Defining Crime

• Author: David M. Paciocco
• Pages: 95-119

CHAPTER

5

Defining

Crime

anxiously

on

each occasion

as the

nurturing hands

of the

obstetricians gently coaxed each

one

from

their mother's

body while

I

stroked

her

hair

and

rubbed

her

shoulders.

The

enduring

image

of

birth

that

I

have

is

witnessing

the

wet, chalky-grey complexions

of

our

children turn

flush

and

pink with

the

glow

of new

life

as

their

first

taste

of

lung-drawn oxygen coursed through their tiny bodies. There

has

been,

and

will

be, no

happier time

for me.

When Brenda Drummond

lay on her

bathroom

floor, her

brown

hair

matted

and

dank with sweat

and her

face

flushed and

contorted with

pain

as she

delivered

her

son, Jonathan,

I

cannot begin

to

imagine what

it

was

like

or

what

she was

feeling. Only

two

days before, during

the

late

afternoon

of 28 May

1996,

she had

gone into that same bathroom

in the

small

Ottawa Valley hamlet

of

Carleton Place while

her two

daughters

played

in the

house. There,

she

inserted

a

pellet

rifle

into

her

vagina

and

fired

it,

propelling

a

pellet

through

the

soft

skull

of her

unborn son.

It

came

to

rest

in his

brain. Brenda

was far

luckier than Patricia Denner,

another Ottawa area woman

who

only

six

months later bled

to

death

from

a

collapsed

uterus

after

she

delivered,

and

then

stabbed

to

death,

her

newborn child

in the

kitchen

of her

home. Unlike Patricia

and her

baby,

Brenda

and

Jonathan were taken

to the

hospital

and

both survived.

At

first,

Jonathan Drummond

did not

appear

to be in

trouble,

but

within

a few

hours

of

birth

he

developed

a

severe infection.

The

medical

staff

at the

hospital

was

puzzled. Desperate

to

find

the

cause, they

x-

rayed

the

young boy.

The

x-ray revealed

a

small metal object embedded

in

his

brain. Further examination revealed

a

minuscule

injury

to his

scalp.

When asked about

it,

Drummond denied knowing

how the

injury

had

occurred.

Finally,

two

days later,

after

the boy had

developed meningitis

and

his

life

was in

peril,

she

revealed what

she had

done.

The

pellet

was

surgically

removed, saving Jonathan's

life.

W

hen our childern were born it was in a hospital. I watched

96

GETTING

OFF ON

TECHNICALITIES:

THE

RULE

OF LAW

A

country

prosecutor,

earnest

in his

conviction

that

what Brenda

had

done

was

nothing short

of

criminal,

charged

her

with

attempted

mur-

der.

She

had,

after

all,

taken

a

firearm

and

blasted

a

projectile into

the

brain

of a

helpless child,

a

child

who

shared

her

breath

and her

nourish-

ment

and who

could

not

possibly have been more

dependent

on her for

his

well-being.

The

rank cruelty

of

doing such

a

thing

was

staggering and,

as

a

simple matter

of

human decency,

it

seemed

to cry out for

justice.

But was it an act of

cruelty

or was

Brenda

herself

a

casualty

in

this

bizarre

event?

Why did she do it? The

psychiatrists

who

came

to be

involved

in

the

case

have concluded

she did not

know

that

she was

pregnant when

she fired the

rifle.

It is not

unknown

for

women

to

carry children

full

term

without knowing they

are

pregnant. These women seem

to

suffer

from

clin-

ical

depression and,

to

protect

themselves

from

the

stress

and

problems

a

new

child

can

create, they delude themselves

wilfully,

or

psychosomatically,

into thinking they

are not

pregnant.

The

prevailing wisdom,

for

example,

is

that

Patricia

Denner,

a

heavy woman,

was not

conscious

of her own

preg-

nancy.

It is

clear that

her

husband

did not

know

of it.

Patricia

had

left

her

bed the

night

the

child

was

born

to

watch television, complaining

of

indi-

gestion.

The

next

day her

young

son

discovered

her

dead body

and

that

of

the

baby,

who had

been stabbed

and

placed

in the

sink. There were signs

that

she

had

tried

to

clean

up the

mess. Psychiatrists have

offered

the

opinion

that when

she was

confronted with

the

shock

of her

child's birth,

she

attempted

to

eliminate

it to

protect

her

belief

that

she was not

pregnant.

The

psychiatrists

who

examined Brenda Drummond

and

consulted

on

her

case came

to a

similar conclusion. Like Patricia Denner, Brenda

was

by all

accounts

a

loving

and

capable mother.

She was a

good, hard-

working person

with

no

prior criminal involvement

and no

history

of

vio-

lence.

As a

result

of

marital

difficulties,

she was

left

largely

on her own

with

her two

daughters. Then

a

co-worker

who had

been providing

her

with emotional support through

her

troubles committed suicide. This

resulting

shock

may

have pushed Brenda into mental illness.

In

summa-

rizing

the

psychiatric opinion relating

to

Brenda Drummond, Judge

Inger

Hansen,

the

trial judge

who

presided over

her

prosecution, wrote:

The

psychiatrist concluded

that

Mrs.

Drummond

suffered

from

a

mental illness

and

major depression which

was

severe

and

caused var-

ious symptoms, suicidal ideation,

and

excessive preoccupations.

Her

lack

of

awareness

of her

pregnancy even

in its

late stage,

was

most

likely

the

result

of her own

depression,

with

inattentiveness

to her

own

body functioning, being "over-absorbed"

in her

inner preoccupa-

tions

of a

psychotic

intensity.