Maybe you've met them before. Or someone like them. You'd know, because later, you'd wish you hadn't. In New York City, they're calling Sante and Kenneth Kimes 'The Grifters,' a mother and son team implicated in scores of crimes spanning the continent, from petty scams to murder. Successfully if sometimes too loudly, the Kimeses left a trail of anonymous victims with empty pockets and emptier lives. And then one day, as it is alleged, the Kimeses targeted one Irene Silverman, who happened to be a connected if quirky socialite butterfly. When the 82-year-old Miss Silverman disappeared, people noticed. Quick detective work and a lot of luck revealed the elaborate details of how the Kimeses intended to scam Miss Silverman out of her estate. She has yet to be found. An even bigger mystery than Irene Silverman's whereabouts is why we are so slow to address the destructive potential of the psychopathic mother.
It is impossible to ponder the incarcerated female without appreciating the needs of her child, abandoned to sudden and terrifying freedom. Women's prisoner advocates do well to fight mandatory sentencing laws by tugging at lawmakers with poignant tales of kids who need mommy at home. Even prosecutors have a mother, and can appreciate the need for providing the child with an available parent figure. The Kimes case, however, provides needed perspectives to this issue. Indeed, the making of Kenneth Kimes, reputed con-man killer, highlights how prison not only protects the public from the psychopath mother, but more importantly, the child.
Is this so unusual? No. Many female prisoners are given to violence, and criminality that endures beyond release. But we persist with misconceptions about the female offender. Finding Jesus, for example, hasn't saved too many men from death row, but when convicted ax-killer Karla Faye Tucker repented, so many more were willing to receive her and to forgive her, as reformed. Somewhere back in Sante Kimes' past, you can bet her guile, charm and above all, her gender persuaded at least someone that it was in the interests of justice to send her home to take care of her son. And take care she did.
Sante Kimes had a history as a longtime repeat criminal offender. The younger Kimes was known as law abiding in his early years. When he was 18, Kenneth's friends were quoted describing him as terrified of his mother's release from prison. At that time, he was especially close with his father. But after her release from prison, and his father's death, Kenneth and his mother grew closer—to the point of partners.
Mrs. Kimes presents many of the qualities of a psychopath. The psychopath, given to impulsivity and spectacular failure, irresponsible sexuality, employment and parenting, dramatic superficial displays, and a natural proclivity to bend the rules, comprises only by some research estimates one-third of prison populations. But this portion earns particular notoriety; for the psychopath is proven to have an especially high rate of reoffense.
Even medical science has been slow to embrace female psychopathy, despite ever more rigorous exploration of the criminal mind. Only recently were the first studies released with validated the standards of psychopathy among women.
Why should psychiatry rethink maternal psychopathy? Because the natural connection that binds son to parent is so easily exploited by the psychopath, and especially well-suited to psychological control over loved ones. The same control of the psychopath within family relationships compels a wife to join her domineering husband in gruesome sadism through kidnapping, rape, and even murder. We witness the same emotionally dependent relationships in cult exploitation, violence, and suicide as well. The psychopath, with a brazen ability to con and manipulate, evades the legal radar screen. And no psychopath is more stealth than the mother, if for no other reasons than our own stereotypes about women and their capabilities.
How many incarcerated mothers with no history of drug abuse have had their parental rights challenged on the grounds that they are psychopaths? The answer from family court is an embarrassing trickle. The camouflage that the psychopath creates obscures the evil within. Psychiatrists, as well as the courts, need to ask questions of fitness to parents on the basis of suspected psychopathy a lot sooner. For psychopathy is not wholly a biological phenomenon. An abusive father may not exist. And Kenneth Kimes just may have grown up to be a most horrifying mama's boy.
