KILLING your mother is one of the rarest crimes, but it has provided sensation over the centuries, in fact and fiction.
Gary Macpherson, consultant clinical psychologist at the State Hospital, Carstairs, described matricide as "most uncommon", representing fewer than one in 100 of all homicides in Scotland.
Dr Macpherson said: "Psychosis is prevalent among those committing matricide, with depression and alcohol dependence both possible causal and disinhibiting factors."
It is known Lisa Brown fought viciously with her mother over the custody of a child. While she needed her mother's help and support, Brown also hated the control her mother had over her own life. Possibly the best known modern matricide is the Parker-Hulme murder in New Zealand in the 1950s, later turned into the acclaimed film Heavenly Creatures, starring Kate Winslet.
Honora Rieper was beaten to death in a Christchurch park by her daughter, Pauline Parker, and the girl's best friend, Juliet Hulme, with a half a brick in a stocking.
They were jailed for life, but released five years later on the strict condition that they never contacted each other again.
Juliet Hulme now lives in relative solitude in Easter Ross. She has adopted the name of Anne Perry, and is an acclaimed writer of crime novels. In a recent case, a US teenager killed his mother and wounded his father after they took away his copy of the computer game Halo 3.
The defence team for Daniel Petric, 17, of Ohio, argued his addiction to the game, in which players shoot invading aliens, had made him insane. In 2006, a teenage classical pianist stabbed her mother to death after years of parental pressure and harsh punishments for less-than-perfect performance.
Esmie Tseng was ranked among the best classical pianists of her age in Kansas and also competed in school athletics and debates.
But the teenager turned on her mother and stabbed her to death. The armed fight moved from room to room around the family home.
The court heard that she had been forced to stand naked in the corner of a room when she disappointed her parents, and had been grounded for scoring 96% in an exam. In fiction, the theme of matricide has been used by horror writer Stephen King on a number of occasions, including the novels Carrie and The Dark Tower.
It is also an underlying plot in Psycho, a novel later brought to the cinema by Alfred Hitchcock, with Norman Bates murdering his mother before taking on her identity to relieve the guilt of his actions.
