Banished Babies: The Secret History of Ireland's Baby Export Business (16 page)

The policy of exporting the country’s ‘illegitimate’ children had survived a sustained period of scrutiny and criticism, but only because the truth had been suppressed. McQuaid’s six-year-old domestic news blackout was still in force, so the public at large remained ignorant of the baby traffic. The threatening clamour in the Dáil had been stilled by a combination of partial answers, unjustified assurances and bullying assertions that questions on the subject were ‘anti-national’. Tom O’Higgins, the only critical voice in cabinet, had been silenced and chastened. The disturbing revelations in the draft statement to the Government about what was really going on had been spiked.

But the staff in the passport section of the Department of External Affairs could at least hope that, in the future, overseas adoptions would be safer under the new rules, which required all child placements in America to be handled by legally registered agencies. The Department of External Affairs had introduced this tougher regulation early in 1956 in response to Monsignor John O’Grady’s revelations about the inadequacies of Catholic Charities. But it was not until July 1957, 18 months later, that Archbishop McQuaid followed suit.

The Archbishop’s delay in tightening up his requirements seemed inexcusable, especially since the risks facing Irish infants sent to America under the old regime had been made abundantly clear. It seems the reason for his hesitation was that he was trying to bring all the religious-run adoption societies into line so there could be a uniform approach to the issue. The fear now, as always, was that if they were left to their own devices, the nuns would be inclined to accept American applicants at face value and offer babies without asking too many hard questions, so as to keep the babies moving and the donations flowing. But in the wake of O’Grady’s revelations, McQuaid wanted procedures standardised. The bishops were contacted with a view to getting them to persuade the nuns in their dioceses to agree common practices for handling future American adoptions. It proved a long slow process, and it was not until early 1958 that Cecil Barrett was in a position to report that McQuaid’s requirements for would-be American adopters ‘have now been accepted and are being enforced by all the members of the Irish hierarchy’.
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This should have marked a turning point in the whole affair. In theory it meant that all future intending adopters, whoever they were and wherever they came from, would need a thoroughgoing home study report from a professionally qualified social worker, employed by a legally registered child-placing agency, before they could get their hands on an Irish baby. In theory at least, professional standards should now have been uniformly applied to all transatlantic adoptions. But they had been a long time coming and even after their introduction disturbing cases persisted.

By the summer of 1958, when the tougher regulations finally came into force, over 1,300 children had been sent to America, and that represented over 60% of the total that would be sent, so at best only a minority could ever benefit from the new regime. What was more, the vetting system that was put in place so late in the day was little different from what had been offered by the secular and highly professional US Children’s Bureau, and turned down, eight years earlier. And one fundamental problem had still not been addressed by anyone in authority in Ireland: Americans could still adopt Irish children without ever having to set foot in the country. The baby export business remained almost entirely mail-order.

Perhaps it was an unlucky coincidence, but one of the hardest hitting reports ever published into mail-order adoptions was released in the United States at the very moment when the Catholic Church in Ireland thought it had cleaned up its act. In June 1958, two prominent and highly regarded organisations, the Child Welfare League of America and the US branch of International Social Service published
A Study of Proxy Adoptions
by Laurin Hyde and Virgina P. Hyde, leading experts in the field. The two organisations used the release of this report to mount a campaign for a change in US Federal law to ban the practice of adopting children from abroad unseen – as happened in the overwhelming majority of adoptions from Ireland. By permitting such adoptions, they said, US law had allowed ‘an often tragic mail-order baby business’ to develop, adding that the current lax system ‘has already produced many tragic consequences, including the death, beating and abandonment of children.’
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The Hyde study recorded cases of ‘physical abuse of children, breakdown of adoptive homes, adoption of children by persons who were unstable or mentally ill and placements of upset or emotionally disturbed children with persons unprepared or unable to help them.’ As proof of the laxity in American law governing foreign adoptions, the report cited the bizarre case of an Oregon farmer who had managed to import 600 children whom he placed with families of his own choice. And, regrettably, these concerns were far from academic.

