Every parent who has looked after a severely disabled child experiences a random breaking point, a moment unannounced when the unthinkable could happen: they are on the brink of inflicting injury. Loss of control is usually so momentary that it leaves nothing worse than a stab of guilt. But occasionally the whole loving edifice of round-the-clock caring collapses into a scene of tragedy such as the one Yvonne Freaney’s family met when they opened the door of her hotel room in Cardiff.
For more than two days, this traumatised woman had sat holding the hand of her dead son, a boy of 11, who suffered from severe autism. Her state of mind as she waited to be found, and the degree of desperation that apparently led her to take his life, can only be imagined. She has been charged with his murder. It is not murder as we normally understand it, however, but something more subtle, more extreme, much more inexplicable: a crime against nature.
This seems to be the latest in a wave of desperate cases where mothers, out of isolation, despair or compassion, are driven to kill a disabled child. Fiona Pilkington died alongside her 18-year-old mentally-disabled daughter after being tormented for years by bullying and abuse from local youths. She had made 21 calls to the police but they had failed to act. A month later, Joanne Hill drowned her four-year-old daughter, Naomi, who had cerebral palsy. She was convicted of murder. Earlier this year, Kay Gilderdale, a devoted mother, killed her 31-year old daughter, Lynn, whose life had become so “unimaginably wretched” through the chronic fatigue illness, ME, that she had tried to commit suicide. She was cleared of attempted murder. As with Frances Inglis, a mother jailed at the Old Bailey in January for injecting her brain-damaged son with a lethal heroin dose, Mrs Gilderdale’s family believed she had had her daughter’s best interests at heart... Read the full article: What could have driven Yvonne Freaney to murder her son?
By Elizabeth Grace
Every parent who has looked after a severely disabled child experiences a random breaking point, a moment unannounced when the unthinkable could happen: they are on the brink of inflicting injury. Loss of control is usually so momentary that it leaves nothing worse than a stab of guilt. But occasionally the whole loving edifice of round-the-clock caring collapses into a scene of tragedy such as the one Yvonne Freaney’s family met when they opened the door of her hotel room in Cardiff.
For more than two days, this traumatised woman had sat holding the hand of her dead son, a boy of 11, who suffered from severe autism. Her state of mind as she waited to be found, and the degree of desperation that apparently led her to take his life, can only be imagined. She has been charged with his murder. It is not murder as we normally understand it, however, but something more subtle, more extreme, much more inexplicable: a crime against nature.
This seems to be the latest in a wave of desperate cases where mothers, out of isolation, despair or compassion, are driven to kill a disabled child. Fiona Pilkington died alongside her 18-year-old mentally-disabled daughter after being tormented for years by bullying and abuse from local youths. She had made 21 calls to the police but they had failed to act. A month later, Joanne Hill drowned her four-year-old daughter, Naomi, who had cerebral palsy. She was convicted of murder. Earlier this year, Kay Gilderdale, a devoted mother, killed her 31-year old daughter, Lynn, whose life had become so “unimaginably wretched” through the chronic fatigue illness, ME, that she had tried to commit suicide. She was cleared of attempted murder. As with Frances Inglis, a mother jailed at the Old Bailey in January for injecting her brain-damaged son with a lethal heroin dose, Mrs Gilderdale’s family believed she had had her daughter’s best interests at heart... Read the full article:
What could have driven Yvonne Freaney to murder her son?