""Personally I think it took a lot of guts to do what he did. He must have been tortured. I hope he's at peace with the girls now.""

[beanieb]

Does a mother's love really know no bounds? Can she not see that he was anything but brave? story

I know, very, very, very weird. Obviously loved her son more than her grandchildren.

I don't think that's love.

I think that's denial.

She is obviously a very damaged woman. She has already been publicly quoted criticising the mother of the murdered children. Whatever your relationship with your DIL, to have the lack of grace to slag her off after your son has just slaughtered her children, is some front. As MIL's go, she makes some of the ones on MN look reasonable.

What a horrible, horrible story. I can't imagine the horrific trauma that she and her DIL and all their families must be experiencing. Trauma can do weird things to people, and if you're then being approached by the press while trying to deal with that kind of emotional hell, you're not likely to give a very balanced interview.

So yes, it's a weird thing to say, but I can sort of imagine why she might end up blurting out something like that. She might now be really regretting having spoken that way so publicly.

She hopes he's at peace with the girls? She doesn't consider whether the girls would be at peace with an egotist who murdered them when his job was to protect them.

The media should not be allowed to approach people in that situation.

Agree there LittleBella. What good has been achieved of allowing an insane woman to make such intensely hurtful remarks in the press?

I would imagine that she is in shock and trying terribly hard to make some sense of the awful thing her son did.

I feel very sorry for her. Imagine if it were your son who had done this - what a burden to have to bear

Thank you Soapbox! I was beginning to think that this thread was becoming rather heartless. It's not fair to call her 'insane' or to make any of the other insults. What she said was awful, yes, and extraordinarily unthinking.

But my God if she can just manage to get out of bed in the mornings that in itself deserves praise. As well as being overwhelmed with grief she must be desperately trying to avoid blaming herself for perhaps causing a triple murder through her influence as a mother - who on earth could handle that and give the press a thoughtful interview? Come on, girls! Where have your hearts gone?

MrsThierryHenry and littleBella - I agree, the press really should back off.

I also agree - she must be going through hell.

Poor woman. She's lost a child too. It is bad for the media to do this. Every parent wants to think the best of their child. I can't imagine the grief they are all going through now though.

There is no point in publishing shit like this. We don't even know if what is quoted is what the woman said, or in what context. And expecting a fair, rational analysis of what happened from anyone intimately connected with the case is an expectation too far.

It is, i am sure very difficult to think of your son as evil. i imagine she was trying to make sense of what he had done and in her own mind trying to put a positive spin on his actions.

yes to all independant and right thinking people she is wrong but it is merely days from finfding out her son and grandchildren have died.

i think it fair to cut her some slack.

My heart is with the mother of the murdered children, rather than with anyone who seeks to portray her as somehow more responsible for the murder than the man who actually did the murdering.

Little Bella, I agree that that poor mother must be overcome with pain and grief. Maybe she's surviving on tranquilizers. Who knows? But no matter how horrific that man's actions, you surely can't deny that he must have been in unbearable pain?

Just imagine - look at your life now. How horrible would things have to become, for you to decide that your life was unbearable and that you were finally going to end it all. How awful would your life have to be to reach that conclusion? Have you ever sunk that low? I really, sincerely hope you haven't. I haven't, but I grew up with someone who did.

In these situations it's just not right to take sides. Everyone's hurting horribly, and that is terribly sad.

Sorry - I meant to say that the man and his mother must have been/ be in unbearable pain.

Btw I hope I didn't come down heavily on you, LB - I didn't want that to sound like a personal attack, so apols if it did.

As solidgold said, there is no point in publishing shit like this.

If she was interviewed, she can't possibly be in her right mind atm so anything she said should be discounted; if she wasn't interviewed, maybe somebody (friend? relative? acquaintance? journo?) made something up.

Whatever, that report is entirely unhelpful...but then it comes from the Sun apparently so beneath contempt, really.

No it didn't sound like a personal attack MrsTH.

