Mothers Who Murder (28 page)

When considering that, I thought back to Rachel Pfitzner, who murdered her two-year-old son, Dean Shillingsworth, in 2007, allegedly because she hated and feared Dean’s biological father and could not emotionally separate her feelings for Paul (Dean’s father) from those for her son. Dean was tortured, physically abused and neglected before he was finally killed by his mother in a rage. Pfitzner then put his body in a suitcase, which she dumped in a duck pond in a local public park in Mandurama Reserve at Ambarvale in Sydney’s west. Pfitzner had two other children – one older and one younger than Dean – who she did not abuse, but these children had different fathers. Pfitzner was suffering from a personality disorder; the exact diagnosis was debated between various experts at her trial for Dean’s murder. What they did agree on was that she was a very disturbed young woman.

Without more to go on, I have to wonder whether this case is similar in some ways. As with Pfitzner’s case, there
is no indication that Wilson mistreated her older son. And also just like Pfitzner’s case, Callum and his brother had different biological fathers. Initially it had been thought that Richardson was the father of both of Wilson’s children, but it later emerged that Callum was the result of an affair with a Mr Workman. Wilson’s defence barrister, Michael Turner QC, stated that this was the reason Wilson was accused of murdering Callum.
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Workman was not aware that Callum was his child until after the boy’s death. Another similarity is that both Pfitzner and Wilson appear to have murdered their sons in a fit of uncontrollable rage, after which they both seem to have panicked when they realised what they’d done.

Reports entered into evidence suggest that Wilson was not suffering from any mental illness, but something was obviously very wrong. These are clearly not the actions of a stable and balanced psyche. Added to this is the fact that at trial Wilson claimed Callum’s facial bruises were inflicted by an older, non-existent, sister – the same lie told to staff at his playgroup. While I have not had access to any reviews of Wilson’s psychiatric history, I still think that it is relevant that some psychiatric disorders lead to the patient suffering anti-social and mood-related issues, and some show signs of impaired empathy. The judge noted that Wilson failed to show any emotion throughout the trial, saying it was ‘a troubling feature in this case’.
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This is an interesting case to watch as more information will become available in time, and I imagine more clues will come to the fore that will help to explain Emma Wilson’s extreme actions.

Just like many of the other vulnerable children, Callum Wilson was known to social services. And just like the other children discussed in this chapter, social services failed to
save his life. As a result of Callum’s death, a serious case review has been initiated. As yet unpublished, a newspaper report
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claims that the aim of this review is to examine social services’ assessment procedures when dealing with the family. The same article raises further questions about whether cost-cutting measures initiated by the Council of the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead could have been a factor in the potential mismanagement of the Wilson case, leading to an environment where staff were over-stretched and under-qualified or poorly managed. The council has elected not to comment until the publication of the review. This will be just the last in a long line of these types of reviews. It remains to be seen if this one will make any difference in protecting children in the future.

SADLY, THERE ARE ALWAYS MORE, UNITED KINGDOM

Callum Wilson was not the only case to make the news in 2013. In August Magdelena Luczak, aged twenty-seven, and her partner, Mariusz Krezolek, were found guilty of brutally murdering her four-year-old son, Daniel Pelka, after many months of abuse and neglect. Leading up to his eventual horrific death, Daniel was starved until he looked like a bag of bones, weighing just 1 stone 9 pounds.
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He was under-weight and undersize for his age (even before the acute episode of starvation), having been systematically starved for anything up to nine months before his death. The court heard that during the time they continued to punish the little boy – getting him to perform arduous physical activity while starving him to increase weight loss – his mother took the lead in convincing teachers and doctors that his dramatic weight loss was the result of an eating disorder.

Luczak and Krezolek were described as ‘heartless monsters’ during the nine-week trial, held at Birmingham Crown Court in England. They will now spend at least thirty years in prison for the cruelty they meted out to a defenceless little boy. The judge who presided over the case was shocked that, even though the evidence moved many of the jurors to tears, the Polish nationals accused of torturing and murdering Daniel sat emotionless throughout the entire proceeding.

