Suicide Among Murderers

TLDR: Another case of murder-suicide is reported in this article, where a young woman who had killed her baby boy by stabbing him ten times was treated by a nurse for two years.

Abstract: SEVERAL years ago I treated a young woman who had mur~ dered her baby boy by stabbing him ten times. She killed him after a number of personally distressing experiences which began with another beating from her psychotic husband. She had been trying to get her husband into an emergency psychiatric hospital, and had requested help from social workers, Salvation Army staff, YMCA housing personnel, the police and local prosecuting attorney, to no avail. Even the husband’s psychiatrist had refused to intervene, as his Veterans’ Administration Mental Hygiene Clinic was about to close for the evening. Her older son then developed a fever of 105° and although the hospital pediatrician expressed fears that the boy might have meningitis, his condition turned out to be measles; he was hospitalized. The young woman took her other baby back home and, after a call to her father resulted in only another rejection of her urgent cry for help, she killed the child. After killing her youngest son, she stabbed herself in her left breast area twice and waited to die, lying next to her dead son. As death did not come she tried taking an overdose of her husband’s tranquilizers, drowning herself in a bathtub, strangling herself and finally, ingesting some lye. The next day her father, who had thought about their conversation the night before, began calling her steadily until she weakly answered the phone. He called the police and she was taken to the hospital, treated, later transferred to jail, tried and acquitted by reason of temporary insanity. She was treated by me for two years and has fully recovered. Another child has replaced her dead son. She has divorced her husband, has a good job and is handling her life very well. Another case of murder-suicide. Carmello DeJesus, a cannery worker of Rochester, New York, shot himself in a field leaving a small handgun, a Spanish Bible and a suicide note at his side.’ He wrote, &dquo;I have killed four persons and that is the reason I want to end my life. I have been having trouble with my heart and don’t want to kill anyone else.&dquo; The victims were all women.