The Anatomy of Evil by Michael H. Stone MD

Author:Michael H. Stone, MD
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781633883369
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Published: 2017-10-10T04:00:00+00:00

Figure 8.1

In 1984, when Suesan was eighteen, Theresa and her son Robert took Suesan to a remote spot in California's Sierra Mountains, where Theresa had Robert douse his sister with an accelerant (probably gasoline), setting her afire. Suesan's body was charred beyond recognition; Robert was warned he would be “next” if he ever told. Two years later, it was Sheila's turn: Theresa locked her in a closet and bound her limbs to a metal pole until she confessed that she had “VD.” The girl confessed, despite her innocence, but that won her only a brief reprieve. Theresa locked her in the closet again, this time leaving her to starve to death. The youngest daughter, Terry, had run away and was supporting herself by prostitution; when she tried to tell the police what went on in her home, she was not at first believed. Theresa was at last brought to trial and convicted in 1993 and sentenced to life in prison for the torture-killings that the judge called “callous beyond belief.”17 Because Suesan's body could not at first be identified, and because of the enforced secrecy and deceptiveness about Sheila's death, Theresa got away with murder for about seven years. At the time of her arrest she was working as a paid companion of an elderly woman.

There are many child murders as horrifying as Theresa's, their grotesqueness triggering the reaction of “evil.” Two morbidly religious mothers in Texas, for example, shocked the public—one with the murder of her two children by smashing their skulls with rocks; the other, by severing the arms of her ten-month-old daughter, intoning the words “Thank you Jesus, thank you Lord,” when the police came to take her away.18 But those mothers were certifiably insane. The level of evil becomes reduced when we take into consideration the mitigating circumstance of their madness. Like other psychotic mothers who murder very small children, the explanation (from a psychiatrist's point of view) for such behavior can lie in the overwhelming tasks of motherhood, coupled with the inability to let this difficulty register in one's consciousness (because of the psychosis). Hence the formation of a face-saving delusion: “I must consign these children to God,” or “This child is the devil and must be destroyed in order to save the world.” But Theresa Knorr was not insane. Twisted, paranoid, afire with jealousy…all of that, but not insane. As a cold and cruel torturer of her own daughters (and corrupter of her sons), Knorr belongs to the extreme end of the Gradations of Evil scale, where those who torture in a prolonged fashion reside, whether or not the end result is death.

The Knorr case is reminiscent of another case of child burning in 1983. A career criminal, Charles Rothenberg, when involved in a custody dispute with his ex-wife, decided to kill his six-year-old son, David, and himself. To that end, he gave the boy a sleeping pill, poured kerosene over his body in their motel room, kissed him good-bye, and set him on fire.

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