In a situation reminiscent of Peter Connelly and Victoria Climbié’s cases, the couple sought to conspire to hide Daniel’s suffering from the authorities through a series of elaborate lies, with the judge adding that the aim was to protect themselves at all costs. Bruises had been seen on the four-year-old’s neck and what staff at his school feared were two black eyes. The bruising on his neck was noted by staff at Daniel’s school, but no written record was made of the later injuries around his eyes.

Daniel was kept in a cold room for an estimated thirty-three hours after receiving a head injury that would eventually prove fatal. During that day and a half, Luczak and Krezolek decided not to call for help as Daniel lay suffering after the couple had inflicted more than twenty separate injuries on him. Many of these had been to his head, causing his brain to swell. Evidence recovered from the computer at the house indicated that he might also have been poisoned with salt and subjected to an attempted drowning in the hours before he died.

What struck me about the coverage in this case is that nowhere did I find a motive; in fact, the judge described it as ‘unfathomable’. What also struck me was the ‘groundhog day’ feel about it. People knew, but still Daniel wasn’t
saved. After the abuse came to light, the British Association of Social Workers said this case underlines the need for all agencies to communicate and work closely together. We’ve heard that before, many times.

FRANCE

We know child abuse is a serious and ongoing problem for the UK, but across the Channel in France children are also suffering. On 19 November 2013, Fabienne Kabou was caught on CCTV pushing her fifteen-month-old daughter, Adelaïde, to the coast. The following day, little Adelaïde’s body was found by a fisherman, strapped into her pushchair and submerged in the English Channel. Fabienne Kabou booked into a hotel in Berck sur Mer with baby Adelaïde on 19 November, after which she took her daughter to the coast and drowned her. She then left the area. It took the police ten days and a nationwide search using DNA from the pushchair to find Kabou, tracking the philosophy student to the home she shared with a sixty-three-year-old sculptor in Paris. Kabou was arrested. She never denied murdering Adelaïde, and in fact made a full confession telling police that she made the decision after she determined that the child simply didn’t fit in with her new love life. Fabienne Kabou’s motive was pure selfishness. She told her boyfriend that she had given the child to her biological grandmother who agreed to take Adelaïde to Senegal, so he had no reason to fear for the child’s safety.

Unsurprisingly, the case made national headlines in France, and when it did it caused public outrage, people wondering how a mother could be so utterly self-centred as to murder her own daughter because she didn’t fit with her
lifestyle.
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Hundreds took to the streets in what is known as a ‘White March’, a protest in which the demonstrators are campaigning for improved child protection.
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Cases such as this rarely fail to cause social outrage. Then follows the inevitable procedural review. However, sadly, weeks or at best months later, no doubt we will read about the next child killed at the hands of a parent or guardian. This case is possibly unusual, but it’s certainly not unique. We know that love is one of the reasons mothers kill their children – love for someone else when having the child around is simply irreconcilable, or love for the child, when the mother feels compelled to commit suicide but can’t bear to leave the children behind. Love can be an incredibly powerful motivator for all kinds of extremely positive or heinous acts, some seemingly selfless, others selfish beyond anything most of us could ever imagine.

FULL CIRCLE, AUSTRALIA

In August 1993, six-year-old John Ashfield was murdered by his mother and her partner in Sydney. The world did not hear his name until it was first published in a newspaper article in 2007, fourteen years after the little boy was savagely beaten and murdered. The media felt it was important to print John’s name and his story, as many claimed that the New South Wales 2004 legislation that made it an offence for the media to publish the name of a dead child who had been the victim of a crime failed in its aim, and instead protected the killers from being identified. Due to pressure from the New South Wales Homicide Victims Support Group and the Victims of Crime Assistance League, as well as publishing giant News Limited, New South Wales Parliament acquiesced and
in 2007 passed a bill amending the law, making a child victim’s name publishable under certain circumstances, as notably, for example, Peter Connelly, who was simply known as Baby P for a number of years.

According to the original article
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– as the case documents were not available – John’s mother, Gunn-Britt Ashfield, then twenty-five, led the assault with the assistance of her twenty-year-old boyfriend Austin Hughes. According to evidence presented to the court in 1993, on 5 August of that year Ashfield became enraged when she was told that John had touched his three-year-old sister in an inappropriate manner. What this meant specifically was not expanded upon in the article, but we can assume that Ashfield was told John had touched his sister in a sexual way. Ashfield and Hughes agreed that the little boy should be punished. And punished he was, severely – punishment that would lead to his death in less than twenty-four hours.

