Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, were killed in their upscale LA Brentwood home. Were they robbed? Did they owe money? Had they upset the wrong people?

No, their son, 32-year-old Nick Reiner, has been charged with two counts of first-degree murder.

Their son? Surely not. Sons love their parents: they’re the people who raised them, took care of them, encouraged them. Rob presumably helped Nick find a role in the film industry, didn’t he?

Apparently not. In fact, Nick was heavily into substance abuse even in high school. He was homeless for part of his teenage years.

All the same, Rob was worth about $200 million.

Well, it looks like Nick didn’t see any of it. There was certainly no love lost between them.

The more this case seems to reveal, the more it mystifies.

How could it happen?

Children killing their own parents is more common than we care to admit. The act even has a name: parricide, from the Latin parricidium. In the United States, parricide is typically estimated to account for around 2% of all homicides. That may sound insignificant, but it translates into several hundred cases each year. In Australia, the proportion appears higher still. A recent Australian Institute of Criminology analysis drawing on 35 years of National Homicide Monitoring Program data suggests that around 5% of homicides involve the killing of one or both parents, with younger offenders disproportionately represented.

Last year in England, Virginia McCulloch, now 36, poisoned her father by crushing prescription medication into his drink, then beat her mother with a hammer and stabbed her repeatedly with a kitchen knife bought for the purpose. She kept the bodies inside the family home for four years before police finally discovered them.

There have been many others. In Auckland, New Zealand, in 1998, teenage brothers Matthew and Tyler Williams killed both their parents. In Port St. Lucie, Florida, Tyler Hadley bludgeoned his parents to death after they refused to let him host a party at the family home. In Albuquerque in 2013, 15-year-old Nehemiah Griego murdered his parents and three younger siblings. In Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, in 2015, brothers Robert and Michael Bever killed their parents and three siblings in a mass stabbing.

Some cases take a less direct route. Jennifer Pan did not kill her parents with her own hands but hired assailants to do it for her in Ontario, Canada. She was sentenced to life imprisonment for first-degree murder and attempted murder, a case built not around rage but around deception and long-simmering family conflict.

The most infamous example of all remains the Menendez brothers. In 1989, Lyle and Erik Menendez shot their parents dead in their Beverly Hills mansion. More than three decades later, the case still divides opinion: abuse or entitlement, trauma or greed? Both men remain in prison, their claims rehearsed endlessly, their crime still resisting consensus explanation. Their request for a retrial was denied.

Suffocating families

Parricide is arguably the most puzzling form of unlawful killing. Greed, revenge, jealousy, honor, crimes of passion — these are familiar categories we invoke to make murder intelligible. The killing of one’s parents fits uneasily into any of them. Unless, of course, we are content with stand-bys such as evil or psychosis — explanations that appear to clarify everything while explaining almost nothing at all.

One of the sternest critiques of the modern nuclear family was that of British psychiatrist R. D. Laing, who challenged the comforting assumption that this arrangement is necessarily wholesome or beneficial to children. Laing’s work on the relationship between family life and mental distress offers one way of making sense of contemporary parricide. 

For Laing, our image of the family has been pasteurized. His own account is far more poisonous. The family, he argued, is often a multidysfunctional amalgam from which children sometimes emerge bruised, if not permanently damaged, emotionally and cognitively, and sometimes physically. Families impose roles, identities and expectations on individuals in ways that can generate anxiety, distress, schizophrenia and what we now euphemize as “mental health issues.” 

Children, on Laing’s account, can experience family life as a suffocating form of captivity, a space from which there appears to be no legitimate escape. From this perspective, parricide can be read as a violent act of liberation or self-assertion. In many of the psychodramas we have seen in recent decades, Laing’s approach has undeniable relevance.

And yet a question nags: If Laing is even half right, why is parricide not vastly more common?

This question forces a reversal of the way criminology typically proceeds. Instead of asking why some children kill their parents, we might ask the more neglected question: why do so few do so? Why isn’t parricide widespread?

Why do we follow rules?

This is not a radical new way of thinking. Philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) famously began from the assumption that human beings are driven principally by self-interest and fear, concluding that the natural condition of humanity is conflictual: life, left to itself, is “nasty, brutish and short.” Society, in this view, is not natural but artificial: a scaffolding of rules, norms and institutions assembled to make coexistence possible among fundamentally self-seeking individuals that even Darwin would have thought were in survival mode. Over time, we internalize these rules, learn to behave conventionally and, in short, adapt to our environment. Mostly.