I disagree that it's not right to take sides though. All pain is not the same. There is a vast difference between taking a child's life because you have gone mad, you think the world is evil, you think they will be better off dead or whatever, and taking a child's life because you know that that is the worst pain you can inflict on somebody you hate more than you love your children.

We don't know enough about this particular case to make a judgement, but too many of these cases of men killing their children to punish the mothers of their children, are being presented to us as morally neutral. They are not. It is right to take sides against those people who are so disconnected from decency, that they even consider the murder of their children as the answer to their problems. It's not good enough to say it's just the result of terrible pain, because without the analysis of what drives these men, and therefore pre-emptive measures to stop them, we will not be able to prevent further murders in future.

LB, do you think it's possible to kill your own children as a 'punishment' for your partner, and not be punished by it yourself? Granted, he killed himself and so the prolonged pain is not his. But you rightly say that we don't know what drives these men (not just men). I honestly don't think anyone can claim to be able get into the head of someone who could do such a thing.

There was a woman who took her children onto the train tracks nr Paddington station and they all died together. I believe it was thought that her husband was abusive, and that her family was covering it all up. Now, how many women escape abusive husbands with their children every year, without resorting to killing themselves and the children? So what on earth could have been happening in this woman's life that she felt she had no recourse but to end everything for herself and her children? Who knows? I certainly wouldn't claim to be able to second-guess her.

Did you notice that on the link you posted is a thing that says rate this article? Well I thought that the points some of you've made about what bad journalism this is were spot on, so I rated it. I thought perhaps if everyone who read it rated it very low then they might not continue to write this sort of article. So I rated it a one star out of five and do you know what the overall rating is? - 3 1/2 stars - so that means lots of people think it's great reading this kind of stuff.

There's no hope.

how bizarre.

just found out one of my mother's dear friends who struggled with very severe bipolar disorder died yesterday from acute liver failure.

30+ years of taking drugs to try to control her illness resulted in worsening Parkinson's Disease and various other serious health problems and ultimately shortened her life.

originally a defector from Romania, her life was much harder than most - her father had 'disappeared' when the Communists took over, she was raised by a grandmother after her mother's own bipolar disease made it impossible for her to care for her, she'd been a rape victim, her husband defected without her knowledge and she was subjected to years of harsh interrogation before being able to immigrate, etc.

she was 63.

but a kinder, more sweet-hearted person than she was you'd be hard-pressed to find.

when people trot out 'oh, he/she committed this horrible atrocity or murder because they were mentally ill,' i always think of Sylvia.

some people like that are a real insult to the mentally ill.

I think I could feel a little bit of compassion for the mother of the man who did it, trying desperately to find and express compassion for her own son. And I am uneasy about the idea that the murderer's mother is in any way to blame for his crime any more than his ex-partner is to blame for what he did.
And LB I agree that more work is needed on preemptive measures: a good one would be forbidding unsupervised access to XPs where there is a history of violence or controlling behaviour.

Another one would be everyone dumping the idea that sexual jealousy justifies any kind of violence. Women whose DC are killed by XPs often find themselves blamed for having had sex outside the marriage (whether they did or did not, whether the XP was insanely jealous and believed, wrongly that his DW was having sex elsewhere or whether the woman started seeing someone else after the original relationship ended). ANd yet people both on MN and elsewhere sometimes encourage and cheer those who respond to a partner's having sex elsewhere with violence, assault or destruction of property. It's NEVER ok to beat your partner for infidelity, or to assault the OW/OM, or to smash up your partner's property to 'punish' him or her.

Agree, Dittany. (Though whether the mother of this particular scumbag actually said what was reported without at least a lot of leading questions is another matter, given the willingness of the tabloids to blame anyone but the perpetrator in cases like this). While it is a good thing for children to see both parents after a couple-relationship has ended, that changes when the reson for the breach is abuse, violence or controlling behaviour. A person who hates their former partner is not a good or safe parent to the children of that relationship, no matter what the former partner may have done WRT to the failed couple-relationship.