On March 22, 2000, a teenager in Arundel, Québec
(a town in the Laurentians), killed his mother in the basement
of the family home, and then went to the shop where his
father was working, and murdered him too. At the trial,
his former friends were dumbfounded. The young man (whose
name cannot be released) was “peaceful and quiet”
and had apparently never said anything bad about his parents.
One witness even said that his friend “hated violence.”
According to Jacques Marleau, a researcher in the Philippe-Pinel
Institute, a Montréal institute affiliated with Université
de Montréal, a teenager who kills one of his parents
generally has fewer violent psychiatric antecedents than
an adult who commits the same crime. The young person generally
lives in the family home and attacks both parents at once—more
often than in the case of an adult murderer. In addition,
according to the results of a study of parricide presented
in Amsterdam recently, the victims of young parricides are
much less likely to have given their children space of their
own. “These teenagers make a radical attempt to escape
parental domination, and sometimes, longstanding sexual
or physical violence as well,” Mr. Marleau points
out.
But this is not always the case. According to this specialist
on intrafamilial homicide, the author of a doctoral thesis
recently submitted to Université de Montréal,
some young people, like patricidal adults, suffer from severe
psychiatric pathology. “Since paranoid schizophrenia
in adults is not always diagnosed and treated, they may
commit a crime during a psychotic episode. This type of
murder is often characterized by the phenomenon of overkill.
The victim may have been stabbed, say, 47 times.”
The researcher noted that parricides among teenagers aged
18 years or under are less psychologically troubled than
older murderers. It is more difficult to predict when they
will lose control, given that the personality disorders
they are suffering are rarely recognized by the parents.
Unlike adults, they generally commit their crimes without
making prior death threats. The reasons why teens kill one
or both parents vary: personality disorders, psychosis,
incest, jealousy, altruism, reactional act, financial loss,
etc. In most cases, “9 times out of 10,” Mr.
Marleau figures, “the murder is perpetrated by a young
male adult. “The scientific literature reports only
38 cases of parricidal women worldwide.”
To arrive at these results, Jacques Marleau, assisted by
two clinicians at the Philippe-Pinel Institute, criminologist
Nathalie Auclair and psychiatrist Frédéric
Millaud, extracted relevant information from the files of
53 patients hospitalized at the psychiatric centre between
1973 and 1999 who had committed parricide. Comparative analysis
of the subjects demonstrated not only distinct profiles
for adults and teenagers in the sample, but also between
those who had killed or attempted to kill a single parent.
Researcher: Jacques Marleau
Telephone: (514) 648-8461, extension 627
Email: marleauj@videotron.ca
