Need examples of parents murdering their children over generation gap

December 7, 2015 12:36 PM

Reading the (fantastic) book Nixonland, the section on the late 60s counterculture mentions a mini-epidemic of parents murdering their own children due to their involvement in the counterculture, the generational gap having become so starkly polar and vast that they felt their own children were alien. The book doesn't go into a ton of depth and I'd like to know more.
posted by Senor Cardgage to Society & Culture (10 answers total)

I think, in many ways, "honor killings" are an example of this these days. Younger generations from cultures where honor killings occur are increasingly considering themselves part of a global culture and thus thinking and acting in ways that would have been unthinkable in their parents generation (i.e. before widespread access to the Internet and cell phones). The behaviour that results in the dishonour to the family is often behaviour that is considered entirely normal within a peer group of their own generation.
posted by 256 at 1:09 PM on December 7, 2015 [10 favorites]

I dug around for a while trying to figure out what he was talking about specifically. I think there are a lot of metaphorical examples he uses, specifically Kent State, but I went through the book looking at every example of the word murder and every example of the word parents and I can't find what you're referring to. Can you pull out the quotation?
posted by jessamyn at 2:09 PM on December 7, 2015 [4 favorites]

This is a theme in the shocking film Joe from 1970. The cast includes Peter Boyle, and Susan Sarandon in her screen debut. I know you're looking for real life, but I can't help recommending this film for its evocation of the period. Trigger warning: some shocking violence amid the fun.
posted by JimN2TAW at 2:39 PM on December 7, 2015 [2 favorites]

Best answer: From wiki:
Ten weeks before Joe was released in the United States, a real-life mass murder with similarities to the movie's climactic scenes occurred in Detroit, Michigan. On May 7, 1970, a railroad worker named Arville Douglas Garland entered a university residence and killed his daughter, her boyfriend and two other students.[10]

During pre-trial deliberations, Judge Joseph A. Gillis saw Joe and strongly advised both the prosecution and defense teams to do the same. He then carefully screened each member of the jury pool and excluded any who had seen the movie. He also forbade any seated juror from watching the movie or discussing it with anyone who had seen it.[11] Although he brought with him multiple weapons and extra ammunition, Garland received a light sentence.[10]
posted by TWinbrook8 at 2:46 PM on December 7, 2015 [5 favorites]

Garland's teenaged daughter had just left home and he stalked and shot her and her male companions in bed. Most likely a sexual motive than a cultural one, but "dirty hippie" goes over better in a conservative courtroom than "victim who tried to break free."
posted by Scram at 3:56 PM on December 7, 2015 [5 favorites]

Here is a famous murder near where I live. the father was a strict Fundamentalist of some sort and the kids were getting out of hand.

John Emil List (September 17, 1925 – March 21, 2008), sometimes labeled the Bogeyman of Westfield,[1] was a convicted multiple murderer and long-time fugitive. On November 9, 1971 he killed his wife, mother, and three children in their home at 431 Hillside Avenue in Westfield, New Jersey, and then disappeared. He had planned the murders so meticulously that nearly a month passed before anyone noticed that anything was amiss. A fugitive from justice for nearly 18 years who assumed a new identity and remarried, List was finally apprehended on June 1, 1989 after the story of his murders was broadcast on the television program America's Most Wanted. List was found guilty of first degree murder and sentenced in 1990 to five consecutive terms of life imprisonment at New Jersey State Prison, where he died in 2008.
posted by mermayd at 4:13 PM on December 7, 2015 [2 favorites]

In 1972, George Diener shot and killed his son, Richie, who was a teen who'd gotten pretty heavily into the drug culture. There's a book, "Richie" about the case by Thomas Thompson, and there was also a TV movie called "The Death of Richie" based on the book.
posted by OolooKitty at 5:16 PM on December 7, 2015 [2 favorites]

There was the notorious case of Linda Marie Ault.

People who don't want to read about murder, suicide, and animal abuse should skip this.

In 1968, Ault was a 21-year-old divorced college student living with her parents. She stayed out all night with an officer in the Air Force; when she came back, her parents were angry. Her mother made her stay walking around for hours at a time in order to abort any possible pregnancy; her father tried to contact the airman with the idea of a shotgun wedding; but it turned out he was already married.

The next night her parents drove her with her dog into the desert and made her dig a grave. Then they handed her a gun and told her to shoot her dog as punishment for spending the night with the man. She put it to her own head and pulled the trigger; it was loaded and she died.

The usual law is that no one is responsible for another person's suicide; originally the police said no charges could be brought except for cruelty to animals. After the incident hit national papers the Aults were brought to trial on involuntary manslaughter charges, where the prosecution argued they were responsible because they caused Linda's emotional state and handed her a loaded gun. The Aults argued that Linda hadn't meant to kill herself; that Linda believed the gun was unloaded and had only put it to her own head and pulled the trigger as a way of messing with them.

The case was extensively covered in national papers. The Aults were acquitted. The younger generation wrote bathetic poetry.
posted by Hypatia at 6:43 PM on December 7, 2015 [2 favorites]

Yeah, there's something to this. There was a lot of paranoia and overreactions on the part of the WWII generation, who had NO antenna for who was straight ("straight": old meaning, not sexuality) and who wasn't. My mother freaked out when my older brother went up on the roof to see Bentley's comet, could only imagine that he was stoned out of his mind. A friend of mine got sent off to military school because they were playing soccer with an empty beer can on a rooftop and the can went flying off the edge and landed next to his mom.

Another friend of mine had a high-school classmate who took too much acid or something (back when average doses were way higher) and didn't know where he was. As his parents were trying to communicate with him, he calmly sat down and began to masturbate. Sure, that's shocking enough, but his father reacted by running and getting his handgun, and then pointing it at him.

So I can believe there might have been some panicked, primal overreactions that went a step further. The media didn't help much with their lurid scare articles. I remember the Life magazine article about that kid mentioned upthread, Ritchie Diener. It's online. Yup, there was kind of a scare back then.
posted by Rich Smorgasbord at 8:36 PM on December 7, 2015 [4 favorites]

Yeah, do a search for honor killings in Pakistan and north India.
posted by redlines at 8:40 PM on December 7, 2015