this case came to trial, the full bench of the High Court of Australia had handed down a decision affirming the right of an expert witness to be heard in a case where mental illness was not being brought forward as a defence.[[11]] The same judgement offered definitions of both non-insane and insane automatism. Non-insane automatism could entitle the perpetrator of the offence to a verdict of "not guilty," and insane automatism to a verdict of "not guilty by reason of insanity." A defence of "sane automatism" to homicide, although on the statute books, has yet to succeed in an Australian court. The High Court re-affirmed, however, that a "psychological" blow would need to precede its onset for dissociation to constitute a credible defence of automatism. Discussing "dissociation" in this context, this judgement cited both Glanville Williams and the Glossary of Mental Disorder

"Dissociative states are classified as hysterical neuroses, in the absence of organic brain disease.[[12]] "

"The most prominent feature is a narrowing of the field of consciousness that seems to serve an unconscious purpose; it is commonly followed by a selective amnesia. There may be dramatic but essentially superficial changes of personality sometimes taking the form of a fugue (wandering state). Behaviour might mimic psychosis, or rather the patient's idea of psychosis."[[13]]

It seems to be rather begging the question to say that Medea was 'dissociated'. A person would need to experience "a narrowing of the field of consciousness" not to be mindful of the personal and legal consequences of killing one's family, while doing it and for many months after.

Expert witnesses seem to be increasingly used for elucidating reasons for behaviour in complex cases where the offender has a story that needs to be told in her defence yet is neither mad nor bad. The range of opinion evidence in this case demonstrates that passionate emotions fit poorly into our socially constructed categories of mental illness, diminished responsibility and legal insanity.

Court of Appeal referred this case to the Law Reform Commission for reconsideration of the continuing necessity for s23A of the Crimes Act 1990. This referral was based on the view that, as sentencing judges already had the power to take into account the mental state of a person when working out an appropriate sentence for murder , then the defence of Diminished Responsibility was no longer needed on the statute books. In making this recommendation, the Court of Appeal seemed to fail to acknowledge that the Supreme Court Judge had already sentenced her in accordance with his perception of her mental state.

References

[1] Petrie C. Goodbye Delilah: medicine and the law. Legal Services Bulletin 7.6:289-290, 1982

[2]. Stern ES The Medea complex: Parents who kill their children. Medicine, Science and Law, 13:120-126, 1948

[3]. R v Chayna. SC NSW. 1992. (unreported) 60078/92 This case report is based on police information, on the seven psychiatric evaluations, including the author's own and on conversations with police and on the evidence given in the trial. Names and personal details have been changed.

[4] R v Chayna CCA NSW 1993 Gleeson CJ Priestley JA Studdert J

[5]. Homer. The Iliad, Penguin Classics Penguin Books. 1975.

[6]. Euripides. Medea, Penguin Classics Penguin Books. 1975.

[7]. Medea. Operas by Cavalli (1649) Gianetini (1675) Kusser (1692) Charpentier (1693) Vogel (1786) Cherubini, text by FB Hoffmann 1797. and many others

[8]. Resnick PJ Child murder by parents: A psychiatric review of filicide. American Journal of Psychiatry, 560-571, 1969:

[9].Jones Ann. Women's rights and wrongs. In Women who Kill. London. Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1991.

[10]. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. 3rd edition revised, American Psychiatric Association, Washington, 1987.

[11]. R.v Falconer (1990) 171 CLR 30.

[12]. Williams, Glanville. Textbook of Criminal Law, 2nd edition 672.1983

[13]. World Health Organisation. Glossary of mental disorders and guide to their classification. Geneva, World Health Organisation, 1974.

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