Killer Dads

April 22, 2013
Spoiler alert: journalist Papenfuss’s depressing account of horrific violence doesn’t offer any insights. “I set out to gather all the facts I could on the killings, assuming the information would unlock the key to motivations and mechanisms toward murder. They didn’t.” Given that, readers who suffer through detailed accounts of savage acts of familicide, such as attorney William Parente’s 2009 killing of his wife and daughters, are likely to feel ill-used. The inclusion of the transcripts of emergency phone calls and heart-breaking photos of families in happier times appeals only to emotions, rather than to an analysis of how or why fathers end the lives they helped bring into the world. Papenfuss (coauthor, Climb Against the Odds) will open some eyes with a chapter on infanticide in the animal kingdom—particularly among primates—but given that her examples there include murderous mothers, her choice to focus just on men, even if they are statistically more likely to kill their children, is unclear. Are men and women so different that Susan Smith, who drowned her two children to sustain an affair, merits no mention at all? As is, Papenfuss’s project feels arbitrary and unnecessary. Photos. Agent: Claire Gerus, Claire Gerus Literary Agency.

A former crime reporter takes on the unthinkable topic of men who murder their own children in this book that melds true crime, anthropology, and issues of social justice. Papenfuss (Climb Against the Odds, 2013) presents five main crimes, offering them variously as examples of a specific type of killer or killing: those that are driven by either a sense of rage or a perverse sense of protectiveness, "family annihilations," a cult-like level of control gone haywire, straight-up sociopathy (this the case of Scott and Laci Peterson, which the author covered for the New York Daily News), and so-called "honor killings." The descriptions--interspersed with briefer examples of equally horrific crimes--are detailed and graphic, the writing bordering on sensationalistic in a way that will both titillate and disturb. Papenfuss takes a more intellectual tone in her early chapters about the evolutionary and social underpinnings of male violence against family members, which provide a fascinating subtext for the subsequent analyses of specific crimes. From Langur monkeys in India, to fairy tales and Shakespearian dramas about dysfunctional step-parent relationships, to mass family murders in early America, she argues convincingly that infanticide is not the shocking aberration we would like to think it is, but it is rather, to some degree, encoded into our biology and culture. She supports this hypothesis with a barrage of statistics (which, while compelling, hamper her readability) and points out problems within the law enforcement, social welfare, and criminal justice systems that impede our ability to evolve beyond the brutality of our primitive selves. Papenfuss's progressive slant is apparent, as she may very well intend it to be--she quotes several activists and system insiders who argue that meaningful reform will require government funds that are now, they say, being misdirected [234-235]--but for the most part she does not speak in platitudes, and she effectively outlines the complexity of the problem and the elusiveness of solutions. She deftly handles, for instance, the politically-charged issue of Islamic "honor killings" in the case of murdered Dearborn, Michigan, teen Jessica Mokdad, and in her concluding chapter she admits, "I assumed when I got to the end of my book, some solutions to the problem of fathers killing children would be obvious. They weren't." [234] Informative, provocative, and challenging in a way that belies its somewhat silly title, this book is a must-read for those interested in criminal psychology and issues of domestic violence. COPYRIGHT(1) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.