In 1958, sixteen-year-old William Arnold asked his parents for permission to use the family’s car. He wanted to go to the movies. When his father refused, he took a rifle, shot both parents dead and buried them in a shallow grave in the backyard of their home in Omaha, Nebraska. He was sentenced to two life sentences in the Nebraska state penitentiary. He served only eight years until he escaped.

It seemed an extraordinary crime, though, in a sense, it was less extraordinary than it seems: children kill their parents more often than readers might suppose. It’s called parricide and the most recent instance of this emerged recently in Great Baddow, Essex, in England, where Virginia McCulloch, now 36, poisoned her father with prescription medication that she crushed and stirred into his drink and, in the attorney’s words, “beat her mother with a hammer and stabbed her multiple times in the chest with a kitchen knife bought for the purpose.” This happened four years ago. She stored the putrefying corpses at the family house until discovered by police.

There are other comparable murders in recent times. 1998, Auckland, New Zealand: Matthew and Tyler Williams, aged 14 and 13, killed their parents.1998, Beverly Hills, California: Lyle and Erik Menendez killed both parents. 2011, Port St. Lucie, Florida: Tyler Hadley pummeled both his parents to death after they refused to let him host a party at the family home. 2013, Albuquerque, New Mexico: 15-year-old Nehemiah Griego killed his parents and three younger siblings. 2015, Broken Arrow, Oklahoma: Robert and Michael Bever, murdered their parents and three siblings in a mass stabbing. There have been related cases, for example, that of Jennifer Pan, who hired assassins to kill her parent in Ontario, Canada: She was sentenced to life in prison after being found guilty of both first-degree murder and attempted murder. 

Parricide in history

Abhorrent and unnerving as parricide strikes us, it was prevalent in the medieval era (specifically, the 11th–14th centuries). Disputes over succession and land ownership were usually the source of dynastic violence: Younger children, ambitious or desperate for control but blocked by their parents, killed fathers, sometimes mothers and occasionally siblings in their pursuit of control.

Even in territories dominated by cultures that encouraged honoring and respecting, as well as loving parents, and norms that emphasized filial duties, there are examples of children either killing or trying to kill their parents. Most famously, Aurangzeb, the sixth Mugal emperor of India (1658–1707) — famous for building the Taj Mahal in memory of his wife — imprisoned his father and killed many of his male relatives in his rise to power. While technically not a case of parricide, Byzantine Emperor Constantine VI imprisoned and reportedly blinded his own mother.

Historical cases of parricide are often intelligible in terms of ancestral struggle, though we should also remember current conceptions of the family as a cohesive, supportive natural unit in which love, caring and unselfishness are taken as natural, are products of a relatively recent understanding of the conjugal family. Earlier forms of the family tended to be different.

Multi-dysfunctional families

One of the most ferocious critiques of the family, particularly the modern nuclear family, was that of R. D. Laing, who challenged the assumption that the arrangement was wholesome and beneficial to children. Laing’s argument about the impact of family relationships on mental health offers a way of comprehending contemporary parricide. For Laing, our image of the family has been pasteurized. His own account is more adulterated: The family is often a multi-dysfunctional amalgam from which children sometimes escape bruised, if not permanently damaged emotionally and cognitively (and sometimes physically). The family imposes roles, identities, and expectations on individuals in ways that can lead to anxiety, distress, sometimes schizophrenia and what we today euphemize as “mental health issues.”

Children, on Laing’s account, sometimes experience a suffocating sense of captivity and believe there is either no escape from family demands. Parricide, from this perspective, would be a violent attempt at liberation or self-assertion. In all of the cases in recent history, Laing’s approach appears to have relevance.

So, why do some children embark on the putatively forbidden path while others think about it and then withdraw just in time for them to leave home feeling virtuous? In other words, if Laing it to be even half-accepted why isn’t parricide most widespread? Here I ask readers to ask a question usually ignored by criminologists and other social scientists. Not, “Why do children kill their parents,” but, “Why do so few children kill their parents?”

Why isn’t there more parricide?

What if we tried to explain conformity instead of spectacularly conspicuous divergences from socially accepted standards? Philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) did exactly this, of course, his aphorism being “The life of man [is] nasty, brutish and short.” Human beings are driven principally by selfish concerns, the fear of extinction being the primary one. So, the “natural” condition of humanity is warlike: Society, as we know it, is an artificial apparatus to accommodate the coexistence of divergent, self-seeking individuals at once. We frame rules, laws and norms so that over time, we become conventional, behaving in a way that meets others’ expectations. Mostly.

The disorienting implication of Hobbes’ thoughts is that we are all not just capable of but have an inclination or natural tendency to behave in a way that serves our own interests, no matter what the cost to others. Why don’t we then? Travis Hirschi, an American criminologist, in the 1930s, supplied an answer: We learn to conform and tend to remain compliant with rules by forming affiliations that secure us to conventional society.

In Hirschi’s model of society, individuals are stitched into conventional life in four ways: attachment, investment, beliefs and reputation. The most important one is attachment to parents, peers and other people who matter to us in some way. Hirschi also believed that as we mature, we invest in society, specifically the years we spend in formal education and in pursuing our careers and starting a family. In many cases, individuals acquire a reputation that they try to maintain or enhance. In other cases, individuals fail to reach the standard, status or rank they had been aiming for. Our attachments prevent us from breaking rules or norms. When they are loose, slack or broken, the probability of transgressive behavior becomes pronounced.

The fathomless McCullough case

We know little of the McCullough case at the moment, though Hirschi’s theory gives it a shape. But there are other perplexities: Virginia, the self-confessed killer, had three sisters, none of whom has been implicated. During the investigation and trial, there were no allegations against these siblings for complicity or involvement in the murders or the subsequent concealment of the bodies.

It seems the siblings were unaware of their parents’ deaths and had somehow been reassured by Virginia that their parents were either unwell or away from home. Virginia contrived an incredible and — at least to this writer — implausible series of excuses for years. Statements from the siblings during the trial suggest they trusted Virginia. One sibling referred to their parents as “blameless victims.” 

Even in the context of other cases of parricide, the McCullough killings are staggering. The actual killings are explicable in terms of misfiring family dynamics and the failure of at least one family member to experience little or no meaningful bonds with wider society. But storing what must have been two rotting cadavers at the family home for four years without arousing the suspicions of neighbors, care agencies, or other family members takes some fathoming. This is a case that is destined to confound us for years.

[Ellis Cashmore’s “The Destruction and Creation of Michael Jackson” is  published by Bloomsbury.]

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