One winter day in 1961, in Newark Valley, New York, the young couple Tim and Waneta Hoyt experienced a horrible tragedy. Their first child, Eric, who was not yet three months old, suddenly died. The precise causes of infant mortality are sometimes mysterious, and doctors could find no obvious explanation for Eric’s death—he had simply stopped breathing. The following year, Waneta gave birth to another boy, James. But he, too, abruptly died. It was only after the couple lost a third infant, Julie, in 1968, that Tim and Waneta turned to Alfred Steinschneider, a medical researcher in Syracuse who specialized in Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, or S.I.D.S.
1961年的某个冬日，对于纽约州纽华克的年轻夫妇蒂姆·霍伊特和华内塔·霍伊特来说，是悲痛的一天。他们的大儿子——未满三个月大的埃里克猝死。一直以来对于婴儿死亡原因的确切诊断都是一个难题，这次也未能例外。医生无法断定埃里克的死因——他就只是简单地停止了呼吸而已。第二年，华内塔生下了他们的第二个孩子詹姆斯。不幸的是，第二个孩子也突然死亡。1968年，当这对夫妇的第三个孩子朱莉，因为不明原因猝死之后。这对悲痛的夫妇找到了锡拉丘兹的阿尔弗雷德·斯坦因施耐德博士，他专门研究婴儿猝死综合症( Sudden Infant Death Syndrome )，简称S.I.D.S。
After examining the case history, Dr. Steinschneider concluded that S.I.D.S. could be genetic, which would explain the deaths of multiple infants in the same family. Waneta gave birth to two more children, Molly and Noah, both of whom died while under Steinschneider’s care. In 1972, Steinschneider published a landmark paper in the journal Pediatrics, in which he argued that S.I.D.S. could be hereditary, and was related to sleep apnea. The paper was a great success, and sales of sleep monitors—which Steinschneider recommended—took off. For twenty years, the Hoyts, who were described in the paper simply as “the ‘H’ family,” served as a sad exemplar in medical literature.
斯坦因施耐德博士经过实例分析认为，SIDS是可以遗传的，这也可以解释为什么在同一个家庭中会有多个婴孩猝死。华内特后来又生下了两个孩子——茉莉和诺亚，尽管博士悉心照料，但是这两个孩子依然没能逃脱死亡魔咒。1972年，斯坦因施耐德博士在《儿科学》杂志发表了一篇里程碑式的论文。他在论文中写到SIDS是一种遗传性疾病，和婴儿睡眠窒息有关。论文引起了强烈反响，而斯坦因施耐德博士所推荐的睡眠监视器的销量也大幅上涨。二十年以来，霍伊特一家（也就是论文中所提到的“H”一家）的遭遇，也成为了医学界的悲剧范本。
However, in the early nineties, a district attorney in upstate New York, who had been tipped off by a suspicious forensic pathologist, took a closer look at Steinschneider’s paper and opened an investigation. As Richard Firstman and Jamie Talan recount in their book, “The Death of Innocents,” under questioning by police in 1994, Waneta Hoyt confessed that her children had died not from S.I.D.S. but, rather, because she had smothered them. She later recanted this confession. But, in 1995, she was convicted of killing all five children and sentenced to seventy-five years in prison.
然而，在九十年代的早些时候，纽约州北部偏僻地区的一名地方律师在一个颇富质疑精神的法庭病理学者的指导下，重新阅读了斯坦因施耐德博士的论文，并展开了一系列调查。理查德·福斯特曼和杰米·塔兰两人将调查结果写进《无辜者之死》一书中。1994年，在警察的审讯中，华内塔·霍伊特承认她的孩子并非死于SIDS，而是她亲手闷死的。然而随后，她又推翻了自己的口供。1995年，华内塔因为杀害自己的五个孩子被定罪，并判处七十五年徒刑。
On the surface, this case might seem unrelated to the story of Amy Bishop, which I recount in a piece in the current issue of the magazine (“A Loaded Gun”). One theme of the Bishop saga is the dangerously formidable power of parental love, which seems a far cry from Waneta Hoyt, who dispatched her own children, one by one. But the two cases share a common, troubling thread: neighbors, police officers, and even the medical establishment may be more likely to overlook glaringly suspicious behavior when the perpetrator of that behavior is a woman.
