A Dark Reflection

If they’re lucky, it starts with flowers, a sympathetic letter or a neighbor’s embrace. But more often than not, it begins--and never seems to end--with a torrent of hard stares, menacing phone calls, hate mail and death threats.

They are the parents of children gone bad--children who are violent criminals or so outrage the national conscience that they become pariahs.Even when parents are legally blameless, they are often damned--by the public, by pundits, by talk show hosts.

The latest set of parents to feel the sting of blame are those of John Walker Lindh. Though the American Taliban has not been charged with killing anyone and has pleaded not guilty to charges he took up arms against his country, he has been reviled as much as some murderers.

What parent could possibly be prepared when a child is suddenly thrust into the headlines in the most negative way? Not only must they grapple with their own horror or anguish, they must do so under the hot lights of the national media. The costs can be enormous. The tab for a legal defense in such cases can run into the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars. Friendships vanish overnight, ties with relatives are severed and marriages shatter.

Grief, guilt and a relentless second-guessing ensue. “Why didn’t I catch this?” “What did I do wrong?” “How could this happen?” It can crystallize into an often overwhelming depression.

“Ever since Sigmund Freud, we’ve been blaming Mommy and Daddy,” said Jack Levin, a Northeastern University professor who has written extensively about murderers and their families. “People want the inexplicable explained. People want to make sense of the senseless.

“I’m not trying to excuse the parents because in many cases they do have something to do with the event,” added Levin, a sociologist. “But the public often makes this leap before the evidence is in and that’s when it can really damage the parents who are already suffering enormously.”

Parents of notorious children rarely talk publicly. E-mail or phone calls to more than a dozen such parents, including those of Lindh, Jeffrey Dahmer and students who have shot classmates, were not returned. Such reluctance is not surprising, report psychologists and sociologists who have worked with the families. Parents battle enormous shame, and retelling the details to the public through the media is simply too painful for most. There can be compelling legal restraints as well.

The parents of Dylan Klebold, who was one of the two teens to shoot 13 classmates at Columbine High School in Colorado, are “facing a number of pending lawsuits totaling $300 million and have been advised not to say a word,” said James Garbarino, author of “Parents Under Siege” (Free Press, 2001). Garbarino was the only person outside of law enforcement to interview the Klebolds. Polls clearly reveal the propensity to blame the parents for the sins of the child. A Gallup Poll taken shortly after the 1999 Columbine rampage showed that 84% of respondents faulted parents, at least in part, for the tragedy. Meanwhile, a CBS News poll at the time found 40% believed that the parents were not only to blame, but were the chief reason for the shootings. (The next highest rated culprit was television violence at 8%.)

The public has it about right. In about four out of five cases, experts believe emotional, physical or sexual abuse at the hands of at least one parent plays a central role in a child’s horribly aberrant behavior. In the other one in five cases, however, parents provided reasonably stable, warm households and, still, their children went wrong. Any number of reasons may account for this including chemical imbalances in the child’s brain, early head trauma, exposure to media violence and peer influence, said Garbarino, a professor of human development at Cornell University and co-director of the Family Life Development Center.

“The Klebolds didn’t abuse or neglect their kid. They were involved and loving,” said Garbarino, who dedicated his book to them. “But it raises the question of why bad things happen to good parents?”

It seems the public is often so quick to blame the parents, it forgets the ultimate responsibility rests on the perpetrator. “We want to place responsibility everywhere else it seems except the killer,” Levin said. “I remember people were blaming the neighbor of [mass murderer John Wayne] Gacy for not noticing the smell,” after more than 30 bodies were discovered buried in his basement.

With that mind-set, besieged parents can be astonished even by the simplest gestures of support.

Rosemary Martinez, mother of Michael McDermott, a mentally ill veteran who gunned down seven people at his workplace near Boston in 2000, reported she was in tears after receiving letters, flowers and hugs from neighbors. Even Lionel Dahmer, father of notorious serial killer Jeffrey, found empathy on his first day back to work after his son’s 1991 arrest. A co-worker said, “There but for the grace of God go I, Lionel,” according to the elder Dahmer’s book, “A Father’s Story” (William Morrow, 1994).

But tenderness is far from the norm. More plentiful, particularly in the case of the Dahmers and the Klebolds, are harassing phone calls late at night, angry letters, threats against their homes and even their lives. All of which can lead to a need for police protection.

The frenzied climate after the capture of a particularly infamous criminal almost always generates a whirlpool of rumors and lies about the parents. Frances Bianchi, the mother of one of the two Hillside Stranglers, Kenneth Bianchi, was accused by her son of holding his hand over a flame and exposing him to pornographic material when he was 12. Both assertions proved false. And a mystery guest on a talk show hosted by Geraldo Rivera claimed that Lionel Dahmer had sexually molested his son, which also was found to be untrue. Yet, the damage was done.

