ALWAYS IN OUR HEARTS: THE STORY OF AMY GROSSBERG, BRIAN
PETERSON, AND THE BABY THEY DIDN'T WANT
EXCERPT: It had been a night of mind-boggling decisions that would leave people in Wyckoff and around the country simply amazed. Nothing that Amy and Brian did made sense, from the summer when they hid her pregnancy, to the night they checked into the motel, to the morning after, when they pretended everything was normal. Until the public had heard of Amy and Brian, the perception of mothers charged with killing their infants was that they tended to be young, poor, probably minority, alone, and uneducated girls. While that was an accurate portrayal for years, it no longer fits. The experts say more and more of the young women charged with killing their newborns are upwardly mobile, educated, and middle class, and their greatest fear is to have their good life derailed by a baby. The U.S. Justice Department estimates that 250 newborns die at the hands of their mothers each year. While the availability of birth control and abortion have lowered that number since 1970, experts say there are likely dozens of infant corpses that are never found. Half of all 17-year-old girls in the United States have had intercourse, and each year almost 500,000 teenagers give birth. Of the teen pregnancies, three in every four are unplanned. While the teen birthrate in America declined 8 percent from 1991 to 1995, teenage mothers are still much less likely than older women to receive timely prenatal care and are less likely to gain the recommended weight during their pregnancy. Park Dietz is a longtime FBI consultant and widely renowned California psychiatrist who was hired by the Delaware prosecutors to study Amy's actions, but he never got to interview her. He said Amy and Brian will change how the public looks at the crime and mark the beginning of the "yuppification" of baby deaths. "It's not time yet to have a baby," he said of the cute and promising cheerleader types charged with killing their infants. "I have so much to live for. It's much clearer to have no loose ends." But why? Every question about Amy and Brian on the streets of Wyckoff, every question in the hallways of their high school and at their respective colleges, every question on talk radio programs around the country, started with that word. WHY COULDN'T Amy and Brian tell their parents? And if not a parent, why not a friend or a counselor? This may be the easiest question to answer, but the most difficult to understand. "She's trying not to shame their family's image," said Neil Kaye, the Delaware psychiatrist. "The whole family, in her mind, would be disgraced by this, not just her. Amy knew her parents saw her as perfect, and she just couldn't break that image for her mom." Dr. Janice Ophoven, a pediatric forensic pathologist in Minnesota who assisted in Brian's defense and the mother of two twentysomething boys, said too many parents unknowingly send a dangerous message to their children, "You are my success story. You cannot fail because it is not you failing, it is me failing." The public and the media latched on so strongly to the case because of the backgrounds of Amy and Brian, everything and everyone they had at their disposal that they ignored in favor of a trash Dumpster. But the experts say what made Amy and Brian unique wasn't their upper-middle-class opportunities, but the fact that Amy did not go through her unwanted pregnancy alone. Brian stuck by her side from conception to delivery, and that was most unusual. "The unique nature of the case was that the mother and father were present," said Dr. Phillip Resnick, a psychiatry resident at University Hospital of Cleveland and a professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. When the defense lawyers went looking for an authority to help them explain what had happened inside room 220 of the Comfort Inn and why, Resnick was one of the first they hired. "That's what made it extraordinary. The affluence has been around. This was the twosome." It was being a twosome that made keeping the secret easier for Amy and Brian, because they had each other to lean on. Amy wasn't alone. She wouldn't tell, and he agreed not to tell, either, because that would betray her. It was loyal and chivalrous up to a point. Then it became stupid. Until 1969 child murders had been lumped together as infanticides. That year, at a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in Miami Beach, Resnick coined a new term: neonaticide, the killing of a newborn in the first twenty-four hours of life. "There is no crime more difficult to comprehend than the murder of a child by his own parents," Resnick said at that meeting. Until Amy and Brian came along, the public had one perception of neonaticide: "The majority of neonaticidal mothers are unwed, poor, and have denied or concealed the pregnancy, or both, since conception," Kaye wrote in a psychiatric review of neonaticide in 1990. "They frequently give birth alone and dispose of the baby as if it were an abortion that occurred 'too late.' " The fathers, whether they knew their girlfriends were pregnant or not, are nowhere in sight when the mothers are charged. But Brian changed that. He was there to the end, Amy's white knight, refusing to leave her side. Experts who researched two hundred years of records found not one case where mother and father conspired to kill their baby. Whether they actually conspired or not in that two-hour motel stay, this pair of educated and well-off teenagers from northern New Jersey changed the face of an entire crime. "The cost of going to the parents is shame, loss of approval, disappointing the parents after all they've worked to achieve, shattering the dream of a family," said Dietz. "Those costs are perceived as high." WHY WOULD TWO bright teenagers with so much formal education, money, abortion clinics nearby, so many options at their fingertips, do nothing about an unwanted pregnancy? "What we consider to be options are not viewed as options to them," Ophoven said. "All the things Amy could have done would have exposed her to what she considered high risk." That might explain why she had backed out of her abortion appointments. "Street