Why Would a Father Burn His Son? : Book: ‘World Without Tears: The Case of Charles Rothenberg’ looks at the man who set fire to room where his 6-year-old slept.

Harry J. Gaynor admits he spent many restless nights wondering whether he should have anything to do with a book about Charles Rothenberg, the former New York waiter who spent almost seven years in prison for severely burning his son, David, in a Buena Park motel room in 1983.

As founder and president of the National Burn Victim Foundation in Orange, N.J., Gaynor has dedicated 16 years to problems associated with child abuse and neglect by burning, and he wasn’t eager to jeopardize the foundation’s reputation.

“I felt people would assume things--that we were an advocate for Charles Rothenberg,” he says. “God forbid if we should be an advocate of Charles Rothenberg.”

As a co-author of “A World Without Tears: The Case of Charles Rothenberg” (Praeger; $17.95), Gaynor felt that a book that delves into the mind and background of a man who deliberately set fire to the room where his 6-year-old son slept would “shed some light into the dark corners of child abuse.”

David Rothenberg, now 14 and living in Anaheim where he will enter high school in the fall, underwent more than 100 skin graft operations to repair burn scars on 90% of his body.

“The crime was so horrible and (burning) is the ultimate in child abuse, the book is going to be controversial,” predicts Gaynor, whose own reaction to reading news accounts of Rothenberg’s crime was that “they should give this guy the same treatment.”

But Gaynor hopes people will look beyond their emotional response to what Rothenberg did and see the book’s objective: To draw attention to child abuse by burning, which he likens to a runaway train.

Says Gaynor: “I’d like to see that train slowed down and stopped.”

Based on an autobiographical manuscript Rothenberg wrote in prison, more than 140 of his letters to Gaynor over a four-year period and a 10-hour prison interview with Rothenberg, the 136-page book provides insight into the cycle of violence that leads to child abuse.

All royalties from the book have been waived by Gaynor and his two co-authors, a psychologist and a minister; they are designated to benefit the National Burn Victim Foundation’s child abuse programs and services.

Rothenberg, not listed as an author, would be prevented from making money off any book dealing with the case because a state law bans criminals from profiting from their wrongdoing.

In his own words, Rothenberg, on parole since January and under 24-hour surveillance at an undisclosed California site, describes his early years--of being placed in a Brooklyn orphanage 11 days after his birth in 1940, of being transferred to another orphanage in the Bronx when he was 5, and of remaining there until he was 15 when his mother, a prostitute, entered his life.

At 20, he was arrested for stealing $4,300 in traveler’s checks to help a poor family in Puerto Rico where he had worked in a nightclub. “I could never figure out why I always wanted to help people and, on many occasions I did it both honestly and dishonestly. I just felt good about it,” he writes.

That is followed by an arrest for an attempted robbery in New York and a succession of jobs before meeting Marie, the woman he married. Rothenberg characterizes her, the mother of their son, David, as “loving,” but “coarse,” “critical” and “condemning,”--a woman who would go “after me with her mouth,” causing him to “feel less than human.”

Marie Hafdahl, now married to a Buena Park police lieutenant, says she had no comment about the book, “none whatsoever.”

“A World Without Tears” does not simply take Rothenberg’s story at face value.

A detailed analysis of Rothenberg’s narrative is provided by Gaynor’s co-authors: Andrew Savicky, psychological director at the Southern State Correction Facility in Delmont, N.J.; and Jack Wilson, senior pastor of Calvary Evangelical Free Church in Essex Falls, N.J., who evaluates Rothenberg’s religious background and his claim of being a “born-again” Christian.

Thus, when Rothenberg writes about his childhood, Wilson comments that “Charles Rothenberg’s description of his early years shows that the context for the development of his own conscience, healthy self-esteem, sense of belonging, and religious concepts was sorely lacking. . . . “

And Savicky writes: “His relationship with his mother is the key to so many of the problems that afflicted Charles throughout his life, and his masochistic tendencies can likely be traced to this source.”

Analyzing Rothenberg, Savicky and Wilson portray a man who is often unassertive when interacting with aggressive people, who is dependent on others to make most of his major life decisions, who lacked spiritual commitment and who has a “shallow conscience,” which lets him subordinate any sense of wrongdoing to meet his needs for esteem and belonging.

The book’s title, “A World Without Tears,” is taken from the title of a poem Rothenberg wrote while in prison in which he professes his love for his son.

When David was born in 1976, Savicky says, Rothenberg “portrays himself as a model husband and father working long hours and being extremely attentive to David.”

But after the Rothenbergs divorce in 1978, while Rothenberg was serving time for check forgery, his attentiveness grew obsessive.

