Murder in Massachusetts

Anarchist

Neil was a simple man, insisted Patricia, adding later in court and to police that he was never abusive. By June 1998, Patricia had custody of Amanda and Christopher. They were fourteen and sixteen then. Neil thought it a good husbandly gesture to help Patricia, so they hired an attorney, sued James Robinson for custody, and won.

As the kids fell into their new lives in Lanesborough, Patricia said they started acting out about the time they both entered high school. "Amanda was fourteen going on forty. Both were unruly."

Their grades, moreover, plummeted during their high school years. They became arrogant, wise, and rebellious. Patricia tried her best to control them, but they rarely listened. Christopher, especially, was getting involved in some rather disturbing behavior. What might have seemed to be a misguided youth, disobedient and undirected, Christopher's actions spoke of a dark and menacing seed he harbored, indicating that he was mentally unstable. For example, Amanda later told police her brother once took a mouse, put it in a jar, filled the jar with lighter fluid, and lit it on fire. More than that, Christopher would go weeks without bathing. He wore all black, painted his hair different colors, and started cutting himself. He and a friend from school had once made a list, Amanda claimed, they referred to as the "death list." It consisted of teachers and other kids from school. He downloaded directions from the Internet on how to make a bomb. He called himself an "Anarchist."

"That's when he got in big trouble ... He got suspended," Amanda recalled during one of her interviews with police. "That's when Neil pulled him by his hair. Neil yelled at him. I don't remember Neil hitting him."

Amanda had her problems, too. In eighth grade, she was charged with assault after spiking a fellow classmate's drink with Tylenol. The kid was allergic to over-the-counter medicines and had a terrible reaction.

"My rules weren't working," Patricia said later, talking in court about this period of Christopher and Amanda's life. "So Neil decided he was going to take over disciplining. I intervened once in a while," she added, "but ... tried it and it wasn't working."

Neil took control, indeed. But from the beginning, Patricia said, he had little patience. Whereas in most blended families the stress of raising someone else's kids can be detrimental to a marriage, Patricia claimed she and Neil hardly ever had problems because of it, and agreed for the most part on how to punish the kids when they acted out.

"He was my everything," she said in court. That tension in the house the kids caused hadn't, in any way, she adamantly insisted, "affected the marriage."

Christopher became more "distant" and eventually "withdrew" from them, said Patricia. He didn't want to be part of the family atmosphere at all. The further along he got into high school the more despondent he became at home, which didn't sit well with Patricia.

But if the kids had changed since living in Lanesborough, so had Patricia.

"After she married Neil, the first two or three years, well, [she] had a very good relationship [with the family]," a family member later told me. "Then she just stopped associating with everyone, as if she was shut off from us. I don't know if it was by Neil or her. Up until today we have never known why. Nothing happened. It was so strange." There was no one event, in other words, that triggered the disengagement. "One day she was just out of our lives. Which meant, as soon as Patricia and Neil got custody of the kids, [we] stopped seeing them, too."

Patricia later explained that Neil, in the beginning, wanted to teach the kids the strong work ethic he had displayed in front of them. He believed he could, by example, show the kids that hard work paid off. Part of his desire to take the time to teach the kids his ways was rooted, Patricia asserted, in his quest to "relieve" her of "the stress" she was experiencing trying to discipline them herself.

No sooner had Neil and Patricia put their foot down, the kids' behavior got worse, not better.

During one period, Neil caught Amanda repeatedly smoking cigarettes in her room. So when simply telling her she wasn't allowed to smoke in the house didn't work, Neil grabbed his tool box, unhinged her bedroom door and hid it. Now there was an open portal into Amanda's room. Part of Neil's concern was that she was leaving ashes all over the place; he worried she'd burn the house down. Then Patricia and Neil found a bag of marijuana in her room. After smoking it with Neil, Patricia later admitted to police, they discarded the remainder of the bag and punished her again.

Another time, when Amanda disobeyed a direct order, Neil brought her outside, put a large aluminum rake in her hands, and told her to "re-grade" the gravel driveway before digging a ditch at the bottom of the driveway near Main Street.

This set a precedent with Amanda. She'd act out and get grounded—then she was forced to do some sort of physical labor as punishment. But when that stopped working, Patricia and Neil grounded her (she was sixteen) until she was eighteen. Two full years.

"Every time we let her off, she would turn around and do something else," Patricia said later in court. "She remained grounded throughout much of her high school years."