A Mother’s Final Deadly Act : Slaying: ‘Altruistic’ killings carried out in the throes of depression appear to be the common thread in last year’s five family murder-suicides.

To die by other hands more merciless than mine . No; I who gave them life will give them death. Oh, now no cowardice, no thought how young they are , How dear they are, how when they first were born -- Not that--I will forget they are my sons One moment, one short moment--then forever sorrow . --Medea’s soliloquy before murdering her children

Euripides, 431 BC

Who knows what careened through Katharina Williams’ mind as she fashioned nooses early last month for herself and two children in her Yucaipa garage?

Before she hoisted them by rope and hanged them from the rafters, she scrawled a short suicide note. It mentioned marital trouble. Williams, 36, had been visibly miserable for two or three months, her next-door neighbor said. She last spoke with her the night before the unsettling deaths.

“I kind of looked at her for a while,” Ruth McIntyre recalled, “and I said to her, ‘you are so unhappy. Can I please help?’ And she said ‘no, everything’s all right; it’s taken care of.’ Words to that effect.”

As he returned from school that Friday afternoon, 11-year-old son Robert Jr. found his sister Nadja, 4, and brother Kevin, 2, hanging beside their mother. The death scene so shook firefighters and deputies that they underwent grief counseling, and some could not work the following day.

McIntyre sighed deeply. “Some things I guess we’re not supposed to know. We’re left to wonder why.”

It’s a question that haunts the loved ones of at least five Southern California mothers and one father who last year murdered their offspring--11 in all--as part of their own death quests. It is filicide with a twist, and accurate crime figures on its frequency are hard to come by.

But the man who wrote the definitive piece on mothers who kill says that, while rare contrasted with other homicides, it happens more than we care to think. American women are more likely than men to kill their children in association with suicide, he says, and half the time it is with a Medea-like “murder for love.”

“It hits the newspapers, and we think, ‘How could a woman kill her own children?’ and all that, but it goes on with regularity,” said Phillip J. Resnick, a professor of psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland whose studies of parents who kill their children were first published 25 years ago in the American Journal of Psychiatry.

“I instruct trainees at the hospital to routinely ask mothers, ‘If you kill yourself, what would happen to your children?’ It’s something mental health professionals should not overlook,” he said.

* Last November, Stacy Phan fatally shot her blind and severely handicapped daughter, cradled the 4-year-old in her arms and lay in a Garden Grove Freeway lane to be killed.

* In October, Kristine M. Cushing, under psychiatric treatment for depression as her marriage to a Marine fighter pilot squadron commander crumbled, shot both her daughters to death in their Laguna Niguel tract home then tried unsuccessfully to kill herself.

* In June, Karen Christensen, a Simi Valley substitute teacher with a history of suicide attempts since her divorce, gunned down her 15-year-old daughter on her junior high school graduation day, then turned the gun on herself.

* And last January, Olivia Phips, obsessed that growing up in Los Angeles would corrupt her four children, packed them in the family van then drove it freeway-speed into Los Angeles Harbor.

The few experts with background in parent-child murders say it is uncommon enough that no large-scale study has been conducted since Resnick’s 1966 examination, although they don’t believe that the psychosis that triggers such taboo behavior has much changed.

“With that many, there is something going on, something very interesting,” said Park Dietz, a Newport Beach forensic psychiatrist and FBI consultant who specializes in unusual crimes.

Clearly these women were mentally troubled, even if temporarily. Most psychiatrists believe that any parent who slays his or her child is suffering from some form of mental illness. But what?

“If we could do a psychological autopsy, I believe we would find all these people extremely depressed,” said Charles Ewing of State University of New York, Buffalo, a psychologist and author of three books on family violence.

“I think these are probably the saddest kinds of intrafamilial killings because they’re probably the most preventable,” he added. “Depression is so treatable.”

Resnick’s study of 131 parents who killed their own children--believed the largest sampling to date--showed that 39% of them did so in trying to take their own lives.

In half of those cases, Resnick found the parent, usually the mother, viewed the slaying as “altruistic,” or an act of mothering.

“You have to view it as a depressed woman would,” he said. “She sees a hell on earth. It’s so miserable that she can no longer stand to live. Then you have a 3-year-old child. To leave that child in that world . . . and motherless on top of it, would be more terrible” than to murder. “It’s the distorted view from the depression. It seems irrational to you and I, but it’s not irrational to the depressed person.”

That seems to be the common thread in last year’s Southern California cases.

Some experts say they may have viewed their final maternal act as a religious deliverance.

“At the time they shoot, they do not think they are killing their children but that they are saving them,” said Bruce Danto, a Fullerton psychiatrist who specializes in violent crimes. “They believe they will be safe together in heaven.”

“Women have a much higher incidence of the altruistic killing because they view themselves as more inseparable from the child than the father,” Resnick said.

Through the depressed woman’s skewed vision, the world can look utterly treacherous, Resnick added. “To take the child with them is to do the child a favor. Among child murderers it’s pretty common. I remember a mother left a suicide note after killing her child that said, ‘bury us in one box. We belong together, you know.’ I’ve seen a couple like that.”

On a chilly day in 1985 near the Santa Monica Pier, Fumiko Kimura, devastated by the discovery that her husband had a mistress, clutched a child in each arm and waded shoulder-deep into the ocean. Submerging her infant daughter and 4-year-old son, she gulped down the briny seawater trying to drown them all.

Beach-goers fished them out, but only the mother lived.

