ABSTRACT
Introduction America is always shocked when a story emerges that a parent has killed a child. Ernie Allen (personal communication, January 2008), the director of the National Center for Exploited and Missing Children in Washington, DC, estimates that about two-thirds of all children killed annually are not killed by sadistic pedophiles but by their own parents. (See Table 7.1 for the demographics of parents who kill their children.) In October, 1994, we all reacted with horror to the story of Pauline Zile’s daughter Christina who was reported missing from a flea market women’s restroom. After missing for four days, the police discovered blood in Zile’s apartment. The story emerged that the child’s stepfather, John, beat Christina and stuffed a towel into her mouth. The child went into seizures and died. The parents kept the child’s body in a closet for four days. The police arrested the couple and charged them both with murder. Both will spend the rest of her life in prison (Jacobs, 1998).
