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Parricide is not rare
The schizophrenic crime
Parricide has been called the schizophrenic crime. Paranoid schizophrenia usually begins in the late teens to early 20s, mostly in young men, and it is behind many of the 300 or so cases each year. Almost all occur in dysfunctional or codependent families, often after years of physical, verbal, and sometimes sexual abuse by one or both parents.
The typical profile
The typical perpetrator is a male in his late teens or early 20s from a white, middle-class family. He tends to be isolated, with few friends, and the typical weapon is a gun kept in the home. In most cases he reports a dissociative state during the killing, and afterward, if he remembers it at all, it seems unreal or dreamlike, almost as though it happened to someone else.
Brian's case
Brian Bechtold was 23, isolated, and the youngest of five children in a household where his father punched and his mother humiliated. The gun was one he kept on him at all times. He remembered going downstairs with the feeling that his feet weren't touching the ground, in a trance-like state.
Why does schizophrenia start in young adulthood?
Symptoms typically first appear between the late teens and the mid-20s in men, and a few years later in women. One leading explanation involves the teenage brain, which prunes away a large share of its synapses during adolescence. In 1982 the psychiatrist Irving Feinberg proposed that excessive or abnormal pruning could contribute to schizophrenia. Women also show a second, smaller peak of onset around menopause, which researchers have linked to falling estrogen.
Why does abuse show up in parricide cases?
The criminologist Kathleen Heide, who has studied parricide for decades, sorts offenders into three groups: severely abused, severely mentally ill, and dangerously antisocial. In her work, the severely abused are the largest group among young offenders. Her research describes children who depend on the abusers for housing and protection and see no way out. Heide laid out the typology in her 1992 book Why Kids Kill Parents.
How does parricide compare with other killings?
Heide has reported, drawing on FBI data, that parricides make up roughly 2 percent of American homicides. Her analyses show that sons account for the large majority of offenders. Fathers are killed more often than mothers.
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