Twenty-four years ago, a doctor who studied adolescent homicides wrote about the prevalence of young women murdering family members and noted that, overall, youthful killers are disproportionately black men. Nine days ago, the doctor’s adolescent daughter arranged for her black boyfriend and his black friend to kill the doctor. It’s a story so bizarre—so novelistic—that I can’t get away from it without comment.
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In 2002, Tamela D. Dutcher and Daniel L. Davis co-authored a study for the International Journal of Adolescent Medicine and Health entitled “The violent and homicidal adolescent. Hearts darkened before time.” The introductory paragraph spells out the thesis:
Adolescence was once a time of promise and light. Today, in our society, children and youth are being killed or are killing at an ever-increasing pace. The vast majority of youth arrested for homicide are males. Those few girls who kill tend to kill family members (1). While ethnic and race variables are important considerations, it is socioeconomic status that facilitates the higher rates of violence among minority ethnic groups. Roughly one sixth of all Americans under the age of 18 years are African American; in recent years, approximately one half of the youth arrested for homicide are African American. In 1988, over 57 percent of the juveniles arrested for homicide were African American. (Emphasis mine.)
Fast forward 24 years, and the New York Post reports that
Tamela Dutcher was allegedly shot in the face by Christian Evans and Dajameous Payne during an invasion inside her Delaware County, Ohio, home on Aug. 14, according to court records viewed by The Post.
Dutcher, 55, was sitting on the couch when Evans, 20, and Payne, 21, charged into the home and fired a single shot just after midnight, according to WBNS.
Both men are black. So, why did these young black men match the statistical probabilities that Dutcher noted in her 2022 study? Well, here’s the rest of the story (also from the New York Post):
Officials claim Dutcher’s daughter, 18-year-old Bryanna Dutcher, set up the alleged hit on her parents after an argument with her mom over chores she was told to do earlier in the day.
The younger Dutcher was quietly seeing Evans because she didn’t want her alleged “very racist” parents to know she was dating a black man or else she would be kicked out of the house, according to a police affidavit obtained by Oxygen.
[snip]
The night of the fatal shooting, Bryanna Dutcher texted Evans about the argument in which the suspected gunman suggested murder.
[snip]
Evans appeared at the home with Payne and waited outside for 15 minutes before his girlfriend confirmed the Dutchers’ locations.
“Alr shes living room he’s basement where you’re here Imk,” the younger Dutcher allegedly texted.
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Dr. Dutcher’s daughter was born long after her mother co-authored the article about girls killing family members. Did Dr. Dutcher ever look at Bryanna and recognize that her daughter was about to fulfill what, in retrospect, seems like a prophecy?
I also wondered, of course, what kind of mother Dr. Dutcher was. She could have just been unlucky enough to have a psychopathic cuckoo in the nest. However, without knowing anything beyond what was reported in the New York Post, I was reminded of how often people state one child-rearing philosophy, only to take a very different approach with their own children.
The most famous child-rearing schism, of course, was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In Émile, or On Education (1762), he challenged Europeans’ rather brutal approach to child-rearing, arguing that children are born innocent and must be subject to a gentle, philosophical upbringing that preserves their goodness while creating moral principles. He especially advocated parental involvement, criticizing parents who used wet nurses and tutors.
However, Rousseau followed a different approach with his own children. As he reported, he had five children with his long-time mistress. Upon each child’s birth, he had the child delivered to the Paris foundling hospital, a place that, like all 18th-century orphanages, had a terrible mortality rate and treated children with disdainful cruelty.
In America, Benjamin Spock changed American culture by advocating a more loving parenting style, one that too often slipped into damaging permissiveness. Meanwhile, Spock himself barely touched his own children. (Think Star Trek’s Mr. Spock with children!)
Mahatma Gandhi, Mr. Universal Compassion, treated his sons with physical and emotional cruelty. He forced them to adhere to his mentally bizarre, austere lifestyle and, when they resisted, dealt with them harshly.
Charles Dickens, whose novels were replete with narratives about the importance of a loving family, the horror of neglected children, and the need to treat children with care and respect, behaved atrociously to his family when, in middle age, he fell in love with a famous actress. He cruelly and publicly dumped his wife of 20 years and abandoned their 10 children.
My own great aunt, an early disciple of psychotherapy (I think she studied or worked with Jung), eventually carved out a niche as one of the West’s best-known child therapists, focusing especially on impoverished children. Her daughters loathed her.
Sometimes, people have very good ideas, but their own issues prevent them from bringing those ideas into their personal lives. Dr. Dutcher, of course, could have been the most wonderful, kind, compassionate, and really good parent in the world, and had a daughter who had such severe problems that they led inexorably to murder. The report’s bare-bones nature, though, reminded me of the chasm that sometimes develops between good ideas and actual human beings.
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