Why did Luke Mitchell kill? His mother holds a clue
AS EVER, the mother is key. Corinne Mitchell is at the heart of the mystery;
the answer to many questions. She is one person who can help explain why Luke Mitchell was able to become the monster he is - indeed, she perhaps understands better than the boy himself, for in her unhealthy relationship with him lies one explanation for his vile and violent actions.
I don't buy this "Luke was evil" stuff.
I think, too, that the focus on Marilyn Manson is to some degree a smokescreen; a frenzy of populist scaremongering about unpleasant teenage culture. Tens of thousands of youngsters adore Marilyn Manson; they don't become murderers. These things are far too facile. No, much of the blame for this tragedy must lie in what went wrong, a long time ago, in the boy's deepest emotional development.
You are what your childhood makes you. If we give credence to the basic psychological tenet that a child's connection with its mother is the biggest inf luence of all in shaping its adult life - as we should - then Corinne Mitchell must bear much responsibility for allowing a 14-year-old boy to become so disturbed that he could kill and maim the way he did. The "why?" is a question many would like her to answer.
It is abundantly clear that things were dreadfully amiss in the Mitchell household: there appears, from the evidence in court, beneath the wellmaintained, affluent surface, to have been a spiritual and psychological squalor which manifested itself in violence, pornography, underage sex, drug-taking, lack of cleanliness and an unusual physical intimacy between son and mother. The trial appeared to expose them as people adrift, cut off from normal emotional and behavioural frameworks.
According to the evidence in the trial, Mrs Mitchell, whose husband had moved out when Luke was 11, apparently had abrogated the role of parent. Friends say Luke "replaced his father and became the man of the family". It was exposed in court that this was a house where anything went.
Her elder son sat at home and looked at pornography on the internet during the day. Luke, her younger son and the favourite, was a little emperor. She did not appear to discipline him, or impose any limits on his behaviour.
She bought him knives. She lied for him. At home, he was allowed to sleep with underage girls; he smoked cannabis; he kept bottles of urine in his bedroom, which was described as a hovel. He stored computers on his bed and appeared to doss on a mattress on the f loor.
When the police came to arrest Luke, he was in his mother's bedroom with her. She claimed he was upset and she was comforting him. She betrayed her intense physical closeness to her son whenever they appeared in public: during the interview he gave to Sky News, she constantly stroked his neck and clung to him.
What motherwould publicly allow herself to caress her son's neck and face like that? And what 14-year-old son would, just as publicly, allow it to happen? During their controversial visit to Jodi's grave, the pair stood face to face in intimate embrace. Had you not known they were mother and son, you could almost have confused them for girlfriend and boyfriend.
Ian Stephen, a lecturer in forensic psychology at Glasgow Caledonian University and a criminal psychologist, is quoted as saying: "The whole relationship comes across as something quite different from normal. It is almost over-close. You are left with the impression that the son has almost taken on a partner's role. She is almost more like a girlfriend than a mother."
To witness Mrs Mitchell visiting her son in Polmont, the day after he was found guilty, was to be struck by how inappropriately she was dressed: in tight jeans, thigh-high boots, bare midriff. Again, this seemed a strange choice, given her very public role at the trial. It was hardly maternal.
Her conduct from the time of the murder to the conviction appears to suggest that her son, a mere child, had been handed inappropriate control in their relationship. At a time when a 14-year-old boy needs discipline, standards and a strong moral lead, it would appear Corinne Mitchell offered none of these things. Did her relationship with him tip over into a form of abuse?
No-one is saying that. But we can look at the facts which emerged from the trial and judge that this mother-son relationship was beyond the ken of what we recognise as normal.
Corinne Mitchell's own background is not straightforward. She is adopted; her adoptive parents were said to be from a travelling family who had settled south of Edinburgh and started a caravan business. She reportedly has a reputation for being confrontational and anti-authoritarian;
did she carry emotional scars from her own childhood into parenthood?
What went wrong between her and her younger son is something we will never know for sure. Only psychology can decipher the code of their unusual relationship. Many psychologists have written of the tension between parent and child; the established tenets of the science say that children denied appropriate parenting face difficulties trying to live a normal life or understand normal constraints. This would appear to explain why Luke Mitchell seemed to lack any moral roadmap in his life.
In psychological terms, it is often considered that a healthy, loving and supportive mother-son relationship is the most important thing necessary to provide the world with the historical and emotional foundations of culture, law, civility . . . and decency.
Even if we only accept this in the broadest terms, the theory has resonance in Jodi's murder, where these essential qualities were apparently absent in Luke Mitchell.
The modern theories of analysis say that a child's emotional life is inextricably bound up from the earliest age in a triangular relationship between themselves, their mother and their father. When things go wrong between the adults, or between parent and child, the child suffers anxieties and guilt. They feel at risk, excluded, responsible.
Nobody knows what Luke Mitchell went through as a little boy when his family fell apart. But it seems that something went drastically wrong after his father, an electrician, moved away.
In this way, broken families can create chaotic, fragmented lives. In this age of divorce, psychologists describe children "lost" because of estrangement between parents. "They cannot get on in life, because there is no living relationship in the lee of which they can prosper. Sometimes they stay very still, lest the stasis give way to something far worse, " says Robert Young, from the Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies at Sheffield University. The tragedy is that Luke Mitchell, a boy psychologically severed from decency and appropriate behaviour, did not stay very still. And that "something far worse" did indeed happen.
