Mothers and Fathers Who Murder

Aug. 1, 2007 — -- Two mothers, acting independently and living on opposite sides of the country from each other, are believed to have killed their children and themselves in recent days.

The alleged killings come on the heels of a disturbing, recent string of family murder-suicides, which criminologists and forensic psychiatrists call familicides.

Though rare, experts say familicides tend to occur in clusters.

Police believe Andrea Roberts, 41, a stay-at-home mother, killed her two children, ages 11 and 7, and her husband, Michael, before turning the gun she used to kill them on herself. Neighbors found the bodies in their home in an upscale Dallas suburb.

Tuesday the bodies of a 44-year-old woman, her 10-year-old son and 7-year-old daughter were found inside a Delhi Township, Ohio, house. The deaths are being investigated as homicides, although murder-suicide was "certainly a possibility," Hamilton County Coroner O'dell Owens told The Associated Press.

Women are more likely to kill their children than men are, but men are more likely to kill both their children and their spouse, said Dr. John Bradford, head of the forensic psychiatry department at the University of Ottawa.

Experts said that men and women are often motivated to kill their children for different reasons.

Unlike men, who often are driven to familicide by feelings that they have failed to adequately provide for their kids, women often kill their children out of a delusional sense of altruism.

Women's attempts at suicide often fail, said Dr. Phillip Resnick, a psychiatry professor at Case Western Reserve University, and their crimes are therefore less likely to be classified as familicide.

Sametta Heyward, 27, was accused Tuesday of leaving her two young children in a hot car in Hanahan, S.C., while she was at work. She was charged with homicide by child abuse after their bodies were found wrapped in trash bags under an apartment sink, the AP reported.

Though it seems likely that Hayward's children were killed as a result of neglect, women are often driven to kill their children by a psychotic impulse to help them.