ment meeting: awoman had cut the throat of one child and had attempted to kill another. When asked why she had done it she answered that she longed to die because she also previously had cut the throat of a child.95 Although more research is needed, not least on the crimes in the countryside, most of the cases mentioned in research seem to be in or close to cities. Aware of this type of crimes Anu Koskivirta in her study of homicide in Eastern Finland found no such murders committed by women. She explains the lack of murders: However, Koskivirta found a murder featuring one of the ideas raised here. The belief that a murdered child certainly would be saved and go to heaven could be present also when explicit longing to be executed was not expressed. The drunken Hannu Leivo in Iisalmi in 1807 killed his daughter Benedicta rather than his wife Marketta, which he originally had planned to murder. As the child would not need Absolution to go to heaven, he decided to murder her instead.97 There are cases and research that point to the murder of another woman’s child as a means for women to take revenge.98 Various ends, such as revenge and a quick and safe way to heaven, should not necessarily be seen as mutually excluding. Women could also kill children of other women to get executed. This could for example occur in gaols or prisons. There were four women in Copenhagen between 1714 and 1759 imprisoned for a long period eventually murdering the children of other inmates in order to be executed instead of imprisonment and one mid–eighteenth–century case in Stockholm.99 Also others, such as childminders, could kill a child because they had none themselves. It is likely that the rural community of eastern Finland and the kinship network there protected women better than urban life from loneliness, insecurity, and exploitation – factors that are regarded as particularly instrumental in creating a fertile soil for suicide murder.96 thecrimes 95 Wedberg 1944 p 105. 96 Koskivirta 2003 p 48. 97 Koskivirta 2003 p 163. On the motive of murdering a child as retaliation against a spouse, ”Spouse revenge filicide”, see e g Lambie 2001 p 77. 98 See Cohen, DA1993 p 73, Odhelius 1842 p 79, Shoemaker 2004 p 169, Krogh 2012 p 26. 49
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