smarts" is a term often associated with inner-city children. Rarely is it used to describe children in towns like Wyckoff. Those children, it goes, are "book smart," though some are certainly more wise to the world than others. A year after Amy and Brian discarded their baby, a 16-year-old boy from the urban streets of Paterson, New Jersey, helped his 14-year-old girlfriend deliver their baby at home. Instead of panicking and discarding the baby, he wrapped the newborn girl in a blanket and took her to nearby Barnert Hospital. Even though he lied and told the nurse he had found the baby in a park a few blocks away, the baby was safe and was cared for. Less educated, but more street smart. A pregnant teenager in New York City might not think twice about going for an abortion or visiting Planned Parenthood. That's life. There is no shame in it. But for Amy that would have meant making an important life-altering decision by herself, sneaking away, and looking over her shoulder constantly to make sure no one who knew her was in sight. And she would have had to do it without discussing it first with Mom and Dad. She had never done that. She couldn't. Nancy Eisenhower, the teacher from Indian Hills High School, said she's lost track of how many students have come to her with family crises, upset about a fight their parents had or wondering why they feel alone, instead of going to their parents first, which is what she encourages. "It's a good idea for parents to be explicit about what 'trouble' means," said Gloria Feldt, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Is trouble flunking a test? A speeding ticket? Getting caught with a six-pack of beer? "If you drink, don't be afraid to call us to come pick you up," Feldt said. "The same is true when parents talk to kids about sex. We'd rather you wait for sex until you're older, but know that you can come to us for help." But simply saying it is not enough anymore. "It's more than just a line," Resnick said. "Parents need to create an ambiance at home where their children are comfortable coming to them." |
How The Book Was Born:
Doug Most on the writing of ALWAYS IN OUR HEARTS
When the last television crew went home and the legal roundtables moved on to the next scandal, I took a week off, a step back. It was then I realized that while everyone, myself included, had been fascinated with what Amy and Brian did, little attention had been paid to why they did it. I wrote this book, Always in Our Hearts, to fill that void, to explore that question. Every year, newborns die at the hands of their parents. Hundreds of babies that never have a chance of riding a bike or graduating from high school or falling in love. Some of these babies are found in trash cans, some are found in rivers, others are discovered hidden in the bedrooms where they were born, and many more are simply never found at all. But it wasn't until 1996-until Amy and Brian-that this crime called neonaticide finally grabbed the attention of the American public and instilled fear into them. Until Amy and Brian came along, we perceived dead, abandoned babies as a problem only of lower-income teenage girls with no support systems to help them through a crisis and a misguided set of values. And tragically, that didn't bother us much. Amy and Brian gave a new face to the crime: white, upper middle class, suburban, and college-bound. But, most importantly, they committed this crime as a couple. Their families seemed tightly knit, their friends, supportive, and because of all that, everything Amy and Brian did made us wonder if other teenagers like them might do the same thing. And that bothered us. Writing this book, the complete story in one telling as opposed to in fragments, was, in a way, cathartic for me. Researching it, I learned just how tortured Amy was by her pregnancy. The letters she wrote to Brian, never seen until now, showed a girl terrified and lost, with no sense of the situation in which she found herself. Reading them, I wished I could have been there to help her realize that her mother, in the end, would have offered her love and support. This was hardly the first tragedy stemming from teenagers and parents failing to communicate, and hundreds more will follow every day. But perhaps it was the most extreme example of what can happen when the bond between parent and child breaks down. Amy and Brian's saga is a new variant of an old story. It's a story, it seems, that must be told over and over until parents and their children finally learn to talk to each other, not just about the easy subjects of school, friends, and sports, but about the awkward topics such as sex. Is my son buying condoms? Is my daughter on The Pill? If parents can make their children comfortable talking to them about these issues, maybe their children will be more comfortable coming to them when they're in real trouble. What made the book challenging for me was that I saw much of myself in Brian. I grew up in a similar setting. I was a mediocre student. I played sports. I also had a serious high school girlfriend, and my only concern was her absolute happiness. I was constantly putting myself in Brian's shoes and wondering at what point I would have stopped protecting my girlfriend's demand for secrecy and betrayed her trust. It's easy for me, and for others, to say they would never have let things get as far as Brian and Amy did, but no one knows for certain. In writing this book, I learned that parents in these affluent suburbs openly acknowledge their children are raised in cocoons. That surprised me, but it's what many of the parents want. It's also the reason so many refused to talk to me. The sooner they could put this story behind them, the better. That is the attitude that leads to tragedies like Amy and Brian's. And there will be another. I didn't write Always in Our Hearts to answer the question of why this happened. Only two people will ever know what happened in that motel room more than two years ago. I wrote it to start a dialogue, to help parents recognize the critical need for open, honest, supportive communication with their children. To contact the Author, Doug Most, with questions or to chat: EMAIL |