What drives mothers to commit crimes
Their crimes were violent and cruel yet these Aussie mums and wives were the most unlikely of suspects. WARNING: Graphic
Behind the Scenes
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Michelle Burgess used a casual conversation during her son’s school pick-up to source a contract killer.
Serial firebug Helen Judith White would pop the kids in the back seat before heading out for an arsonist’s adventure, lighting catastrophic fires across the Adelaide Hills.
Donna Fitchett chose the family home as the site for her sons’ double murder and Angelika Gavare used her toddler’s pram to dispose of dismembered body parts.
Then there was Katherine Knight, who turned her freshly murdered husband into a casserole, boiling his head on the stove. Twenty years on, her crime has not paled in its horror.
Their offences, motivations and mythologies differ but these women are united by one thing – an intriguing ability to pivot from their role as loving mothers and nurturers to perpetrators of violent or life-threatening crimes.
The dichotomy has long fascinated criminologists and forensic psychologists but according to forensic criminologist Dr Xanthe Mallett, the phenomenon is simply explained.
“Women are driven by the same emotions that men are: love, hate, greed,” says Dr Mallett, who recently released a book, Reasonable Doubt.
“Most crimes come down to one of those and we’re driven by the same emotions as everyone else so you can be the nurturing mother and wife and you can still have those desires and respond to them. We just tend to do it in slightly different ways.
“Especially the black widows — they may enlist the help of a man and kind of manipulate them into committing the crime for them.”
MICHELLE BURGESS
The ‘Black Widow’ label is often applied to unlikely suspect, Michelle Burgess.
Burgess was a wife and mother-of-two living in the Adelaide suburbs when she began an affair with her husband’s boss, Kevin Matthews. Together, they would attempt to orchestrate two contract killings.
Aesthetically, Burgess could hardly be mistaken for a sex siren, but she wielded an incredible sexual power.
She used this power to convince Matthews they should murder his wife, Carolyn – the mother of his three children. They should also kill Michelle’s husband, Darren Burgess, she advised.
One afternoon, while waiting to pick her son up from primary school, Burgess asked another mother if she knew a hit man to knock off Carolyn Matthews.
“Do you know anyone who could get rid of her? I don’t care how it’s done. Maybe a car accident,” she allegedly asked.
The fellow mother put Burgess in touch with her brother, David Key, a recent jail evictee who happily took on the task.
Burgess drew up two contracts, with photographs of the intended victims, details of their movements, and how she wanted to murders done.
In July, 2001, Key and Burgess ambushed Carolyn Matthews in her kitchen, and Key stabbed her to death.
However, police uncovered their plot before they were able to commit Darren Burgess’ murder.
Burgess and Matthews were sentenced to life imprisonment for Carolyn’s murder and their contract killing plots, while Key was sentenced to 20 years.
Even while incarcerated Burgess has continued to wield her ‘Black Widow’ power over the male staff, and had an affair with a male correctional officer.
Correctional staff dealing with her are now cautioned about her devious ways.
“Every intake of prison staff were always told that the male officers had to have another person present when dealing with her because she would manipulate the relationship,” says former prison officer Jennifer Kaschau, who managed Burgess at Adelaide Women’s Prison.
Catch up on her story, plus others from Australia’s prisons in our On Guard podcast:
ANGELIKA GAVARE
Angelika Gavare was a young single mother to two toddlers when she murdered her 83-year-old next door neighbour Vonne McGlynn in 2008.
While her children were sleeping, Gavare broke into McGlynn’s home in Christie Downs, Adelaide, by removing tiles from her roof and shimmying herself into the pensioner’s home. She then bludgeoned the old woman to death with a statue, and dismembered her body in her back shed.
Gavare used her children’s prams to carry the body parts to a nearby creek, where she dumped them to be discovered by police. However, McGlynn’s head and hands were never recovered – a point Gavare reportedly boasted about.
Police believe Gavare was financially motivated, and sought to take possession of pensioner McGlynn’s home and bank accounts.
Despite overwhelming evidence linking Gavare to the crime she repeatedly lied, protesting her innocence, throughout the police investigation and court process.
She was convicted and sentenced to 32 years non-parole.
DONNA FITCHETT
If Angelika Gavare was driven by greed, it could be said Melbourne mother Donna Fitchett was driven by hate.
In 2005, former nurse Fitchett murdered her two primary-school age sons, drugging and asphyxiating them in their beds. She then unsuccessfully attempted suicide.
