It’s the kind of case a veteran homicide investigator never forgets: the decomposing body of 15-month-old Domenic Brown, lying on his back on the bedroom floor of a barren inner-city apartment.
Domenic, along with his infant sister Gemini, died when their mother, Rie Fujii, left them to starve while she partied with a boyfriend in Cochrane for 10 days during the spring of 2001.
Police initially charged Fujii with two counts of second-degree murder, but she pleaded guilty instead to manslaughter and received an eight-year sentence.
![Rei Fujii pleaded guilty to manslaughter after she left her two young children to starve to death while she partied with friends.]()
Rie Fujii pleaded guilty to manslaughter after she left her two young children to starve to death while she partied with friends.
To retired homicide investigator George Rocks, Fujii took the easy way out: by pleading guilty, she avoided a potential life sentence and cleared the way for deportation back to Japan after serving only a portion of the eight-year term in Canada.
“It stuck in everybody’s craw. We saw the body,” said Rocks, who was a staff sergeant in charge of the homicide unit at the time.
“I still find it offensive, what she did. It’s the babies that come up when I think of it. You remember the kids. You feel for them.”
Crimes against children have always sparked revulsion. But when the perpetrator is the child’s mother, public reaction is even more visceral.
“It violates an archetype, the archetype of the mother bear. That archetype is based on some reality, that most mothers will put themselves in harm’s way for their children,” said Dr. Thomas Dalby, a Calgary forensic psychologist who has assessed at least 20 women who have killed their children.
Mothers who kill their children are not only confounding, they’re rare. A Calgary Herald database of every homicide in the city going back to 1990 shows there have been 12 mothers who killed one or more of their children or were accused of the crime. The 16 child victims in those cases make up roughly three per cent of all homicide victims over the same period.
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Filicide — the killing of a child by a parent — is unusual in another way: it is one of the few crimes committed in relatively equal numbers by men and women. The pattern has held true in Calgary where, since 1990, 10 fathers have been either charged or convicted of killing one or more of their children.
Yet the Herald’s statistics show key differences in the outcomes — of the eight mothers who stood trial for murder none were convicted of the charge: every case resulted in a conviction on a lesser charge, such as manslaughter or infanticide, or a finding of not criminally responsible due to a mental disorder.
The only exception is Marie Magoon, who was recently convicted of second-degree murder in the death of her six-year-old stepdaughter, Meika Dawn Jordan, in 2011. Magoon and the girl’s biological father, Spencer Jordan, inflicted prolonged abuse on Meika over a weekend.
The number of fathers who have stood trial for murdering their children is much smaller — mainly because two men killed themselves afterwards — but all three whose cases have concluded ended up being convicted of either first- or second-degree murder, including Jordan.
The different outcomes raises a question about whether courts have a lower standard of accountability for killer mothers.
But Dalby says that in many of the women’s cases, there were mitigating factors such as mental illness or a personality disorder. Often times, there were other issues as well such as financial stresses, isolation and abusive relationships.
![Hideio and Tomoklo Fujii, the parents of Rie Fujii, attend her trial in Calgary in 2001.]()
Hideio and Tomoklo Fujii, the parents of Rie Fujii, attend her trial in Calgary in 2001.
“Many have personality disorders, some really don’t, and I’ve seen a few who are flat-out psychotic and they had a full defence,” he said. “… motives are complex. There’s never one single motive that explains human behaviour.”
Rocks remains unconvinced that applies in Fujii’s case.
“The kids were an inconvenience to her and she made a decision: the kids aren’t going to stop me from having my fun,” Rocks said.
Fujii came to Canada on a student visa in 1997, when she was 19. She abandoned her studies a year later after meeting Peter Brown. During their stormy, and often abusive, three-year relationship they had two children together. Fujii kept them a secret from her parents.
When Brown was physically and verbally abusive, she checked into women’s shelters and the Children’s Cottage, which provides emergency, short-term child care. Evidence in court detailed several occasions when Fujii told shelter staff she loved her children, but she was feeling depressed and overwhelmed.
But Fujii’s behaviour toward the children and things she said displayed a different attitude. Friends told authorities that Fujii had said she wished the children were dead. She never said that to shelter workers, but several noticed she didn’t display any affection toward Domenic and Gemini.
Back at her apartment, Fujii began leaving the children. She left them alone while she drank and partied with friends. When she began a relationship with another man, she left them to spend nights with him at motels. The final time she left them, in May 2001, she was gone for 10 days.
“She knows what’s happening at home: the babies are starving,” Rocks said.
Rocks felt Fujii had to have known leaving her children unattended for 10 days would kill them — an assertion, had it been proven, would have resulted in convictions for murder. By pleading guilty to manslaughter, Fujii admitted to killing Domenic and Gemini, but that it was unintentional.
