CRIME CORNER
May 8, 2021
We’ve all complained about our mothers or mother figures at one time or another, but your’s hopefully aren’t as bad as some of these infamous mothers! With that being said, be sure to treat your mother right after she watches these movies and gets some ideas…
This one may be the odd one out here, considering the mother isn’t the evil one. It’s eight-year-old Rhoda Penmark who was born with a silver spoon in her mouth, always wearing pink dresses and her hair in pigtails. But her mother, Christine, is suspicious of her perfect daughter. She seems to know things a little girl shouldn’t, and there’s mysterious deaths that keep revolving around Rhoda’s presence. How far will Christine go to protect her daughter from travelling down the terrifying road she’s on?
“Mother, we didn’t really have our lunch,” admits Rhoda, “because Claude Daigle was drowned.”
I’m sure everyone is familiar with the story of Marion Crane’s unfortunate fate when she decided to stay at the Bates Motel after stealing a large sum of money. While she may be the victim in all of this, Psycho enthralled audiences for decades because of the strange relationship Norman Bates had with his mother, which is based off of serial killer Ed Gein’s unhealthy devotion with his mother.
Both Bates’s and Gein’s mental health declined after their manipulative mothers died, which pushed them to cross-dressing to act like them. They even refused to change certain set ups in their homes due to knowing their mothers wouldn’t approve of their rearranging things, along with it being an odd form of mourning. Obviously, Bates and Gein went to the extreme with their devotion by killing women who piqued their interest, knowing their mothers should be the only woman they love in life.
“Well,” says Bates, “a boy’s best friend is his mother.”
One of the biggest female lead names in Hollywood history is that of Joan Crawford’s, but the movie star was devastated when she heard she was unable to have children. Despite her claim to fame, Crawford was denied by adoption agencies due to being divorced twice and a single working person, but when her boyfriend — who happened to be a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lawyer — convinced an agency to let her adopt, life wasn’t as pleasant as one would hope.
While Crawford made a lifelong dream come true when she adopted twins, she saw her children as competition for the spotlight. Prone to drinking and lashing out towards her children over the smallest of things, Crawford made her life a living hell for her household, which is all the more frightening since these are supposedly based on true events.
“Why can’t you give me the respect I’m entitled to?” Crawford asks her adopted daughter. “Why can’t you treat me like I would be treated by a stranger on the street?”
To which her daughter replies with, “Because I’m not one of your fans!”
Deemed as “America’s most hated mom,” Casey Anthony enraged the nation’s public eye through her consistent denial of being responsible for Caylee’s, her daughter’s, death. Caylee was raised by her grandparents, and her grandmother was the first to report her missing, thus beginning a series of lies coming from Casey’s mouth.
Prosecuting Casey Anthony goes in depth with just how complicated this case was, despite much of the evidence pointing to it being Casey. Of course, there were many twists and turns, and the result of the trial shocked news watchers all around the U.S.
“Nobody in my family is on my side,” Casey said on a recorded call from jail. “That’s all they care about now, finding Caylee.”
Dee Dee Blanchard claimed her daughter, Gypsy, had a myriad of illnesses shortly after her birth. First it was sleep apnea, then leukemia, muscular dystrophy, and others that lead to Gypsy using a feeding tube, breathing machine, many medications, and enduring a few surgeries. Dee Dee was devoted to providing the best care for Gypsy and her many ailments, always wanting the best for her before one of Gypsy’s illnesses inevitably kills her daughter.
The only issue is Gypsy was born perfectly healthy. Despite her mother’s claims, she could walk, talk, and wasn’t the age she claimed she was. The surgeries and medications caught up too and resulted in Gypsy’s teeth rotting and needing replaced along with other issues. This encouraged Gypsy, with her boyfriend’s help, to murder Dee Dee to finally be free of her hold.
“For a long time I believed, like, we were best friends, and when I was younger she was my best friend … other than my stuffed animals,” says Gypsy in an interview with 20/20. “I saw her as an angel that can do no wrong.”