Donna Fitchett: "No one was going to hurt my boys"

Essay here. Excerpt:

'In Australia as in many another place, it has become so familiar a news item we can call it hackneyed. It croaks from the radio as we grump through our Monday breakfast: the missing dad found this weekend in his car at some abandoned spot, his children dead in their seatbelts beside him — shot or poisoned by fumes from the exhaust. There is no sympathy for such a father; perhaps there should not be. Our feelings go out conventionally to the innocent lives the dad has taken with him, and perhaps, as we sip our coffee, we catch mention of a distraught mother — who’s released her darlings on an ‘access’ or ‘contact’ visit, for Father’s Day perhaps or for one of the children’s birthdays — only to see the lives most precious to her snuffed out by an oaf who is now exposed for all to see as the brutal, ‘abusive’, self-obsessed pig that she’d always said he was.

That’s what is reported, and it’s what we see.

His distress? It would smirch the memory of his children to go into that. The economic strain of his having raised a family while tied to an obdurate partner; of his being forcibly separated from the family who were his life; of his loss of house and savings; of his being faced with unemployment as he’s driven to the edge by those matter-of-fact lawyers in the Family Court, who are assured of their income whatever destruction they wreak upon him. His life has been unstrung by the militant and confused institutions of the state, and now he’s groped for the one way out that his battered brain can visualise — annihilation. It’s the wrong way, and if he were still around we wouldn’t have any compunction about telling him so. And no doubt he’d see it too.
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If he were a wife and mother things would be very different. We’d find an explanation and a way out for him (for her) — an abusive relationship, poor self-esteem, molestation during childhood or post-partum depression; there is no end of possibilities for getting a woman off her murder charge, even if we can’t stop her before the killings. But if a man tries filial murder he’d better make sure he well and truly tops himself. He’d better embrace Samson’s, the way of self-destruction as he takes those others with him out of the world. Alive or dead, a father will rightly be lambasted in the aftermath.

Men act in that violent way because they are naturally active. Women in similar straits crouch in the victim position because that’s their nature. It happens that the path of non-violence is deemed to be more virtuous — less wicked and blatantly destructive — than the violent one. The gender differences in response to crisis do matter, but they are arguably incidental from the ethical viewpoint — expressive only of the two sexes’ programmed behaviour. Is a ‘victim’ innately virtuous because she behaves as victims must?
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David Fitchett came home from his job at UltraTune at around 6.30 of a Tuesday evening in early September 2005 to find his family’s house in Dight Avenue, North Balwyn — a solid, middle-class suburb northeast of Melbourne — surprisingly quiet. He found his 46-year-old wife teetering about the gloom, glazed in her bra and pants, and cut about the neck, arms and groin. She’d taken sleeping pills, she told him, to “dull the pain”. Their sons Thomas, aged 11, and Matthew, 9, were lying in separate bedrooms — cold, stiff and without any vital signs.

The ambulance took Fitchett — as she must now be called — to Box Hill Hospital and there she stayed under guard till transferred by police the following dawn to homicide headquarters in South Melbourne. Though she could not be interviewed because of her mental state, she was directed by the magistrate to supply police with scrapings from beneath her nails: “There are reasonable grounds to believe she may have committed the offence.” The offence of doing away with her two boys. One of them had been scratched about the face; and one had material under his fingernail which was thought to be body tissue. The suspect kept her face hidden in a blanket for much of her short preliminary hearing, from which she went back to suicide watch at the Thomas Embling psychiatric unit in Fairfield.
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In Melbourne popular support for Fitchett was a good deal more muted than it had been for Lemak in Illinois — because Australia is not yet America, because the tide of rabid feminism had eased slightly over the intervening years, and because Fitchett had not been threatened by her husband with any known material loss. It seemed plain that the destruction of Fitchett’s life had come wholly from within herself. In both the Melbourne and the Illinois narratives, sympathy for the defendant declined during trials which uncovered unpalatable detail about the crimes. And a final parallel between the cases: lengthy custodial sentences were handed down for both Donna Fitchett and Marilyn Lemak — 24 years in Fitchett’s case, with a non-parole period of 18 years; and life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for Lemak. Disquiet about the sanity issue lingered beyond both verdicts.'