Feeling threatened by Marie’s attention to her new boyfriend and fearful of losing his son, Rothenberg doted on David, walking him to school and seeing him as much as possible. He even carried a beeper so David could contact him at any time.

As a divorced father, Rothenberg is described by the authors as a man whose concept of a loving father is that of a “sugar daddy, who takes great joy in recounting all of his gifts to David and the extra money he gave to Marie.”

Writes Rothenberg: “I bought David everything he wanted, and why not? My son had the right to experience life with his Dad.”

In 1983, Rothenberg was under investigation for a robbery at the restaurant where he worked. Instead of turning himself in for a crime he insists he did not commit, he decided to take David on a week’s vacation, pausing before to wonder, “Why did I have to suffer emotionally because of Marie’s hard, sandpaper personality that I could never stop, try as I might?”

In a phone call to Marie the day after arriving in Orange County to visit Disneyland, Rothenberg writes that Marie was furious at him for taking David out of the state without her knowledge--and threatened that once they returned to New York she would make sure he never saw their son again.

“I was deeply disturbed and couldn’t get that call out of my mind,” Rothenberg writes. “I’m not sure what really hit me, but I wanted to end it all, to leave Marie in her misery with John (her boyfriend). I was ready, in some way, to commit suicide with David, to end it all, to get away from Marie’s mouth and the years of verbal abuse that I could never understand.”

Rothenberg writes that after pouring kerosene around the motel room that night after David was asleep, he decided not to go through with the double suicide and went himself to sleep: “In my mind, I didn’t want to hurt my son. I was not angry with him. He surely was not to blame. I just wanted to zipper Marie’s mouth--that’s all.”

He says the next thing he remembers is rushing out the door with a shadow of flames in front of him.

In writing the book, Gaynor says, “we learned a lot about someone who would commit such a horrendous crime, what triggered him and what in his character, in his background, made him go over the edge and then cower out and run.”

That, Gaynor says, is a recurring theme in Rothenberg’s life: “Whenever he is faced with a stressful situation, he runs.”

Many of Rothenberg’s characteristics are typical of someone who would abuse a child, Gaynor says: “There are variables in circumstances, of course. His intent was to kill the child. This is not always the intent of the child abuser. The intent is to hurt the child, to make the child feel pain.”

In his “hateful act of revenge” aimed at Marie, Gaynor says, Rothenberg’s “fantasy was that Marie would never know what happened to them. He was going to burn both of them up beyond recognition. Nobody would have known who it was. So Marie would have suffered and would still be looking into what happened to her son.”

In child abuse cases, Gaynor says, “many times a parent will, to punish the husband or wife, take it out on the child in one form or the other, especially gutless people--wimps as I refer to them--who will hurt the child because they don’t have the courage to stand up and stand their ground and argue the point intelligently. (Rothenberg) never could.”

“A World Without Tears” grew out of a series of letters Rothenberg wrote to Gaynor from prison beginning in 1985. Rothenberg had heard about the National Burn Victim Foundation from a television program and wrote to Gaynor, offering to donate “some skin, parts of my anatomy to relieve (David’s) pain for reconstruction.”

Gaynor’s first reaction was to tear up the letter and throw it away. But he was curious to learn more about Rothenberg’s background and personality to see how it fit with what was already known about child abusers.

Rothenberg once mentioned that he was writing a manuscript about his life, saying, “if you think my story would help prevent some child from being abused, or prevent some parent from making the same mistake I did, you can have it.”

It was, Gaynor says, an offer he couldn’t refuse.

Says Savicky, who used Rothenberg’s life story to develop a formula, presented in the book, that can be used to analyze parental characteristics and behavior to prevent child abuse: “The mission of the book is that all individuals can learn from this tragedy. . . .”

Gaynor says he last talked to Rothenberg on the phone about a month ago. “It’s my understanding that he has been out seeking employment and has not been successful at this time,” he says, wondering about Rothenberg’s future once he is no longer on monitored parole.

“He’s going to be challenged as never before,” he says. “In the past, he had opportunities for jobs. He was a hard worker. However, he got in trouble again and again. So we are creatures of habit. Has Charles Rothenberg learned his lesson? Has he been conning us? Has he been telling us what we want to hear? Only through his actions, not what he says, can we tell.”

At the outset of the book, Rothenberg writes how David “must live disfigured and deprived of all that life could have given him because of me, and I must live with myself knowing how I hurt my son I love.”

Gaynor says he believes Rothenberg is remorseful: “Can you imagine? Let’s say something snapped in your head, due to many stresses, and you did a terrible thing, and your son survived and looked like that and you did it. Every time someone lit a match . . . we get punished by our subconscious.

“I think this man has a conscience, and he’s going to have to live with that. That’s the hell on earth.”