这不禁使我联想起我在之前的文章《装满子弹的枪》中所提到的艾米·毕晓普的案件。毕晓普故事的其中一个主题是：来自父母的关爱有时是十分危险的；而在本案中，华内塔残忍地接连杀害自己的五个孩子——从表面上看起来，这两起事件毫无联系。然而这两起案件有一个共同点，那就是无论是邻居，警察，甚至医学工作者，都非常容易忽视那些原本是非常明显的可疑行为——而这仅仅是因为犯罪者是女性。
In the aftermath of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, last December, there has been much public discussion about the necessity of greater vigilance regarding mental-health issues—about our ability to recognize red flags early and get potentially dangerous individuals into treatment. It’s a reassuring notion, and less divisive, certainly, than calls for greater gun control or for censoring video games. But, as the Bishop story makes clear, this kind of early-warning system is often difficult to institute in practice. Amy Bishop shot her own brother, after all. She punched a woman at a pancake restaurant. She stood accused of mailing a bomb to one of her supervisors at Harvard. Red flags don’t get much brighter than that. Yet, nobody stepped in. Why not?
去年十二月，桑迪·霍克小学的屠杀之后，人们开始对心理健康提高警惕——要及时发现个体的潜在危险行为并且促使他们接受治疗。这比起要求更大范围的枪支管制和更为严格的游戏分级审查显然要可靠的多。然而毕晓普案件的发生却告诉我们，这种预警机制其实很难实施。艾米·毕晓普曾经射杀自己的亲生弟弟，她在一家煎饼店里对另一个女人拳打脚踢，她甚至曾经被指控给她在哈佛大学的一名导师邮寄炸弹——难道这一切还不足以构成“潜在危险行为”吗？然而事实却是没有任何人试图阻止毕晓普或者给予心理治疗。这是为什么呢？
One answer, which I explore in the piece, is the role that collective denial can play, not just in families but in communities and local institutions, like police departments. But another answer may lie in Bishop’s gender. In a 1998 article about gender bias in the criminal-justice system, Larissa MacFarquhar, reviewing two books about female killers, observes, “The message that emerges from this collection of tales is clear enough: be a woman, act like a woman, and you may blithely strew your neighborhood with bloody axes and severed heads, since the chances are that you will get away with murder.”
其中一个原因，无疑是“集体否认”的作用，不仅仅是家庭方面，包括社区、地方机关都不认为毕晓普会犯罪。但是另一个问题也许在于毕晓普的性别。1998年拉丽莎·麦克法夸尔（Larissa MacFarquhar）在阅读了两本关于女性犯罪者的著作之后提出了刑事司法体系中的性别歧视问题，她指出“这一系列的故事清楚地告诉我们，只要你是个充满了女人味的女人，你就可以轻松愉快地割破邻居的喉管，并且有很大的几率免于谋杀指控。”
In her article, MacFarquhar relates gruesome tales of so-called Black Widows (women who murder their husbands or lovers) and Angels of Death (women who kill those placed in their professional care). These women often skirt suspicion and kill prolifically because it doesn’t occur to the cops until much, much too late that a female could be capable of such a thing. In retrospect, the crimes seem gallingly obvious: Genene Jones, an Angel of Death who worked as a pediatric nurse in Texas, is believed to have murdered as many as forty-six children before authorities caught up with her, in 1983. But as the murders are actually being committed, investigators prove far too ready to attribute the mounting body count to accidents, medical error, or a male perpetrator.