Prosecutors said they accepted her guilty plea to charges of voluntary manslaughter based primarily on reports by seven psychiatrists, who concluded that she was suffering from psychotic depression and delusions when she walked into the sea. “An impulsive, unpremeditated act,” one doctor called it.

She would later tell a probation officer that her husband’s infidelity left her feeling an inadequate wife and mother. She went to the beach that January afternoon to think in peace, but after reflecting on her life, concluded she was loathed. Because they would be viewed as extensions of her, she explained, the children would also be hated and thus, abused. So she could not leave without them.

Something about her story touched people. Before she was sentenced to probation, 25,000 people signed petitions supporting her. Stories about the case described oya-ko shinju , a Japanese term for parent-child suicide. Although it is not legal, oya-ko shinju is tolerated within the culture and, until Japan attained a level of affluence in the 1970s, occurred as often as twice every three days there, most often at the hands of the mother.

Mamoru Iga, a Japanese-born author and retired Cal State Northridge sociology professor, said parent-child suicide is often triggered by a family’s financial ruin. Women who have been financially or emotionally abandoned by spouses are particularly liable to commit oya-ko shinju. And parental survivors of such attacks are rarely prosecuted, Iga said. A suicidal parent would be more scorned for leaving children orphaned.

Aside from Japan, parent-child suicide is rare in other Asian cultures, Iga and other experts say. If there is any cultural link, it may be only that several of the mothers in Southern California cases were immigrants, suffering depression from the pressure and stress of adjusting to a new life in a new land.

For Stacy Phan, those burdens were magnified when her daughter, Dianna, was born handicapped into a family, and culture, that viewed it as shameful.

In November, the 32-year-old mother--raised in Vietnam, but of ethnic Chinese heritage--culminated four years of heartache over her daughter’s dismal future with a startlingly violent solution.

The month before, it was discovered that Dianna had blinded herself. She wore a helmet to prevent her from hitting her head on the floor, something she found so infuriating that she took to smacking and flailing her own eyes. Arm splints that barred elbow bending were quickly fitted, but by then she had already caused blinding injuries.

Stacy Phan had offered murder-suicide as an answer, said her husband, David Phan. He pleaded against it and thought he’d persuaded her not to. But as her husband, parents and sisters slept, the former bank teller sneaked out of their Garden Grove home, 4-year-old Dianna beside her, and drove to a neighborhood park. She shot her daughter dead, left scribbled notes to her family, drove six miles with Dianna to the Garden Grove Freeway. She parked, curled her arms around Dianna and was killed by a motorist who, mercifully, may never know that.

Vietnamese mental health professionals say Phan may have battled cultural stigmas on top of her immense stress in grappling with her daughter.

Many Asian cultures shun airing personal problems outside the family, even with a professional. Vietnamese immigrants still cling to old superstitions and customs, says Mai Elliott, a Vietnamese-born, American-educated marriage, family and child counselor in Tarzana.

“In my culture . . . a physical defect, we are taught, it’s because we are being punished, that we have done something wrong, and we are cursed,” said Elliott. “If your child is retarded or has a cleft palate,” the parent feels guilt. “Some can cope, but they still carry that shame, and they try to hide anyway.”

“As I told my staff after this happened, this was a beautiful, loving young woman,” said Karen McMillan, principal of Mark Twain Special Center, where Dianna was enrolled. “I firmly believe that what Stacy did, she did out of love.”

Love is what Ruth McIntyre thinks about when she baby-sits the only surviving child of Katharina Williams. She had been a thoughtful neighbor to McIntyre. The day after a windstorm, McIntyre would find all the leaves on her lawn scooped into trash bags. She arrived home many nights to find dinner waiting in her microwave oven.

“She was a kind and gentle mother, which makes (the killings) hard for me,” McIntyre said. “You knew those children were loved, because they were so loving. When a 4-year-old little girl runs out to my car and says, ‘Hi Ruthie! I love you; did you have a good day?’ That’s dear. That comes from the parents.”

An ethnic German, Katharina was a child when she immigrated to the United States from either Hungary or Romania. She had worked as a Redlands bank teller but quit to have her second child. She held a string of part-time jobs to boost husband Robert’s income as an insurance broker, the last one cooking meals for a retired woman nearby.

“She was an attractive woman; she had a rather serious face, though,” McIntyre said of her neighbor. “She didn’t do it often but when she smiled, it was like the sun coming up.”

In recent months, her meticulous grooming was abandoned and her unhappiness plain to see. Those who knew her said there were no hints of drugs or alcohol, no visible money, health or marital troubles. But McIntyre knew her friend was fraying. And at some point in the days before the hangings, investigators said, Williams came to believe that her husband had a mistress and wanted a divorce. Robert Williams could not be reached. But Sheriff’s detective Norm Parent said Katharina’s suicide note told her husband he could now do what he pleased, that “she was setting him free.”

McIntyre knows nothing of that, only that Katharina Williams had been a selfless neighbor whose family had painted her home last year. She will be watching after the only surviving Williams child weekday afternoons until his father gets home from work. It is the least she can do to help, she says. “I’m very close to the father and son.”

The way the Williams children were killed seems particularly painful and violent, but Resnick said such violence in mother killings like this does not necessarily suggest a statement of anger.

“People use what they have handy. She might have told them it was a game, so as not to scare them,” Resnick said. “It sounds extremely brutal, but (the parent is) so anxious to put the child out of it’s misery that . . . it is still an act of love to them.”