An Archival Exploration of 19th-Century American Adult Female Offender Parricides

Abstract

Social and behavioral scientists have increasingly attended to the contexts and motivational dynamics underlying parricidal events. These efforts notwithstanding, most research has focused on adolescent or adult male offender populations. One largely neglected area of study is that of adult female offender parricide. The present study utilizes archival records to examine the contexts and sources of conflict that gave rise to adult female offender parricides in the late 19th century. Three general themes emerged, representing the primary contexts behind adult female offender parricide: (1) abuse and neglect; (2) instrumental, financially-motivated killings; and (3) expressive killings, often during the course of arguments. Each of these contexts is explored.

Matricide in Ghana: Victims, Offenders, and Offense Characteristics

“…The adoption of newspaper surveillance methodology in the study homicide is not a novel practice. Indeed, it has been an established methodology given the paucity or absence of homicide datasets in some countries or jurisdictions (e.g., Boots & Heide, 2006; Heide & Boots, 2007; Shon, 2009; Shon & Williams, 2013). The use of newspaper surveillance for procuring homicide and other crime data is particularly critical in non-Western developing countries such as Ghana where law enforcement records on certain crimes or aspects of criminal activities are inadequate, unreliable, or simply nonexistent.…”

Double Parricide: An In‐Depth Look at Two Victim Homicides Involving Parents as Victims

“…This research method, previously used by Liem and colleagues (Liem, Levin, Holland, & Fox, ; Liem & Reichelmann, ), provided a means to examine the case circumstances behind these killings and to note case processing and outcomes. Use of newspaper accounts to identify possible motives and case characteristics in parricide cases has also been successfully utilized by Shon and colleagues (see, for e.g., Shon & Roberts, ; Shon & Williams, ).…”

“…In her review of the literature, she found only two cases of female‐perpetrated double parricide, one by a severely abused juvenile (Reinhardt, ) and one by a severely mentally ill adult (Chamberlain, ). Archival research of newspaper accounts of parricides reported in the New York Times and Chicago Tribune during the mid‐to‐late 19th century identified no cases of both parents slain by adult females (Shon & Williams, ). Lizzie Borden, who was charged with killing her father and stepmother with an ax, was tried and acquitted for the 1892 murders (Robertson, ).…”

Female Victims and Offenders in South African Parricides, 1990-2019

“…Daughters who kill their parents represent one of the rarest class of offenders in the homicide literature. The handful of works that exist on female parricide offenders suggest that abuse-sexual, physical, and emotional-configures in significant ways as risk factors in parricide incidents (Shon & Targonski, 2003;Shon & Williams, 2013). It remains unknown if such patterns of abuse that previous scholars in North America and Europe have noted are applicable in a South African context.…”