文中麦克法夸尔提到了令人毛骨悚然的“黑寡妇”（杀害丈夫或恋人的女性）和“白衣死神”的故事。在这些故事中女性犯罪者往往制造多起命案，在事发很久以后才会被警察注意，原因是警察总是认为女人是做不到这种事情的。然而当我们回头再看这些案件，其实有些证据的指向已经十分明显了。比如在“白衣死神”案中的珍妮·琼斯（Genene Jones），她是德克萨斯州的一名儿科护士，曾先后杀害她护理过的46名婴孩。在她1983年被控谋杀之前，调查者曾将这些事件归咎于意外、医疗事故、以及其他男性嫌疑犯。
The detection of crime, as MacFarquhar notes, is “one of the most stubborn redoubts of male chauvinism.” Women have fought to undo the patriarchal notions of gentle femininity that in the past have excluded them from suffrage, employment, and combat roles in the military. But in the criminal-justice system, they may still be construed as lacking in the moral and physical agency that is necessary to carry out a violent crime.
正如麦克法夸尔所说，该案的犯罪调查员是“最顽固的大男子主义者”。一直以来，人们总是认为女性具有阴柔娇弱的性格特点。所以在选举、就业、参军等各个方面将女性排除在外，而在刑事司法体系的角度，人们还是据此认为女性不具有犯罪所需的精神力和行动力，而将女性从嫌犯名单中剔除。
Consider the case of Karla Homolka, a young Ontario woman. In 1991, she married an accountant, Paul Bernardo. They were an attractive, apparently happy couple, but, in 1993, Canadian authorities began to suspect Bernardo in a string of unsolved rapes. Investigators also linked Bernardo to the recent rape and murder of two local schoolgirls. When Homolka was questioned by police, she informed them that her husband was indeed responsible for the crimes, and that he had beaten her savagely and forced her to become an accomplice. Homolka made a sympathetic witness—a middle-class white woman who worked at a veterinary clinic and had been battered by her domineering spouse. She had also suffered a recent tragedy: in 1991, her fifteen-year old sister, Tammy, had died after she passed out from drinking too much champagne at a Christmas party and choked on her own vomit.
我们再来看看卡拉·霍穆尔卡（Karla Homolka）一案。1991年，这个年轻的安大略女子嫁给了一名会计保罗·博纳多，他们的婚姻生活非常甜蜜。可是1993年，加拿大当地警方开始怀疑博纳多涉嫌一系列强奸未遂事件。调查人员还认为博纳多与当时发生的两起强奸并谋杀学龄女孩的案件有关。卡拉接受审讯时声称，她的丈夫正是这一系列案件的主谋，他暴力迫使卡拉加入犯罪行动，使自己成为共犯。就这样，卡拉·霍穆尔卡，一个中产阶级的白人女兽医，被自己专横的丈夫暴力以对的悲惨遭遇赢得了舆论同情。这个女子还有着悲惨的过去，1991年她15岁的妹妹塔米，由于在圣诞聚会中喝下了过量香槟被自己的呕吐物窒息而离世。
Because Homolka had known about her husband’s crimes and played some role in them, prosecutors could not offer her full immunity. But they struck a plea bargain in which she agreed to testify against Bernardo in exchange for a light sentence. In assessing her culpability, Canadian investigators were reportedly influenced by a paper, written by Roy Hazelwood, an F.B.I. profiler, called “Compliant Victims of the Sexual Sadist.” It was only after Homolka’s deal was in place that she provided a fuller confession, explaining that she had not merely been a witness to Bernardo’s crimes but an active participant as well. Home videos that showed Homolka’s role in the sexual assaults to be anything but forced surfaced not long afterward. And it ultimately emerged that Tammy’s death was not an accident: Homolka had drugged her sister with an animal tranquilizer that she had stolen from work, then she and Bernardo had raped her.
