On the morning of November 22, 1965, soon after eight o'clock, when her eight-year-old son had left for school, Maggie Young of Nalopaka Place in Aiea, a suburb of Honolulu, took her four little daughters one at a time into the bathroom and drowned them in the tub: Janice, five, Judith, three, Jeanette, two, and Jessica, eight months. At about half past nine she walked the few blocks to Alvah Scott School, took her son, James Frank Young Jr., out of class, brought him home and drowned him too. She laid the children, wet and unclothed, on the twin beds in the girls' room, the four daughters on one bed and the boy on the other. Then she called the authorities.
She was thirty-eight and the mother of seven; two older daughters from an earlier marriage were grown and living in homes of their own. Her husband, an Air Force captain, was away on a flying mission. According to the press reports of the time, she had been treated in a hospital for a mental breakdown earlier that year. The case was one of the worst multiple killings in Hawaii's history. Some accounts give the boy's name as James Francis.
A policewoman led her to a patrol car, and she confessed at once. The doctors who examined her concluded that she had acted under a diseased and deranged condition, and she was found unfit to stand trial and committed to the state hospital at Kaneohe. On July 25, 1966, about eight months after the killings, she got away from the ward to a chicken shed on the hospital grounds and hanged herself there. There was no trial and no verdict.
Thirty-five years later, in June 2001, Andrea Yates drowned her five children in a bathtub in Clear Lake, Texas. The children's father, then seventy-two and a retired Air Force officer, wrote to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin that he felt compelled to help her, calling Yates a victim of postpartum depression and of the terrible feeling of inadequacy, he wrote, that his late wife must have felt. He said the signs had been ones everyone recognized in hindsight, that medical science needed to recognize the condition earlier and help a mother before it developed into paranoid schizophrenia, as it had with Maggie, and that Yates needed treatment rather than prison. His first name is given in the reporting as James and as Ed.