The Sociopaths Among Us #3: Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome

People sometimes ask, “Where do you get ideas for stories?” One place is when I read a small item, something like, “Man Nails Girlfriend’s Fish to Floor” (real headline) and think, what the heck is going on here?

The way I found this story started with a very small item in the Oregonian. A mother and her 14-year-old daughter had been found dead in their home in Vancouver, Washington. Very little was known, aside from that foul play, or foul play by an outside party, was not suspected. But the piece didn’t even go that far, it seemed more concerned with handwringing about how Laurie Recht, 54, had been unemployed and had fibromyalgia, how daughter Rebecca had cerebral palsy, how life was so very hard and now they were gone and the end. And I thought, how does that make any sense?

Within ten minutes of reading the piece, I was at my computer, Googling “Laurie Recht.” I have no idea whether the Oregonian reporter did the same, but if she did, she failed to mention that two decades earlier Recht had been convicted in New York of filing false claims of being the victim of a hate crime: A camera in Recht’s apartment building had captured her drawing swastikas on her own door. This was a glaring red flag, one that would eventually lead to two dead bodies in a drab rental house 3,000 miles away.

People will almost always be shocked by a murder-suicide - Recht’s closest neighbor said the deaths “came out of the blue.” As someone who has written about sociopathic and criminal behavior, I am quite sure very little comes out of the blue. It certainly did not here, as it became clear Laurie was suffering from both Munchausen syndrome and Munchausen by proxy syndrome (more recently given the name Factitious Disorder Imposed on Self). As I wrote in “Sacrificing Rebecca”:

Munchausen syndrome is one of the more devastating and difficult-to-treat psychiatric disorders. Typically, the afflicted feign illness or trauma in order to gain attention and sympathy. Closely related is Munchausen by proxy, or MBP, in which a parent (almost always the mother) fabricates or induces illnesses in the child, again for the purposes of gaining sympathy. As detailed by an MBP website, “Cases have been reported in which children developed destructive skeletal changes, limps, mental retardation, brain damage and blindness from symptoms caused by the parent.” Based on the evidence accumulated since her death, Laurie almost certainly suffered from both Munchausen syndrome and MBP.

Because most people do not lie, they do not expect that others lie to them, or not until the stories they’re being told get seriously out of whack with reality. Which, in Laurie and Rebecca’s case, they did. As you will hear in the audio, officials at Rebecca’s school were panicked about what Laurie was doing and might do to Rebecca. It was too late. In an effort to be kind; to accede to Laurie’s ever more outrageous demands, they had unwittingly placed Rebecca in her mother’s crosshairs. But it’s also more complicated and sadder than that: Rebecca was on the cusp of young womanhood and likely would - despite all the pain and harm imposed on her by her mother - soon be spreading her wings, she might fly away, and this, for Laurie, would not do; she would clip those wings the only way she knew how. This from a woman who in 2005 had told a newspaper, of Rebecca, “‘I want her to have a chance for a real future”…