This is outing, but sod it.
Not that she ever murdered anyone- as far as we know!- but my paternal grandmother was a cold, evil mother. Had three kids through different fathers (all with seemingly total random surnames, which is what immediately made the hairs on the back of my neck at this story) and didn’t give a shit about any of them.
My Dad was the eldest and was found by neighbours aged around 9 months old, half-starved and tied to a pole. He had impetigo that was eating him alive and his mother was nowhere to be found. He was taken to a Banados home and lived with an older couple. Eventually words got around and he was taken in by his Nana, who tried to help her daughter be an active part of his life but she wasn’t interested- she was young and she was out all the time. Maybe it did start out as postnatal psychosis but it went on for the rest of her life.
His brother and sister fared little better- both born quickly after my father and after each other and similarly mistreated and eventually taken away by the authorities- for what they were worth, this was very early days of the welfare state. She didn’t have any more kids that we know of, I’m not sure what stopped her. Maybe even she realised she wasn’t much of a mother.
She went missing for a while and everyone hoped she’d stay lost but she had actually married a Scottish man and moved up there. When that broke up- thankfully childless- she tracked my Dad down and reported him to the police for handling stolen goods (definitely not true, he worked for the council and wasn’t involved in anything shady. He was 19 and living in a house share so it was all a bit humiliating) which ended up with his house being searched. She pulled stuff like this every so often for years- until he was married to my Mum, because it was her that stopped it by helping my Dad get legal advice. Same with his siblings- false accusations, she stabbed her daughter with a kitchen knife when she was a little girl and then when she tracked her down after she cane back from Scotland and my aunt was a teenager she pulled the same stunt and stabbed her again saying she hadn’t made a good enough job of it the first time. Let’s put it this way, if you told me she had a fourth child who she had killed, I would have no problems believing you.
She died when I was in my early 30s and the whole family felt like a weight had been lifted. Even in her later years she could be unpredictable (tried to kick the coffin off the stand at her mothers funeral, for example) although she had been a long term inpatient in a psychiatric facility in the 70s and 80s which had mellowed her a bit. Never had a diagnosis- she wasn’t bipolar or schitzophrenic or any of the diagnosis people always ponder on. She claimed to her last not to love her children and that they “ruined her potential”.
Difference there of course is that the mother who’s been convicted here lived in a far different era where preventing pregnancy is easy and help easier to access. In my grandmothers defence - and you won’t hear me say that too often- she was quite mad and really bad at a time when it was harder to get help and contraception was less freely available (although she worked it out in the end). What I can’t unferstand with this woman is how she slipped through the net.