IN
A
SMALL
GEORGIA
TOWN, A
MOTHER
MURDERS
HER TWO
SONS—
AND SOME
VIEW IT AS
AN ACT OF
©Mimmo Jodice/Corbis
KINDNESS
26
science &spirit
may june 2003
by Jill Neimark
A TIME TO
KILL
IT’S
A QUIET
SATURDAY NIGHT
IN
GRIFFIN, GEORGIA — A
PEACEFUL VILLAGE OF SHADY
streets, rolling farmlands and cool
streams. A 64-year-old woman
enters a nursing home, walks up to
two men lying in their beds,
takes out a handgun, and
shoots them in the
head.
She returns to
the waiting room of
Sunbridge Care and
Rehabilitation, sits on a
couch and waits. “I did it,
I shot them,” she tells
police officer Joe
Hudson when he
arrives.
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27
Later, weeping, she begs another police officer, “I want you to
kill me.”
Carol Carr has just murdered her two sons, both of whom
were in the end stages of Huntington’s disease. This fatal,
hereditary neurological disorder burns away a person’s mind
and body, stealing their ability to perform the most basic functions. Carr’s second husband, Hoyt, had died of the condition,
as did his mother and sister. Hoyt’s brother killed himself when
he discovered he had inherited the illness as well.
Carr nursed Hoyt, a factory worker, through twenty years of
physical and mental deterioration. He died in 1995, unable to
move, swallow, or talk. By that time Carr’s oldest sons, Randy
CARR’S
ACT OF
DOUBLE HOMICIDE IS AS
GRUESOME AND FLAGRANT AS
AN EVENT OUT OF
GREEK
TRAGEDY.
and Andy, were showing signs of the disorder and she turned
her life over to caring for them. Her youngest son, James,
recalls that “Randy had it a lot longer, but when Andy got it
he progressed really fast. Trying to get both of them to a doctor was extremely hard. They never wanted to go into the
nursing home, but it got too hard to care for them. It’s
extremely difficult to transport somebody when they’re in
the later stages of Huntington’s.”
Carol Carr’s act of double homicide—Andy was 41, and
Randy 42—on the night of June 8, 2002, is as gruesome and
flagrant as an event out of Greek tragedy. And yet, on hearing
the circumstances of this woman’s life, it’s nearly impossible
not to sympathize. What can we say before the mind-numbing
reality of a woman who has witnessed three deeply loved family members wither before her eyes? Her own health, compromised by decades of stress, has endured a heart attack, ruptured spinal discs, and kidney problems.
And what of her youngest son, now thirty-eight, whose brothers are dead by his mother’s hand, and yet whose support for her
has been unwavering? James Scott organized rallies in support of
his mother. “My brothers had gone to probate court and signed
living wills saying they didn’t want to live in the state they
ended up in,” he says. “We all signed those wills.” However, in
Georgia, a living probate will only means that one does not
want to be put on life support or be subject to heroic measures
to prolong life. Scott’s brothers were not at that point yet.
Scott, who has one daughter with an ex-wife, lives alone. He
has never been tested for the Huntington’s gene but believes he
is in the early stages. “If a day came when I couldn’t take care
of myself,” he says, “and walk and talk and fish and hike and
do the things I like, then my life would already be over.” In the
past year, Scott’s health has deteriorated. “My blood pressure is
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science &spirit
may june 2003
up, I have heart trouble, I had the flu five times this winter, and
I’m just now getting over pinkeye.” Even so, he is a man without malice. “There’s a purpose for everything” he says. “God
has his reasons. You just take it day by day.”
Most of us don’t pause to question our moral truths—
we think of them like reflexes—fixed, automatic, and reliable.
Mothers should not murder their children. But in real life,
morality can become strangely taffylike. It stretches, it sticks. In
1998, four years before Carr killed her sons, they joined her for
an evening of reminiscing and then each took 50 tablets of the
tranquilizer Tranxene in an unsuccessful attempt to kill themselves. Phrases like “mercy killing” are invented for situations
like Carr’s, a moral point-of-no-return.
Andy and Randy’s double murder ushered in nearly a year of difficult legal
maneuvering, because the state of Georgia
does not allow mercy killings. Carr was
jailed and denied bond twice.
“The case was difficult for everyone,”
says Griffin Judicial Circuit District
Attorney William McBroom. “It’s certainly the toughest case I ever handled. This
is not your ordinary criminal case. Carol
Carr came in with no prior record. But
she killed two people. Some people were saying we ought to
hang her. Others were saying don’t prosecute.”
Most of Carr’s friends and the world at large, however, rallied around her. Carr faced two counts of felony murder and
two counts of malice murder. A murder conviction would have
put her in jail for the rest of her life. McBroom recommended
she be allowed to plead guilty to the lesser charges of assisted
suicide—a successful compromise. “You can’t just condone this
and let her walk away with no punishment,” he explains. “It
sends the wrong message. The next person that tries something
like this might not have noble motives. They might just do it
because they don’t want to be bothered, or they want the insurance money.”
The final sentence, in February of 2003, found Carr guilty
of violating a law that prohibits aiding in a suicide, and sentenced to five years in prison—on the condition that she could
never again live with her remaining son, James Scott, or be his
caretaker. The state of Georgia had only invoked that particular
law three times previously. “It’s a classic example of the old
legal adage that you should always temper justice with mercy,”
Carr’s lawyer, Lee Sexton, of Stockbridge, Georgia, said after
the decision. Her son James commented: “This disease is our
family curse, and my mother has suffered enough.”
