Ruminations

Blog dedicated primarily to randomly selected news items; comments reflecting personal perceptions

Saturday, January 31, 2009

'Mommy, Don't'

And those were the last words of a twelve-year-old girl, imploring her mother not to take away her life. The most difficult part of this atrocious and horribly sad, tawdry story is the realization that a child - who chose to live with her mother rather than remain with the father who loved her and in whose care she would be safe - understood at the end of her twelve years of life that she was not able to invoke in her mother the normal response of any mother for the well-being of her child.

It simply boggles the imagination that any mother would deliberately and with degraded malice seek to take her child's life. A life that she had a hand in bringing into the world, a life that she was able to witness bloom as her child grew from infancy to maturity, able to think for herself, display the emotions of need and love, clinging to the belief as all children do, that their mother is their protector, charged by nature to nurture, love and support them.

It is painful in the extreme to read the account of this mother who chose to take literally the choice given her by a boyfriend - to make the choice between his needs and that of her child. A choice - difficult as it might seem to any normal human being - that has been made countless times by others, who chose to abandon their children, or to leave them in the care of others to enable them to pursue an interest they placed before that of their children's.

But to plan to murder a child, to dispose of the life of a young girl, a daughter, for the sole purpose of assuring a lover that his interests were more meaningful and precious to her than those of her child? To cold-bloodedly, in the heat of passion, determine that she would be the instrument of her daughter's death for her desired purpose of retaining the loyalty and interest of a jealous and possessive man? Impossible, a crime too heinous for the human mind to absorb.

Yet the woman, Penny Boudreau, set about to plan and execute a ruse whereby she would murder her child, manipulate her daughter's corpse and surrounding evidence to encourage the belief that her daughter had been abducted, sexually assaulted and left to be discovered by the police. In the process posing as a grief-stricken mother, her performance exonerating her from any undue suspicion.

In the end, this woman informed police how she had wrapped rope around her hands, placed the rope around her daughter's neck then pulled with all the strength she could muster until her child breathed no more. She then lifted her daughter's body into her car, drove to an isolated spot where she removed the child's clothing and then dragged the body to dump it beside the LeHave River.

Returning home, she reported her daughter's absence, as a runaway. And then spent the following several weeks publicly mourning, and presenting tearful appeals over public media to appeal to her daughter to come back to her, to return home to her loving mother. Evidence finally appeared, to confirm what already-suspicious police felt, that the mother murdered her daughter.

Penny Boudreau was sentenced to life with no opportunity for parole. In her case, life will mean 20 years' imprisonment. She had pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. Legal niceties aside, this woman planned to murder her child, she took care to assemble the tools she would need to complete the horrible crime. She forced her daughter, who sensed something badly awry, to remain with her, as she drove her to a desolate area.

In the annals of criminal, murderous brutality utterly bereft of human compassion, the mother of Karissa Boudreau will have her own, very special place of solitary infamy. The unspeakable horror of this act, of a mother betraying a daughter's love and trust, choosing to terrorize and to murder her own child, is a very peculiar act against nature and against humanity.

Those imploring words, "Mommy, don't" will haunt, psychically torment and profoundly affect all those who have read or heard of them, the last desperate words of a dying child begging her mother to have pity, to love and cherish her.

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