from
Violence and Nonviolence: Pathways to Understanding by
Gregg Barak
On the morning and afternoon of
February 21, 1978, a Mill Basin, New York lawyer killed his three children and
wife. Subsequently he was found not guilty by reason of
insanity. In Facing the
Wind, Julie Salamon captured
the severe depression, exculpatory delusion, and altruistic killings of Bob
Rowe. Her book is also a case study of lives experiencing human tragedy, of the
inner depths of violence, and of emotional recovery.
On the day of the killings, while
Bob Jr., Rowe’s teenage son, was still sound asleep, the father took a baseball
bat and smashed his son’s head with one deliberate and forceful blow. A few
hours later, when his adopted daughter, Jennifer, age 8, worrying that Bobby
was sleeping too late, came to her father, Rowe talked her into bed with her
12-year-old brother, Christopher. He then told the two children that they were
going to play a game and to close their eyes. Using the bat, he killed them
both with swift blows to their heads. Late in the afternoon, he called his wife
at work and urged her to hurry home. Upon her arrival, Rowe instructed her to
stand in the middle of the living room with her eyes closed, as the children
had a surprise for her. One more swift blow to the head, and his wife Mary lay
dead on the floor. The next day, he turned himself over to the authorities,
admitting that he had killed his family.
Mary and Bob Rowe’s second son,
Christopher, had been born blind, deaf, and brain damaged. Consequently, Mary
and Bob had become active during the 1960s in organizing parental support
groups for others with severely handicapped children. Both were considered
ideal role models: “The Rowes were devoted, selfless parents, dealing with
extreme adversity with an awe-inspiring combination of optimism, determination and
sense of humor” (Stewart, 2001, p. 10). Indeed, many of the mothers had wished
that their husbands were as involved with their special kids as Bob was. Needless
to say, Bob’s killing of his children and Mary came as a total shock to their
friends, families, and other associates. Preceding the killings, Bob Rowe had
been extremely depressed and down on his luck, unable to find work as a lawyer
in his chosen profession. Prior to that, and for more than a decade, he had
been a fairly successful attorney in the insurance industry.
His explanation for the four
murders was simply that he thought his family would be better off dead than
living with a loser, a failure, an unemployed lawyer—like him. Rowe also told
the various doctors who worked up psychological examinations on him to
determine whether, according to New York criminal law, he was an “incapacitated
defendant” not capable of mentally standing trial, that he had been depressed,
and that the pressures of raising a handicapped child had been getting to him.
Rowe’s case history was coauthored
by Kings County Hospital forensic psychiatrists Daniel W. Schwartz and Richard
L. Weidenbacher. The two psychiatrists concluded that Rowe was insane at the
time of the murders. Whether or not one agrees with their findings, excerpted
quotations from their diagnoses provide much insight into Rowe’s behavior.
Schwartz’s diagnosis was (1)
adjustment reaction to adult life, with psychotic features and (2) personality
disorder, with obsessive features. More specifically, his findings said,
[Rowe] is a rather bright man, with
a verbal I.Q. of 120. His performance I.Q. (108) has been affected by the fact
that he is considerably depressed. Dynamically, he appears to be vulnerable to
emotional pressures and troubled by extremely forceful unconscious homosexual
wishes, feelings of inadequacy as a man and feelings of insatiable needs for
emotional support, things that his mother had never provided.
He somehow attributed the killing
of his wife and children to his mother, but in a very confusing, unclear way.
The test suggests that unconsciously he may have viewed his wife as his mother
when he killed her, and his children as himself. There is a tendency to
dissociate, to put off anxiety-arousing thoughts and feelings and therefore his
inability to deal with emotional problems in a rational way. He says that he
had “a compulsion to kill.” (Salamon, 2001, pp. 133-134).
Weidenbacher’s diagnosis was
adjustment reaction to adult life, with depressive and psychotic features. His
findings also said,
It appears that the essential
problem may be seen as one of pathological reaction to the death of mother,
some years ago. Fairly clearly, the relationship between mother and son had
been a difficult one, the son feeling frustrated by his mother and harboring
strong and mixed feelings towards her. She, in turn, left her estate entirely
to his younger brother, disinheriting the defendant, in effect. It seems clear
that within a few years of her death the defendant was affected by a psychotic
disorder, entailing visual and auditory hallucination of his mother, during
which she commanded him to destroy his family. She had disapproved of his
marriage and his wife; his wife had borne him one normal child, and one grossly
defective child.
Related
Books
Inevitably,
people do things to hurt us. Inevitably, we do things that hurt
others. This is part of what it means to be human, to have
feelings, to be imperfect, to be vulnerable. Compassion moves us
beyond our own wounds and back into human community. It asks the
question: What sort of people do bad things? The answer: lonely,
scared, ignorant, confused, sick, misguided, angry, fallible,
human sort of people - in other words, all of us.
He may well also have been affected
by delusion, with regard to his conduct. Although the hallucination and the
likely delusion with regard to conduct resolved during the course of
psychiatric treatment, including medication, there is reason to believe that he
was subsequently, and around the time of the reported offense, exercised by
delusion regarding poverty. . . . the defendant appears
incapable at this time of adequate participation in his defense. He still
“hasn’t sorted out his thoughts”; he has not as yet grasped what has
transpired, so that he still rather expects his family to reappear. It would
appear proper and wise to arrange for further psychiatric hospitalization,
probably over a period of months, with an eye to greater emotional and mental
stability and further perspective on the part of the defendant. (Salamon, 2001m
pp. 135-136).
After his acquittal, Rowe was
assigned to the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens. Some 2 years later,
using lawyerly acumen, he was discharged (this is record time). In December
1980, his new life began as he went to work outside the confines of law. In
fact, Rowe had unsuccessfully pursued his rights to be reinstated to practice
before the bar of New York, employing every creative legal argument that he and
his attorneys could muster.
A few years later, through a
mutual acquaintance, Bob met a woman some 20 years his junior. Colleen was a
deeply religious and shy woman who had been sexually molested as a girl. Along
her way to adulthood, she would abandon her quest to become a nun. Immediately,
she and Bob formed an unexplainable emotional bond. Her feelings for Bob only
became stronger once she learned of his former life. The seemingly unmatched
pair evidently found solace in each other as they were able to exchange their
feelings of shame, humiliation, and mortification for love and redemption. Nine
years after Bob’s release, he and Colleen married, and shortly thereafter,
Colleen gave birth to their one and only child, a daughter.