由于霍穆尔卡目击了自己丈夫的暴行并参与了犯罪，检察人员无法认定她无罪，但是检察人员保证，只要卡拉愿意出庭担任她丈夫的污点证人，就可以减轻量刑。据称加拿大司法机关在量刑时参考了FBI分析员罗伊·哈兹伍德的一篇题为《性虐待中顺从的受害者》的报告。然而，一切尘埃落定之后，卡拉公开承认了自己的全部罪行。她并不仅仅是丈夫暴力胁迫的顺从受害者，而是整场犯罪的积极参与者。后来的家庭录像清楚地反映出了卡拉在性暴力中的角色，甚至还清楚地表明，塔米的死并非意外——卡拉从诊所窃得兽用镇定剂，向自己的妹妹下毒，随后她和她的丈夫，一起强奸了塔米。
To be sure, women are less apt to commit crimes—especially violent crimes—than men are; that has long been an accepted criminological fact. In recent decades, the “gender gap” in crime has narrowed somewhat, however, and there are a number of theories that might account for that change. Some believe that women are committing more crimes than they have in the past, but others argue that women are simply being investigated and arrested more often, as cops gradually come to terms with the concept of a female criminal.
一直以来，犯罪学传统观点都认为，在犯罪，尤其是暴力犯罪的倾向性方面，女性确实弱于男性。最近的十几年来，这个犯罪的性别鸿沟似乎变窄了，为数不少的理论和事实从某种程度上证明了这一点。一些人认为现在的女性犯罪数量高于往年，但是另有一些人认为实际的犯罪数量并没有增多，只是警察重新认识了女性犯罪，所以有更多的犯罪事实被发现了而已。
Still, when you look at penalty statistics, it seems undeniable that our justice system remains warped by some measure of gender bias. In 1987, the year the Massachusetts State Police ruled that the death of Seth Bishop was an accident, twenty-two per cent of people arrested for “serious crimes” in the United States were women. But women were only ten per cent of those convicted of such crimes—and only five per cent of those imprisoned. A recent law-review article described the persistence of certain “chivalric norms,” which might explain the disproportionately low number of women who receive the death penalty in this country. (Only twelve women have been executed in the United States since 1976, as opposed to thirteen hundred and eight men.)
事实上，查阅刑事犯罪数据时不难发现，性别差异依然存在。1987年，当马塞诸塞州警方认定赛斯·毕晓普死于意外的那一年，因为严重犯罪行为被逮捕的嫌犯有22%为女性，然而只有其中的10%被定罪，服刑的女性更是只占有5%。最近的某篇法律报道认为，这个国家中女性犯罪者被处以死刑的概率过低的原因，或许是某种对于骑士精神的贯彻。（1976年以来，美国共有1308男性被处以死刑，而女性仅为12人）。
If a bias in favor of women is statistically obvious in the prosecution of crimes, there is likely a similar bias in the investigation of wrongdoing. This claim is harder to substantiate, of course—there is no way to accurately quantify the number of potential crimes and suspects that law enforcement opts not to pursue. But one useful counterfactual exercise would be to consider the events surrounding the death of Seth Bishop, on December 6, 1986, and wonder how things might have played out had the perpetrator been his brother rather than his sister. Would the police have accepted the notion that the shooting was an accident due to incompetence with a gun? If a young man had fled the scene of a shooting, brandished a shotgun in an effort to commandeer a vehicle, then ended up in an armed standoff with two police officers, would the cops have been so quick to release him without charges? Would officials have believed the explanation, which the Bishop parents still maintain, that this behavior was simply the product of “shock”? MacFarquhar points out that one feminist critique of gender bias in the treatment of violence is that it can “infantilize” women: “In supposing that a woman can’t be truly responsible for her violent acts, we are treating her as if she was a child.”