The disquieting implication of Hobbes’s argument is that we are not merely capable of harmful behavior but inclined toward it. Why, then, do most of us refrain? Writing in the mid-twentieth century, American criminologist Travis Hirschi had an answer. Hirschi turned criminology inside out by asking not why people offend, but why they do not. His answer was deceptively simple and brilliantly contrarian: conformity is learned and maintained through social bonds that tie individuals to conventional life, the “real world.”

Hirschi identified four bonds: attachment, commitment, belief and involvement. The most important of these is attachment, especially to parents, but also to peers and other significant figures who signpost our way through life. Some of these we know personally; others we know only through the media (Hirschi didn’t recognize what we now call parasocial relations, but these surely complement his analysis). 

As people mature, they invest in conventional pursuits: education, careers, relationships, reputations. These investments create stakes in conformity. When attachments are strong and investments substantial, rule-breaking becomes costly. When they are weak, slack or broken, the probability of transgressive behavior increases sharply. Approached this way, parricide is not the starting point of analysis but the endpoint of failure: a situation in which attachment has slackened, investment has failed to materialize and the restraining power of social bonds has become ineffective.

Details of the Reiner killings are sparse. It’s believed Rob and Michele died from stab wounds. Nick has been charged with two counts of first-degree murder in the killing of his parents and a special allegation that he used a dangerous weapon, a knife. The additions could mean a greater sentence. The accused has not yet been tried. But what has emerged about Nick Reiner’s life is relevant.

By his own account, he struggled with substance abuse from his teenage years and was homeless for a period while still in high school. This is extraordinary given his background. Nick Reiner was not raised on the margins of society but at its cultural center: the son of one of the world’s most successful and influential film directors, a man whose personal wealth was estimated at around $200 million. Homelessness and chronic instability are not what we conventionally associate with such circumstances.

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that this points to a serious breakdown in the father–son relationship. Material resources were clearly available, but material resources alone do not constitute attachment, guidance or emotional investment. In Hirschi’s terms, the crucial bonds that secure individuals to conventional life appear to have been weak, fractured or absent altogether.

Intimidated rather than inspired

Hollywood offers numerous counterexamples. Kirk Douglas famously mentored and supported his son, Michael Douglas. Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis passed on both professional insight and a sense of vocation to their daughter, Jamie Lee Curtis. Tom Hanks’s son, Colin Hanks, has spoken openly about the influence of his father’s presence and expectations. Liza Minnelli distinguished herself as Judy Garland’s daughter. In each case, success was accompanied by transmission: of norms, aspirations, confidence and commitment.

In the Reiner case, that transmission appears to have stalled. The mechanisms Hirschi identified — attachment, investment, belief and the gradual accumulation of stakes in conformity — seem not to have taken hold. Instead of developing commitments that might restrain destructive impulses, Nick Reiner appears to have drifted, becoming increasingly detached from both parents and from the conventional social world more broadly.

Seen through this lens, parricide is not explained by a single motive such as greed, rage, psychosis or even evil, but by the collapse of social controls that ordinarily make such acts unthinkable. When attachment weakens, when investment in a conventional future never materializes, the prohibitions that bind most people lose their force. What remains is not conformity strained to breaking point, but no inclination to conform at all.

The more difficult question persists: why did those attachments weaken in the first place? Unless we fall back on clichés about “addictive personalities” or speculative talk of unconscious death wishes, attention inevitably turns to the parent–child relationship itself. Having a pre-eminent and successful parent does not automatically confer advantage. Fame and fortune do not guarantee emotional availability, guidance or affirmation.

Some children flourish in the shadow of achievement. Others manifestly do not. Many children of famous parents never follow them into public life and remain largely anonymous; not because they lack opportunity, but because comparison itself can be disabling. They grow up measured against an impossible standard, intimidated rather than inspired, overpowered rather than supported. The inheritance is not confidence but pressure; not direction but exhaustion.

Seen this way, Nick Reiner’s trajectory (early substance abuse, homelessness, drift) is not anomalous but symptomatic. It suggests both the presence of privilege and the failure of transmission of encouragement, expectations and a sense of belonging. When that transmission fails, Hirschi’s bonds do not form. Attachment loosens, commitment never consolidates and the ordinary moral restraints that govern behavior lose their grip.

[Ellis Cashmore’s Celebrity Culture is published by Routledge]

[Kaitlyn Diana edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.