Two defence experts who assessed Fujii, including Dalby, said she suffered from a personality disorder that allowed her to deceive herself into thinking the children could survive without her. It also meant she had unstable moods, behaviour and relationships.
Fujii’s lawyer Robert Batting said a combination of negative factors brought out Fujii’s personality disorder and allowed her deceitful behaviour to go unchecked.
“Ms. Fujii’s social network was predominantly street people. None of her friends extended a hand of support or seemed to recognize she was in crisis,” said Batting.
“She had been living in Canada illegally (and) her status led to a reluctance to seek government-funded assistance. She eventually did seek assistance and she and her children stayed at various women’s shelters. It was my opinion that her plight was not recognized by the staff.”
Despite his diagnosis, Dalby said police and prosecutors weren’t wrong in believing that Fujii acted selfishly.
“Part of it is that she just didn’t care,” Dalby said.
Fujii’s case shows a lot of the hallmarks of maternal filicide, according to a review of research published in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law.
Psychosocial stressors include “being the primary caregiver for at least one child, unemployment/financial problems, ongoing abusive adult relationships, conflict with family members and limited social support. Social isolation has also been noted as a factor common in women who killed their children, as has a history of child abuse,” Dominique Bourget, a forensic psychiatrist and associate professor at the University of Ottawa, wrote with two co-authors in 2007.
The researchers also noted that parents, both men and women, who kill their children often have personality disorders, such as Fujii.
“It can explain things, why they do something, but it’s not a legal defence,” Dalby said.
In cases involving severe mental illness, courts can find the accused not criminally responsible (NCR), which puts the defendant under the jurisdiction of mental health review boards which can order treatment and confinement at secure psychiatric hospitals.
The legal threshold for NCR is high, with the Criminal Code stating a person must be so ill that they’re incapable of understanding their actions were wrong. Since 1990, only 12 Calgary homicide cases have ended in NCR findings — and just two involved mothers. The most recent was in 1998, when Liza Santos strangled her infant son, Samuel. A judge ruled Santos not criminally responsible after a Crown expert said the woman was suffering from postpartum psychosis. Santos believed she had to kill her son to protect him from an evil woman who appeared in a bathroom mirror.
![Forensic psychologist Dr. Thomas Dalby says]()
Forensic psychologist Dr. Thomas Dalby says mothers who kill are often suffering mental-health issues.
Mothers who kill their newborn babies can fall under another part of the law. The charge of infanticide was put into the Criminal Code in 1948 and the language reflects those times, saying a woman guilty of infanticide suffered a disturbed mind as a result of not being fully recovered from the effects of childbirth or lactation.
While the wording is outdated, Darby argues the charge itself is still relevant as it balances legal guilt with diminished moral culpability.
“Is childbirth a mental disorder? No it’s not, but it could lead to depression and it could lead to real, genuine mental health disorders.”
The maximum sentence for infanticide is five years, far less than the mandatory life sentence and a minimum of 10 years behind bars that comes with a second-degree murder conviction.
“The idea to look at each case individually is what the criminal justice system is supposed to be doing — and (infanticide) falls in line with that,” Dalby said.
Some times, it’s not mental illness but religious and cultural stresses together with depression and isolation that lead to women killing their children.
No one will ever known exactly why Harsimrat Kahlon killed her three newborns but her diaries show a woman full of shame and fear with little family support in Canada.
![Harsimarat Kahlon]()
Harsimarat Kahlon’s diaries showed her life was full of fear and shame, with little family support in Canada. After her death, the remains of three babies were found in her home.
Kahlon, 27, died in her northeast Calgary home in October 2009 from complications of childbirth. While sorting through her things, Kahlon’s boyfriend found the decomposed body of an infant girl hidden in a suitcase. The medical examiner subsequently found two more babies — a boy and a girl. All three infants had been wrapped in layers of bloody towels and in plastic bags to conceal the smell of decomposition.
One girl had been born at the Peter Lougheed Centre in 2005. The birth record didn’t name the father, though DNA testing ruled out Kahlon’s current boyfriend. Investigators believe Kahlon killed the girl shortly after taking her home, but her body was too badly decomposed to determine cause of death.
Kahlon’s boyfriend was the father of the other girl and the boy, but he was unaware of their existence. The couple lived separately during their three-year relationship and it’s believed Kahlon secretly gave birth at home before killing the newborns and hiding their bodies. They were also too decomposed to determine how they died.
To bring closure to the family and community, Dalby and investigators pieced the details together through interviews with Kahlon’s family, friends and co-workers, and by examining diaries she wrote in Urdu, Hindi and Punjabi.