如果在案件起诉方面有如此明显的对女性的偏袒，那么我们有理由相信在案件调查的过程中也或多或少存在着这种不公。当然这种说法很难证实——因为我们无法去计算有多少潜在犯罪没有收到法律追究。但是1986年12月6日的赛斯·毕晓普之死也许能够说明一点问题——如果当时被怀疑的是赛斯的哥哥，而不是她的姐姐艾米·毕晓普，事情究竟会怎样？警察们是否仍然认为这只是一个没有资格使用枪支的小孩的一次走火？如果挥舞着枪支从枪杀的现场逃离，并试图劫持一辆交通工具逃跑，最后被两个全副武装的警察截住的是个年轻男孩，那么警察还会那么快就放弃指控并将他释放吗？那些官员，包括毕晓普的父母，是否依旧坚持把这些行为解释为“过于震惊而做出的”呢？麦克法夸尔之处这种性别主义的表现之一就是女性“婴儿化”，“女性不需要对她们的暴力行为承担太多责任，我们一直在把她们当做孩子看待”。
Of course, Amy Bishop was not just a woman—she was also an academic, and a related question is whether warning signs were overlooked because some degree of eccentricity is accepted, even nurtured, in a university setting. “Academe is often home to oddballs,” an article about the case in the Chronicle of Higher Education conceded. “Choosing to spend your life in a library or a laboratory is, by definition, out of the ordinary.” There is a fine line between eccentricity and instability—a line that is sometimes indiscernible. And in our rush to pre?mpt future mass shootings, we don’t want to start involuntarily committing any university professor who is given to erratic behavior.
诚然，艾米·毕晓普不仅仅是一名女性——她还是一名学者。所以我们总是把那些危险的信号解读为学者的怪癖而不予重视。某篇高等教育编年史的文章中有这样的句子：“学术是怪胎的摇篮。当你选择把余生献给图书馆或者实验室的时候，你的人生已经与常人不同。”然怪胎与疯子只有一墙之隔，这个界限极易被忽视。当可怕的枪击案件发生时，我们谁也不会下意识地把犯罪和某个大学教授的奇怪行为联系起来。
But according to a lawsuit filed by the families of two of Bishop’s victims, Maria Ragland Davis and Adriel Johnson, Vistasp Karbhari, the provost of the University of Alabama at Huntsville, was well aware of Bishop’s “dangerous instability,” yet did nothing to intervene. “Bishop had a history of severe, observable mental instability and violence dating back more than 20 years,” the suit alleges. According to court filings, the university had procedures in place to report potentially dangerous people on campus to the police and to get them into therapy—procedures of a sort that were instituted at universities across the country in the aftermath of shooting incidents at other educational institutions, like Virginia Tech.
毕晓普案的两名受害者家属说，亚拉巴马大学汉茨维尔分校的督学卡布哈里已经对毕晓普的危险倾向有所觉察，却没有作为。他们说“毕晓普的精神病史和暴力倾向可追溯至二十年前。”该案发生后，大学已经采取措施，将校园中一些潜在危险人员名单报送警方，并敦促他们接受治疗。美国的其他学校，例如弗吉尼亚理工大学，也采取了类似措施。
In something of a bombshell development, the Huntsville Times reported earlier this month that Amy Bishop herself wrote an affidavit from prison in which she described watching Karbhari flee the administration building along with David Williams, who was president of the university at the time, and an armed escort—because they believed that she was coming to see them. This is a damning image: if Karbhari was so concerned about his own safety, how could he not warn Bishop’s students or her colleagues? But a university spokesperson has dismissed the claim, pointing out that in the same affidavit Bishop mentions that she “sees dead people.” (Bishop told me that she has heard “voices” and suffered from “hallucinations” since shortly after her brother’s death.)