“I could not imagine a better resolution than the one we
obtained,” says Sexton. I do think that Georgia and other
states that do not have a euthanasia statute are in dire need
of one. I find it remarkable that if I had a dog in the condition
Carol Carr’s children were in, I would be prosecuted for cruelty to animals if I did not euthanize the dog. But if a disease
is terminal and causes terrible suffering as it progresses, a
human does not have the right to die with dignity when
they choose.”
Carr’s was not the first such difficult Huntington’s case in
Georgia. In 1985, a woman named Glenda Caldwell began to
develop Huntington’s, which had killed her father. Afraid that
she had passed it on to her children, she killed her 19-yearold son, and tried to kill her daughter, Susan. “My brother
had gone out with friends,” Susan told the Atlanta JournalConstitution in a June 2002 interview. “He came home,
walked through the door, and she shot him three times. . .
I hated her. . . I was the prosecution’s star witness.” Her mother was sentenced to life in prison. Later, Caldwell forgave her
mother and in 1994 testified on her behalf in a re-trial; toward
the end of her life, the two grew extremely close. It’s easy to
understand Susan’s hate for her mother, and as easy to understand her love.
In 1988, Barbara Monroe of Smyrna, Georgia shot her
daughter, who suffered from cerebral palsy and epilepsy,
with a shotgun. Monroe told detectives she wanted “to put
Gail out of her misery.” Monroe pleaded guilty to voluntary
manslaughter and served five years of a twenty-year prison
sentence.
In 1994, Georgia physician Eva Carrizales was accused of
suffocating a premature baby with myriad disabilities. Nurses
said she had intentionally killed the infant, and a 1994 trial
resulted in a split jury. The prosecutor said, “I could not have
found twelve people of like minds.”
In Carr’s case, the legal conundrums were just as tough, but
the final sentence was in many ways an ingenious and merciful
compromise. “I feel the utmost sympathy for her,” says Ira
Byock, M.D., author of Dying Well, co-founder of Life’s End
Institute in Missoula, Montana, and a faculty member of the
Practical Ethics Center at the University of Montana. “It was
RIGHT
OR
an incredible tragedy, because she perceived that there was no
other way available to her to respond to her sons’ suffering.
I’ve seen and known others who felt similarly at a loss to
respond to the suffering of their loved ones.”
Byock sees diseases like Huntington’s, Alzheimer’s, and Lou
Gehrig’s disease, as “orphan conditions that are the ultimate
paradigms for human suffering.” These diseases leave only remnants of a human behind. “I think we in the helping professions
need to do everything possible using medicine and our own creative imaginations to alleviate suffering. I spend my days trying
to expand access to services for people like Mrs. Carr and her
sons, and the barriers to that are many. Our system focuses on
acute care and high-intensity life-prolonging care. And so there
are many thousands of patients across the country who feel
abandoned. This reflects an incredible lack of commitment on
our collective part to respond to basic human needs.” Perhaps,
speculates Byock, if Mrs. Carr had felt there were other options
for her sons, she would have chosen a different route. A number
of promising treatments are now being tested for Huntington’s.
Today, an estimated 2.7 million adult children with developmental disabilities live at home with a family caregiver—and
one in four live with a caregiver over sixty. Their numbers are
growing as medical technology advances. Yet when Congress
created the National Family Caregiver Support Program in
November 2000, it offered almost no aid to parents caring
for adult children.
Most of us reading Carol Carr’s story are safely ensconced
in lives and bodies that have not betrayed us so outrageously.
But her questions are still our questions. As Byock reminds us,
“When we suffer, we all present ourselves as patients. The etymology of the word patient means sufferer.” &
WRONG? Tell us What You Think
Moral dilemmas haunt the world of
medicine. We’d like to know how you
feel about some famous cases. These
particular cases focus on pregnancy
and childbirth:
• In February of 2003, Costa Rican
police arrested a man who had raped a
nine-year-old Nicaraguan girl. She was
four months pregnant at the time of
the arrest and her parents asked the
Nicaraguan government to allow their
daughter to have an abortion, even
though it is generally illegal in
Nicaragua. The pregnancy is high-risk
in one so young, and the girl said she
did not want to have a baby.
• In 1999, doctors used genetic
screening to select a test-tube baby
from twelve embryos created by invitro fertilization. The selected baby
had the right cells for the child to act
as a donor for his older sister, who
was six years old and suffering from a
rare, inherited, and fatal disorder called
Fanconi anemia. The baby boy, Adam
Nash, was born August 29, 2000.
Cells were collected from his umbilical
cord and infused into his older sister.
• In May of 2002 workers sorting
garbage in Storm Lake, Iowa, found the
body of a newborn boy, dismembered
by the sorting machines. The body was
so damaged it could not be identified.
Police subpoenaed the records of
Planned Parenthood in town to obtain
the names of women who had received
positive pregnancy tests in the previous
nine months, but Planned Parenthood
refused to comply with the subpoeana.
• Last year, two white parents gave
birth to black twins after a mistake at
a fertility clinic in England. The error
at the fertility clinic could lead to a
court battle over legal paternity of the
children. Similarly, in Holland in 1993,
a white woman named Wilma Stuart
gave birth to dark-skinned twins. DNA
tests showed the hospital had mistakenly mixed sperm from her husband
with that of a black man from the
Dutch Antilles. She kept the twins. &
Send your answers to:
respond@science-spirit.org
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