On July 17th, Judith Elizabeth Williams drove her 16-year-old son Adam up to Lookout Point on Mt. Diablo near the San Francisco Bay area and shot him once in the chest and then once in the head.  She then killed herself with the same pistol that she had only recently purchased.  Read about it here (San Francisco Chronicle, 7/25/09).

Why would a mother murder her own son in cold blood?  According to the article it was to keep him away from his father.  Adam's dad, Jim Williams had just moved back to California from Missouri and was spending more time with the young man than his mother liked.  Her brother Bill Collins, described Judith as "livid" about Jim's spending time with Adam.

As a practical matter, that amounted to only every other weekend, but apparently even that was too much.  Father and son were scheduled to take a trip to southern California in the near future.  Seemingly that fact caused Williams to set her murder-suicide plan in motion.

"She didn't want Adam to go to his dad," Williams' brother, Bill Collins, 55, of Palo Cedro (Shasta County) said Friday.

We've seen maternal gatekeeping before and unfortunately, we'll see it again.  Extreme forms of it are kidnapping, murder of the father and in this case murder of the child.  Less extreme forms include everything from deriding the father's efforts at childcare to false claims of abuse to police and courts.  Fortunately, although maternal gatekeeping is common, only a very small fraction of mothers do anything like what Judith Williams did.

Whatever form it takes, maternal gatekeeping is an effort to separate fathers (and others) from children.  Because overwhelmingly, children benefit from paternal care and attention, maternal gatekeeping should be seen as psychopathological and treated as such.  It is rarely in the best interest of a child to be denied access to his/her father.

For Adam Williams, though, it's too late for that.

Thanks to Pat for the heads-up.