Murder of the innocents: Why parents are killing their children

Loud, heart-rending cries erupted from Kelvin Wambui’s house in Mirangine village, Nyandarua County, on the morning of August 30, 2019.

They did not last long. Alarmed neighbours gathered outside the house, wondering what had gone wrong. The house was locked from the inside.

The neighbours knocked and called Kelvin but there was no answer. Just eerie silence.

Alarmed, they decided to bring down the door, only to find Kelvin’s body dangling from the roof. His two sons, Morgan Ng’ang’a and Brian Macharia, eight and six years, respectively, lay lifeless on the floor.

There was a bloodstained panga close to the bodies, which the 32-year-old man had used to hack them to death.

Atop a small wooden table was a suicide note. In the note, he explained that he had committed the act after his father-in-law asked his wife, Teresia Nyakinyua, to leave him.

She had left two years ago. He explained that life had become unbearable for him and his sons since she left.

DOMESTIC VIOLENCE
As the news spread in the village, revelations about the couple’s troubled marriage emerged. It had been one characterised by domestic violence.

In fact, during one fight, Kelvin had injured Nyakinyua with a knife. She finally ran away and returned to her parents’ home in 2018 after he threatened to kill her.

It also emerged that a few weeks before Kelvin committed the brutal act, his wife had reported him at the Mirangine Police Station after he threatened to kill her.

A few hours after this incident, another act of filicide was reported in Bomet County.

Peter Kipkorir Langat slashed his two children to death at their home in Shiomo village, Konoin Constituency in Bomet County.

He reportedly committed the act after a quarrel with his wife over money he had given her to buy maize flour.

The two children were aged six and four. Kipkorir was arrested at Mogogosiek Trading Centre in Bomet while armed with the panga he had used to kill his two children.

He claimed that he had killed them after his wife misused his hard-earned money and started having an affair.

REASONS
These two murder incidents not only shocked the nation, but also raised alarm on the increasing number of murders of children by the people who should protect them.

They also raised the big question on why a parent would kill their own child.

Elizabeth Ngarachu, a psychiatrist consultant based in Nairobi, explains that there are five reasons why a parent would kill his child.

“The primary reasons are spousal revenge, fatal maltreatment, which includes excessive battering or disciplining, psychosis, altruism, and not wanting the child,” she says.

These five reasons will tend to manifest during certain times of the year. Chris Hart, a psychologist based in Nairobi, says that such incidents are likely to take place in the months of July, August and September.

“Timing is a factor in child killings, and these months are compounded with pressure from increased responsibilities such as school fees, new school terms, new school years, and new births,” explains Hart.

GUILT

Once an act of filicide has been committed, a high number of the perpetrators will proceed to commit suicide.

“About a third of mothers who kill their own children commit suicide. Fathers are twice as likely as these women to commit suicide after committing filicide,” says Ngarachu.

This filicide-suicide set up does not happen out of the blue. Hart explains that parents who commit suicide after killing their children view their family as a possession that they cannot bear to leave behind, or whose destruction and consequences they can’t bear to face.

“In one scenario, the parent will consider and decide to commit suicide. He will then decide to kill his children and sometimes his wife because he cannot bear the thought of leaving his family behind.

In the second scenario, he will kill his children without the thought of suicide, but once he commits the act and begins to realise the consequences of his actions and the burden of guilt he will face, he will end his own life as an escape,” says Hart.

While men are more likely than women to commit filicide and filicide-suicide, there is no direct connection with a potential perpetrator’s criminal history.

Both criminals and non-criminals can end up committing filicide. Among the five reasons why parents kill their own children, the most common is altruism.

ALTRUISM
Ngarachu says that this involves acts of filicide that are skewed to look like expressions of ‘parental love’.

“With altruistic filicide, parents kill their children with the belief that they’re doing so out of love rather than anger or hate,” she says.

A mother who wants to commit suicide evokes what she believes to be her sense of sympathy and opts to take her children with her instead of leaving them ‘motherless’ in what she perceives to be a cruel world.

For example, in April last year, 26-year-old Felista Mutindi killed her two children and then hanged herself at Vumulia slums near Donholm Estate in Nairobi.

She left a suicide note in which she blamed her husband, Victor Muthoka, and a woman called Mueni, who she believed her husband was having an affair with, for the act.

She also wrote that her husband could now enjoy his life since she and her children would no longer be a bother to him.

The two children - four-year-old David Mwenda and three year-old Martha Kalondu - were found on chairs with a length of cloth around their necks, while Felista was found hanging from a length of cloth that was tied to a timber beam on the wall.

MENTAL ILLNESS

There are also those who will kill their children to relieve them of suffering that may be real or imagined.

“These kinds of perpetrators commit the act based on delusional perception or hallucinations that a child is suffering or is on the verge of great suffering,” explains Ngarachu.

This suffering might be economic, such as dire poverty, hunger or even health-related, such as a chronic illness.

It could also be delusional, such as the conviction that a child is possessed by evil spirits.

Incidentally, this kind of filicide is also closely associated with acute psychotic filicide, in which psychotic parents kill their children with no comprehensible motive.

“These parents suffer from conditions such as schizophrenia, in which a person’s sense of reality is impaired,” says Chitayi Murabula, a consultant psychiatrist and mental health advocate.

“If psychosis is involved, a parent may kill after losing the knowledge that the child is his and instead believe that he or she is a dangerous alien or demon,” he says.