“To the police, this was something that happened in the community. (They thought) we needed an answer to tell people. We’re not just going to cover it up,” said Dalby.
He said the diaries made it clear Kahlon feared the reaction of her family, some of whom lived in Canada and others, including her mother, who remained in India. She wrote of feeling worthless, depressed and even suicidal.
“We talked to her family and they said that child, those children, would have been welcomed. But her thoughts were, ‘I’m an unmarried woman,’ ” said Dalby.
“She thought the stakes were high here and she simply didn’t want to go the route of exposure.”
In the end, investigators could only guess what Kahlon did to her children and why. Her actions were unspeakable, but Dalby said that didn’t mean Kahlon didn’t have genuine remorse.
“She thought about those children. There was really evidence of her thinking about those children,” he said, adding she wrote at one point: “One day, they will stop crying.”
In their review of research on the topic, Bourget and her co-authors found that children are most at risk of being killed by their mother within the first year of life.
Between 8 and 12 per cent of mothers experience some degree of postpartum depression — and for the majority it is treatable and transient condition. In Alberta, public health nurses contact new mothers within eight weeks of giving birth to conduct an assessment.
“We’ll look at how she’s coping, from her personal history to how she’s adjusting to motherhood and what her family situation is,” said Marilyn Young, program manager of prenatal and postnatal services for Alberta Health Services.
A woman who is struggling financially or with caring for a newborn — factors that can lead to depression — might be referred back to her doctor and put in touch with agencies that can help, Young said. Someone talking about harming themselves or their baby will need more urgent intervention, like hospitalization.
But in their article, Bourget and her co-authors acknowledge that few women who kill their babies seek any help.
In Kahlon’s case, she rebuffed the nurse’s followup visit after the first baby was born and kept the other two pregnancies secret. Meredith Borowiec, convicted of infanticide for throwing two newborns in the trash after secretly giving birth at home in 2008 and 2009, also concealed her pregnancies.
Like the others, Stacey Joy Bourdeaux never confided her darkest secrets to anyone. She smothered her 10-month-old son, Sean Fewer, with a pillow in 2004 — but the crime only came to light in 2010, after she tried to kill her five-year-old son.
![FACEBOOK, Calgary Herald CALGARY, AB: August 27, 2010 - Facebook profile pic of Stacey Bourdeaux. Courtesy, FACEBOOK, Calgary Herald (For City section story by Facebook)]()
Stacey Bourdeaux pleaded guilty to manslaughter for killing her son Sean. She smothered the infant with a pillow in what she said was an attempt to quiet his crying.
Sean’s death was originally deemed medical, but investigators probing Bourdeaux’s assault on the older boy — which left him with irreparable brain damage — found a confession she wrote to her recently deceased husband in a diary.
“Dear Ted. Now that you are gone, I can confess about Sean,” she wrote. “That night that (Sean) left us, it wasn’t actually while he was sleeping. Due to me being very sick at the time I did what I didn’t want to do. The crying wouldn’t stop, so I ended up putting a pillow over his face.”
Bourdeaux pleaded guilty to manslaughter for killing Sean, with the judge characterizing the crime as an attempt to quiet his crying that went too far. She received a sentence totalling 13 years: four years for killing Sean, eight for the attempted murder of the five-year-old and an additional year for failing to provide the necessities of life for waiting three days to seek medical attention after attacking her son.
The prosecution sought an 18-year sentence, but defence lawyer Katherin Beyak argued for less because of Bourdeaux’s traumatic background, which included childhood sexual and physical abuse.
“People, to a great extent, are a product of their environment,” Beyak said in a recent interview.
Victims of abuse can, and frequently do overcome their own traumatic upbringings to be loving parents — but they do it with support and positive influences Bourdeaux never had, Beyak said.
Instead, Bourdeaux harboured anxiety about being a mother for years that only intensified after her husband died, said Beyak.
“There was a real feeling on her part that she couldn’t cope with it, that she couldn’t handle those children emotionally or financially on her own,” she said.
Beyak believes the diary confession shows Bourdeaux harboured extreme guilt for her actions, even if she was never able to clearly explain the motive behind them.
“She was never able to verbalize a clear reason why it happened, (but) she knew what she had done and wasn’t at peace with it,” said Beyak.
Mothers who kill their children deserve punishment, Dalby said — “No one gets a pass on this sort of thing” — but he also believes the contributing factors bear some consideration.
“I’ve met many monsters in my life — in prisons, the worst kind of psychopaths you can think of, so I have a comparison. I know what the worst is: people who would do anything to any other person and derive glee from it,” he said.
“They’re not monsters. They simply aren’t.”
jvanrassel@calgaryherald.com
twitter.com/JasonvanRassel
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