The couple confronted the child in the kitchen, where Hughes assaulted him before sending John to his bedroom. But the couple decided that was not enough, and followed him to his bedroom where the assault became very violent and prolonged. This attack was carried out in front of his siblings. John’s sister, Melissa, gave evidence that she saw Ashfield and Hughes beat John with their fists as well as with a white aluminium curtain pole. While the ferocious attack continued, John cried and apologised. Apart from the physical assault, Hughes then sought to humiliate the boy by telling him he cried like a girl, taking a girl’s dress out of the wardrobe and forcing the dress over John’s head and his arms through the sleeves. In all John had over 100 bruises all over his body from the savage beating, which culminated with Hughes – a willing and
violent accomplice to Ashfield’s malice – putting a phone book against the little boy’s head and then hitting him repeatedly with a hammer, causing severe and fatal head trauma. This continued until John lost consciousness. It was hours before Ashfield took her son to Shoalhaven Hospital, Nowra (approximately 160 kilometres south of Sydney), and from there he was airlifted to Westmead Hospital, Sydney. In the meantime Ashfield coached her other children to say that John had been assaulted by a gang of teenagers when he was out shopping for groceries. Ashfield got her oldest child, an eight-year-old boy, to pretend to have been a witness to the attack, which he did, going on national television repeating his mother’s version of events. This was never going to work, predominantly because John’s injuries indicated that he had been subjected to a repeated and sustained beating.

John died of his extensive injuries on 6 August 1993 and Ashfield and Hughes were arrested. As we have seen with other cases, the Department of Community Services was aware of John and the family, as his biological father, Brian, had warned them that Ashfield was violent and that she intended to hurt the children. The media reported that it was far worse and that DoCS had around thirty-five notifications that there were problems at the Ashfield home.
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In a detail reminiscent of Pfitzner and the murder of Dean Shillingsworth (detailed in
Chapter 4
), Ashfield had even asked DoCS to take the children away as she felt violent. After dropping the unbelievable story of the gang attack, the couple both admitted to killing John. They were found guilty and both sentenced to twenty-one years in prison with a minimum term of sixteen years. This was reduced to nineteen years on appeal, with a minimum
of fourteen years. The judge said John was subjected to ‘hideous brutality’
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at the hands of his carers.

Newspaper reports continue the story of what happened to John’s killers.
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This case is a good example of the print and online media acting as a mechanism to protect the public by spreading information about potentially dangerous individuals – or at least people attempting to hide their true identities and backgrounds. John’s mother changed her name while in prison and now goes by Angelic Karstrom. I find this choice of first name very interesting, as ‘angelic’ literally translates as ‘of or belonging to angels’. Does this tell us anything about how Ashfield sees herself or about how she wants other people to see her? It is hard to say, but nonetheless it is a curious choice. Various other newspapers picked up the story over the years; this was a positive outcome as both offenders have changed their names. However, I would want to know their true identity if they were going to be part of my, and my family’s, life.

Angelic Karstrom (aka Ashfield) was released from prison in August 2011, having served eighteen years in prison. Austin Hughes was released from Silverwater Prison in Sydney in 2009 after serving sixteen years, was placed on the Child Protection Register and is required to inform police of his movements. Hughes moved to Kempsey (a town around 345 kilometres north of Sydney) but, still considered dangerous, was back behind bars the same year when he breached the Children and Young Persons (Care and Protection) Act 1998
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by moving in with a woman and her children. His new partner had no idea about his past, as he had changed his name to Blain Lopez-Smith, thereby leaving his criminal conviction behind. However, the new girlfriend’s sister became suspicious as he was
very reluctant to have his photograph taken; she did some research and found images of Hughes online and that’s when she learnt of his criminal past. It could be argued that the media, including the news outlets and Internet sources, have protected this woman and her two children, as who knows if Hughes was, or is, still dangerous. At least she gets to make the choice about whether to have him around her family through knowing his past.