For example in 2014, former KTN news anchor Esther Arunga’s husband, Quincy Timberlake, is reported to have killed their son while trying, according to Arunga, to expel demons and aliens that he believed had possessed the three-year-old boy.

MENTAL TEST

Chitayi also points out that the presence of a mental illness – which falls under psychotic filicide – is found in about 37 per cent of all cases of filicide. Some cases of filicide are also partly instigated by epilepsy.

“In a case where a parent is epileptic, the act of filicide will mostly occur during a period of postictal confusion – a period of between five and 30 minutes that involves altered consciousness immediately after an epileptic seizure,” says Ngarachu.

The law demands that parents who kill their own children to undergo a mental examination to determine their psychiatric state.

Where it is determined that they are suffering from a form of psychosis, they are admitted at the Mathari Mental Hospital, which has a wing for psychotic perpetrators.

This resonates with a 2016 ruling by Justice Francis Tuyott. Justice Tuyott ruled that a woman suspected of killing her own child must be subjected to a psychiatric assessment.

This assessment determines what psychiatric state she was in at the time of committing the act.

Justice Tuyott was ruling in a case in which a seven-year jail sentence on an appellant identified as PAO was dismissed after the charges were downgraded from second-degree murder to infanticide.

The appellant was standing trial for the offence of killing an unborn child in Nasewa location, Busia County, on December 5, 2014.

PREVALENCE

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime's (UNODC) "Global Study on Homicide 2019" says that acts of child murders are perpetrated by men as an extension of their domestic violence towards their wives.

“Women are disproportionately affected by intimate partner violence. The male perpetrator will kill his children in order to inflict maximum pain and suffering on their partner,” says the report.

Ken Munyua, a consultant psychologist, explains that in domestic conflicts, children are more likely to be victimised or used as a tool of punishment due to their vulnerability and third role-play in the conflict.

“The victimisation, fatal maltreatment and subsequent murder will be very likely where the children are the subject of the conflict or have become a regular centre of blame during fights,” he says.

Where a man kills his wife in the close presence of the children, Munyua says the children can end up getting killed in the perpetrator’s delusional attempt to conceal evidence or get rid of witnesses.

The UNODC report shows that out of every 10 children killed in filicide globally, six will be boys and four girls.

Between 2008 and 2017, this report says that 205,153 children aged 0 to 14 years died to filicide.

IMPEDIMENT

In most cases, these child victims were subjected to violence and various forms of abuse. For example in 2017, says the report, a billion children aged two to 17 years were subjected to physical, sexual and emotional violence worldwide.

Hart says that this number is not so far-fetched. “Pre-existing violence is one of the biggest risk factors in filicide. This violence could be physical, emotional, psychological, or even sexual,” says Hart.

A parent who has delusions that his child is ill-fated, or is a product of infidelity, will also have a record of abusing the child for a long time.

This abuse will eventually lead to murder or accidental death and will be ruled out as fatal maltreatment filicide.

There are parents who kill their children because they see them as unwanted or a hindrance to their wants and needs.

Mildred Imaili Musya from Kabui village in Murang’a was arrested in June this year and arraigned in court for killing her two-year-old baby.

The police reported that she had seen her baby as an impediment to her getting married by a man who was identified as Stephen Kamau – Ms Musya killed the child by drowning her in river Mathioya.

BE CIRCUMSPECT
In other cases, some have killed their children after joining suspected cults.

In a 2014 case that shocked the nation, Paul Magu, a lawyer, murdered his three children, his wife, and then committed suicide by jumping in front of a speeding bus on Thika-Garissa highway.

The ‘pastor’ behind the controversial church, Ann Wanyoro, has been charged with aiding the murders.

As grievous as these acts are, they are almost impossible to stop. For example, a study on filicide titled "A Qualitative Study of Filicide by Mentally Ill Mothers" that was conducted by psychiatrist researcher Josephine Stanton J Simpson, says that mothers who commit filicide almost always show previous caring tendencies towards their children.

They also report investing heavily in raising their children. These mothers portray little or no symptoms of committing filicide, which makes them hard to predict and stop.

The report also says that mentally ill mothers who have committed filicide will have done it suddenly without much planning.

On the other extreme, depressed ordinary mothers will contemplate killing their children for days to weeks without showing any significant symptoms before committing the act – Chitayi is however of the opinion that keen relatives and neighbours can arrest such a situation by acting immediately they suspect something is amiss.

“It will be a very dangerous sign if a parent is talking about suicide and expressing concern about who will look after their children when they die, especially if they are young. Younger children are killed more frequently than older children by their parents,” says Dr Chitayi.

INADEQUATE DATA
Postpartum depressive disorder, which is associated with childbirth, is also a major risk factor that is confined to mothers.

Worth noting is that Kenya does not have proper statistical data on filicide or measures to help stem acts of murder of children.

The "Kenya Police Annual Crime Reports" in the country are largely vague when it comes to proper analysis and data recording on acts of filicide.

In most cases, these acts are lumped together with general acts of murder. Over the past three years, Kenya has been experiencing a rise in the number of such murders.

The 2018 Economic Survey shows that in 2014, 2,649 murder cases were recorded; in 2015, 2,648; while in 2017, 2,751 murder cases were recorded.

On the other end, the police report shows that in 2010 there were 35 cases of infanticide, 45 in 2011, 33 in 2012, 45 in 2013, 33 in 2014, 51 in 2015, and 42 in 2016.