随着案件进展，汉茨维尔时报本月早些时候披露了艾米·毕晓普的监狱口供，她说亲眼看到了督学卡布哈里和校长大卫·威廉姆斯在武装保护下逃离了行政楼。这就是一个可恶的事实了，如果卡布哈里如此关心自己的安危，那么他为什么不警告毕晓普的学生和同事呢？但是学校的发言人随后否认了这一说法，并指出毕晓普的口供中还说到她会“看到死去的人”。（作者注：毕晓普说她在弟弟死后的一段时间里饱受幻觉的折磨，并且常常会听到杂音。）
Bishop is also not exactly an objective source on the subject of Karbhari: her parents expressed confusion to me about her decision to shoot her fellow-professors, some of whom were friends of hers, when it was Karbhari whom she perceived as her greatest antagonist. I’m not suggesting that Bishop would lie in her affidavit simply to assist in a lawsuit against the provost, but there do seem to be grounds for assessing her story with a skeptical eye.
毕晓普并不是卡布哈里事件的唯一信息来源。毕晓普的父母也说，女儿一直视卡布哈里为最大的敌人。所以她枪杀了自己的同事甚至朋友，却没有杀卡布哈里的行为令人费解。我并不是否认毕晓普为了构陷这位督学而伪造口供的可能性，但是我们可以带着一种怀疑的目光看待她的故事。
Another person named in the lawsuit is Amy Bishop’s husband, Jim Anderson. If anyone was in a position to spot red flags, it would presumably be her spouse, with whom she often collaborated in her research, and who drove her to campus on the day that she shot her colleagues. According to the lawsuit, Anderson “had direct knowledge of his wife’s impairment, her history of violence, her anger and threats toward colleagues over the denial of tenure, and her acquisition and use of a firearm shortly before the massacre.”
另一个证词来自毕晓普的丈夫，吉姆·安德森。整个案件中最能意识到毕晓普危险行为的人莫过于他了。因为他经常对毕晓普的研究给予协助，并且在案发当天也载着毕晓普到学校。案宗显示，安德森“对她妻子的所有危险信号——包括她过去的暴力经历，她在终生教授申请失败后的愤怒和对同事的恐吓，以及她在案件发生前使用火枪的情况——均知之甚详”。
“He, too, knew of her dangerous propensities,” Allen Brinkley, an attorney representing the Davis and Johnson families, said in 2011. “He more than anybody.”
“他什么都知道。”毕晓普案受害人的律师说。
Anderson’s role is one of the most unsettling features of the whole affair, because either he grasped that his wife was dangerous and did nothing or he, too, was oblivious to the warning signs. While it might be tempting, even comforting, to conclude that the family members of a killer would be the first to register tremors of danger, it may actually be the case that those closest to an unstable person have too much invested, emotionally, to take a dispassionate view. Perhaps the closer you are to someone the more blinded you become to what they are capable of. Even after Waneta Hoyt confessed to smothering all five of his children, her husband, Tim, continued to assert that she was innocent. He insisted that Waneta’s confession was coerced even as she was tried, convicted, and sent to prison, and close friends and neighbors of the family agreed—as did Waneta and Tim’s one surviving child, who was adopted.
安德森的存在是整个事件中唯一的变数。或许他注意到了妻子的行为却没有制止，又或者他司空见惯以致没有注意。凶手的家人能够第一时间发现凶手的危险倾向并制止，这固然是令人欣慰的，然而事实上有时候正因为是最亲近的人，所以对那些危险信号视而不见。开篇提到的霍伊特案中，即使在华内塔承认自己杀害婴儿的罪行之后，她的丈夫蒂姆，依然坚持认为他的妻子是无罪的。即使是在华内塔在监狱服刑的期间，他的丈夫蒂姆，依然认定华内塔的认罪是出于强迫。她的挚友和家人同样这样认为，他们还收养了华内塔和蒂姆唯一幸存孩子。
This raises a chilling question: If the killer’s own family and neighbors miss the red flags, what hope do the rest of us have?
这就带来了一个令人心寒的问题：如果凶手的家人和朋友都无法注意到那些潜在的危险信号，那么我们还能指望谁来阻止暴行呢？

译者：Lizzzzz