By a fortuitous coincidence I was reading B. M. Gills’ now-out-of-print Nursery Crimes (1986) when Amy Bishop’s sad history began to emerge in the news. It’s also a coincidence that the copyright of this mystery novel about a girl who murders several people was published in the same year in which Amy Bishop killed her brother, 1986.

The TV talking heads are all agog over Ms. Bishop’s insane string of crimes. At first, I thought the University of Alabama-Huntsville shooting was simply more proof of my contention that prosecutors ought not to be elected and most definitely ought not to be affiliated in any way with a political party: reports are that when Ms. Bishop shot her 18-year-old brother her mother was a local Democratic Party official and the local prosecutor was William Delahunt of Quincy, MA, now Democratic Representative in Congress.

But fiction is often more insightful than TV talking heads or bloggers: Nursery Crimes explains it all. When children of privilege (and that includes the middle class) kill, everyone rushes to protect them,  rather than society.

Sidebar: The key term is privilege. Race has nothing to do with it.

Gill’s Nursery Crimes

Gill’s plot is simple: In Britain during WW2, the family of an army bomber pilot (an officer) takes in two children from a bombed-out working-class family: “little Willy” (4) and “Dolly” (7). The officer’s daughter, “Zanny” (6) promptly pushes little Willy into the backyard goldfish pond and sits on his head until he drowns. Dolly sees it happen but wisely keeps her mouth shut. Zanny’s parents understand well that the pond was too shallow for even a 4-year-old to drown in, especially when two other children were there to pull him out, but they know the local constabulary will never suspect their child: not the progeny of long-time local landowners.

Zanny concludes from the way the local cops give her candy that what she did is fine—she’s special. The rules don’t apply to her the way they do to other children. She therefore commences to wreak havoc. She tries to kill Dolly by pushing her in front of a “lorry.” The driver swerves into a tree to avoid Dolly and dies in the ensuing horrible, fiery crash. And that’s just the beginning.

Zanny’s parents are scared. They don’t know how to “cure” her. They send her to a Catholic boarding school to get her out of their hair. There the priest who confesses her refuses to believe her confessions; the nuns think she looks like an angel and so must be one. The more horrific and overt her crimes become, the more the “establishment” rallies round her: they rationalize everything.

Amy Bishop’s Nursery Crime

Amy Bishop was 21 when she killed her brother, so it hardly qualifies as a nursery crime, but one can’t help but speculate that she likely killed a cat or two before she decided to do away with her brother. Psychotic behavior generally begins to emerge in late adolescence.

It’s difficult for a family to acknowledge that a loved one is crazy.

Sidebar: I use the word advisedly: psychologists may find the word offensive, but the alternatives are equally offensive in my opinion. The PC police object to “insane” and “mentally ill,” and the DSM doesn’t provide an appropriate adjective (“mentally disordered,” perhaps?).

The law doesn’t provide any help for such afflicted families. Children under 18 can be involuntarily committed to a mental hospital, but only the wealthiest families can afford to put a child in a private hospital, and many public hospitals are less than nurturing environments. (This is not an argument for public health care, because then all the hospitals would be less than nurturing, in my opinion.) After 18, the law requires hospitals to release mental patients if they wish to be released.

Sidebar: I’m a civil libertarian. I know how the law can be abused to incarcerate people. I simply think there must be a way to deal with the truly mentally ill so that they can’t hurt other people.

If an adult (such as a 21-year-old Amy Bishop) behaves bizarrely, all her family can do is seek a court order for a temporary hospitalization. In most states, to put a family member into a permanent guardianship, a family has to take him or her to court. Such a court order is rare accept when the troubled family member is elderly and has severe dementia (in other words, is a clear physical threat to himself or others).

The problem is compounded when the troubled individual is bright and well-educated. Many of us can’t distinguish between eccentricity in such a person and outright insanity.

Of course, you might say, there’s no reason to tolerate violence as eccentricity. I agree. But there’s madness that isn’t violent: paranoia, manipulative behavior, narcissism, inappropriate emotional responses to events, temporary amnesia, delusions, hallucinations. Few people are prepared to deal with these behaviors in children. We misinterpret them. And even if a parent noticed such behavior, there would be no one to turn to for help.

So, I understand why Amy Bishop’s parents and husband did nothing but deny there was a problem. I’m less understanding of the local constabulary, though—and completely appalled by prosecutors who indict selectively based on party affiliation.

Prosecutors ought to be apolitical—they should be appointed by an elected board (a county board, for instance, as are school district officials) based on credentials and perhaps experience in the local prosecutor’s office.