What causes wives and mothers to kill?

This episode continues the conversation with Dianne Berg, author of What's behind our enduring fascination with wives and mothers who kill. In this episode, Nat Cardona and Diane talk about what causes wives and mothers to commit murder and how the public, judicial system and medical fields contribute and/or react to these criminal events.

To listen to the first half of the interview with Dianne, click here. 

To learn more about Dianne Berg, click here. 

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Episode transcript

Note: The following transcript was created by Slack and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically:

Welcome to Lee Enterprise's Late Edition Crime Beat Chronicles. I'm your host Nat Cardona. In this episode, we're continuing the exploration of a niche area of true crime stories, the obsession that fans seem to have with killer wives and mothers. We're back with Diane Berg, a professor at Clark University and author of the article What's behind our enduring fascination with wives and mothers who kill? She is very much an expert on this complex topic. If you haven't listened to the first episode, go back and listen to the first half of my interview, please. Otherwise, we pick up the conversation back up by discussing some causes of what makes mothers and wives kill.

I'm a mother myself and I'm, I'm actually pregnant.

So I'm gonna have a baby in four weeks.

I'm actually pregnant, but I'm having a baby in four weeks. Thank you. So I'm kind of like, you know, going through all these things and, you know, very much in the, you know, what makes me different from these other women who have done this historically or in more recent history.

But the thing that comes to mind is there is just something so grabbing about when women do this, because you carry the child for so long and you birth the child and it's so much more intimate than the father who's removed and can kind of clean his hands in the sense of when there is a murder, you can go.

You know, and that's because he's not involved. So in the natural process of pregnancy and birth. So, yeah, when there are these women historically or modern day that do this, it's like, well, you know, you just sit there and go, how how could this happen? How could this happen? And you do. The next point I want to get at is the openness nowadays that we have about talking about postpartum depression, because there seems to be a link with that postpartum psychosis.

And you mentioned it's Lynsey Clancy who's kind of the most recent with that. So in your research and I is something you mentioned, I just want to clarify. Have you you've seen a difference between, let's say, 20, 30 years ago media coverage and nowadays media coverage of like like just jump into that.

Okay. I mean, I kind of want to take those in order, if I may. So, yeah. First, going back to what you were talking about, how okay, when a man does it. Yes, that's terrible and bad and they're they're bad people. But when a woman does it, when a mother does it, especially, there's all this kind of language of the unnatural and the monstrous.

And again, going back to, you know, right now, I've been rereading Euripides Medea all week to get ready for this class, because Medea is like the her murderous mother. Right. And a lot of times these these early modern mothers who kill their children, who, as you point out statistically are fewer than men who kill their children. It is then is now like men commit way more domestic violence than women do.

But women do it. It gets more attention. And it's because of this unnatural list. Right? Women mothers are supposed to be, as you say, it's the natural process whereby we actually think we incubate the child. And there's a lot of that kind of language of like, how could she like a bloody like a bloody tiger? A tiger wouldn't do a thing like this.

A snake wouldn't do a thing like this. The child that she nursed in her body for 40 weeks and fed with her breasts, and there's all this kind of language of like how unnatural this is that you would destroy your own creation in this way. And I think that's really deep. Obviously, that plays it. I think at a really macro level, it plays into fears about like God destroying the earth.

But I think on the more kind of social and cultural level, it just flies in the face of everything that women are supposed to be. We're supposed to be kind and gentle and nurturing and giving and selfless, and all of these things are intimately tied up with o