“Looks and glances that were probably entirely innocent, now looked sinister to me, questioning and accusatory,” wrote Dahmer in his book. “A kind of paranoia gripped me. I wondered how people could believe such a terrible thing about me, if they believed it. And that was part of my confusion, that I absolutely could not be sure what anyone thought of me anymore.”

At precisely the time they need human warmth and contact the most, the isolation these parents experience can be at its greatest. “The Klebolds had the dual thing of losing their kid’s life and then dealing with the immensity of what their child had done,” said Garbarino, who frequently is called as an expert courtroom witness in family relationships. “When your child dies in a suicide/homicide, your ability to grieve and get social support gets severely compromised.”

The lives of many such parents simply collapse under the weight of suspicion and shame. The fate of Frances Bianchi is not uncommon, said Levin, who has interviewed dozens of family members of murderers. Before adopting her son from an alcoholic prostitute when he was 3 months old, Bianchi was the picture of a contented, middle-class homemaker in Rochester, N.Y., according to Levin.

Within a short time after her son’s arrest for killing more than a half-dozen young women, her friends and relatives deserted her and her longtime marriage abruptly ended. Today, she lives under another name in a trailer park on the West Coast, Levin said.

“Her entire life fell apart,” said Levin, who talked with Bianchi for six hours, during most of which, she cried.

Joyce Flint, Jeffrey Dahmer’s mother, also struggled mightily with her parental legacy. She and her husband divorced in the late 1970s and she later moved to Fresno in the late 1980s--years before her son’s crimes came to light. In Fresno, she managed a retirement residence and later became a case manager for the Central Valley AIDS Team. Three years after her son’s arrest, she tried to commit suicide.

One of Dahmer’s lawyers, Gerald Boyle, said his client told him repeatedly that Flint was a great mother. “It was clear she bore no responsibility ... [but] she had to live with the idea that she was the mother of a monster, and it drove her crazy,” Boyle said. Flint died of breast cancer in 2000.

Meanwhile, Dahmer’s younger brother, David, also left Ohio, legally changed his name and has steadfastly refused all media requests for interviews. Yet Lionel Dahmer remains in Ohio, clinging to his old life, refusing even to get an unlisted phone number.

As gruesome as the Dahmer case was and as shocking as school shootings have been, Lindh may well be more reviled than any murderer. His acts have struck at something greater than the individual, at America itself, generating widespread outrage.

Lindh, a child of wealth and privilege, is seen as having betrayed his nation when it was under lethal attack. A grand jury indicted him on 10 counts, including one on conspiracy to kill Americans overseas. And despite the fact he doesn’t face the death penalty, there are regular calls for his death, most recently by the family of the CIA officer killed in the Afghan prison where Lindh was captured.

Lindh’s parents, who are divorced, also have been largely excoriated in the opinion press. They are routinely denounced for failing to set limits for their son. “When someone is accused of [being a traitor], the parents are seen as responsible. In the minds of many, the parents of John Walker Lindh are as treasonous as their son,” Levin said. The parents’ courthouse protestations that their son “loves America” and “has done nothing wrong” have failed to win much sympathy for their son or themselves.

“Parents are expected to defend their children,” said Murray Strauss, an author and parenting expert at the University of New Hampshire. “But there has to be a recognition that their child has done something wrong and in the case of the Taliban fighter I don’t think the parents’ claims have gone over very well.”

A better example, perhaps, of supporting the child while still acknowledging wrongdoing, were the parents of David Attias, the college student accused of running down and killing four people and critically injuring another on a street near the UC Santa Barbara campus last year.

In a brief statement at his son’s first courthouse appearance, Hollywood TV and film director Daniel Attias said: “On behalf of my wife, I’d like to say how devastated and heartbroken we are for everyone affected by this horrible event. We know this has not affected just the loved ones and families of victims who must be feeling unspeakable grief.”

As the parents of victims know, apologies have to be done with a great deal of sensitivity and care. Otherwise, they only reopen a painful wound. In many cases, the parents of a murder victim don’t even want to see, much less hear from, the parents of the killer, said Nancy Ruhe-Munch, executive director of the National Organization of Murdered Children Inc. She estimates that parent-to-parent apologies occur in about three out of 100 murder cases. Despite the low number, Ruhe-Munch still feels parents whose children commit egregious acts deserve a break.

“The parents of murderers don’t have any place to turn because nobody wants to hear about their pain,” she said. “People don’t usually stop to think they hated what their child did, too. Jeffrey Dahmer’s parents are in pain too.”