Imagine that a father threw his small children in the river to spite his ex-wife for leaving him and for winning custody. Would it occur to anybody to write a book blaming the ex-wife? Suggesting that she drove him to it because she nagged him to quit drinking and get a job and criticized his cooking? It doesn’t sound likely.
If roles are reversed, however, and it’s the wife who kills the kids to spite the husband, it is somehow perfectly ok to blame it on the nagging ex. It’s still impossible for way too many folks to accept that women have agency and can be vile shits of their own free will and not because some guy drove them to it.
Nancy Rommelmann wasted a crapload of time trying to construct a narrative of how Amanda Stott-Smith killed one of her children and almost killed another because she was a poor innocent victim of a nagging husband.
I don’t approve of nagging. I’m actually completely opposed to it. But no amount of marital bickering justifies murdering kids.
I have no idea why it’s so hard for some people to accept that there are women who do horrible things not because they are abused or made to do it but because they are bad, shitty people.
Another observation I have about the book is that these Stott-Smiths are not poor miserable bastards who grew up in a hut and never had a chance to find out how to take care of the basic aspects of civilized life. These are folks who inherit hundreds of thousands in stocks, have relatives who pay for their college and provide rent for years, etc. Yet they seem utterly unaware of small things like kids needing to be fed regularly or not throwing empty pizza boxes on the floor and leaving them there for months. It’s like they were not socialized into adulthood at all even though their parents are well-to-do, respectable, and not addicted.
It’s strange to see this degree of dysfunction (which eventually leads to drug addiction, alcoholism, and throwing kids into a river) in people who don’t come from any sort of hardship.
In short, it’s a creepy true crime book about creepy people written by a creepy author.