Fitchett pleaded not guilty on grounds of insanity, claiming she had killed her boys as ‘the greatest act of love’. However the court heard that at the time of the murders, Donna was in the process of divorcing her husband.
Prosecutors alleged she was resentful of her husband and murdered their children to punish him.
“The pattern we seem to see with women who intentionally harm their children, they often come from damaged backgrounds themselves, such as substance abuse issues, domestic violence, they quite often lack support networks,” says Dr Mallett.
However, this was not the case with Donna Fitchett.
“Donna Fitchett murdered her children because she hated her husband for no reason we could ever decipher. (It was) Pre-meditated. She basically set him up to find them to torture him as much as possible. She was just a controlling horrible, horrible woman who continued to torture him after she went to prison by writing to him and just prodding him occasionally. That is just sadistic what she did.”
KATHERINE KNIGHT
Katherine Knight is one killer who supports Dr Mallet’s theory that women who suffer severe abuse and violence, particularly during childhood, can become violent themselves as a result.
In 2000, Katherine Knight – a mother-of-four and a stepmother-of-three – murdered her partner John Price by stabbing him 37 times with a butchers knife.
However, it was what she did next that makes Knight’s crime one of the worst in Australia’s history.
A former abattoir worker, Knight decapitated Price, and skinned him so that his head, face, nose, ears, neck, torso, genital organs and legs were removed as one pelt. She then hung this on a hook in the living room.
Knight then put his head to boil in a pot on the stove and set the kitchen table with “steaks” carved from Price’s buttocks, which has been oven-roasted with vegetables. On the table, were notes addressed to Price’s son and daughter.
During her trial, the court heard she had been subjected to years of sexual assault and domestic violence during her upbringing.
She also had a history of violence with her previous partners.
At sentencing, the judge said Knight should “never be released”.
HELEN JUDITH WHITE
The crimes of serial arsonist Helen Judith White may pale in comparison to the violence perpetrated by Katherine Knight, however the bizarre motivations behind her offences make White’s criminal history particularly intriguing.
Over the summers of 2006-2007, the Adelaide wife and mother terrorised Adelaide Hills residents by deliberately lighting a series of bushfires, using matches and mosquito coils.
At the height of her attacks, residents of Harrogate maintained a 24-hour vigil to protect their properties from the firebug – who at the time was thought to be a young male.
But White’s offending was made stranger by the fact her husband Darren was a member of the South Australian Country Fire Service, and was often called to put out the fires.
It transpired White had developed a crush on Darren’s firefighter colleague and began lighting the fires in the hope her darling would arrive to extinguish the blazes, allowing her to watch him from afar.
The mother-of-two pleaded guilty to 21 counts of intentionally causing a bushfire and was sentenced to 13 years in 2009, leaving behind her then two and four-year-old children.
“A lot of the time with firebugs it’s voyeuristic. They want to see the police come around or they want to be the heroes but that’s obviously not the case for her. Or some fireman may be setting the fire to rush in and save everybody so there’s reasons why people set fires but it may be deeper seated in a traumatic background,” said Dr Mallett.
KIM PATTERSON
Kim Patterson’s murder-suicide remains one of the most baffling and tragic crimes in Queensland’s history.
In 2011, Patterson murdered her teenage daughter, 14-year-old Sidonie Thompson, in their palatial home in the up-market suburb of Paddington, Brisbane.
She then committed suicide by jumping to her death from the Story Bridge, in front of her 12-year-old son, Hugo.
Prior to the tragedies, the family lived a seemingly idyllic life together with Patterson’s husband, Peter Thompson, an investment banker.
On the morning of murder, Thompson had headed out to play tennis, when Patterson used an axe that was kept at the property to hack her daughter to death in a frenzied attack.
For many, the motivations behind her crime are still difficult to understand. However, it is thought Mrs Patterson’s battle with mental illness finally got the better of her.
In 2010, she was involuntarily admitted to the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital for mental health treatment and prescribed antipsychotic medication.
However, months before the shocking attack she had stopped taking her medication but was in regular treatment with a psychologist. At her funeral, her husband asked mourners to forgive his wife.
“Some people would be hating her right now but she must have just snapped,” he said.
Dr Xanthe Mallett has recently released a book, Reasonable Doubt, about wrongful convictions in the criminal justice system. Available online and from all good bookstores
* There is no suggestion that the women mentioned in this story were wrongfully convicted.
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