It was October 1958 – three months after Archbishop McQuaid thought he had at last established a regime that would safeguard children sent to the United States – when four-year-old Kieran McNulty was put on a plane at Shannon by the Sacred Heart nuns from the Bessboro home in Cork, and flown to his new adoptive parents in Chicago. On top of adjusting to his new and alien environment, the four-year-old had to adjust quickly to a new name as well, for now he was Kevin Murtaugh. ‘I remember bits and pieces of what it was like living at Bessboro,’ he said in later years, ‘things like the nuns hitting us, being called by a number – I was number 36.’
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It was hard to imagine how life in the United States could be any worse for Kevin, but it was. ‘Things went well for the first few years,’ he recalled. ‘Years later I would figure that it was because I was a novelty to have around.’ Kevin described his Irish- American father as ‘a mean drunk’. ‘When he grew tired of me, he began to beat me, and one of the most common things he would say to me when he was beating me up and knocking me down was, “Get up you son of a bitch and take it like a man.”’ Kevin had to pay towards his own education. ‘I had to get up at 3.45 every morning, Monday through Friday, and sell newspapers on a street corner.’ By comparison, he said, none of his adoptive parents’ four natural children had to work. ‘I always felt like an unwanted guest in their house, not a son.’

One of the things Kevin’s adoptive father seemed to hold against him was the fact that his natural mother had been unmarried, a fallen woman whose offspring would carry her tainted genes. It was the ultimate irony. The Catholic Church insisted on placing all ‘its’ children with devout and practising Catholics – the very people who were most likely to disparage their adopted children’s natural mothers for their supposed moral laxity. As a leading Irish social worker noted in later years: ‘Since most children placed for adoption are conceived out of wedlock, attitudes [of adopting parents] to non-marital sex are very important as this has been shown to colour attitudes towards the children.’
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Professional social workers assessing would-be adopters look for broad-minded, non-judgmental parents, the opposite of what McQuaid seemed to want – and, in Kevin Murtaugh’s case, got. Kevin was made pay – physically and psychologically – for his natural mother’s supposed sexual sins.

On his seventeenth birthday, for the first and last time, Kevin defended himself from his father’s blows, giving – he said – as good as he got. Next day he left home and joined the US Army, never to return to his adoptive parents’ home. He subsequently married a woman called Diane Camm, a nurse, but the marriage failed. Drugs were involved and Diane had gone off with another man. ‘During a period in which we were trying to reconcile our marriage,’ he told me, ‘we got into an argument and it turned violent. I ended up choking her to death.’ This was as far as Kevin went with his story, but court documents obtained subsequently show that strangling his wife was far from the end of it. After killing Diane, Kevin borrowed a neighbour’s chain-saw and dismembered her body. It was January 1977. At the age of 22, Kevin was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in jail. When he first contacted me he had already spent over 20 years in prison, years in which he said he had had extensive counselling. ‘The psychologists have all said they believe my problems go all the way back to prior to the adoption. I can see why I ended up in prison. No real stable family life; an abusive relationship with my father; the fear of abandonment; always being told I was unwanted; no one or no place to turn to with my problems; the feeling of being a stranger in a strange land, out of place. It all added up.’ In 2002, Kevin’s request for parole was rejected and he had to wait until 2007 to apply again. On that occasion he was refused once more and told it would be 2015 before he could re- apply.
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By then he will have served 38 years in jail.

At this remove it is impossible to say if Kevin Murtaugh is simply engaged in a charade of self-exculpation. Certainly Diane Camm’s family think he is a master of deception. Yet research shows a very high over-representation of adopted people among those in trouble, of one sort or another, with the authorities. In one 1980s study from California, between 30 and 40% of people in residential treatment centres, juvenile detention facilities and reform schools were found to have been adopted, yet adopted people comprised less than 3% of the wider population. Symptoms that were described as ‘consistent’ among adopted people referred for treatment included impulsiveness, aggressiveness and provocativeness.
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For a very small subset of adopted people – especially in closed adoptions marred by denial and deception – the adoption experience has also been linked with extreme forms of anti-social behaviour in later life, including murder and even serial murder. New York’s most notorious serial killers – David Berkowitz, known as ‘Son of Sam’, and Joel Riflin, ‘The Ripper’, who between them killed 23 women – were both adopted as infants. Berkowitz’s biographer, psychiatrist

