With all due respect, I don't agree that all discussions of the nanny's possible motives as per her statements are merely based on class issues. I was looking at it from the standpoint of the employer-employee relationship. There's a long history of disgruntled employees retaliating in a violent manner against their employers. Those don't always include acts of violence against the employer's family but, in this case, taking care of the family was the very nature of her job. I don't think any of the posters here have tried to paint all domestic workers with a broad brush based upon the actions of this woman. I think we have just been trying to understand her motivations. In the case of the Chicago woman, I believe she stated that she acted out of anger at her husband.
In the case of YO, she may have started suffering from some mental health issues, but millions of people are mentally ill and never harm anyone or, at most, only harm themselves. I think most of us are just trying to understand what other factors may be at play here.
IMHO
BBM. Yes, that's fair. And true. I don't think everyone sees it as a class issue. The reason I made that connection, however, is that I have been seeing posts from the very beginning that immediately and easily assumed the nanny was seething with rage and jealousy and that motivated her. I now see posts that assume she just wanted to lie around all day and do nothing and savagely butchered two babies because she couldn't. How the heck can we jump to such conclusions unless we see people like this nanny as inherently jealous and usually hiding anger at what they don't have? Because gruesomely murdering two babies in one's care in such a manner (stabbing to death) is so unusual, so rare.
Again, let's look at other cases where employees are involved and/or children are involved:
1. Disgruntled employee killings - usually mass murders involving a gun. Targets are adults, mostly the employers or co-workers. Sometimes collateral clients. Sometimes they just involve the murder of the employer and no one else.
2. Children who are stabbed to death - overwhelmingly, it is by parents, romantic partners of parents, other relations, or someone who molested or tried to molest the child (exception would be stabbing deaths of children by other children).
3. Children killed by unrelated caretakers - usually beaten to death, sometimes smothered or scalded. Caretakers try to cover up the crime, cast blame elsewhere and almost never kill or try to kill themselves in the process.
Or, let's look at greed killings:
1. They involve monetary gain of some sort. Insurance policies, pending divorce, etc.
How about rage killings?
1. They involve suicide or suicide attempts usually only when the person against whom the rage is directed is related or was a romantic partner, perceived romantic partner or abuse victim of the perp.
2. In the case of rage against a child, they tend to involve beating or scalding the child to death.
3. In the case of rage against the parent being taken out on the child, they pretty much always involve a romantic partner or former romantic partner of the parent who is doing the killing.
This case fits none of those. Most cases fit a pattern. This case fits more with a psychotic episode. (Just google "psychotic episode stabbing" or "psychotic episode homicide"). Here's some facts:
The observation that almost half of the homicides committed by people with a psychotic illness occur before initial treatment suggests an increased risk of homicide during the first episode of psychosis. The aim of this study was to estimate the rates of homicide during the first episode of psychosis and after treatment. The rate ratio of homicide in the first episode of psychosis in these studies was 15.5 times the annual rate of homicide after treatment for psychosis. Hence, the rate of homicide in the first episode of psychosis appears to be higher than previously recognized, whereas the annual rate of homicide by patients with schizophrenia after treatment is lower than previous estimates.
(Snipped for space/copyright)
http://schizophreniabulletin.oxfordjournals.org/content/36/4/702.full
Delusional disorder and psychotic (delusional) depression are more likely to have onset during middle age and old age than during early adulthood. Late-onset psychotic disorders may be fundamentally similar to their early-onset counterparts in the underlying neurobiologic predisposition. Certain specific protective factors may, however, prevent an earlier breakdown, whereas other aging-related precipitants may be responsible for the onset of symptoms during later life.
http://www.acnp.org/g4/GN401000138/CH135.html
Late-onset psychosis is much more prevalent in women than in men for reasons that are imperfectly understood. When you are evaluating a midlife woman with first onset of psychosis, don't assume an illness of unknown cause (bipolar disorder or schizophrenia) until after you have done a comprehensive search for triggers of her psychotic symptoms. After age 40, women are more likely than men to develop psychosis because of gender-specific medical and psychological precipitants.
Predisposing factors for psychosis
Psychosis is an emergent quality of structural and chemical changes in the brain. As such, it can be expected to surface during:
* brain reorganization or transition (adolescence, senescence, brain trauma, stroke, starvation, inflammation, or brain tumor)
* change in brain chemistry (flux in gonadal, thyroid, or adrenal hormone levels; electrolyte imbalance; fever; exposure to chemical substances; immune response).
Psychological stress impacting the brain via stress hormones also can predispose a person to psychosis.
Because some individuals are more prone than others to develop psychosis during brain alteration, chemical and structural changes in the brain are assumed to interact with genetic propensities to influence gene expression. Once a psychotic event has occurred, it is thought to sensitize the brain so that subsequent events emerge more readily. (1)
Schizophrenia--though not the only illness in which psychosis plays a role--is a prototype for psychotic illness, and several reported sex differences in this disorder are worth noting. The incidence of schizophrenia is approximately the same in both sexes, but women show a later age of onset--a paradox in that the brain develops at a faster pace in females and theoretically should reach the threshold for the first appearance of schizophrenia earlier.
The estrogen hypothesis. Women show a tendency toward premenstrual and postpartum exacerbation of symptoms when estrogen levels are relatively low.
http://business.highbeam.com/435938...en-consider-midlife-medical-and-psychological
This study shows that the chance of finding psychosis among female murderers (or homicide perps) is about 21% higher than among male murderers:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10683161003752311#preview
My issue is that in comparing this case to all the thousands of other homicides we study via websleuths, it fits more with cases of sudden, undiagnosed psychosis, rather than revenge, greed or rage killings. So the fact that many people readily and early on assumed that a woman who apparently got along well with her employers, who actually stayed with her family in her third world nation, killed the babies in her care out of a sense of rage, entitlement, or greed, when such cases look far different, a focus on class becomes apparent. Especially when I see posts stating, "It's always the have nots who complain", or posts discussing how wealthy the Krims are and how she must have been "jealous".
Finally, find me a case in the United States (or England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand or western Europe, as those most closely resemble the U.S. culturally, which matters when profiling) that involves a disgruntled employee killing the children of the employer, and not the employer him or herself. And if you do, then find one that does NOT involve an attempt to cover up the crime.