David Abrahamsen, concluded that the ‘mystery of his origins’ and the feeling that he was ‘an accident, a mistake, never meant to be born – unwanted’, played a crucial role in turning him into a killer of young women.
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And although there are no official statistics on the subject, one American criminal lawyer, Paul Mones, has estimated that in cases of parricide – murder of one or both parents – adopted people outnumber non-adopted people by a factor of 15 or more.
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In one famous case in America, expert witnesses called by lawyers representing a 14-year-old adopted child, Patrick DeGelleke, whose parents died when he burned their house down, were allowed to introduce what they called the ‘Adopted Child Syndrome’ as a defence argument. One of the experts, David Kirschner, who has testified at numerous trials of adopted people charged with murder, argues that adopted people are at particular risk of extreme dissociation under stress, especially the stress of real or perceived rejection by family or friends.
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It has to be emphasised, of course, that cases of extreme violence and murder involving adopted people, while seemingly more frequent on a pro rata basis than among non-adopted people, are still extremely rare, and that the vast majority of adopted people have adjusted to the conditions in which they have found themselves, or at least sufficiently so for them to function without serious outward signs of being troubled by their conflicted status.

The sort of psychological research that is available nowadays was unavailable in the days when the nuns were sending children like Kieran McNulty/Kevin Murtaugh to the United States for adoption, and it seemed that no amount of regulations from Church or State could prevent such human tragedies. Nor, for that matter, could they curtail the activities of the even less scrupulous baby traffickers who continued to ply their lucrative trade in the shadows.

8. A Very Grave Offence

On the 19
^th
of January 1965, Mary Keating, midwife and proprietress of St Rita’s private nursing home in south Dublin, was convicted in the Dublin District Court for what was described at her trial as a ‘very grave’ offence. Over 30 years after the event, Dr Karl Mullen, the gynaecologist and celebrated hero of 1950s Irish rugby, recalled that Mrs Keating had been prosecuted for ‘selling babies to America’. It was an erroneous, but highly revealing, recollection from someone who was personally close to Mrs Keating and who had attended her trial as a potential character witness. Someone else in court that day was future TD, Senator and Lord Mayor of Dublin, Joe Doyle, who for the past ten years had been Sacristan at Donny- book Catholic Church where Mrs Keating had her falsely registered babies baptised.
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Mrs Keating had, in fact, been prosecuted for forging the official birth register and uttering forged birth certificates with intent to deceive. Behind the seemingly technical charges, however, lay a much bigger story, for while Mrs Keating may not have been
charged
with selling babies to America, as Karl Mullen thought, it was certainly suspected that that was precisely what she was up to.

Mrs Keating’s name and that of St Rita’s were, of course, well known to the authorities. Back in the mid 1950s they had figured prominently in a Special Branch investigation into a Babies-for-export racket involving American airmen stationed in Britain. On that occasion the authorities had been more interested in keeping the whole business under wraps than in bringing the culprits to justice. On the second time around Mrs Keating was not so lucky, although the full story still never came out.

In 1959, a year after all the regulations regarding foreign adoptions had been standardised and tightened up, an American couple, Mr and Mrs Wedderburn, travelled to Dublin looking for a child to take back with them to the United States.
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They were introduced to Mrs Keating as someone who might be able to help. She promised to find them a little girl, as they had requested, and they went home with their hopes raised. But they were in for a long wait. After their return home to the States, the Wedderburns maintained a regular correspondence with Mrs Keating as weeks turned to months, and months to years. It was one indication of how difficult it must have been for the couple to adopt a child in America that they were prepared to wait so long to get one from Ireland. But finally there was good news from Dublin. Halfway through 1962 the Wedderburns received word from Mrs Keating that a baby girl had become available. The baby was born at St Rita’s on 16 June. Her mother was unmarried, but of good background, and was prepared to ‘disappear’ from the official records by not having the birth registered in her own name.